Voter identification & American identity

My media consumption habits led my meandering thoughts into some surprising confluences yesterday. Whilst working out, I listened to a Center for Global Development podcast in which two researchers pointed out that progress toward the U.N.'s Sustainable Development Goals cannot be measured unless all persons in the developing world have a legal form of identification, beginning with registration at birth. The contrarian I am, I immediately began wondering about the people who might not want to be registered at birth. (Let the record show Pa Curmudgeon was careful to register me as a natural-born U.S. citizen under color of law, and I have the State Department-issued piece of paper to prove it.) 

I remembered Robert Heinlein, the Ayn Rand of science fiction, whose work I read avidly in high school until it dawned on me that his exaltation of the heroic individual was profoundly anti-humanist. But while I was still an adolescent, I read, in any number of forms, Heinlein's argument that the truly free individual will abandon any society which makes legal identification mandatory. Objectivism aside, this always seemed to me a very American concept: the individual should not be hindered by the regulatory government, even when the individual runs the very serious risk of endangering himself.

Then I opened up the December 8 Denver Post to an article on the living situation of Robert Dear, now infamous for shooting up a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs a couple weeks ago. Reporter Kirk Mitchell visited the plains of Hartsel, Colorado, a desolate, utilities-free place where newcomers squat in trailers and makeshift fortresses of dubious structural integrity on plots of land bought in order to strike it rich in marijuana cultivation. (No one has yet struck it rich, by the way.) I'm a big fan of the electrical grid and indoor plumbing, so the lifestyle doesn't appeal to me, but there's something very American, and definitely western, about people willing to suffer any adversity in their attempt to live their lives as they choose.

Out here in the Great American Desert, we tend to associate that instinct with conservatism, and conservatism tends to be associated primarily with the Republican party. As I was eating my raisin bran (I'm at an age at which fiber intake becomes a controlling priority), I thought it ironic conservative Republicans are insisting that people must have a government-issued identification card in order to vote. Call me naïve, but it doesn't seem very conservative, or even very American, to ask the government permission to exercise a personal, unalienable right.