Voting
It’s been quite a few years since 2000, when Al Gore lost the presidency to El Busho. But the same arguments used then to blame Ralph Nader’s candidacy for Gore’s defeat are still around, in what may be an even more reductive form.
The basic argument runs thus: Third-party candidates can’t win in this country; our only choice is between a Democrat and a Republican (though actually, the voting machines seem to imply that we can vote for whoever is on the ballot). Therefore, since the most viable third-party candidates tend to come from the left-of-center regions, and since Democrats are (supposed to be) more “left-like” than Republicans, voting for third-party candidates hobbles the Democratic ones, the only ones that have a chance of winning (other than, of course, the Republicans).
“You’re just handing the Republicans the election!” “A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush!” “You’re wasting your vote!” (with a tone that suggests the violation of some sacred talisman).
In fact, people can get quite worked up about “the vote,” and how we’re wasting it – the best analogy might be masturbation, in which the precious semen/vote is wasted instead of being used to make a baby (or a president). In fact, people seem to get more upset by this metaphorical masturbation than they do about the real thing. It’s been a long time since anyone yelled at me about jerking off, but people seem always to be yelling at me for the way I vote.
Let me explain the Byzantine rules by which I vote. It’s really complicated, so you’d better go and get a pencil and paper now so you can take notes. Don’t worry – I’ll wait.
Okay, here it is: I vote for the person I think is the best candidate.
Let’s take a moment now to catch our collective breath; I know that was kind of abstract. I don’t expect you to take it in all at once. Try a little at a time. Today, you can just work with the “I vote” part. Tomorrow is soon enough to try “for the person” (Kant and Heidegger each spent years trying to penetrate that one!).
All right, enough leaden sarcasm.
I don’t claim to really understand how the system works. I know many people who do think they know how the system works, but I am not one of them. I am easily confused. I like to stick to the basics: An election is where every citizen has the opportunity to cast a vote for the candidate that he or she thinks would do the best job (as defined by that voter). In the U.S., each citizen wields roughly 1/316,000,000 of the power of the electorate (sort of – I’m kind of blurring the whole electoral college thing). It’s a tiny little bit of power, granted, but we all have it, and the only way to waste it is to fail to take seriously the possibility that voting might be important. Notice I didn’t say that the only way to waste it is not to vote. Because you can take seriously the possibility that voting might be important and still not vote – say, because you think all the candidates are assholes. Which I often do.
There’s no philosophical principle or law that says you must vote. The voting police don’t round up all the people who didn’t vote and make them take high school civics again. Nor would, I think, Jefferson or Adams have had any problem with the notion that one can choose not to vote as a matter of personal conscience. And I kind of don’t give a shit if they did, because it doesn’t make sense to say that voting is always good and not voting is always bad.
Now, when I say I don’t know the rules, what I mean is this: I don’t know how to play the system. I am not clever enough to figure out what consequences my vote will have. It’s like me going into a casino in Vegas, thinking, “Hot damn, I’m going to put one over on those croupiers and walk out with a ton of moolah!” Or better, I think of my vote as a cue ball on a billiards table. I can aim it left or I can aim it right, but I don’t really know what the impact of my cue ball on all the other balls will be. Similarly, I don’t vote because I know that voting will have a foreseeable consequence, as when I throw the ball, I know my dog Isabelle will chase it. No one can know the consequence of their one measly vote, which in a presidential election is potentially (though never actually) only one of 316 million votes.
Nor do I say, as I have heard it said by others, that Maryland, for example, always votes Democratic by a wide margin, so I don’t really need to vote. That, you see, would be playing the game in an expert way, as one does when one understands how the system works. I just vote for the person I think would be good. I’m satisfied if I know that I have voted for someone I think would do a good job. That’s all I want out of my vote. I guess I have low expectations of my vote, but I do have some expectations. These include informing myself somewhat about candidates in races I care about and not being completely full of shit. If I claimed to be some kind of policy wonk or pundit who was savvy about electoral politics, I would be full of shit.
And here we come to the important point. There is an idea and there is reality. We claim to understand the distinction, though we don’t always observe it. But you understand it when I say that America is both an idea and a reality. America has been an experiment in many good things, things that hadn’t taken shape in the world before, some of which still don’t exist anywhere but here. Good things, as I say, and one of these good things is the whole democracy thing: “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” This seemed like a good idea at the time, and it is still a good idea. But it is not reality. Maybe it never really was completely (I’ll defer to my brother Clyde on this, as he’s the American historian in the family), but maybe it was a little more than it is now. Be that as it may, we know that it is not reality now.
And as if to suddenly appear like Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall to support my point, here comes this study by two Princeton University eggheads, Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, whose conclusion can be summed up pithily as “the United States is no longer a democracy.” They write:
The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.
As if we needed them to tell us this. But in a sense we do need them, because, being Princeton researchers and all, they’re mainstreaming what all 316 million of us should have known already.
If you believe Gilens and Page, then, you will have some trouble getting your panties in a wad about voting for Ralph Nader in 2000, because that panty-wadding was based on the assumption that you could affect the outcome of the election in some way. Or that 10 of you could. Or a hundred or a thousand or a million could. But people don’t elect leaders; corporations do. We are now officially an oligarchy, a plutocracy – not a democracy. Our elected officials – yes, even Obama – do only what the corporations allow them to do. Every perceived progressive win in government policy or personnel is a sop to make us feel that the system works and that we’re a part of it.
I remember when the MTA wanted to raise the cost of a subway token a couple of decades ago. It released its plan which called for an increase to $1.75. The riding public was outraged, they held protests, and the MTA appeared to back down: The increase would only be to $1.50. The people rejoiced! Democracy in action! Except that the MTA had wanted the $1.50 fare all along; It started with $1.75 so that the citizens could enjoy the illusion that they’d had an impact on policy.
As with the subway, so with American government policy. No policy will be allowed that substantially erodes the status quo and costs the corporations serious dough. If it looks like it is, it’s only an illusion – multinational corporations’ pockets are far deeper than most of us know. What seems to us like a huge fine or a stunningly onerous regulation has all been worked out in advance so that it will, in reality, have the smallest possible impact on big business, while at the same time giving the impression that democracy works, and that our voices count. It is naïve to believe otherwise.
People sometimes come up to me and exclaim that this or that show on commercial television is “edgy” or “subversive” or “speaking truth to power.” As someone who’s worked in commercial TV for the last 14 years, I can tell you with certainty that nothing gets on commercial TV unless it’s had its balls removed first. If it’s on TV, it’s no longer dangerous; the advertisers simply wouldn’t allow it. Commercial television networks are the bitches of the advertisers; they do what they’re told. Even “The Simpsons,” which appears to be “sticking it to The Man,” is eunuched. Ever read “Civilization and Its Discontents”? Maybe a little Gramsci on a cold winter’s night? In a system like ours, all rebellion is co-opted into harmless forms, and rebels turned into lobotomized Randle McMurphies that can join the general population as upstanding citizens. The art form of American politics is lobotomy.
No company is going to underwrite an activity that will cost it money or call into question the basic underpinnings of our corporatized economy.
As with TV, so with government.
So, to return to the year 2000 and the kvetchy, tiresome lament that voting for Nader cost Gore the election, and that voting for a third-party candidate is a cardinal sin, I take a position that strikes me as a nice balance between the idea and the reality. As a lover of the idea of America, I vote for the person I think will be good – often the person whose beliefs don’t offend my own and who seems smarter than a turnip; but as someone who is basically in favor of acknowledging reality, I know perfectly well that my vote – anyone’s vote – is not what determines what we do as a nation and as a culture; that this is in the hands of the oligarchs. I don’t waste my time second-guessing my inclination because I believe the person I’m voting for is “unelectable.” I have yet to hear any argument that convinces me I should.
Finally, I want to point out that when people get all huffy about electable this and electable that, they are in effect buying into this whole notion of a two-party system – not just buying into it but becoming fervent apologists for it! And this is the most logically fallacious part of the whole shtick. The two-party system tells us, and has told us for as long as I’ve been alive, that when election time comes, we have the choice between two people: the Democrat and the Republican. Now the reason these two candidates are viable is that they’ve raised a lot of money – enough money to be “taken seriously” as candidates for public office. But how does one “raise money”? You guessed it! You whore yourself out to special interests and corporate contributors. (See the Princeton study, above.) Virtually no one gets elected without a little whoring here and there, and most do more than just a little. So, by endorsing the two-party system, ands voting for candidates you think can win, all you are doing is a sustaining a corrupt system. As long as we only have two old whores to choose from, we will never marry the beautiful princess. The only reason third-party candidates “can’t get elected” (if we ever see them at all) is that they don’t have enough corporate and special interest contributions to make themselves visible, let alone compete. So, we have a nice example here of circular reasoning. Don’t vote for Nader because he’s unelectable in the two-party system we endorse; and as long as we endorse it, Nader will never be able to raise enough money to be electable; therefore, the two-party system will exist in perpetuity and we will be exhorted never, ever to vote your conscience, because that would be “wasting your vote.”
(Gore didn’t lose because Nader ran. Gore was a shitty candidate. Uninspiring, flat and so eager to do a Clinton middle-of-the-road thing that there was really nothing to vote for. Gore was far more interesting after politics than he was when he was running for president.
In Florida, 24,000 registered Democrats voted for Nader. More than 300,000 voted for Bush. Chew on that.)
I submit that it is actually this addiction to the status quo, to the way things are now (another word for that is conservatism, not to say reactionary-ism), that causes us to “waste our vote.” Since we aren’t deciding anything anyway, it is only an illusion to think we are accomplishing something by voting for the “Hobson’s Choice” – between candidates who are ever more indistinguishable one from the other. Of course, it is self-described liberals who always give me a hard time for my position, so it’s more than a little ironic that they champion such a patently reactionary view.
If we want to break out of this national trap we’re in, we’re going to have to do better than concede all the strategic ground to the forces that want to keep things exactly as they are (because they profit from them). And we have to stop this ridiculous habit of growling at people like me who simply vote for the candidate they like. If your position requires you to say something twisted like that, it may be time to rethink your position.