The Death of the Liberal Class

What I DO agree with:

I CAN see the argument that the Democratic candidates are not radical enough in their efforts, and are disappointing if one seeks much bigger and/or quicker changes of policy.

What I don't agree with:

I can NOT agree with the argument that declining to vote is equal to a "vote" for a change to the system. If that were true, then the fact that most citizens do NOT vote would have already resulted in a change in the system. If a non-vote is a vote for systemic change, then this "vote" for systemic change has won every election for a very, very, very long time. Obviously this tactic has met with resounding failure. The non-vote has been the majority - yet systemic change for the better has not resulted. Non-voters, despite all of their massive numbers, have not been effective as a method of shifting policy - other than a policy shift to ignore to an even greater degree the portions of the population who don't make their desires known via candidates.

If you raise a counter-argument that non-voters still aren't numerous enough, despite being in the majority, then I think you may fall very quickly down a slippery slope of preposterous and impossible thinking, basically wishing for some sort of unanimously (or near-unanimously) non-voting population. There's nothing realistic about this hope, any more than there's anything realistic about thinking the whole population is going to unanimously or near-unanimously elect ANY candidate.

Again: The non-vote "voice for change" has already won the election, over and over again, and it hasn't worked.

I also disagree with the statement that there's no difference between Democratic and Republican candidates. Do you think McCain would have pulled the troops out of Iraq? Do you think McCain would have begun the long process of expanding health care coverage? Do you that Kerry would have implemented the tax cuts for the rich that Bush did? Do you really think that Al Gore as president would have been no different from Bush as president? Do you really think that Hunter S Thomson wouldn't have made any difference if he had been elected to office in Colorado in the early 70s? Do you really think that it made no difference to American foreign and domestic policy that Kennedy spent 3 years in office and Nixon spent 6? Would the country not have been different if McGovern had defeated Nixon in the '72 election?

Okay, I admit, none of these Democratic candidates were going to turn America into a pacifist-anarchist/eco-themed/economic utopia -

But to say that the best thing to do for America, then and now, is to sit back and not participate in the voting process because the Republicans are no different from the Democrats... that standpoint would seem to me, based on historical evidence of our past half-century, to be either a fringe faith with insufficient supporting evidence to appeal to educated people, or a cynical justification for laziness.

If I had a kid who told me "I don't want to do my home work, there's no point, academic learning is crap" - I might be inclined to agree IF the kid was using the extra time to be educated (on ANYthing) via other means. I would NOT be inclined to agree if the kid was going to use it as an excuse to have more free time, or a justification for failure.

Good point,

I think voting for a third party candidate is an excellent way to accumulate the non-plussed/non-voting masses into an effective power for actual systemic change.

However, it can't be denied that votes for Ralph Nader in Florida caused Bush be president. Figures that I just got from the internet:
"In the 2000 presidential election in Florida, George W. Bush defeated Al Gore by 537 votes. Nader received 97,421 votes..."

My response to this is that people need to take responsibility and be pragmatic - it was well-known that Florida was a crucial swing state. Supporters of Nader in Florida in the 2000 election would have realistically done better if they had voted for Gore, but done a bit of volunteer campaigning on behalf of Nader in non-swing states.

One volunteer campaigner, putting in a few hours of civic effort or a few dollars, can potentially rally many more votes than one's own single vote. (That's why I'm volunteering to get out the vote for the Democratic candidate in swing-state PA, while casting my one solitary personal vote in NY, where amassing extra Democratic votes is not as crucial, realistically speaking.)

In other words, voting for Gore in Florida in 2000 while simultaneously assisting the push for Nader in non-swing states could have resulted in Gore winning the presidency AND Nader winning a more significant actual number of votes nation-wide than he did.

Nobody had any illusions of Nader actually winning the presidency, or even of Nader carrying one single state; the practical point of the Nader campaign was to amass enough votes to show that a more left-wing view than was offered by Gore did actually have some significant support among the American population.
SO....
If I think about it, the (completely valid and noble) "protest statement" of a goodly number of nation-wide votes for Nader would have been a demonstration of desires that could clearly only have affected the decision-making of a President Gore while not having much chance of winning any sympathetic respect from a President Bush. Nader and his supporters would have done themselves more justice by acting on this logic.

Perhaps it's all too easy to see this in retrospect.

You say:
"It's amazing to blame people who voted for Nader instead of blaming Gore and the Democratic party for refusing to move away from the center..."

I say:
If Gore had moved to a more radically left-of-center position I think there's less of a chance that he would have won over any of the 600 Nader votes he needed in Florida than the greater likelihood of Gore losing hundreds of thousands of centrist voters in Florida and everywhere else. There's a reason more Americans supported Gore than Nader - There's way more centrist voters in America than radical voters. Radicals don't vote much, judging from this board anyway. If they did, Nader would have gotten a lot more votes nation-wide. Appealing to this tiny sliver of "radicals who can be bothered to go to a ballot box" would not have been worth Gore's risk of losing all the millions people in the center who DO vote. Thats another reason why voting is important. Politicians create their platforms based on the desires of the population that VOTES, not the population that doesn't, no matter how large a non-voting population may grow.

You say:
"The two parties [Democrat and Republican] were nearly indistinguishable..."

I say:
If you CLAIM you can't distinguish between the politics of Al Gore and George W. Bush you're either lying for the sake of bolstering your argument or you've done very little research into the two candidate's track records.

You say:
"And it's amazing to blame Nader instead of blaming the Supreme Court for appointing Bush president when he received fewer votes than Gore. Remember? Gore won the popular vote..."

I say:
As EVERYBODY knows, the president is not elected by popular vote. The Supreme Court was not deliberating whether to overturn that particular detail. The issue was the electoral votes, and thus the Supreme Court's issue was how long to prolong the debate over Florida's vote count, when Bush maintained a slim margin of victory. Nader supporters in Florida, knowing in advance that Florida was a swing-state with a huge number of electoral votes up for grabs, were irresponsibly putting the country in the hands of the right wing by not casting their vote for Gore. Again I say: They should have pushed to get a higher vote turnout for Nader via telephone banking to non-swing states. And again I admit that hindsight is 20/20 (but can we AT LEAST get to 20/20 with hindsight? If even hindsight won't get you there, then you can't learn from mistakes).

You say:
"Gore won the popular vote, and the Supreme Court ordered recounts halted and sealed, and then appointed the loser president. How exactly is this Nader's fault?"

I say:
See the above, which explains "how exactly [it is] Nader's fault."

Here's a CNN post back from Halloween 2000, right before the election (back when hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians now dead or maimed still had their lives and their limbs, and the US was taxing the rich instead of cutting the rich's taxes and spending billions of everyone else's taxes on war... in other words, before Bush beat Gore because of Nader):

CNN, Oct 31, 2000 - Gore, Nader supporters agree to swap votes online

"Nervous Naderites" who live in hotly contested swing states such as Washington and Michigan are making pledges via the Internet to swap votes with Democrats in Republican havens such as Texas, as traffic zooms on three Web sites promoting the political tactic.

The strategy, designed to simultaneously promote the Green Party's political goal of achieving 5 percent of the popular vote while enhancing Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore's chances against Republican George W. Bush, has resulted in more than 1,000 swaps so far, according to the creators of Voteexchange.org, NaderTrader.org and Voteswap2000.com.

I say:
You can't mess with that. Good idea. Too bad even a tiny Florida Nader-ite voter sliver the size of the NYC Antifolk scene couldn't be bothered. If you had known about this program would you have promoted it? Are you doing anything right NOW, ten years later at Halloween time with a major election just days away hanging in the balance? Hindsight, anyone?

Check it out here if you're interested in getting involved this weekend and/or Monday and/or election day:

http://www.actnowny.org/2010/10/06/join-us-to-help-joe-sestak-and-john-h...

PS - I love Ralph Nader, and I don't think Gore's policies were better than Nader's. I'm glad Nader introduced his policies into mainstream discourse by acting out. I don't think I'm clashing with my above positions by saying that.