TBT: Voting Defensively
Ten Years Ago, I Made the Case that the Greater of Two Evils Was Truly Evil. It’s Only Gotten Worse.
Years of targeted attacks on the institutions of American democracy have left our political structures calcified and creaky. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and a general assault on the legitimacy of our voting processes has undermined trust, and has allowed the right to proliferate conspiracies, the result being the election of Donald Trump and the Jan. 6 insurrection.
The two-party system was designed to work with the Constitutional system of check and balances to rein in what the mainstream considers to be extreme views. The founders, often portrayed as revolutionaries, were far from it, seeking to keep the passions of the public in check.
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The result, historically, has been to narrow the range of politically accepted ideas — a compromise that has allowed power to pass back and forth between the two parties and to create a sense of stability.
The failure of our system to account for this has been our chief weakness, I think, because it too often has allowed conventional wisdom and money to set the national agenda. And when revolutionary fervor is pushed to the margins, passions will bubble up and out — as it has done periodically, in civil war, in labor unrest, in civil rights and anti-war protests. Change is possible, but only at a glacial pace. The demands for actual equal treatment of African Americans remain only partially met. Women continue to deal with harassment and second-class status. Gays and lesbians can marry and participate openly in our society.
This slow change, however, has triggered a backlash. This is not a new response (see Rick Perlstein’s series of histories of the conservative movement), but it has spilled out of the margins, with the right finally saying the quiet part out loud. The entire project of the American right has been revanchist and grievance-based, an effort to return to a false Eden of White male (mostly Christian) power. In the past, Republicans attempted to dress this reactionary undercurrent up in polite clothing — think the “compassionate conservatism” or George W. Bush — but the ugly, authoritarian instincts were always driving their legislative efforts.
Democrats attempted to address this conservatism by playing along. Jimmy Carter made deregulation and a balanced budget major goals; Bill Clinton doubled down on both of these and smashed welfare to pieces. Even the supposedly liberal Barack Obama considered a “grand bargain” that would have gutted Social Security. All attempted to play ball on the Republican’s home turf and all managed to do little more than enable and empower the right. All assumed that constitutional and party structures would keep the right in check.
Enter Donald Trump. The Trump takeover of the Republicans has transformed them from an extreme right-wing coalition into a fascist enterprise beholden to a single figure head. Trump dictates where the party is going and what it stands for, ripping the cloak of small government from a party that never really cared about anything but boosting profits and making the rich richer, while rigging the system to maintain and enhance their hold on power.
This last part is key. The cultural fracturing that makes compromise impossible and that conflates message and messenger, that has transformed Democrats and the broader left from legitimate actors with differences into enemies in a civilizational war. Winning is the only thing that matters to modern Republicans (by this I mean going back to the 1950s), and winning entails crushing the opposition, demeaning and damaging them. The right trucks in images of violence and martyrdom, and the line between metaphor and reality has grown and is growing increasingly faint.
Take Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican. Should Republicans take control of Congress, he said, they should “‘open up every vector of attack’ on Democrats” and focus on “the impeachment of President Joe Biden and senior members of his administration for unspecified reasons.”
According to The Huffington Post:
The Republican mandate in this year’s midterm elections is “not to go hold hands in the warm spring rain with the Democrats, it is to investigate them, hold them accountable and we can do that without the Senate, without the White House,” Gaetz continued.
We hear the same thing from Trump, from Lauren Boebert, from Josh Hawley, from so many elected Republicans, that it is clear we cannot sit out elections any longer or pretend that our conscience can only be calmed by voting for an obscure third-party candidate like Jill Stein or even Ralph Nader. I used to believe this. I used to think that voting in this way would result in change. It doesn’t. Not as long as our political system is structured the way it is.
We can make changes to our system, but we cannot ignore it. Third-party quests have proven not just hopeless, but too often lead to the worse of two evils being elected. (Seen the Florida vote in 2000.) Voting implicates our conscience, but also must be approached strategically. It may make one feel good to vote for Nader (as I did in 2000) or Stein, but that good feeling is useless when George W. Bush is in the White House driving us into an unnecessary, foolish, and wasteful war. Or someone like Trump is banging his fascist drum.
The key is understanding that one’s vote is not the only action one has available. Vote strategically, even defensively. In November that will mean voting for Democrats to ensure the GOP does not take over the House and Senate and all of the nasty things that come along with that. It will mean doing the same in November 2024, and it means doing the same going forward, because the kinds of structural fixes needed are not likely to happen — at least not in my lifetime.
So vote, and then act. Protest. Organize. Your responsibility extends beyond the ballot box.
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Here is a piece I wrote for The Progressive Populist in 2012, when Obama was seeking his second term. I make a similar point.
Voting Defensively
It was nearly four years ago that Barack Obama stood on a podium in the cold in Washington D.C. and took the oath to become the 44th president of the United States.
The first black man and one of the youngest to take the oath, he took office amid a wave of optimism. Part of it was the historic nature of his victory, but mostly it was the tone of his campaign and the way he connected with younger voters, giving much of the electorate a sense of hope as the nation seemed to be teetering on a precipice.
The economy had collapsed, thanks to the bursting of a housing bubble and a financial system run amok, and a budget surplus had been turned into record deficits. We were still at war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the outgoing president and vice president had no concern for the constitution.
Four years later, and the economy remains stalled, the deficit has continued to grow and our civil liberties may be worse off than before.
It is clear that the promise of Barack Obama was greater than the reality.
And yet, progressives have little choice but to back his re-election bid. I don’t say this lightly. I agree with Green Party candidate Jill Stein that the two-party system is broken beyond repair. And I agree with Chris Hedges that electoral efforts are largely futile and that resistance is our best option.
But staying home this time is a poor option, if only because we must cast a defensive vote to ensure that the few programs that work and what little is left of the federal safety net remains intact. We must vote defensively to ensure that the anticipated retirement of moderately liberal justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsberg does not result in a further shift to the right for the court.
We should have no illusions, of course. Obama’s first term has been marked by a slew of missed opportunities and failures. And even his greatest success – the Affordable Care Act – was overly bureaucratic and will not address the larger problems facing our healthcare system.
Obama is, as Robert Scheer says, a very good moderate Republican. But moderation is better than the politics of anger and fear being peddled by Republican candidates Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.
The GOP is promising to:
• gut Medicare by turning it into a voucher program;
• slash the social safety net while cutting taxes for the richest among us;
• repeal the limited financial regulations put in place after the Wall Street meltdown;
• replace the Affordable Care Act with something weaker and less likely to expand coverage.
As disappointing as Obama has been, Romney and Ryan, armed with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, are likely to do real damage to what is left of the social compact and give license to the worst instincts of the citizenry.
The approach, therefore, should not be to boycott this vote but to back Democrats while holding our noses. And we need to make sure that every Democrat who wins re-election – including the president – knows that their survival comes with a price, i.e., support for real progressive legislation.
At the same time, we need to follow Hedges’ prescription and take to the streets and make our voices heard.
Obama said in his inaugural address that the nation had “chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.” He then proclaimed “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”
Too many on the left missed his meaning. They stood down and, as Obama pursued an essentially amoral bipartisanism, the right dug in and made any progress impossible.
We’re still waiting for the bold action he promised. Rather than waiting, however, we need to make him do it.