James Devine writes:
And, more importantly, tell us what's _wrong_ with the alternative to the mug's game. Ignoring the arguments against the L-O-T-E theory of voting seems a symptom short-term thinking. (In this, it's extememly akin to that of the sectarians who reject thinking in favor of mindless action.) Instead of seeing the ballot box as a potential tool for pressuring politicians, it's some sort of obligation that promises vague results. But it is a strategic tool. It also has ethical implications. Do we want to vote for a party that trashed AFDC? a party that endorsed the strategic bombing of a medicine factory in Sudan (with suspicious timing, to say the least)?
BTW, if you compare Nixon's program with that of Clinton, it's sometimes hard to decide which is better. After all, it was Nixon who brought the US OSHA and EPA.
What's happened is that the US political spectrum has steadily moved to the right. ------------
This sentiment more or less echos Paul Rosenberg's post also.
Yes Clinton resembles Nixon--I would even argue Nixon was more liberal--but only in relation to our period. Nixon was responding to what he thought was the threatening policy appeal of Robert Kennedy, Gene McCarthy, and certainly the then growing changes occurring in the Democratic Party under Civil Rights and the Anti-war movements. He was pushed to the left. Twenty years before that when he wanted to get on the Republican national ticket he aligned with the Joe McCarthy movement to appear more solidly American (with a capital A). Nixon was a chameleon much like Clinton, moving in whatever direction seemed most expedient to his own career.
So, here's the rational argument. By voting consistently democratic, then consistently liberal democratic, and then consistently the so-called radical wing of the democratic party (grass-roots? or in local elections), you move the entire spectrum back. But you have to vote this way. Otherwise, you throw away votes on candidates that have no chance of holding office and the consistent results are the dissembled Democrats through out the seventies and eighties. Now, I've been lucky since I moved to Berkeley from the LA area a long time ago as a student and have almost always had these kinds of choices in the local elections. Sometimes you get lucky. Delums for example started out in Berkeley city counsel elections where I voted for him then and so on through out his career. Not that he was any kind of true radical, but in relation to the existing spectrum, he was very liberal and quite tolerant. I just hope his career assistant Dejon Aroner, will be the same way. I suspect she might be more so, at least on local issues.
Of course this is the 'lesser of two evils', but the choice is to throw away votes, or not vote. The trouble is that so many people are so turned off to the entire idea of a public commitment to anything, they don't vote, thus giving the fanatical Right and their minions the illusion of representation. They are not representative of anything but a rather limited group of mostly suburban, frightened and greedy bourgeois. With sufficient money from petty minded small business, they have managed to take over vast sections of the political spectrum and lay waste to the entire arena of public discourse--not to mention the concrete devastation they have wrought on tangible public institutions. To turn this around requires large solid turn outs, solid Democratic districts that are never in question, over and over and over--while working in whatever way you can to move those districts into ever more tolerant and progressive public positions. After all the Right is a disease than can only be kept under control through statistical means, but probably can be not irradicated. (Can fear, loathing of public duty, and selfish greed ever disappear?). The only time I would vote outside the demos would be when the demos were solidly in the lead and I wanted to effect a more progressive perception--move the existing candidate further to the left through their perception of their own base.
So, there is no choice. Either you fine your discourse and votes within the possible and work to build up the perception of a more liberal public view, or you are excluded, or worse join the great sea of silence.
Chuck Grimes