In bygone times, elections were about self-government. Nowadays, voters merely have a cameo role to sanctify the nearly boundless power of officialdom. Every year, the federal government slaps a “secret” label on trillions of pages of information – enough to fill 20 million filing cabinets. And since the government is automatically benevolent (if a Democrat is president), there is no need to trouble citizens with the grisly details of how they are being served.

Is it worth pondering the role of voters? Why are people saying, “we” when referring to anything the government does, today? Aren’t we just being taken for granted by TPTB? Potemkin, indeed.