Throwing My Vote Away For The Last Time

For the second (and, I swear, the LAST) time, I stupidly threw my vote away this year by pulling the lever for a Democrat in a national election. The first time was in 1992, when I already knew better, at the urging of my soon-to-be wife - we were married four days after the election - and voted for Bill Clinton despite grave reservations. Clinton wasted no time confirming my initial view of him, and the country spent the next eight years witnessing Clinton do what national Democrats now do best at the policy level: sell austerity to the working class with a minimum of resistance.

That last point is important, and not to be underestimated. Would Reagan and Bush Senior have been able to secure passage of the NAFTA treaty and the savage welfare "reform" act as easily as Clinton did? Not likely. Democrats who might otherwise have stood in opposition to these measures on purely partisan grounds found themselves under equal pressure to support them when advanced by Clinton. Yet far worse than what transpired within the Democratic Party under Clinton was the nauseating conduct of many would-be "progressive" organizations who stifled the opposition they should have mustered against the Democrats' unrelenting assault on working people. Labor unions, civil rights organizations, women's rights organizations, environmental groups, and liberal policy advocates across the country closed ranks around Clinton and defended the Democrats despite the glaring betrayals on almost every front. In fact, "betrayal" might not be the right word, for it implies that the Democrats actually made commitments to the working-class constituencies that once made them a majority party; in fact, nothing of the sort took place. One could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, however, because of the willingness of these organizations to denounce and stifle internal critics and dissidents who urged a break with the Democrats over critical issues.

This time around, I foolishly adopted a kind of half-assed "popular front" approach to the election, thinking that the nightmare of Bush's reign might warrant setting aside my disgust with Kerry in favor of a large and unified voter turnout delivering resounding majorities to break the Republican stranglehold on all branches of the federal government. In hindsight, I see that what inspired this view on so many occasions was not what the Democrats were doing - if anything, they were a hindrance to forward movement against Bush's agenda - but rather what other people were doing. Of course my perspective was skewed, not least by the fact that I lived in a place sure to give the Democrats a majority anyway.

In effect, I fell into the same dumb pattern of behavior as the so-called progressive groups that back the Democrats despite overwhelming evidence this makes no sense. My "popular front" approach could only be comprehensible in terms of an all-out Democratic effort to mobilize the vote in favor of their national ticket...but this wasn't happening, and probably couldn't, because the Democratic Party had long since given its historic "base" the heave-ho in favor of chasing corporate dollars and middle-class voters in the 'burbs, with all the attendant policy positions you might expect from the Republicans circa 1988. Citizens thoroughly alienated from an electoral process and a policy debate so far removed from their concerns and hostile to their interests stayed home on Election Day in more than adequate numbers to repudiate Kerry and deliver even more of Congress to the Republicans.

Responding to an earlier post 'o mine, my pal the Superannuated Pedagogue said he "agree[d] that the Democratic Party must turn more progressive, and I hold out a degree of hope that they will be forced in that direction." But I'm not calling for the Democrats to be reformed, for there is no hope of reform from within. On the contrary, I'm calling for them to be abandoned, permanently, by every organization that holds pretentions to leadership among the working class. I'm looking for the Democrats to go the way of the Federalists, Whigs, Know-Nothings, and Populists and disappear from the political landscape, so they can do no further harm.

Let me put this as simply as I can: The continued existence of the Democrats and the inexplicable hope among people all over the country that they represent an alternative to global empire and the corporate rape of the planet may be the single greatest obstacle to peace and progress in our time. If this somehow sounds "extreme" to you, then you haven't been paying attention, for the rot has been under way for a good long time. It's also been well documented. Back in 1986 Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers provided a clear analysis of the Democrats' Right Turn and the reasons behind it in a book that should be required reading for anyone who contemplates getting involved in electoral politics and still holds illusions about what (and who) the Dems represent. In 2002, Steve Perry offered an update of the Ferguson/Rogers argument that is blistering in its judgment and no less true for its polemicism. Perry offers a boatload of compelling, practical arguments for dumping the Democrats, but the one I found most useful was his reply to those who accused him of ideological purism and a corresponding lack of "realism":

"This is ironic. In the past generation countless people have left the Democratic party, or gotten pushed out of it, or simply stopped caring about it, over all sorts of issues. It's the party itself that's burdened by an untenable ideological purity: It means to remain programmatically compatible with its financiers and large donors at any cost, even though that cost is an increasing and now perilous level of defection by traditional Democratic voters who have no stake in sticking with the party. But again, the Democrats are not in this position because they're out of touch. This is where they have chosen to stand. They would be happy for your help--in fact, they are positively desperate for it, because a party can lose only so much ground before the patronage that keeps it functioning at ground level begins drying up--but come what may, they mean to stick with the people who pay their bills, thank you very much."

A recent study by Political Money Line indicates that among 268 corporate Political Action Committees giving $100,000 or more to federal candidates, 245 gave more than 50% of their contributions to Republicans and only 23 gave more to Democrats. This represents a 10 to 1 tilt towards Republicans this election cycle...so perhaps the Democrats have now carried their ideological purity to the point of losing the elite patronage they so crave. One can hope.

So in the aftermath of this year's election my one regret is that I did not cast my vote for Ralph Nader, who was on the ballot in New Jersey and who certainly deserved my vote for the extremely important work he has done and continues to do in building (small "d") democratic strength everywhere he goes. Diana Barahona did the right thing and voted for Nader. In the concluding section of her essay explaning her vote, she reflects on those who are already calling for the Democrats to move further to the right and the madness of following in that path:

"There is no lack of irresponsible types who have no sooner made one mistake than they are off and running toward the next one, and in four years they will do it to us again. Every mistake is magnified now because the planet's days are numbered. Global warming is destroying the fabric of life as I write and unless there are radical changes in policies right now, its effects will not be at all mitigated; more likely, the US leaders will increasingly resort to military violence to try to maintain control in the face of constant natural disasters, wars over resources, and massive displacement of populations. The time for radical change was twelve years ago, and the failure of the American left to lead us toward this change is unforgivable."

In retrospect, I think my "popular front" attitude was also motivated by a sense that a great deal was at stake in this election, and that a victory for Bush would mark a very dangerous turning point in an American political system already corrupted to the point of emergency. In an October essay attacking the Nader campaign and warning progressives against supporting him, my undergraduate mentor H. Bruce Franklin painted the world after a Bush re-election as a very frightening place:

"If George Bush is elected, he and his gang will have the official stamp of approval from the American people (perhaps with help from Diebold), a Republican Congress, legislation in place for a police state, a thoroughly compliant media, at least two upcoming vacancies on the Supreme Court, and an unhindered opportunity to pack the rest of the federal judiciary with fanatical right-wingers. That packed federal judiciary alone will be enough to prevent progress on any legal front. Environmental protection will be decimated, legal challenges to the tortures carried out daily in the hundreds of Abu Ghraibs in the American prison-industrial complex will be tossed out, basic Constitutional rights and liberties will be jettisoned, the disenfranchisement of poor people will accelerate, and there will be no legal way to prevent the right-wing forces in power to steal any election they choose, whether by electronic voting machines or more old-fashioned methods such as purging voter rolls or tossing out thousands of ballots....The door toward a progressive agenda may be about to close. The only way to get a foot in that door is to get George Bush out of the White House. And the only legal way to do that is to elect John Kerry."

While I strongly disagreed with Bruce's attack on Nader, when Election Day arrived I did what he recommended and voted for Kerry, having arrived at the same bleak vision of what a second term might mean. But all the lefties in academia could not make up for the millions of working-class citizens who did not register, or who did not vote, because it was not enough for them to vote against Bush. There were no longer enough regular Democrats to win an election, even with ample support from non-Democrats. So do we now stand in the nightmare world Franklin described, with liberty and democracy in mortal danger?

Note that both Barahona and Franklin allude to the likelihood that legal methods of effective resistance to Bush's agenda will soon disappear, snuffed out through judicial sanction and state repression. If Barahona and Franklin are right, what options are now available to the peace movement? Stay tuned, while you can...