I don’t need a leader. I need someone who will advocate for me.
I’ve spent years noticing a quiet truth in American politics: the people who write the rules rarely have to live under them. They are insulated. Their families are insulated. The healthcare they rely on is stable, comprehensive, and guaranteed. Their children have access to educational opportunities the rest of us can only dream of. And yet, when the same protections are suggested for citizens, they are called aspirational, idealistic, or impossible.
At first, I couldn’t understand it. Why would the very people entrusted with making decisions for the public create rules that treat themselves and their families as essential while leaving everyone else to navigate uncertainty, debt, and insecurity?
The answer is simple, though uncomfortable: they understand the value of stability and protection because they live it, and they do not extend it universally.
Consider healthcare. Members of Congress receive coverage through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. It is comprehensive. It is national. It covers spouses and children. Continuity of care is guaranteed. Financial risk is limited. In other words, the system works for them and for their families.
Now consider most Americans. Healthcare is conditional: tied to employment, income, geography, and luck. Family coverage is expensive. Deductibles are high. Networks are narrow. Losing a job often means losing access to care when it is needed most. Medical debt is common. Families shoulder enormous costs. For millions, the difference between stability and catastrophe is one illness, one accident, one unforeseen event.
I began to see a pattern. The very protections considered essential for effective governance are treated as luxuries for the public. When citizens raise the same concerns—family coverage, continuity of care, financial security—they are told these expectations are unrealistic. For them, scarcity is inevitable. For those in office, it is carefully managed.
Education shows a similar divide. Elected officials do not have tuition programs for their children—but they have access to publicly funded training, conferences, and elite networks that indirectly benefit their families. Professional and cultural advantages are built into the system. Meanwhile, citizens are expected to pay for education themselves, often through decades of debt. Opportunity is rationed, disguised as personal responsibility.
It isn’t that politicians are immoral. It’s that the structure of power itself reproduces privilege. The gap between what they live under and what the public is asked to endure is built into the system. It is quiet, invisible, and rarely questioned.
That’s when it became clear to me: if representation is real, it cannot include exemption. If stability, healthcare, and access are necessary for governing, they are necessary for living. What is considered a prerequisite for officeholders should be a baseline for everyone.
Citizens should demand the same protections. Not more. Not symbolic gestures. The same. The systems exist; the government already administers them effectively for elected officials and their families. The challenge is not technical—it is political. Extending them is a choice, one that has been deferred for decades.
This is why the question of standard matters. If Congress believes certain protections are essential for decision-making, then they are essential for citizenship. If family stability matters to the functioning of governance, it matters to the functioning of civic life. Anything less erodes trust, deepens cynicism, and creates disengagement. People do not withdraw from politics because they are apathetic—they withdraw because they are being asked to accept a system that does not accept them.
Democrats, in particular, have long claimed to champion equity, access, and fairness. Yet when it comes to their own benefits, they continue to operate in a separate system, insulated from the pressures their policies are supposed to alleviate. The question is not whether they can argue for democracy—it is whether they are willing to live under the same democracy they ask the rest of us to trust.
The solution is simple in principle, though difficult in practice. No elected representative should receive a benefit they are unwilling to guarantee to the public. Healthcare, education, family security—these are not luxuries for governance. They are baseline conditions for a functioning society.
Representation should not mean privilege. It should mean obligation. It should mean alignment between those who make policy and those who live under it. Until that alignment exists, trust will remain fragile, participation uneven, and democracy incomplete.
I do not want leaders. I want representation. And representation begins with equality of condition—not exemption.
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