Election season is fully upon us, and we can now see the malaise of liberal political culture as it is: restrictive upon citizenship as well as human agency — relegating the individual to an empty conception of citizenship while championing such a conception through manipulations of a cold, lifeless machine.

This conception of citizenship begins with the idea of the liberal state as a state of separations: Between religion and state, state and economy, university and state and private and public life. These separations strangle any legitimate conception of human agency, forcing us to divide ourselves into categories the spirituality of our souls fails to recognize.

As a voter I am forced to cast aside my religious, economic and private distinctions, and vote as a public individual for the sake of politics. As a human agent, I cannot do so. I fail to do so. In my heart, I know that voting accordingly is wrong, but the ruthless political juggernaut of liberalism keeps chugging forward and, as such, so must I.

However, this system of liberal separations is manipulated by its very proponents — those that go forth within the federal system as so-called representatives of the people. Alas, it is not people who vote for these representatives, but robots — robots that calculate the separations of church, economy and private life perfectly, instead plugging into the ballots the values that are only political and public, nothing more. Within these values and within these separations, rests nothing. The notion of citizenship is slaughtered, and what is worse, no human agent can handle this depressed citizenship.

We reject being robots. And so we vote according to our religious, economic and private values. We eschew public and political morality for something that is in our hearts more organic and more fulfilling for our agency.

The so-called representatives know this, and they manipulate the separations. Soon the representatives toss aside their vows as cogs in the liberal machine, and — realizing they're not robots — add religion, economics and private values into the sphere of politics and public values. This manipulation degrades liberalism, but that is of no matter — for liberalism is a dreadfully failed system in the first place, designed by rude men who believed plugging calculations of utility into a machine took precedent over celebrating an organic and whole human agency.

This manipulation degrades the system further and further, making a horrible system worse, the results of which we see now: The value of victory subsumes all other values, for each representative needs to ensure his stranglehold over the juggernaut of liberalism, in order to taint the machine with religious, economic and private values.

This year, 2004, is the expression of this ultimate value. Win at all costs, or fail to maintain (or gain) control over the values. The spoils are grand to the rigorous liberal, for it is he that exercises the implementation of these evil manipulations over a decimated population, void of their citizenship.

Go ahead, vote for a candidate based upon this ultimate value of victory. Your citizenship means nothing, and the representatives that you put into office will only further manipulate that liberal machine that is at once dying and strangling those it was meant to serve.

Zettel is a junior political science and philosophy major.

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