On Wasting Votes

Recently, fwoan wrote an excellent take down of electoral lesser-evilism.

Starting right out of the gate, fwoan writes, "As our country gears up for the election cycle again, we will be subjected to the tired campaigns of status quo politicians explaining to us that this year’s election is “the most important in our history” as we’re told every election cycle to make sure true democracy is stifled by inhibiting actual choice – increasing their wealth while decreasing ours."

Immediately, he* tackles a core problem with the American electoral project. Every two, four or six years bundlers, fund raisers, PACs, interests groups and campaigns invite the electorate to pick from a narrow slate of candidates who will, almost invariably, use their positions to enact enforceable policy with results that hurt - in a very real way - the voters.

These candidates, with rare exceptions, belong to the capitalist class, either as owners or as managerial professionals. Because they can afford to run, or have access to the funding which the majority of citizens cannot obtain, they enter the lists ahead of the large number of filing candidates who do not gain media coverage.

They possess a sympathetic hearing from the press, known as "viability" in electoral parlance. Let's gain some clarity - a "viable" candidate comes in one flavor only: he or she has sponsors. He or she can win.

Let's muse on that. A viable candidate has the access, power, position, resources and sponsorship to beat other candidates who also have access, power, position, resources and sponsorship. Before we treat this as a corruption of the original intent, let's remember that Thom. Paine languished in a French prison (pondering the abolition of private property) and John Madison wrote the Constitution with an eye to the continued power of the landed and mercantile elite.

Fwoan soon continues with, "How are we to ever institute social justice if we can never move beyond those who would sacrifice their sisters and brothers in the name of capital? I propose that if you don’t already, please vote third party!"

And while I think the invitation to voting third party channels involvement towards a dead end, fwoan uses the next several paragraphs to outline the relationships between struggle and social perception, keeping always in mind the admirable project of toppling the political economy which rests on the capitalized one. He* unravels the mystical appeal to a lesser evil, with alacrity, here:

The fight to win a more just society is not a fight that can be won in the short-term but rather, has to be part of an organized effort. Those who would say that voting third party only empowers the Republicans (And you don’t want to see a President Palin do you?) are missing the point! While yes, the Democrats are less conservative than the Republicans – both parties are on a slow crawl to the right. In that crawl, eventually candidates like Palin will become the norm, and later still will be considered progressive when compared to candidates of the future. I already outlined how Obama has been doing everything he can to empower conservative talking points as if McCain had been the one that was actually elected in 2008. The point is to upset and destroy this rightward crawl, not empower it by choosing what you perceive to be the lesser of two evils! But let’s humor this argument. Let’s say a mass movement to vote third party only splinters the traditionally Democratic vote and allows Republicans an easy victory. This would mean that the Democrats would suffer overwhelming losses, and Democrats are in the business of winning elections just as the Republicans are too, so a loss like this would not be something they would enjoy, correct? As often as they like to make us think otherwise, the Democrats didn’t become one of the strongest parties in our country by being stupid so it seems reasonable that they would study the election results and find the reasons for such a splintering of their electorate. When faced with demands for a party that doesn’t support wars, enable theft by the rich, allow discrimination, etc, the Democrats could choose to continue to lose elections, shift to the right even faster hoping to take away Republican voters (which worked disastrously for them in the first half of the last decade), or shift back to the left to earn their electorate back and gain new voters."

And on this I must part ways with him,* however estimable the reasons provided.  Over the four or so decades of my life, I have never seen the Democratic Party lurch leftward after an electoral defeat. The ratchet only works to the benefit of the ownership class because their membership controls the means by which ideas disseminate, the banks through which investment passes and the organs through which politicians finance their campaigns.

An electoral defeat for the Democrats won't result in a reformist party (and fwoan rejects a reformist party as a goal, rightly). It won't result in leftist or liberal programs, because the Democratic Party does not represent the constituencies of "the left." It neuters them. The Democratic Party represents that faction of the powerful who prefer to use social spectacular means (see, the Spectacle) to maintain the status quo, in occasional opposition to the broadly militarist-nationalist (still spectacular, all the same) GOP.

Casting votes and campaigning for third party candidates won't undermine the power of those who've accumulated control of the American economy, and the protective government which shields it from revolt. It will rather, I believe, isolate insurrectionary population groups from each other, in piddling factions and sects, providing easy targets for political machination and domestic anxiety.

Instead of raising consciousness, especially in the context of the American system, it will create pockets of disaffected sectarians who will inevitably retreat into defense of their positions, even as the spectacular media consigns them to mocking irrelevance, or focuses on them as examples of the dangers of "extremism."

Instead of encouraging an uprising, or new models for cooperation, working towards third (or fourth, or fifth) party electoral efforts will waste labor on a project which cannot but isolate its proponents, because it simultaneously affirms the electioneering, whilst guaranteeing its members will only suffer defeat.



* - a generic grammatical assumption on my part