Getting political
An Electrolite entry has spawned a hot discussion, chiefly concerned with whether Nader voters are irresponsible idiots who are to blame for everything that’s gone wrong in the past two and a quarter years, or just unconscionably misguided fools who are to blame for everything that’s gone wrong in the past two and a quarter years.
I continue to be astonished by the arrogance of this position, that because I’m no fan of the Republicans, the Democrats own my vote. That it wasn’t Gore’s job to get himself elected, it was Nader’s. Bush voters, people who didn’t vote, Gore and his milquetoast platform — they played no role in the election. It was all Nader and his voters. (I alluded to this in MMG’s early days.) Despite that it’s very unclear Gore would have won without Nader’s candidacy, even the coming war is all Nader’s fault .
They’re fond of patronizing us with the facts of the matter — that we have a two-party system, that we’re obliged to vote for the lesser of two evils regardless of how we feel (convenient how claiming the high ground of “realism” automatically marginalizes dissent.)
Well, here’s my patronizing lecture: if you want my vote, earn it by running a candidate I can vote for in good conscience. I voted for Clinton in ‘92 to vote out Bush Sr. Having done so made me ill thereafter as he stuck to everything I didn’t like about his platform, and caved on everything I liked. I voted Green in ‘96 and 2000, and I do not apologize for it.
Yes, Gore is not Bush. He could have done a lot more to demonstrate that before the election. I couldn’t make out much advantage in having someone who understood the environmental issues but planned to ignore them over someone who just didn’t care and planned to ignore them (to comment on just one issue.) And so I chose to cast a vote that said “being not registered as a Republican isn’t good enough.”
All that said, I know of no more pressing issue for this nation’s future than ousting Bush. So much so that I figure I’ll register as a Democrat for the first time, to participate in the primary and maybe help to select a candidate I can live with. So far Kucinich looks pretty good to me, but I haven’t looked at all the candidates in detail yet.
Wooo! Go Zed!
(The people who kept saying "I hope they choke on" something made me want to hug Deb Notkin for saying *she* didn't hope anybody choked on anything.)
Posted by Mris on March 13 2003 06:27
Well, I've always chosen to respectfully disagree with Zed on the issue of "political realism" -- although both the Republicans and Democrats espouse some principles with which I strongly disagree, I find the Democrats less unpalatable and tend to vote for them just because they have a chance of winning.
As for the currently declared Democratic candidates, I feel that John Edwards has the best chance of actually pulling it off in 2004. As in almost every year, though, I'm frustrated that the people I'd really like to see running from both of the major parties, aren't. My political fantasy is a Powell/Whitman ticket. I think they could garner a mandate from both Republican and Democratic voters, and wouldn't do nearly as much damage to the country as George W. (or, say, Hillary Clinton on the other extreme). Oh well, there's always 2008.
As far as voting for Clinton is concerned: he had his flaws, but I still have a clear conscience about having voted for him twice. The major triumph of his administration, in my opinion, was the dismantling of the badly flawed welfare system. Remember the saying "only Nixon could go to China"? Well, only Clinton could reform welfare. Still, I'm just as angry as anyone that he lied to the American public and asked his associates to back him up on it.
(I have lodged one third-party protest vote: I voted for the Socialist Party candidate for governor of New Jersey in 2001, because I thought both major party candidates were bozos. The Democratic bozo won anyway.)
Posted by Jimcat on March 13 2003 09:02
Of course, nobody claimed that the Democrats "own your vote". They don't own _my_ vote; I have voted against Democrats in living memory. And they don't own yours.
The issue isn't about Democrats supposedly owning anyone's vote; it's about what was right to do in 2000. Naturally, if I had shown such catastrophically bad judgement as to vote for Ralph Nader, I might be scrambling to mischaracterize my critics' arguments as well.
Posted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden on March 16 2003 19:35
What I'm scrambling to do is to understand why the oppobrium reserved for Nader voters seems so disproportionate to that I've seen expressed for anyone else who didn't vote for Gore, like, say, people who actually voted for Bush, or people who didn't vote, many of whom probably felt the difference between Gore and Bush was negligible, as did some Nader voters.
This makes sense to me in the context of an unstated presupposition that Nader voters are Traitors to the Cause because the Democrats are entitled to the votes of anyone with our sympathies .
Without such a presupposition, I still can't figure out why we're so much more contemptible than everyone else who didn't vote for Gore.
Posted by Zed on March 17 2003 19:47
I agree with Zed, and think that PNH has mischaracterized the voters. People who voted for Nader are, in my opinion, guilty of nothing worse than an excess of idealism. The ones who showed "catastrophically bad judgment" are the ones who voted for Bush.
Posted by Jimcat on March 18 2003 07:18