Ivy Day Thoughts
5th November 2024
ZMan is delightfully dyspeptic today.
If you were to ask an American to name a corrupt country, he would most likely pick one from what we used to call the third world. To a great degree, this is how we now define the term “third world”. It simply means corrupt. First world countries have transparency and the rule of law, while third world countries are opaque, and the rules are not always clear to the citizens of those countries. These days it is not unusual to hear Russia or China called third world, for example.
This is one of those legacy ideas from the 20th century that evolved with the times rather than following the Cold War into the history books. As a result, our rulers tend not to think much about the corruption in American society. It is just assumed, as it was in the Cold War, that Western countries are largely free of corruption, mostly due to the honesty of Americans, while the rest of the world is riddled with corruption. It is a form of the old good guy – bad guy view of the world.
The thing is you can quite easily make the case that America is one of the most corrupt countries in the world now. Today is election day and most Americans assume the vote counts will be corrupted with fake votes generated by the people who support things like mail in voting, drop boxes and ballot harvesting. In popular government, voting is the key to its integrity, but in the world’s greatest democracy, most people assume the vote is as corrupt as anything that happens in the third world.
The countries that holds elections, even the ones we still call third world, require voters to cast their vote in person and show that they are a citizen. The burden of proof is on the voter to show they are entitled to vote. In America, this basic safeguard has been corrupted through many schemes like mail-in voting, drop boxes and bans on voters showing their government identification. Anyone who questions the integrity of the vote must prove their case all the way to the Supreme Court.