Voting Green in a swing state
by B. Sidney Smith
10/25/12
(Preface:
This article isn't really meant
for everyone, so I might be able to save you some time. If you think
climate change isn't a serious electoral issue, this probably wasn't
written for you. If you think American presidents should conduct wars on
their own authority and that it's okay if they secretly assassinate
whomever they (secretly) decide are bad people who might hurt us then
you needn't concern yourself with what follows. If you think the Bill of
Rights of the Constitution doesn't necessarily apply when terrorism is
involved, or that letting gays have civil rights should be decided on a
state-by-state basis like slavery before the civil war, or that the
health of the environment isn't more important than economic growth, or
that whistleblowers who expose governmental and corporate crimes should
go to prison but that privileged lawbreakers shouldn't, or that whether a
candidate is electable should depend on how much she pleases wealthy
donors--if any of these approximates your own take on the issues, please
read no further. You'll be bored. Honestly.)
I live in a purple part of the country (Virginia)
and move in academic circles, so of course I know many, many people who
will be voting for Obama. If that doesn't strike you as funny, then you
are the person I have written this for.
Of course it is impossible to know, but if I murdered Santa Claus in
front of their children, the look on my Obama-voter friends' faces could
scarcely be much different than the look they get when I say I am
voting for Jill Stein.
"But this is a swing state...you have to vote for Obama...what if Romney wins?!?"
The pain in their voices tugs at my sympathies; their fear is very
real. I want to reassure them, but I was cured a few presidential
elections ago. I won't be drinking from that cup again.
At first they assume I don't understand what's at stake. They tell me
about the Romney/Ryan agenda. They tell me about Obamacare. They tell
me about DOMA and the Fair Pay Act. But the conversation wanes when I am
not only unsurprised by the information but able to supply
amplifications and corrections. I've read the (detailed summary of) the
Affordable Care Act. I know about Romney's probable agenda. I even know
the age and bodily afflictions of key members of the Supreme Court. In
short, I know what's at stake.
This is awkward, and for some there is no plan B, but experienced
partisans know where to take it next. There is something wrong with me.
I'm a purist, a liberal elitist who won't be satisfied, arrogantly
"engaging in a form of rhetorical narcissism and ideological
self-preoccupation."1 I indulge in a "pernicious idealism that wants the world to be perfect and is disgruntled that it isn't."2 I trade the common good for private conceit.
Fortunately my friends are mature people with trained minds, so for most it is enough to mention the ad hominem fallacy,
to remind them that my personal faults --which I stipulate are
legion-- aren't relevant to the validity or otherwise of my position in
this debate. Usually we can agree to leave that brand of "discourse" to
the professional bloviators.
So at last we come down to it. What are the arguments? There seem to
be only two reasons for a progressive (you're still reading, so I
suppose that includes you) to vote for Obama. Either (1) you think Obama
is not so bad, really, and has done a lot of good and could do more, or
(2) Obama's record makes you green about the gills, but the thought of
Romney winning is intolerable.
Obama enthusiasts have by heart a widely-circulated3 list
of his achievements: The Fair Pay Act, the auto bailout, legislation for
credit card reform and hate crimes and student loans, some tax cuts,
repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, raising fuel efficiency standards, and
ending the war in Iraq. Some also add killing bin Laden, the stimulus,
and a new Start treaty with Russia. Everyone adds Obamacare.
Some of these really are achievements. The Fair Pay Act is a
no-brainer, for one. Others are marginal. Credit card reform stopped
some abuses but left millions imprisoned by usurious interest rates on
their debt, with their homes and futures at the mercy of predatory
lenders. If you are drowning it is definitely better to have fewer
stones around your neck. You still drown though.
Some of the "achievements" are problematic at best. The Affordable
Care Act introduces crucial reforms and increases access to healthcare
for many, but it does so by placing a new tax on labor and small
business to underwrite private insurance and pharmaceutical
corporations' complete capture of the nation's healthcare system. The
phrase "lipstick on a pig" comes to mind. (One could say something about
the spectacle of progressives celebrating the plan corporate
conservatives were pushing until Obama swiped it. One could.)
Some of these are not achievements, or not Obama's. U.S. troops
ultimately left Iraq not because Obama wanted them out, but because Iraq
wouldn't sign a Status of Forces agreement to allow them to stay,
despite the Obama administration's efforts. Hard to see how it is honest
to give credit to Obama for doing something he was forced to do against
his will. (Iraq's intransigence was owing in part to the revelations
allegedly leaked by Bradley Manning, so if anyone is responsible for
getting us out of Iraq it is he. For this he was locked up under Obama's
direct authority under conditions that for many months met the
international definition of torture, and now faces life in prison.)
But enough: he's done some good things. Is that enough, or
should his merit be judged on the whole of his record? This matters,
because the weight on the other side of the scale is not insignificant.
Some of these are marginal too. He's deported more people than ever,
but made some concessions on immigration. Others are not entirely his
doing. (Congress helped, passing the NDAA for instance.) Some, like
making life hell for medical marijuana growers, are difficult to
understand. But unfortunately the seriousness of some of his actions is
on a different scale entirely.
The country has been bankrupted by war and its reputation ruined, but
the lies that got us there will never even be investigated; that was
ruled out by Obama practically the moment he took the oath of office,
the first of many betrayals of expectations he engendered in his
supporters. The banksters who tanked the economy and destroyed the
nation's wealth likewise received blanket immunity. The "stimulus
package" given to financial elites was many, many times bigger than the
one the rest of us had to share, locking in the material ruin of the
working class. He expanded the pointless war in Afghanistan and extended
military assaults to many other countries in Nixonian secrecy. He
continued every Constitutional excess of the previous administration and
extended them to include new grants of executive-branch secrecy and
extra-judical power, to include not just war-making, kidnapping, and
indefinite detention, but assassination even of American citizens.4 Obama has done more to render the U.S. Constitution a dead letter than every previous right-wing administration combined.
If that is something you can put on the same scale with credit-card
reform and call it even, I respectfully suggest you re-examine what is
usually meant by the words "progressive" and "liberal." And "American,"
while you're at it. The presidential oath of office is to defend the
Constitution, and this president knowingly betrayed it. That issue isn't
even partisan: Some, no, every future president is going to use these precedents, and when they are used against you you will have no judicial recourse thanks to Barack Obama.
So if you think Obama is not so bad, really, and has done a lot of
good and could do more, then by all means vote for him. And you can stop
reading now--the rest of this essay will be of no interest to you.
The rest of us, reviewing this administration's record and its likely
future course with dread, face just one question. Must we reelect Obama
to save the country from something worse? This is a serious question,
and calls for considered analysis.
Notice first that "Romney's worse so we have to vote for Obama" isn't
an argument, or even a syllogism. What people really mean is something
like this. (1) A Romney presidency would be worse than a second Obama
administration, and (2) if Obama isn't elected then Romney will be, so
therefore (3) we should vote for Obama, at least in any state where our
vote might make a difference.
Certainly one can't quibble with the second premise. The probability
that neither Obama nor Romney gets elected is exactly zero. The first
premise too at first blush looks irreproachable from a progessive
perspective. Mere common sense seems to endorse the conclusion once the
premises are stipulated, and most folks think no further.5 They don't have to agitate their consciences over voting for the war criminal, corporate lackey Obama, they can just vote against the
likely greater war criminal (and proudly greater corporate lackey)
Romney. And all the rest of it follows too: maybe Obamacare is a
sell-out to big-insurance and big-pharma, but at least they won't get
their greedy mits on Medicare. (Well, this time. Probably.) And so on.
Those of us growing gray about the temples are struck most by the
argument's familiarity. We have heard it--and consented to it--often
before, in fact about once every four years. Replace Romney/Obama with
McCain/Obama, Bush/Kerry, Bush/Gore, Dole/Clinton, Bush/Clinton,
Bush/Dukakis, Reagan/Mondale, Reagan/Carter, Ford/Carter--no wonder it
rings bells. In every election for 36 years a center-left Democrat has
run against a center-right Republican, each campaign pandering to their
more ideological supporters, and in each case the elected administration
tossed a few bones to their left/right base while dutifully serving
elite interests.
Meanwhile, as elections come and go, both ideological conservatives
and ideological progressives find the country moving away from them; not
towards their ideological counterparts, but towards a corporatist,
oligarchic security-state. The electorate is apparently not in charge.
Those who are in charge find the partisan electoral process useful
because it keeps a potentially dangerous population quiescent, occupied
like loyal sports fans not with what is actually being done to them, but
with the business of "winning." This is a classic method of control,
used by elites in one form or another throughout the ages. Tiny little
England built a global empire using it. It works equally well on the
unsophisticated and the ostensibly educated. Check yourself: if you have
mentally colored yourself red or blue, if you see the country as made
up of red, blue, and purple blotches, then your political identity is no
longer yours. You have been co-opted. Occupied.
Welcome to the game.
By itself this doesn't disprove the partisan argument, and many
progressives point to such achievements as increased LGBT rights as
proof that voting for the less-bad can result in genuine positive
change; that likewise the assault on women's reproductive freedom shows
the danger in allowing the other side to win. These are excellent
examples, but those using them to urge partisan loyalty omit the
essential point that these changes have been occurring independently of
which party is in power, because the motive force behind them is serious
activism, not partisanship. Gay rights activists have fought a long and
sometimes brutal campaign characterized not by loyally supporting the
Democratic Party but by confronting it, by being prepared to play
hardball with politicians who won't get in line. Anti-abortion forces
have done likewise.
That point deserves a double-take: The core activists driving actual
political change don't hesitate to imperil a nominally allied
candidate's election if that candidate appears insufficiently committed
to their cause.6 This fact is obviously a key to their
success, and it strongly suggests there is a problem with the partisan
argument. But what, then, is the error in that argument? As it happens,
this very week's news reports furnish an example that illuminates it
completely.
In 2002 the Total Information Awareness program was created within
the Defense Department to gather and coordinate intelligence to support
the War on Terror.7 The Bush administration had to abandon
this project in the face of determined opposition, especially from the
left, to what was rightly seen as a grave peril to civil liberties.
However, components of the planned program lived on under separate
authorities until Obama took office. Like the other elements of Bush's
"anti-terror" activities, the TIA program was then consolidated and
expanded under new guise. We now know that domestic surveillance and
data-mining has not only been greatly accelerated within a burgeoning
military-security complex, but it is also now combined with the
extra-judicial detention and assassination program (dubbed "the
disposition matrix")--at least insofar as both have been bureaucratized
within the same agency, an agency whose activities are shrouded in
impenetrable secrecy.8
The relevant point is not the seriousness of this developement--which
I hope goes without saying--but that no Republican president could have
gotten away with it. It's the "only Nixon can go to China" principle:
in a democracy only a nominally liberal leader can put in place the
machinery of a totalitarian state, just as only a nominally liberal
leader could gut the social safety net (Clinton), or put privatizing
Social Security and Medicare on the table (Obama).
This is a clear counterexample to the claim of the first
premise--that a Red president is bound to be So Much Worse than a Blue
president--and thereby reveals that the partisan argument is unsound.
Let me be quite clear: it is not unsound because of the differentials on
some set of policies or issues. Partisans will argue that in this
election there are issues--the Supreme Court, Medicare, etc.--where
there is a clear choice, and that is true. It is always true, every four
years, as sure as the tides. That is by design: the political
gamesmanship the argument draws us into is itself the trap. By
constraining our discussion to the acknowledged differences between the
sides, partisanship tricks us into supposing their similarities aren't
an issue, when in fact their similarities are the most critical issue.
This is because their differences will remain in contention regardless
of who gets elected, but their similarities assuredly will not.
If Romney is elected, he will re-empower neocons and serve the
interests of the national security state with (perhaps) greater zeal
than Obama would, but with this difference: his every move will be
scrutinized and hampered by a determined opposition. Also if Romney is
elected, he will try to privatize Social Security and Medicare and
transfer even what little remains of the nation's wealth to the
oligarchs--but he will face the same wall of opposition that stymied
Bush on these issues. Obama, on the other hand, can continue to
negotiate away Social Security and Medicare and progressive taxation and
face only whimpers from his own base. Romney may nominate a justice
likely to reverse Roe v. Wade, but it would be with the certain
knowledge he was engendering an electoral tsunami against Republicans
that would last a generation, if not forever. Obama will nominate
another corporatist jurist certain to further indenture flesh-and-blood
citizens to their corporate-citizen betters, and pay no political price.
From the bank bailouts to climate change to Israel/Palestine to the
Patriot Act--one could go on for pages, and the story would in every
case be the same.
This dynamic at work in American politics is now evident even to the
willfully blinkered. It is a dynamic that will not change if Obama is
re-elected with solid liberal support. Why would it? It will also not
change if Romney eeks out a victory despite solid support for Obama,
because whatever new reactionary or militaristic policies Romney
succeeds in perpetrating will be loudly condemned by the next Democratic
presidential candidate, who, if elected, will then adopt them.
The only point of leverage is here: whether Obama wins or loses, if
progressive third party candidates get enough support to scuttle the
Democrat in a close race, change is possible. This is not wishful
thinking, but an empirical observation. Every successful progressive
movement in our history has illuminated this path to change. Politicians
are not ideologues but pragmatists. They need your vote to get elected. If you deny it to them, the next one will learn to whistle your tune.
The partisan argument for progessives to hold their nose with one
hand and vote for Obama with the other is thus refuted, but the larger
point introduced above bears emphasis.
As I have documented elsewhere9, the partisan duopoly
disenfranchises the entire electorate, left, right, and center. The
American people as a whole, irrespective of ideology, have been locked
out of running their own country as the writers of the Constitution
intended they would. The mechanism at its root is dead simple and works
in exactly the same way on both "liberal" and "conservative" voters. You
are offered two choices, each of whom has been carefully vetted by the
owners and is dedicated to serving elite interests. You are then
pursuaded that one of them is bad and must be voted against.
This is not to say that there aren't real issues between the two; on
the contrary, without the presence and validity of such issues the trick
wouldn't work. People aren't stupid. But from the point of view of
those whose interests the elected candidate will first serve, those
issues are of minor importance.
Once voters are pursuaded of the validity of a vote-against it only
remains to ensure that the two political "sides" remain in approximate
parity, a task ably handled by the corporate media in collusion with the
parties themselves.
The only escape from this trap is to understand that the call of civic duty is a call to active participation
(activism) in the political process. To those who answer such a call,
voting-against doesn't even make sense, because it means giving up on
one's own commitment to self-government. It is only when voting for the actual changes one wishes to see that it is rational to hope those changes will someday happen.
As I have shown in my book The Good American: A Situation Report for Citizens,
the real challenges facing America and the world are far more dire than
most people realize, even those who make an effort to be informed.
Unless Americans reclaim their government, and soon, we stand to lose
everything; our democracy, our livelihoods, our liberty, and the
ecological foundation of civilization. It will not require a wholesale
conversion of the electorate to political activism. It only requires
enough of us refusing to play the partisan game to break the duopoly's
lockdown on political discourse. At that point the gates of the
political arena are unlocked, and the course of the nation can once more
become subject to the will of the people.
My vote for Jill Stein in swing-state Virginia isn't a protest vote,
it isn't an angry vote, and it isn't elitist. It is a well-informed vote
for the political agenda I think is best for my country. The United
States of America is (or can be) a Jeffersonian democracy, and I am a
citizen. Casting this vote is my civic responsibility. What's yours?
Footnotes:
5. It is formally valid by disjunctive syllogism (modus tollendo ponens): ((O or R) and notR) implies O.
B. Sidney
Smith is a recovering math professor, gardener, and creative
loafer living near Appomattox, Virginia. His autobio, curriculum vitae,
favorite recipes, and much more besides can be found on his website,
bsidneysmith.com.