Why bother to vote?
02-05-2008
The evolution of a frustrated voter
[My apologies in advance for going on at such length about my personal voting history. I think those of us who aren’t just knee-jerk Republicans or Democrats, voting that way because our parents did, consciously or subconsciously go through this process of thinking through our votes. Let me hear from you about your reasons for voting the way you do.]
I face this problem every two or four years: Why bother to vote?
Someone in my family who shares my libertarian convictions chooses not to vote. The system is corrupt and hopeless, he reckons, and participating in the racket only legitimizes it.
I understand his frustration, but I find his solution to be emotionally unsatisfactory at the least. As long as I stay in the U.S. as a resident and a citizen, and outside the walls of a federal penitentiary, I cannot fully disassociate myself from “my” government and its actions. A good chunk of my income is paying for its misdeeds. So, how can I let the world know that I am paying for this perfidious government under duress and over my objections?
One way is to be politically active and vocal about it, which I have done since the fateful day that—at age 13—I read John T. Flynn’s The Road Ahead. And even though my vote is private, I have always chosen to go public with it to demonstrate my opposition to—well, virtually everything that goes on politically today.
Stage One
Until 1988 I actually held some flickering hope that by taking over the Republican Party, conservatives might be able to reverse the trend toward ever bigger government in Washington. I certainly would not get all the changes I wanted, but I’d get enough to make it worth my effort to go to the polling booth every four years and pull the lever for the Republican candidate for President. Call this the Delusionary Stage of my voting history.
That came to an abrupt end in 1988. When the Republicans nominated George H. W. Bush to succeed Reagan, I realized that fight was over. The accomplishments of the Reagan years had been disappointing enough; now formal control of the party was returning to the Eastern liberal establishment we had temporarily ousted (at least in theory) with Goldwater and then Reagan. The next day I drove to my voter registration office in Rockville, Maryland, and changed my registration from Republican to Independent.
Stage Two
Who to vote for in 1988? That was easy—a rather obscure congressman from my native Texas by the name of Ron Paul. He was the Libertarian Party candidate for President that year, saying pretty much the same things he’s saying this year as a Republican candidate—he is nothing if not consistent in his opposition to every form of collectivism. And I continued voting Libertarian for the next few years.
Call this the Purist Stage of my voting history. The people I had grown up with in the conservative movement were selling out every principle they had once espoused, and had to justify every atrocity committed by the Republican Party. I was totally unencumbered by that sort of baggage. I didn’t have to create any justifications for what the GOP was doing, and I had no apologies to make for enabling them to do it.
My purist votes were emotionally satisfying, but the problem was the lack of any hint of a practical impact on the body politic. Granted, one vote is always only one vote, but if you are a person of exceedingly low expectations you can vote Republican or Democratic with the hope of saying, afterwards, “we won” and “they lost.” Vote Libertarian and you plunge down the memory hole. TV broadcasts and newspapers don’t even report how many votes your candidate got. Are you sure you went to the polling booth yesterday and voted, or was that just a dream?
It was time for a new approach to voting.
Stage Three
It was a new century, and time for a new voting strategy. Also, I had moved to Virginia, where you don’t have to be a member of a party in order to vote in its primary. You can only vote in one primary a year (spoilsports!), but you can choose which party’s primary that will be. I could remain an Independent and have more leverage as an Independent.
In 2000, it was a foregone conclusion that Bush would win in Virginia. I certainly wasn’t going to vote for Bush because he was obviously (to me) a phony conservative, and definitely no libertarian. (Why was I so much smarter than my conservative friends? Ah, best not to venture into that territory…. Aw shucks, let’s do it. For one thing, almost all of them had fallen under the wicked witch’s spell, the Lesser of Two Evils myth. I’ll have to write about that in a future posting. Also, by 2000 a surprising number of them had a personal stake, financially or career-wise, in the fortunes of the Republican Party, and you may have noted that this tends to dilute the idealism that motivated you in your youth.)
At any rate, my vote for either Bush or Gore wouldn’t matter, so I decided to have some fun. I voted for Ralph Nader. In Virginia we have a provision—I no longer remember the details—whereby a third party gets some sort of semi-permanent status if it receives more than 5% (I think) of the vote in an election. Well, I said to myself, maybe we can get the Greens ensconced in Virginia this year, the Libertarians next time around. Then, perhaps, each major party will have to appeal to its third party in order to win statewide, and we might actually end up with two distinct and different parties rather than One-Party-In-All-But-Name. I admit that’s quite a bit of convoluted mental engineering to justify my vote for Ralph Nader, when in reality I did it mostly to give the salute to both major parties.
Out of this experience, though, came a new sense of freedom. I no longer felt obliged to vote ideologically, since the Republicans were now worse than the Democrats by my standards, and my ideologically pure party—the Libertarian—was all but invisible. I could vote strategically—thus the Strategic Stage of my voting history. At first my strategic goal was divided government: Let the two parties spend their energy fighting each other like thought-challenged 10-year-old kids, in the hopes of at least slowing down the growth of the welfare/warfare state. Then, after Iraq, my personal goal and strategy was to drive the Republicans out of every vestige of power in Washington, to teach the bastards a lesson.
So, I became a Deaniac, joining MoveOn.com and going to their house parties, where the atmosphere was remarkably like what I remembered from the Goldwater movement so many years ago. And, of course, the media and government establishments (really one establishment) got Dean just the way they had previously got Goldwater. But in the process, a new political weapon—the Internet—was discovered that would be put to greater use in a 2008 guerrilla campaign. In 2004 I voted strategically for the presidential candidate whose last name was not Bush, I forget what his name actually was, and in 2006 I voted for the former Reagan defense official who was running for the Senate as, ha ha, a Democrat. (I promise you, your first strategic vote for a Democrat is the hardest. After that it becomes easier every time.)
Which, of course, brings us to 2008 in my search for a meaningful voting strategy. Which strategic goal is more important—divided government or teaching the Republican Party a lesson it can’t ignore? And where does Ron Paul fit into the picture? Stay tuned.
[P.S. My apologies again for going on at such length about my personal voting history. I think those of us who aren’t just knee-jerk Republicans or Democrats, voting that way because our parents did, consciously or subconsciously go through this process of thinking through our votes. Let me hear from you about your reasons for voting the way you do.]
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