"Don't scare me with the court! We can just vote them out!"

Panorama of the west facade of United States Supreme Court Building at dusk in Washington, D.C., USA, by Joe Ravi, CC-BY-SA 3.0

The second part of the title to this piece may be apocryphal. Certainly no one said that in my hearing, or typed it at me on Twitter. But it's gained a life of its own, so I assume there's some veracity to it. However, the first half of the title is all too real.

The Supreme Court was on the line in 2016. Mitch McConnell had already denied Pres. Barack Obama the right to get a hearing on his nominee to replace the deceased Antonin Scalia. A 5-4 liberal majority was knifed in the back in an unprecedented fashion by a man who wasn't going to allow the black guy to fill one last vacancy. And it was no one other than hero John McCain who averred that if Hillary Clinton became president, the Senate GOP would continue its judicial boycott.

Secretary Clinton told us that the courts were on the ballot. Pres. Obama told us that the courts were on the ballot. But the purity voters stamped their feet and scoffed that they should vote strategically to prevent the courts from becoming bastions of fascism. Hey man, we can vote them out!

Everything that the purity Left claimed to care about was wrapped up with having a Democratic president with the ability to nominate judges. And they decided that it wasn't important enough to violate their delicate consciences.

One assumes that they care(d) about reproductive rights. Yesterday, the Supreme Court handed down this decision:

The Supreme Court on Monday left in place a Kentucky law requiring doctors to perform ultrasounds and show fetal images to patients before abortions.

The justices did not comment in refusing to review an appeals court ruling that upheld the law. Enforcement of the law had been on hold pending the legal challenge but will begin shortly, said Steve Pitt, general counsel to Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin.

A court with Merrick Garland as an associate justice would have probably overturned the Kentucky law. A court with Merrick Garland as an associate justice would have probably overturned Citizens United. A court with Merrick Garland—or Hillary Clinton's nominee—would have voted differently on many issues over the past three years.

But, of course, that would have involved people voting with their heads. Voting for the entire package, rather than who made them feel a frisson of righteousness.

There was a choice on the November 2016 ballot: fascism vs. democracy. And too many people who claim to be antifascists decided that the woman representing democracy was too flawed to vote for, and was, indeed, the real fascist.

I'm often gobsmacked by the infantilization of the American voting public. I can't go too far in this, as three million more people voted for Sec. Clinton than they did for Donald Trump. But enough voters decided to go third party when every vote for a third party was, in effect, a vote for Trump. Faced with a national crisis, they decided to waste their votes on people who had no chance of winning, "to send a message." We're living with the results of that Western Union wire, and will be doing so for years to come as we clean up the mess that they, in part, helped engender.

I can't blame them completely. They never stood a chance. The removal of basic civics education from our high schools—a joint project of the right and left—has rendered at the very least a large plurality of our voters unable to exercise their franchise intelligently. The can't think critically about major issues of the day, and see where both parties are far from the same. Fed on a diet of soundbites and reality TV, they vote for who excites them, rather than for who will safeguard the Republic, and thus their own freedoms.

But freedom is hard. The seminal rock band Devo had a song which touched on this subject:

Freedom of choice
Is what you got
Freedom from choice
Is what you want

Too many of our people would be happy to be left alone to binge on TV and surrender the freedom for which their ancestors fought. This is common across the Western world, as populists ply voters with easy fixes to complex problems. Unlike the populists, I have no easy solutions for how to fix our crisis of apathy. But it won't happen until more citizens take their roles as the most powerful actors in our democracy seriously. Until then, we will be ruled by the likes of Louie Gohmert, and those who turn out to vote for him.

In the words of the truism: Freedom ain't free. But we've been told it is, and that we don't have to work for it. Therein lies our existential dilemma.