Chelsea Handler: We Need To Fix America | Opinion

"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

There it is, the preamble to our United States Constitution, a lovely 1787 compound sentence from our nation's founding fathers full of beautiful words, goodwill and good intentions toward "we the people." And here we are, 231 years later, 37 states larger and 320 million people stronger.

America has come a long way from the days of our founding father George Washington, a well-to-do white guy who was born into a slaveholding family who eventually freed his own slaves only upon his death via his legal will. But we haven't come far enough.

Throughout American history, the American people have had to slowly and forcefully push their leaders to do the right thing and to correct the grave misdeeds, injustices and unfairness that permeate American society.

This nation and its colonies first had slavery in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619 and we outlawed it in 1865 with the 13th Amendment amidst 1.2 million Civil War deaths and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

We had the great progressive Teddy Roosevelt take on unregulated robber baron corporations and monopolies and give them a well-deserved spanking. Female voting was banned until 1920 when women organized and the nation corrected that misogyny.

The progressive Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic Party gave us the National Labor Relations Act to prevent businesses from treating their workers unfairly, and they passed the Social Security Act of 1935 so senior citizens and their survivors and the disabled could live with economic and human dignity.

Lyndon B. Johnson, with the bipartisan help of Democrats and Republicans, passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act—100 years after the end of the Civil War—because white Americans couldn't quite figure out how to respect black people, Latinos and other minorities without a written law telling them to cut out their Jim Crow white supremacy and tribal instincts.

Women were only recently granted full ownership of their bodies in 1973, and many Americans are still troubled by female sovereignty in 2018. This nation used to treat gay people like Satan's schoolchildren thanks to religiously-infused homophobia, but more recently most Americans have learned to treat them like human beings.

This country can fix its mistakes and tragedies, but it takes effort, courage, time and it takes citizen votes to do so.

Which brings us roughly to 2018, two weeks away from our national civic duty of voting for a representative government, a duty that must be vigorously exercised if we expect real representation.

Our nation is a republic, supposedly democratic in nature, but the 2018 reality resembles a wholly undemocratic farce, replete with our Professional-Wrestler-In-Chief, his crooked Russian-Republican Duma, his rigged Republican Frat Boy Supreme Court, and a nationwide network of vote suppressors and vote riggers and oligarchic donors and bribers doing their seditious best to once again subvert democracy in the name of right-wing tyranny.

Through the Machiavellian joys of gerrymandering, voter suppression tactics and laws, voter file purges, red state Senate obstructionism, Supreme Court hijackings, automated black box vote counting, and Electoral College tyranny-of-the-minority rule, Republicans have utterly abandoned the will of the American people and flushed democracy down a right-wing toilet, fueled by white Christian male spite and daily repainting of the toenails of the rich in the finest gold.

Instead of the "one person, one vote" principle that animates our modern ideals, American elections have largely devolved into a "one white person, one vote" charade that would make perfect colonial sense to the 1787 founding fathers who didn't know any better.

But it's 2018, and we do know better. The only way this country will dig out of our current Republican political sinkhole of misrepresentative government is to vote in historic numbers on November 6.

We must vote in supermajority numbers. This is only possible by motivating the unmotivated, by motivating those who have given up on voting. Remember, the opposition wants voters to give up; it is a specific part of their obstructionist strategy. A nonvoter is actually a vote for the rabid right-wing waiting breathlessly to give another greedy tax cut to millionaires against the will of the people, while attacking health care, Social Security, Medicare, climate science and abandoning the nation's infrastructure.

But real-life problems aren't solved with tax cuts, much to the denial of the Greed Over People caucus. Real-life problems are solved by investing in the future with roads, bridges, airports, science, technology, education and people. Taxes are the cost of a decent civilization, and paying one's healthy and fair share of taxes is much more patriotic than simply waving the flag or the pledging of allegiance while raiding the treasury for billionaires.

America's Election Day should be a national holiday this year, and if our legislators won't make it so, then the citizens should make it so, by driving or walking with a friend, an old person or a poor person to the polls, by babysitting for working parents with children, by having all companies give their employees an extra hour or two off to cast a vote, by persuading our friends and family and strangers that voting and elections matter—and that not voting is a great way to hurt your own country and hurt your own chances by letting the political hijackers win.

Remember, Republicans do not like voter turnout; in fact, they can't stand democracy. Americans deserve much more than the last two years of the Republicans' intellectual, moral and economic bankruptcy.

So let's give Republicans democracy "good and hard" on November 6, 2018, just like H. L. Mencken said.

Just say "NO" to kakistocracy.

D to go forward; R for reverse.

Chelsea Handler is a comedian, author and activist. She is the author of five New York Times best selling books. Chelsea is a co-chair for Emily's List and has been touring the country to help elect women and progressives for the 2018 mid-terms. She is currently writing her sixth book and filming a documentary for Netflix. Glen Handler is an Audit Director of a large multinational corporation. He used to change his baby sister Chelsea's diapers when he was a teenager.

The views expressed in this article are the authors' own.​​​​​​​