The man who shot up the Fourth of July parade in Highland Park was legally able to purchase the gun he used to commit the shooting because he didn’t have, and hadn’t applied yet for, a firearm owner’s identification card when he got in trouble with the police last year.

COVID-19 vaccines are being thrown away, but the only way the Food and Drug Administration will qualify you for a second booster if you’re under 50 years old is if you’re immunocompromised. As for monkeypox vaccines, well, if New York City’s failed attempt at scheduling and distributing vaccines to its residents is any indication, nobody’s learned a thing in the past couple of years.

Meanwhile, the leaked draft Supreme Court ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health — the Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and returned the question of whether women have a right to an abortion, or even access to certain forms of birth control, back to the states — was released in May. Two months later, with Dobbs in the rear view mirror, national Democratic lawmakers are on vacation and on record as having come to absolutely nothing resembling a consensus on what to do about the most predictable court ruling in fifty years.

Finally, housing is also still expensive, but it’s okay — we have tiny houses to look forward to because Heaven forfend an incumbent homeowner has to look at a two-story apartment complex, townhome, domestic violence shelter, or residential treatment facility.

With another Independence Day behind us, it’s difficult to look at the products of our local, state, and federal governing systems and conclude that the American system of government works. Given the neverending parade of incompetence, bureaucratic inertia, adversarial legalism, and regulatory capture endemic through every level of our government, it’s tempting to grow cynical. It’s tempting to assume our public institutions are led by crooks and staffed by employees who treat The Art of Simple Sabotage as an employee handbook. Why would anyone ever want to give such people more power and responsibility?

It’s a fair question.

Unfortunately, in much the same way letting a lazy spouse off the hook when they intentionally fail to competently perform a household chore rewards bad behavior, treating public institutions as inherently incompetent rewards politicians and bureaucrats who seek to keep their power while they shirk their responsibilities.

Don’t believe me? Look at Pahrump.

Pahrump is — and I say this with kindness and love to the tens of thousands of residents there — arguably the most politically cynical place on Earth. Pahrump even disincorporated its town council at one point because, given a choice between valley residents governing themselves and letting Nye County govern the valley from Tonopah on their behalf, the valley’s residents decided they’d have less government to deal with if their seat of government was at least 150 miles away from their homes.

This, by the way, would be like the founding fathers, rather than declaring independence, instead demanding the British government abolish the original colonial governments and directly manage the original thirteen colonies from London.

To be fair to the good residents of Pahrump, their cynicism towards the concept of government, self- or otherwise, is arguably justified, at least where it pertains to that valley in particular. As History:Nevada (a good Twitter follow, by the way) recently pointed out, Gawker called Nye County “America’s Worst Run County” in 2010 after a Nye County sheriff’s deputy and the district attorney both attempted to arrest each other in Pahrump. 

Matters have certainly not improved with time — a county sheriff once left her gun in a Saddle West bathroom (she was the same one who compared Gov. Steve Sisolak to Hitler), and the saga of soon-to-be-former county commissioner Leo Blundo and his wife (come for the harassment of county staff and the attempted insider trading of a medical facility, stay for the cocaine bust) regularly provides an endless source of inspiration to fellow columnist John L. Smith.

None of that cynicism, however, has resulted in better government for Pahrump. All of that suspicion and hatred of elected officials and appointed bureaucrats alike has not resulted in better governance for the valley’s residents. Quite the contrary — Nye County Clerk Sandra Merlino, after decades of successful and thankless public service, resigned after county commissioners, egged on by constituents who refuse to accept the notion that paper ballots sometimes get lost in transit, demanded she replace the county’s election machines with some pretty scraps of paper they found in the dumpster out back.

The trouble with cynicism is, to mangle a quote from Ayn Rand (a rather cynical individual in her own right), where there’s widespread cynicism, there is someone being had. A candidate who speaks of self-serving politicians is speaking of crooks and marks, and intends to be the crook. When a candidate and their supporters say all politicians are crooks and frauds, they’re not speaking truth to power — they’re admitting in public that they will use any power and responsibility we grant to them to line their own pockets and hope to lower our collective expectations far enough to allow it. 

When a candidate and his supporters claim all elections involving voting machines are fraudulent, they’re not revealing some previously undiscovered flaw in voting machines — they’re admitting in public they can't perform voter fraud while those machines are in place.

The reason so many of America’s institutions aren’t working is because a lot of cynics empowered a few political leaders to commit institutional malpractice. That, in turn, produces more cynics who enable politicians to commit even worse malpractices. If anything is ever going to get better, we’re going to have to consciously choose to break this cycle, stop listening to those who insist the people who make up our institutions are only capable of unfathomable evil, and start demanding accountability and competence from the institutions that seek to govern us.

If we don’t, this entire country is going to turn into Pahrump in a handbasket.
David Colborne ran for office twice and served on the executive committees for his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is now an IT manager, a registered nonpartisan voter, the father of two sons, and a weekly opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].