In an earlier blog I suggested disenfranchising people who take a job with tenure or other equivalents of lifetime employment. My reason was that these people take themselves out of the vicissitudes of mainstream life that the rest of us live with.
The radical part of the disenfranchising notion may be the hardest for people to grasp and may be the reason I got no comments on this radical proposal.
For several centuries democracy has been about enfranchisement. In the 1860s, in America, many lives were lost over this issue.
The time has come to reverse this process. We are watching experiments in democracy that are failing. At this moment the Palestinians have used democracy to vote in an anti-democratic party. The Iranians did that several decades ago and we all suffer.
Before we can disenfranchise parties we have to disenfranchise voters. Hamas would not have come to power if voters had been required to renounce violence and open display of weapons.
The examples are just beginning to emerge on the world scene, it is time for America to be a leader in this movement.
Should citizens be refused the vote because they opt out of the vicissitudes of life? That has historically been the reason for denying the franchise. It is the reason we deny the vote to citizens under 18 and people in prison (The argument that the vote is taken away from felons as punishment fails because it is trivial compared to incarceration).