I am skeptical about the American two-party system, but not cynical enough (not yet) to refrain from participating in elections. There’s one coming up in six weeks, and though I voted for Barack Obama in 2008 I doubt I’ll do so again.
A most interesting Internet timewaster is this quiz at a Web site called isidewith.com, which compares your responses to a poll about your political beliefs to the platform statements of several different parties — the Democrats and the GOP, of course, but several others as well. While I won’t reveal my own results here, I will say that apparently my views coincided most strongly with those of a third-party platform, which result I view with both relief and dismay, for obvious reasons. But it did confirm my dissatisfaction with Obama’s first term.
In an essay in The Atlantic published yesterday, “Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama,” Conor Friedersdorf does a good job of expressing my dissatisfaction. He lists a series of specific charges against the Obama administration (and please do read them), before concluding thusly:
The whole liberal conceit that Obama is a good, enlightened man, while his opponent is a malign, hard-hearted cretin, depends on constructing a reality where the lives of non-Americans — along with the lives of some American Muslims and whistleblowers — just aren’t valued. Alternatively, the less savory parts of Obama’s tenure can just be repeatedly disappeared from the narrative of his first term, as so many left-leaning journalists, uncomfortable confronting the depths of the man’s transgressions, have done over and over again.
Most of his charges against the current administration concern the field of foreign policy, which takes a backseat to domestic issues in most elections, but as Friedersdorf suggests, this is a matter of conscience. It is in the field of foreign policy, at any rate, that American actions have the longest-term, most far-reaching effects; it is perhaps this field that reveals our attitudes towards Others most explicitly.
I had been planning to vote for a third-party candidate long before reading Friedersdorf’s article for many of the same reasons that he mentions there. It isn’t that I wish Mitt Romney in the Oval Office; I think he would be worse. But as Friedersdorf also says:
How can you vilify Romney as a heartless plutocrat unfit for the presidency, and then enthusiastically recommend a guy who held Bradley Manning in solitary and killed a 16-year-old American kid? If you’re a utilitarian who plans to vote for Obama, better to mournfully acknowledge that you regard him as the lesser of two evils, with all that phrase denotes.
“If I must choose the lesser of two evils I will choose neither,” Karl Kraus said in 1906, and I can think of no better expression of the need to vote on principle or conscience rather than attempting to out-strategize the strategizers of a two-party system which excludes third- or fourth-party alternatives — there will never be a third party alternative in this country so long as nobody votes for it, for whatever reason. In any event, the Romney campaign seems to be neatly and rapidly imploding, as Jon Stewart describes here; it may be that all Obama need do to win this election is to sit back and say nothing for the next six weeks.
In 2000, Green Party Presidential candidate Ralph Nader — and those who supported him — were accused of throwing that year’s election to George W. Bush. But it is not Nader’s fault, nor his supporters’, that nearly half of the nation’s voters hold views at polar variance to those of the progressive and mainstream left; red states will not suddenly become blue if Obama wins the election in November.
So, surprisingly, there is a real choice coming up this election day. One can pull the lever for the candidate who most closely shares one’s views of America’s obligations and responsibilities to its citizens and those of the world, and throw away one’s vote; or one can pull the lever for either Obama or Romney, and throw away one’s conscience. The choice, as they say, is yours.
Anyone who does not vote for Barack Obama is a traitor to his country, IMHO. I hear the critique of him – I agree with most of it; but right now it’s irrelevant, and using it as a self-glorifying means of damaging America at this highly vulnerable moment is unconscionable. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is.
Since you live in NY – not a swing-state – you have the luxury of this particular self-indulgence. Just please don’t try to pretend that it’s anything but.
Friedersdorf puts his finger on the source of my discontent with Obama, too. I remember the flush of relief and gratitude I felt when, on the second day of his Presidency, Obama vowed to close Gitmo within the year. His failure to do more than downsize that wretched facility remains a deep shame for me. On torture, Obama improved our legacy by ending it, but he did not cure that legacy because he failed to prosecute past offenders and prevent future ones.
I’m surprised Friedersdorf mentions warrantless wiretapping and Pakistan because both were on the record in the 2008 candidacy he (and you) supported. Obama voted on domestic surveillance in the summer of 2008 and repeatedly made a point — a contentious point, you’ll remember — to expand military action in Pakistan, if necessary. It is “surgical” in the sense that it is traumatic and scarring, but also in the sense that the civilian casualties Freidersdorf cites are orders of magnitude smaller than the broadsword nation-pillaging policies of Obama’s predecessor. I do not care to make body counts a measure of merit; I mention it because Friedersdorf acts as though war in Pakistan was some big surprise, when in fact the man he supported in 2008 promised precisely that and followed through. Whatever calculus of foregin-v-domestic issues Friedersdorf used in 2008 had to accommodate the above, so why is it a deal-breaker this time ’round? Especially (yes) given the possibility that a far, far worse alternative is within striking distance of the White House?
I’m surprised you quoted the following passage because it makes no sense whatsoever:
“The whole liberal conceit that Obama is a good, enlightened man, while his opponent is a malign, hard-hearted cretin, depends on constructing a reality where the lives of non-Americans — along with the lives of some American Muslims and whistleblowers — just aren’t valued.”
How does that follow? There is extant evidence of Obama’s goodness and enlightenment as well as Romney’s malignance and cretinous behavior. This judgment BETWEEN men does not “depend” on constructing a reality where the lives of non-Americans “just aren’t valued.” Nor does one have to supress a grotesque hipocricy to vote for Obama now, for reasons I outlined above. However, the inverse caricature — where Romney is noble and Obama corrupt — does direclty depend on constructing a reality where immigrants, women and gays “just don’t count.” If Friedersdorf confined himself to his firm-handed (and most welcome) critique of Obama’s executive over-reach, he’d be on firmer ground. But he lunges to connect it to the larger choices before us and fails to make a sound argument.
Every nation — capitalistic, socialistic, totalitarian — is a dialectic between internal welfare and external relationships. The two are rarely in balance and one often trumps the other in any given transfer of power. But to accept Friedersdorf’s implicit priority of causes, one must disqualify Obama, Romney AND his third-party alternative Gary Johnson for their failure to address global warming. Surely the fate of the planet outranks all other external contingencies and causes. Where do the trade-offs begin?
I understand the urge to chuck the whole mess. Every neocon in upstate New York, together with every women’s health provider in Mississippi, knows that gerrymandering and the electoral college have neutered more than half the voting public. But only by magnifying tendencies and perceptions — your vote is still your vote. If there’s a great third party option out there, I’d really like to hear advocacy for them from the beginning of their candidacy, instead of now, at the end, when they can only be a protest vote.