I’ve written two posts recently about the persistent awfulness of the Democrats, neither of which mentioned voting. Despite that the discussion on both of them has turned to voting.
I would say voting is completely irrelevant in a discussion on the extent to which the Democrats suck. First you discuss how much the Democrats suck, then once you’ve reached consensus (or not) on that you discuss what impact that would have on your voting habits.
On the thread about Freedom Movement Amanda’s first question was:
What’s “support”, then? Are we permitted to steal into the election booth and shamefacedly vote for Democrats while publicly condemning them and helping them lose elections by increasing the number of people who don’t vote on the theory that they’re all the same?
My answer is it doesn’t matter.
Well it matters if people don’t publicly critique the Democrats because they’re afraid of the consequences. It’s unprincipled and bad politics. One of the first jobs of the left (wherever you are on the left) has to be to raise people’s expectations. Part of raising people’s expectations means saying that left-wing governments are not good enough.
But it doesn’t matter whether or not people steal into the election booth and vote. Sometimes it really doesn’t matter – since she’s from Texas Amanda’s vote in the Presidential election will be as important as mine. ((I’m from NZ; I don’t get a vote.)) At other times voting may have an effect, but if it’s the most important, or anywhere near the most important, political act you take, then you’re unlikely to achieve what you’re going for.
A lot of my friends don’t vote ever; I think even that is giving voting too much weight. Voting doesn’t do any harm (and America is proof that not voting doesn’t give the government any less legitimacy). I’ve no problem with people voting, or not voting, on the flimsiest of reasons. I’ve voted for the most left-wing party in parliament up until now, but at the next election I won’t do so, because of the co-leader of that party. ((I should point out that New Zealand has a welfare system, and a national health system. Our Prime Minister even acted like a feminist for a few days this year (it’s not going to last). The parties I’ve voted for have been to the left of the Labour party, which is turn to the left of the government.))
But, and this really shouldn’t come as a surprise based on what I write, I don’t think real positive change comes from voting, which is why I see political energy focused on changing voting patterns, as wasted energy. I’m hardly the first person to observe that progressive change is driven from below, not given from above. That means that we should focus our energy below, not above.
I think that the importance of voting will be greatly affected by the jurisdiction. Here in Canada, voting can be very important, even (or especially) if you vote for a marginal party, since each party gets funding based on the total percentage of votes that they earned. This funding model has allowed the Green party, for example, to increase its effectiveness immensely, because the 3% or so of votes that they got at a federal election allowed them to get a significant amount of money (something like 2$ per vote). The same model is in place on a provincial level here in Quebec.
If this is the case in your jurisdiction, voting can be important – you can fund the people you want to help! Not voting is effectively refusing to fund people working to effect change.
It is always important to vote – if for no other reason than that folks like George Bush thrive when they can convince people it isn’t worth the effort. Yes, politicians are sold like soap these days, resulting in the advertising dollar competitions for political voices. The two best ways to fight these trends is to donate small sums to candidates, and more importantly, VOTE YOUR BELIEFS.
Money is secondary to politicians, only important because they believe they need to buy ads in order to garner votes. De-link voting from money (admittedly almost impossible), and they’ll ignore money in favor of ideas.
The Religious Right is an excellent example of this. Who in the 1970s cared what the fundys thought? It wasn’t until they hooked up with Reagan in the 80s and started voting as a block that their beliefs started getting put into law.
Yes, we need to keep pushing for our beliefs, and yes, often the politicians will fail to enact what we want. However, if we fail to vote, we have only ourselves to blame when politicians say there isn’t the political will to deal with global warming, AIDS, poverty, wiretapping private citizens, politicization of the justice system, stopping pre-emptive invasions…