What The 2012 Election Would Have Looked Like Without Universal Suffrage.

A leftist friend of mine linked to this article on Facebook.  I think the point the left is trying to make here is that Republicans are racist or something, but to me, the real question goes much deeper.

As someone falls further and further down the libertarian rabbit hole, you pass through various stages.  First, you hit the Ron Paul stage, which is based simply on “do what the Constitution says.”  Some people stop there, but if you keep falling, you eventually hit the Lysander Spooner stage of “If the constitution was unable to stop people from perverting it, then it itself is fundamentally flawed as well.”

Given that the constitution was assembled under a “representative” government that wasn’t really representative at all, should we be surprised that as suffrage expands, people want to get further and further away from the basic principles of it?  Had the original constitutional convention been fully representative, would we have gotten the same document?  Most likely not.  If a new constitutional convention were held today, we’d certainly get a far different document, most likely one that was far less accommodating to individual freedom than the current constitution.

Perhaps the only reason we ever had so much freedom in the first place is because everyone didn’t have a vote.  The advent of universal suffrage and the decline in individual freedom certainly enjoy a correlation, although there too many other factors in play to make any claim of causation.