By Ayesha Kreutz
How many more times can I say this, or in how many more ways? Does it even mater at this point? Is anyone listening or does anyone care?
Power doesn’t corrupt all people — but it attracts the ones who want it for the wrong reasons. And when those people infiltrate government, they flip the system upside down: wrong becomes easy, right becomes hard, and the people paying the price are you and me.
One of the most destructive things bad people can do is infiltrate government — making it easy for bad people to do bad things, and hard for good people to do good things. It is vital we break this paradigm.
That starts with exposing and removing the mechanisms — and the people — that enable corruption. That means voting. Plain and simple. Every election. Every time. That means good people running for office and winning.
That means getting on your local committee and making sure we stop the flood of sold-out, low-quality candidates from becoming our only choices in general elections. Right now, even our committees are rife with malfeasance.
For the last two decades or more, the “default” Republican has been, at best, a RINO. We’ve been fooling ourselves into believing most of these folks are, principled and quietly working for us. The truth? Our ranks have been infiltrated — and it’s time to stop the bleed. Talk is cheap! We know it and yet keep falling for the same old rhetoric. I am a republican and I can admit, The Republican Party hasn’t rolled back a single major progressive program in 2 or 3 generations easy. In fact, they’ve helped entrench and expand many of them. That is the hard truth — and it’s why action can’t wait. Oddly we have Trump, who is not an ideologue republican, doing more to try and roll back some of these progressive programs than actual so called conservatives or republicans.
Stand up. Speak out. Stop falling for the same tired promises and the same candidate shell games. Get on your local committee and cut off the corruption at its root. Run for office. Support those who will. Give your time, your voice, your resources. And above all — stop handing the same career politicians your vote on a silver platter.
And it doesn’t stop there.
We must also — or simultaneously, we must — reform and fortify systems so that integrity is rewarded and wrongdoing is punished, consistently, regardless of who’s in power.
It’s not just about electing “better” people. It’s about building institutional bulwarks-safeguards that make it hard for bad actors to hijack the system in the first place.
A president can only do so much. What they do is largely temporary. The next president and administration can undo much of what their predecessor did.
That’s why we must demand Congress act — making permanent, through legislation, the executive orders and other temporary actions of an administration that we deem worthy.
If we don’t, we’ll be stuck in the same broken cycle — watching bad people make it easy for evil to flourish, while good people fight uphill just to do what’s right.