Midterm Voting: A Metaphor
I hear from disillusioned progressives who can’t seem to get motivated to vote in the upcoming midterms: Obama hasn’t come through. We’re still in Afghanistan. Health care reform was a sham. DADT repeal is worse than a joke.
I have found there is no effective retort to win over people who are disillusioned to this degree. I think it comes down to expectations denied. I favor keeping them low – all the better to exceed them.Because sometimes the dysfunction of government overwhelms our ability to see the people who use it to do, or try to do, good things. I happen to know that Senators Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) are stand-up people by any measure. Not only are they well intentioned, but they have resumes that show them to be effective leaders who simply dig in to get the job done. And I could name any number of members of the House of Representatives who fit this description.
That doesn’t mean that the Senate isn’t rotten to the core—and it is—a dysfunctional, decrepit old debating society owned by special interests.
But it’s a little like bed bugs. I can’t do a lot about warding them off when I travel, but I can check under the sheets, I can put my suitcase on the suitcase holder instead of the bed, and keep my clothes off the floor. I do this to avoid a negative consequence, nothing more – there is no other reward.
When we shun the voting booth we offer the opposition (we’ll call her Christine) two votes. If Christine stands for everything you hate, and her machine has been so effective in poisoning the waters of public discourse that you are ready to walk away, then she and her handlers all amplify their votes to the degree that their opposition gives up.
Voting is Strategic
Voting is a matter of strategy. The idea that somehow we get what we want from voting is misleading and inaccurate. One’s vote almost never leads to wish fulfillment. And unless one is an absolutist, say, an anarchist who hopes for the whole thing to fall and means it, then exercising your vote is sometimes nothing more than an effort to avoid being trampled.
Symbolic voting, that is, voting for a protest candidate without a chance of winning, was shown to be utterly harmful when it allowed George W. Bush to win. Ralph Nader was lying when he said there was no difference. Mr. Bush’s choices for the Supreme Court alone gave the lie to that claim.
Those choices affected the lives of every person in the land, and will continue to do so for a generation. The Citizens United decision alone was a monumental setback. That doesn’t mean that Al Gore would have nominated a progressive’s dream to the Court, or that his overall policies would have even averted war. Would he have done less harm than Bush? The question hits the raw nerve of everything progressives have left undone in pursuing purer politics. There is no such thing. But the two men, and the parties they represented at the time, were not the same. That was a lie.
There are other reasons to vote in these midterms. The outcomes of state gubernatorial and assembly races will determine who controls the reapportionment process based on the 2010 census. Redrawn districts inevitably favor the dominant party and will affect the potential viability of progressive candidates for the next decade.
I would argue it is despair that sets us up for failure. Despair calls the tune when we walk away because we cannot see the republic we desire on the horizon. And every new star politician that the left throws up the pop chart disappoints because the system demands it. There is no other way.
At this historical moment, one cannot govern from the left in America. But neither is anyone governing from the left in Britain, France, Greece, or, well…anywhere. We stand to lose everything here. Right now. We stand to lose health care reform, and I would argue until I am blue in the face that the reform we have is better than what will come if it is repealed; and should the Republicans and the Tea Partiers win big, really big, the only thing standing in the way of repeal will be a veto pen.
Did you notice that this is not about Obama? He’s not on the ballot last I checked. But men like Russ Feingold are. And if we lose them because we are in a petulant snit about our rotten system, we will have only ourselves to blame.
Sometimes you vote to avoid a negative consequence. And it is—I know I am dating myself here—a duty. It’s that simple.
See you on November 2.
Steve Klingaman | Contributor
Steve Klingaman is a nonprofit development consultant and nonfiction writer living in Minneapolis. He blogs on public policy and politics from a progressive point of view at Open Salon and writes on personal finance at Wisebread.com. His music reviews can be found at minor7th.com.
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