To Vote or Not to Vote

[gmd]

Re: To Vote or Not to Vote

I did vote, what can I say it is an excuse to come to work late.

I did take my kids. I explained to them we were there to pretend that we are throwing out the bastard in office to replace him with a new bastard.

The poll workers, all neighbors who know me in our small town, were confused as to why I could not stop laughing.

[gmd]

Re: To Vote or Not to Vote

Why We Vote

Whatever problems our politics have, Election Day is a moment when we hope for the future and revel in the solemnity of the democratic process.

Paul Waldman | November 4, 2008 | web only



For years, some economists and political scientists have scratched their heads in bewilderment at what they call "the paradox of voting," which states that going to the polls is a profoundly irrational act. If the only reason we do anything is because the material benefits of an action outweigh its costs (an assumption embedded in this theory, among others), there's no reason at all to vote. The odds that the election will be decided by one vote -- and therefore your vote will be decisive -- are vanishingly small. Therefore, whatever benefits you will derive from your favored candidate's policies must be multiplied by that infinitesimal chance that your vote will decide the election, to ascertain the return on the investment of voting. On the other side is the effort, time, and possibly the expense of walking or driving to the polling place, or filling out an absentee ballot. No matter how you calculate it (and many intrepid scholars have tried), the costs clearly outweigh the benefits.

And yet, people do vote. Therein lies the "paradox," which is what it looks like if you inhabit the soulless world of homo economicus. People reorganize their schedules, wait for hours in line, and otherwise act outside their narrow self-interest to cast votes they know will not affect who wins and loses. So on this day, when over 100 million of us will pull levers, fill in bubbles, or push buttons on a touch screen to register our choice for the next leader of our nation, it's worth taking a few moments to reflect on the meaning of the vote.

We vote today in ways that are profoundly different than Americans did in previous eras. In the nineteenth century, voting was an act of party loyalty, and a highly public one at that. The parties printed ballots with their candidates written in, and your role as a voter was to take one and put it in the ballot box, often under threat of violence or in exchange for payment, in cash or alcohol. Different parties' ballots were sometimes printed on different colored papers, so there was no mistaking a voter's choice. Progressive Era reforms led to the secret ballot, transforming voting from a public proclamation of loyalty to a private choice. Voting became not something one did in full view of one's community, but in silence and alone.

Indeed, it became an almost sacramental act. In today's polling places, voices are hushed and movements slow, and we move toward the altar of the booth until we are finally alone with our selections. But though our choices may be private, election day itself is one of the few occasions many of us have to gather with our community. On the others -- sporting events, concerts, watching the fireworks on the Fourth of July -- we come together as spectators, observing the action but not participating in it. And unfortunately, spectatorship characterizes much of our contemporary engagement with the world. But on election day, we gather to act. We look around at our neighbors and know that at that very instant, millions of other Americans are doing the same thing. At that moment we are something extraordinary: we are citizens.

If recent history is any guide, this election day will be replete with problems, as the incompetence and inadequate preparation of election officials meets the profoundly un-American efforts of some to prevent certain people from voting. That's not to mention the question of whether the votes will be accurately counted. (Election day fun fact: Thomas Edison, the greatest American inventor, secured his first patent in 1869 for the Electrographic Vote Recorder, which he hoped would be used to tally votes in Congress. The august members of the nation's legislature were uninterested in such newfangled whizz-bangery, and Edison vowed never again to waste his time on an invention with so little commercial value.)

There are plenty of other reasons to forget what is moving and inspiring about election day. Those of us who find politics endlessly fascinating have few illusions about the limitations of leadership or the motivations of political actors. The outcome may or may not be the one we desire, but any president will eventually disappoint those who voted for him or her -- thus has it always been, and thus shall it ever be. There are too many battles to be fought, too many opportunities for what some will view as unnecessary compromise, too many chances to fail. Only the deluded will look back on a president's term as a source of unconditional joy and pride.

But at the moment of election day, the disappointments are in the future, their arrival seemingly uncertain. The hope, on the other hand, feels as real as the sun that rose this morning. It can stir our souls and move our feet. The hope of what may come invests the small act of voting with the weight of the future and all its possibility.

So at least for a day, we can remove the heavy cloak of cynicism that covers us for the rest of the year. For a day, we can revel in our own participation, and feel ourselves not subjects but citizens, the very embodiment of the democratic promise. For a day, we can indulge our fondest hopes, we can expect that new leadership will transform our nation, we can ask "Why not?" to what we want our country to be and believe that the question will be answered. There will be plenty of time later for doubt and disgruntlement.

If you have children, take them to the polls with you. Remind them that for most of human history, people had no say in who would lead them, that violence and fear determined who controlled the institutions of power. Tell them that even in our own country, founded on the most noble of democratic principles, people have had to labor and protest and fight and even die to secure this right for themselves and for others. Tell them that there are many things you can do to exercise your citizenship, but this is one thing you must do. Tell them that election day is when you act not for yourself but for your community and your country. Tell them that although campaigns can be small and mean, election day is when our nation can also be bound by hope.

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=why_we_vote

[Anonymouse]

Re: To Vote or Not to Vote

I'm not voting.

Wise choice sir.

[MrHyeSev]

Re: To Vote or Not to Vote

This is my first year of voting.

[One-Way]

Re: To Vote or Not to Vote

I'm not voting.

[Anonymouse]

Re: To Vote or Not to Vote

Don't Vote

by David Ker Thomson

Believing that each person has an equal vote in a democracy is like believing that banks will check each mortgage to make sure it’s not a subprime risk. In fact banksters have been bundling mortgages – tossing subprimes in with primes and selling them as an aggregate – for long enough that we had been starting to believe there weren’t any subprimes anymore but merely ascension, something like what Evangelicals call The Rapture. Well, there’s been a lot of downward rapture lately. My brother is losing his house right now to the repo man, though he has an email in his inbox from two years ago – from me – telling him not to buy his crap house in Nashville, that the market would drop. Now the house will return to its original owners, the raccoons, who may have mixed feelings about his departure, because Clive, a gentle soul, had allowed them to remain in the attic and would play his mandolin for them.

The electoral landscape has as many rotten boroughs as the mortgage or "real" estate one. If your vote is for one of the two approved parties (sometimes three in non-U.S. parliamentary democracies), it’s bundled and counted, and if not, it’s tallied in a cluster of votes which are given only nominal status. Usually this is performed as some kind of musical chairs routine, where your vote bundle gets something called a "seat" if your team has played the game correctly. If you want to dissent, your vote bundle is not given a seat, but your group can tell each other with grave faces that you’ve "done" something to "change" things. Let’s be clear about this. Most votes for change are bundled and thrown away. From this fact you might guess that voting is merely useless, but that isn’t the case. Your vote for alternative candidates is useless but not your vote for the system. Your vote is useless for change but powerful for stasis – it ratifies the system and sends a strong message that you think it’s okay to have a dynamic where any vote for change is tossed out. Don’t kid yourself. Your deed in the voting booth isn’t merely useless, it’s pernicious.

How has voting, the mechanism for ceding authority to surrogates, come to seem like the means of actually reclaiming that authority? Voting is highly esoteric, even if you don’t include certain anomalies in Western parliamentary procedure that stand out for their freak value, like the American electoral "college." But voting presents and re-presents itself as simple. Even those who have the most to lose from impenetrable and arcane electoralist procedural shufflings will routinely tell you that each person has a vote (I’ve even heard 17-year-olds tell me this!), though "each" and "person" and "has" and "vote" are highly contested categories with a level of complexity that does not lend itself to the glib integer of the "cast." Everyone used to "know" that a person was a man and not a woman and not a black man. Now we "know" that each person gets a vote. In such a system, could "I" "have" "a" "negative vote"? If you think the word "a" isn’t contested, you may have forgotten Ohio and Florida. How have we come to this appalling state, where the vehicle that has made the greatest inroads on the self living authentically in the world, a vehicle which has thrust its tendrils into our most private parts, pierced our flesh, and dragged us off to Washington like so many interchangeable Mr. Smiths, can continue to appear not only as our savior but as our very self? Even lovers of big trees clamor to have a part in the general calamity, to comfort themselves with a color in the electoralist spectrum that is everywhere stolen from them in nature itself. Here in Toronto the number of seats the greens (who according to their signs were "voting for the future") garnered in the recent election was zero, which is a nice symbol because you can make a zero with your fingers and use it to view trees, which tend to look bigger this way. I write here as an environmentalist, by the way. I mention this because you might not be able to see my tears from where you’re sitting.

This democratic dissatisfaction with the self, the urge to enlist it in some tawdry ventriloquist act, to keep it at a distance, is as old as philosophy, and could make you want to drink hemlock. As for me, I’m named after the second king of the xxxs, a guy who liked to spy on women while they were bathing, murder their husbands, kill Palestinians for sport, and keep a sexy virgin in bed even after he was impotent. "Now this is a man after my own heart," said the Semitic storm god who installed him, and I have to say I’ve always liked David, because he was a big man who could weep, repent, and also write excellent prose. Of course, he wasn’t as big as the first king, who’d been installed on the basis of his height and movie-star good looks, despite major provisos and warnings in triplicate from the storm god that this whole idea of a leadership structure wasn’t going to do anyone any good. Well, it all came to a bad end, of course.

Why are we so sure we need leaders at all? Much of what passes for an answer to this is a highly complex set of insecurities but which appears to be as simple as citing pavlovian cue words and phrases like "Hitler" or "intruder in wife’s bedroom." Here is our condition, then, to mistake the complex for the simple and the simple for the complex. The pre-utopian condition comes "after" modernism and post-modernism with their pretensions of naming our historical moment, but pre-utopia only appears to be something separate from our heart, here, now. It is the utopian condition with a cloud. I speak here as a five-year street person who knows a thing or two about intruders. Still I say, even when I am in the street: here. Not there. On the street, I learned to wake in strange places. The point is less about where you wake up, than that you do.

It’s funny that in the system of elsewhere, of capital and statist abstractions, utopia is spoken of as distant in space and time. But really it is no where, in the same way that one’s heart is not a where, unless it is everywhere. Eat, drink, sleep, be here now.

When people ask me what I have against democracy, I assume they mean other than its long history of bloody foreign adventures or other than the fact that its best forms are always complicit with totalitarian regimes, or other than the fact that it arises in slave states like 18th-century America or ancient Greece, or other than that it pretends to authenticate the self by sending it as a degraded proxy elsewhere to cede authority to people who are usually dumber than oneself and always less scrupulous, or that its rituals of affirmation and allegiance are too embarrassing to watch on TV even with the sound turned off, or that it’s too embarrassing to contemplate the image of one’s otherwise intelligent friends watching things called "debates" as if their irony somehow buffers them from the idiocy. So maybe they mean, other than the obvious. Do the Made in China stickers all over their apartments count as something other than the obvious? Do we need Hannah Arendt to tell us that democracy is merely a stage on the way to totalitarianism? Here’s what you get in a democracy: until December 31st of this year, the label "Made in Canada" can legally be affixed to apple juice grown in China by Chinese people using Chinese apples and reduced to concentrate in China, on the basis of its having water and a container added to it at the Canadian end [Clark Hoskin, Edible Toronto, Fall, 2008]. You can learn everything you need to know about democracy’s self-deceptions from that word "Made." Statist self-deception is constitutive, not incidental.

We’re nickled and dimed in this way, lied to and cheated upon in fractions too numerous to tabulate, and it is no consolation that we in turn murder in decimal bits, suck Iraqi baby blood in subtle calculations reckoned to the right of the decimal point when we fill up our automobiles, and then slap ourselves on the back and tell ourselves that at least we’re not like people with "regimes."

From the midst of this welter of micro-deceptions, the state exacts your tribute as a gesture of excess, and your submission comes not as a response to a request for the small change of your self, not merely for bits of you as the micro-fractured political subject you feel yourself to be. Rather the state wants all of you, and calls you to duty beneath the shining upright of the integer, the neat compression of the self into a single upright one (1), yourself squished sideways into the vertical submission of supportive citizen, like a soldier at attention, a sideways and non-committal smile, a single digit indistinguishable from the next, and your superiors can then mobilize you – now as an it – at will.

A sign on my neighbor’s lawn urges us to vote, to "Stand Up For Canada." The sign keeps tipping over. Someone writes to tell me that the way to fix democracy is a new invention, The Fourth Party. As if the name doesn’t hint at its likelihood of success. Voting for something called The Fourth Party is like hoping for a long line at the bank. Don’t get me started.

I haven’t had the heart to call Clive. In my mind’s eye, he’s sitting in the empty house, playing one last round for the animals. Then he gathers himself to leave. If I squint, I might see what comes next.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/thomson2.html

[Anonymouse]

Re: To Vote or Not to Vote

Very good article gmd.

[gmd]

Re: To Vote or Not to Vote

Mock the Vote

Daily Article by David Heleniak | Posted on 11/3/2008

Jesse Ventura, when he's not talking about 9-11, makes a lot of sense. Describing the two party system to Larry King, he said,
[W]hat you have today is like walking into the grocery store and you go to the soft drink department, and there is only Pepsi and Coke. Those are the two you get to choose from. There is no Mountain Dew, no Root Beer, no Orange. They're both Colas; one is slightly sweeter than the other, depending on which side of the aisle you are on.
In an interview with Newsmax, he described politicians in the two party system as pro wrestlers.
In pro wrestling, out in front of the people, we make it look like we all hate each other and want to beat the crap out of each other, and that's how we get your money, [and get you to] come down and buy tickets. They're the same thing. Out in front of the public and the cameras, they hate each other, are going to beat the crap out of each other, but behind the scenes they're all going to dinner, cutting deals. And [they're] doing what we did, too — laughing all the way to the bank. And that to me is what you have today, in today's political world, with these two parties.
Jesse's right. Our political system is a farce. This year, we have running for president a warmonger who's a reluctant socialist versus a socialist who's a reluctant warmonger. We have two parties that claim they're different, but when the Establishment, the Complex, our shadowy overlords, whatever you want to call them, really want something, they get it. When the Establishment wanted the Bailout in the face of almost universal grassroots opposition, they got it. When the Complex wanted immunity to the telecoms who knowingly spied on Americans, they got it. When our shadowy overlords wanted stormtroopers to brutally stifle protesters during the party conventions, they got it.
But even if voters had a real choice — and even if the politicians followed the majority will on issues that matter — the system would still most likely be a farce. As Augustine observed, without justice, a government is nothing but a band of thieves. Augustine was writing about kingdoms, but his insight applies to democracies as well. Without justice, the ability of the subjects of a government to vote on the laws and rulers that govern them doesn't make a government any more legitimate than an unjust monarchy. And the founders of this country did not believe democracies were likely to be just.
As Walter Williams points out,
We often hear the claim that our nation is a democracy. That wasn't the vision of the founders. They saw democracy as another form of tyranny.
In Democracy: The God That Failed, Hans-Hermann Hoppe notes that
it is difficult to find many proponents of democracy in the history of political theory. Almost all major thinkers had nothing but contempt for democracy. Even the Founding Fathers of the U.S., nowadays considered the model of democracy, were strictly opposed to it. Without a single exception, they thought of democracy as nothing but mob-rule.
In order to create a just government, the founders established a constitutionally limited republic, in which the popular vote was to be just one check among many. Notably, the word "democracy" does not appear anywhere in the Constitution. Yet today, the word is sacred. As election day approaches, Americans dutifully watch inane debates, respectfully watch commercials in which celebrities harangue them to "rock the vote" or other such nonsense, and compulsively ask each other who they're going to vote for.
On election day, they go to the polls as if they were receiving Holy Communion and then go through the rest of the day wearing "I Voted" stickers as if these stickers were ashes on Ash Wednesday. Pat Buchanan calls the blind reverence to and awe of the seemingly divine force of democracy "democracy worship." He notes it was the prospect of spreading democracy to the Middle East that ultimately convinced The Decider to decide on war in Iraq. So how did we get from the founder's deep suspicion of majority rule to the deification of democracy?
Once, humans lived in small bands and were free. True, life was dangerous, but no one told you what to do. As Philip Jackson explains,
Men might hunt individually or in groups. But when they cooperated, leadership was not based on official rank, but rather on one hunter proposing a group hunt and recruiting others to follow him. None were compelled to follow, however, and different hunts might have different leaders based on the relative charisma of different individuals at different times. Women needed even less coordination. With them leadership would be more a matter of the wiser or more skilled giving advice as the need arose.
Then came the great collusion, followed by the long oppression. As humans increased in number and food became harder to come by, bands became tribes and tribes became chiefdoms. Big Chief, hungry for power, convinced the high priest to delude the people to his consent. Big Chief was divinely appointed, they were told, and maybe even divine himself. Therefore, the people must do what he says.
Murray Rothbard (1926–1995), economist, historian, and political theorist, was one of the greatest minds of the 20th centuries. Perhaps Rothbard's greatest achievement was his identification of the "court intellectual." In contrast to the masses, who "do not create their own ideas, or indeed think through these ideas independently," intellectuals are society's opinion shapers. The court intellectual is the intellectual who, "in return for a share of, a junior partnership in, the power and pelf offered by the rest of the ruling class, spins the apologias for state rule with which to convince a misguided public."
Until recently, the propaganda put out by the court intellectuals was linked to traditional religion. To quote Rothbard again,
particularly potent among the intellectual handmaidens of the State was the priestly caste, cementing the powerful and terrible alliance of warrior chief and medicine man, of Throne and Altar. The State "established" the Church and conferred upon it power, prestige, and wealth extracted from its subjects. In return, the Church anointed the State with divine sanction and inculcated this sanction into the populace.
In the West, the myth of the divine right of kings held sway until the Enlightenment.
According to Keith Preston, "A principal achievement of the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries was the demolition of the notion of the divine right of kings." The word "enlightenment" may conjure up images of a man sitting in the lotus position on a mountaintop, at one with the universe, but in regard to the time period, enlightenment refers not to mystical insight but to the realization that much of the received wisdom — including the myth of the divine right of kings — was a pack of lies. With the courage to question the lies and disseminate their conclusions, the writers of the Enlightenment began a revolution in thought that culminated in the Declaration of Independence.
Unfortunately, at the same time they were knocking down one pillar of the old order, another writer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was planting the seeds of democracy worship. In Rousseau's mystical vision of a society governed by what he called the "general will," each of us would put "his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we [would] receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole." The resulting sovereign, "being formed wholly of the individuals who compose it, neither [would have] … nor … [could] have any interest contrary to theirs; and consequently the sovereign power [would] need give no guarantee to its subjects. In his imagined world, "[t]he Sovereign, merely by virtue of what it is, [would] … always [be] what it should be."
James Bovard, who calls Rousseau the "modern state's evil prophet," contends that in promoting his concept of the "general will," Rousseau "unleashed the genie of absolute power in the name of popular sovereignty, which had hitherto been unknown."
Rousseau's concept of the general will proved irresistible to future court intellectuals, as it perfectly conflated society and state — a useful trick indeed. Rothbard wrote,
With the [subsequent] rise of democracy, it is common to hear sentiments expressed which violate virtually every tenet of reason and common sense: such as "we are the government." The useful collective term "we" has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If "we are the government," then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and tyrannical; it is also "voluntary" on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must he paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that "we owe it to ourselves"; if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is "doing it to himself" and therefore nothing untoward has occurred.
Observing the power of "the myth that says we are governing ourselves," Lew Rockwell notes that whereas "[k]ings of old would have been overthrown in short order if they had tried to grab 40 percent of people's earnings, or told them how big to make their toilet tanks, or determined how schools taught every subject," modern Americans "turn a blind eye to petty tyrannies in our midst."
As Bovard comments, it is as if "[b]eing permitted to vote for politicians who enact unjust, oppressive new laws magically converts the stripes on prison shirts into emblems of freedom."
"It is difficult to find many proponents of democracy in the history of political theory."
Wise up, America. There's nothing special about 50% plus one. Truth and justice cannot be determined by a show of hands. We are not the government. Voting is not a sacrament. And as it stands today, when we're only given a choice between two Establishment-approved candidates, voting is a joke.
Voltaire, the undisputed leader of the Enlightenment, used humor and wit as two of his primary weapons, and, as Robert Ingersoll remarked, "In the presence of absurdity he laughed…" It was largely by making the divine right of kings a laughing stock that the Enlightenment writers destroyed it. It is time for us to do the same thing to the divine right of the majority.
This year, vote laughing or stay home.

http://mises.org/story/3170

[yerazhishda]

Re: To Vote or Not to Vote

This makes me want to vote: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVRmsLAvVzQ

Great video, it really shows what we Armenians can do when we are united!

[crusader1492]

Re: To Vote or Not to Vote

Crusader, did you know that Obama is very pro-union?