2024: Early thoughts

It shouldn't be too surprising, but Joe Biden recently announced that he will be running for reelection. If you know me, you know that the issue that I care about most is educational rights. Joe Biden's hostilities towards educational rights is an automatic disqualifier for my vote.

Those who want to learn should be allowed to do so with as little restriction as possible. This is what I mean by educational rights. Since schooling is restrictive by nature, I oppose all efforts to ensure that education must be confined to a schooling environment.

In 2000, Joe Biden campaigned on increasing the amount of time in which our educations are controlled by schools by four years, two pre-kindergarten and two years minimum in college. He fell short of a mandate, but his proposals would have clearly strengthened credentialism. A big component of credentialism that people tend to overlook is that it requires slamming doors shut on people who learn outside of a schooling environment. His policies would have also been highly expensive with a requirement to embrace educational constraints in order to get anything back.

We have a serious educational crisis in our country. This crisis primarily stems from the power the government has over the system. The people in power are far more interested in maximizing their power than maximizing the population's educational attainment. This is why authoritarian governments overwhelmingly embrace government control over education.

The good news is that Biden hasn't gotten everything that he wants. The bad news is that he is still showing an interest. He and his Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, have shown a desire to strengthen what clearly doesn't work. Miguel Cardona has repeatedly proven his incompetence by confusing memorization with learning while insisting that we can reimagine education by ensuring that we continue to do things the same way as we always have. Quite frankly, Betsy DeVos might be the lone winner from Cardona's time in office. Cardona is making her look so good by comparison.

Joe Biden could very well be the most anti-educational president that we have had so far. That doesn't mean that my views match what I have heard from the Republicans. In all honesty, I view the Republicans as somewhat mixed on this issue. Donald Trump's 1776 Commission was an absolutely horrible idea. We should be fighting political indoctrination, not controlling it. What I like about the Republicans' views on this issue is that most of them are willing to cede at least some control over education. They are the ones looking for ways to allow low-income families to escape the disastrous model that we have in place. They are not the ones who are trying to trap citizens in anti-educational institutions that they control.

Although Biden's anti-educational hostilities are an automatic disqualifier for my vote, I want to make it clear that I do not look exclusively at that single issue. Donald Trump has crossed way too many lines, and I think Ron DeSantis has gone too far in certain areas. I honestly don't think I could cast my vote for either one of them.

In a sense, it seems like the two parties look for the absolute worst candidates that they think have a shot. Then, they fuel division and hope that the hate for the other guy can allow them to elect a horrible leader. This is why I hate two-party politics. This is also why I refuse to treat third-party candidates as unequal. In our state, we had six presidential candidates on our ballots in 2020. All but one had automatically disqualifying traits. Jo Jorgensen pretty much won my vote by default.

We don't actually know who the candidates will be. Biden seems like a lock since the Democrats have indicated that they will forgo debates. This is unfortunate because being elected last time should not be sufficient to establish that he's the best candidate available to the party. I said the same thing in 2020 when Trump's challengers weren't offered an opportunity to debate.

Like I said, Biden will likely be given the nomination for the Democrats. The Republicans aren't nearly as certain, but I hear that Trump is somehow the current frontrunner. Even if the Republicans realize that Trump isn't a viable candidate, their recent history of picking the worst Republicans doesn't have me excited. Since I refuse to outright dismiss third-party candidates, there will likely be a better candidate who will win my vote.