Something maybe too subtle for people to understand about my “love of government”:
I do not for a moment believe that our government structure is ideal right now, or that we have consistently good leaders. I have very little trust in the efficacy of many/most structures within our government and limited confidence in the intentions of many/most individual players.
What I do believe in is the underlying mission. Government, specifically democratic government, is by its very nature the only kind of thing that can accomplish a number of goals that are critical to our survival as a species. Whether I “love” any given elected individual or candidate at the present moment, or whether I believe that a given policy is the best possible way that a goal could ever be accomplished, are all basically irrelevant, or at best way below secondary to the primary goals: to move toward “a more perfect union.” That is a good phrase. How about, to establish justice. To ensure tranquility where it can be made possible. To control for hazards of violence. To promote a better life for all, and perhaps even to secure for all people whatever benefits can come from freedom and personal liberty, to the extent those can be achieved and protected.
Doesn’t that sound familiar?
It is the preamble to the United States Constitution, written a decade after the writers experienced the forcible removal of monarchy from government of essentially an entire continent, followed by chaos of fledgling early democratic experiments. Many forget that the Constitution was not the first such document in this country, though technically it was the one in which the country as we know it was established. Prior to the Constitution, the fledgling nation had the Articles of Confederation, a much weaker coalition of independent states, that failed fairly dramatically. The Confederation was unsuccessful enough that within six years, states sent representatives to start from scratch, which they did – and gave us the structure that with periodic changes survives to this day.
These principles are good. Good reasoning went into the entire framework. It was, however, deeply flawed, and those who wrote it knew so. Jefferson famously declared that it should be rewritten every other generation or so. But Madison and others insisted on making it flexible, and instead of starting from scratch each time, we the people have on 17 occasions agreed to make changes. The last of these, incidentally, took two full centuries to happen, and many proposed amendments have been defeated. But ultimately, debate, change, and the concept of “try new things and see what works, and drop what doesn’t” were baked in from the beginning by a group who had seen the failures of the Articles of Confederacy as well as England’s own failed experiment 130 years prior. Washington was probably remembering Oliver Cromwell and Max Robespierre when he wrote his farewell address warning of demagogues (and parties).
It’s been a process… and it’s been going well. By almost every metric, quality of life and the degree of democratic representation has improved in not just the United States but just about every country that has embraced some form of constitutional republic, including even England who followed suit with their own democratic reforms, though they still lack a modern written constitution. We have seen fascism arise and be defeated a handful of times since then as well, and through those examples we know how nominal democracy can be destroyed. Yet we also know that it can come back – today, Germany and Japan are paragons of strong democratic societies.
What I am fighting for in the end is not Kamala Harris or the Democratic Party, though at the moment I am absolutely advocating for both of them as the present best choices to move toward the ultimate goal. That ultimate goal is a strong government of, by, and for the people that it serves.
There is a lot more to this than winning one election or passing a handful of small short term policies. There is no “you won’t have to vote anymore” scenario, and there never should be. Democracy must be an ongoing process with full engagement. In the short term best case scenario of Democrats taking control of the houses needed to get our most urgent crises solved, we the people will need to closely monitor those leaders, keep them accountable, and prepare to replace them when the time comes, be that in the next primary or after a handful of terms. It will never end but perhaps we can get it to a point where we don’t need to devote giant chunks of our mind space to it.
I would like government to be something that I can outsource to trustworthy people. Yet I know that whenever humans are involved, accountability is necessary, as is change for any number of reasons. Nor is perfection ever really going to be on the table.  now, the metaphor breaks down a little bit if you think of a perfect union as something like joining two parts, because with a good weld two separate parts can absolutely achieve what is called a perfect union. But I don’t think that that’s what is really meant. If you instead asking orthopedist what perfect union really means, here she will tell you that it’s not about being indistinguishable under a microscope, which is impossible, but it is about fitting together well enough that healing is possible and full function can be restored. To achieve perfect union in the United States does not mean life would be perfect for anyone really, because that’s not possible, but could it be possible to achieve a state of harmony within our society, of everyone basically agreeing on the premises of what a good society is? I think we obviously have a long way to go, but I also think it’s 100% worth the effort.