Mina Kumar:
> Apocalyptic "let the worst leadership get in power because then the people
> will rise" logic really scares me. It's kind of dismissive of the people
> who get trampled on in the meantime, the people for whom the difference
> between bad and worse makes a profound difference in their life.
>
> I have an acquaintance who hasn't and won't vote at all bc it means
> acquiescing in fiction of the state's legitimacy etc etc etc, even during an
> election when talk of an amnesty was in the air, an issue that effects so
> many undocumented people we know and it just seemed so egregiously callous
> to say well, go ahead and suffer bc eventually the revolution will come.
>
> Yeah, yeah, lily-livered quasi-liberal etc etc.
Anarchist that I claim to be, I did go down and vote against Bloomie, but it was only because of his pandering to Giuliani and all that Giuliani represents. (A flyer thrown in the entry of my apartment building showed Bloomie marching with Giuliani and, I believe, one of the local zombie leaders under a storm of flags, and who could blame me?) But that was just a venting of spleen; it would have been nobler to sit on my hands, like so many Black and Hispanic voters, and let the honest crook win. In reference to your acquaintance, the likelihood that a single vote will affect the outcome of a large election is vanishingly small, and even were it to do so, the likelihood that elected officials will do anything decent is still pretty much below the horizon. Therefore I say, not "Don't vote", but "Enjoy yourself within the context of the political religion of your choice." Voting or refusing to vote isn't making anyone suffer except possibly yourself. (Unless it has some kind of arcane spiritual potency, an odd idea often promoted by otherwise rational people).
In this regard, it seems to me that "destroying the Democratic Party" is a vacuous proposition. In liberalism, the parties are businesses, shouldering one another at the trough for market share, selling State services and payoffs for votes, contributions and taxes. If you have an appealing line of goods (or, more likely, bullshit) to sell, your enterprise should do well, and either get bought out by one of the big guys, or get big on its own and take _them_ over. If this isn't happening, you need a new product line or better salesmen and marketeers. You don't concentrate on destroying a particular competitor unless you're a monopolist, and that's not nice. After all, the competitor you're destroying might be holding back _other_ competitors, or might become a desirable buyout prospect at some point in the future. And while you're destroying the competitor, you're not concentrating on positively building up your own product line, image, and bullshit capabilities.
At least this is how it seems to me, an cynical outsider of course and hardly anyone to be taken seriously. But still, there may be some usable grain of truth in there somewhere. We _are_ talking about liberalism, parties, the State here, and I think I can see how it all works even through my extraterrestrial eyes.
-- Gordon