In an argument with a colleague over the election, the oge wrote:As usual, your reliable instincts direct us to another focal problem: "real change depends on the majority of voters." Let's consider that proposition, using two approaches.
The first would ask whether you may be equating voters with the American people in their non-voting capacity. When we look at the great popular issues of the last two centuries, it is surprising how little of their energy could be expended effectively in the voting booth. Most, from suffrage through the struggle for workers' rights and unionism, to civil rights and the antiwar movement of the 60s and 70s, were advanced extra-politically, when Americans voted with their feet, in the streets. On the local level, i could throw in Delaware County's anti-rent wars. In the case of emancipation and its related issues, the struggle promoted civil war, the final solution to problems too complex and divisive for political/electoral address.
In all these issues, government eventually responded to the people's demands by enacting legislation, but this was not in any significant measure the result of electoral politics. When is the last time you saw a national referendum on the ballot? Even Constitutional amendments are a real challenge; women still do not have equality guaranteed by an ERA.
Part of the confusion comes from the general belief that we are a democracy, accompanied by the strong assumption that what voters want, means something. But as every school kid is taught (or used to be taught), we are far from a democracy; we are, very deliberately, a Republic with a representative government. That simple fact represents an effort by the founders to protect us from ourselves---from the transient passions often described as mob rule. But the price for that wise decision, as they cautioned us, was constant vigilance over the creatures we elect to office.
What the founders did not provide for---although Washington, among others, warned us of their inevitable corrupting influences---was the role of political parties in our politics. The first three US congresses sat without political parties. What parties do, is protect the power of vested interests (including its incumbent officials) by excluding other points of view from access to power, primarily by restricting ballot access.
That brings us to the second approach, examining the exclusionary and inclusionary functions of parties. The only candidates with easy ballot access (automatic access) are those endorsed by the two major parties. To gain that endorsement, candidates must subscribe largely to the platforms (or reigning practices) of their parties. It is a natural evolution of self-interest that the parties develop similar, cooperative positions in a mutual effort to protect themselves from third-party challenges. We end up with a dysfunctional duopoly, where the significant contest is over access to office/power, not over fundamental issues. So we get debates and ads that focus on misrepresentation, personality, and invented distinctions.
When individualist positions arise, the party consensus, driven by the leadership, serves to constrain them. Their voices are either isolated and marginalized (Kucinich and Paul, in their respective parties), or eventually driven out (Gravel and McKinney, and Barr, in their respective parties). We end up with virtually indistinguishable positions or minor distinctions on fundamental issues: privatized health care, an imperialist foreign policy, an energy "plan" focused on cap and trade, a Wall Street bailout, and enough "compromise" in legislation to give us incredible federal laws supporting torture, unlawful seizure and imprisonment, and forfeiture of posse comitatus.
If competition is the life blood of the markets, of athletic effort, if it serves to produce the best science, crafts, and art, then why would it not serve the American people as well in their exercise of the polls? The short answer is, it would. But it would threaten the incumbent power. Unlike businessmen, athletes, scientists, and artists, the members of the political parties make the laws to protect themselves, which foremost means protecting their parties. That is the unarguable advantage of their position. They are vulnerable---if in fact they still are---only to the degree that a vigilant voter votes them out of office---not one party or the other, but both, in the healthy search to replace them with truly competitive and representative officials; or, as we did during the great movements, that we march with our feet for reform.
But so complete is the public indoctrination that many if not most have come to view alternative candidates as mere spoilers. We forget that Ross Perot correctly predicted the effects of NAFTA, that Nader predicted the course of war and environment under either party. We forget that one of the lions of American history, Teddy Roosevelt, who took on the overarching oppression of the oligarchs early in the last century, himself had recourse to a third party.
Next, the other profound effect of our duopolistic politics: the excess of the executive. As the parties in their self-interest inevitably approach the same center---as do all entities that merge on common ground, from galaxies to grains of sand---their proportionate power is weakened as a function of their loss of special identity, and that deficit is yielded to the executive. Their interest in the office is merely partisan. The functions of that office grow unchecked by debates on fundamental differences that do not exist.
Since both parties have accepted an imperialist foreign policy, they leave it to the president to declare wars, to institute doctrines of first strike and pre-emption, to dictate the length, breadth, and objectives of conflicts; they rubber stamp the extensions of Constitutional limits on the mobilization and funding of armed forces.
Even appointments to the judiciary suffer. Contrary to the common belief that justices represent distinctions in liberal or conservative leanings, the real test that is applied, is whether they support vested power. That is the reason bush's appointments went through; with their bias for power, they would not threaten the status and functions of the parties.
Finally, the self-protective practices of the duopoly both invite and are served by money flowing from lobbies and campaign contributions. While the rhetoric of both candidates promises to control earmarks, their parties exercise the practice to the max. Both candidates extoll the virtues of their campaign financing, but their parties intentionally escalate the costs of campaigns at all levels of office---both to handicap directly alternative challengers and to secure the support of great wealth and collusive voting blocs. The net effect for the American citizen is big debts to be satisfied by legislation and policy friendly to special interests.
Whoever wins the election tomorrow (or the next day or next month---and i still question the capacity of a racist culture to put even a mildly black man in the white house) will inherit more power abrogated by the other branches of government than the world has ever seen. Do not expect him to surrender it. The exercise of that power is pre-ordained by the lowest common denominator of his party, which is shared by the other party. The only constraint is the tottering of a bankrupt, diseased political economy that at least appears beyond the control of politicians.
If it is possible to elect an alternative candidate, it is the patriotic imperative of the American voter, without regard for his standing in any poll or any other pragmatic calculus, to do so.
If it is no longer possible to save the Republic with a ballot, then it is the duty of the American person, following his brothers and sisters in all the great movements for equal justice, to vote with his voice and feet.
That is why the Founders guaranteed free speech and assembly and cried for the need of a vigilance they could not institutionalize.
