Moving More Toward an Anti-Voting Stance…

Some of my old anarchist comrades might be pleased to know that I’m leaning more and more toward not voting in the election of ‘08 and even joining some vocal opposition to voting that year.  Assuming the anti-vote crowd could actually get it together to make any vocal opposition…

Earlier this month, I received a message from someone in e-mail (ironically, through a group that meets and talks about “Noam Chomsky and Anarchosyndicalism”) that we should all make sure to register to vote by October 12, the deadline for participating in next February’s primaries.  The person who wrote this insisted that the primaries were “where the power is.”  I thought of writing a critique of that statement, but I don’t think getting into that argument would have helped anything, especially since I never actually met with this group.  Besides, I have often taken the side opposing those who always set out to criticize voters based on anarchist dogma.  My approach has always been, if we have this chance to vote for strategic purposes or even to register a (weak) protest, why not just go ahead and do so, if we can put aside the time?     

But I really didn’t have the time or energy to re-register with a party that I dislike intensely (almost as much as that other party), just so that I could cast another useless primary protest vote for Kucinich, who’s going to instantly throw his support to whover gets nominated at the convention, no matter how awful that person is.

And as for voting in the next general presidential election, that might be a bigger waste of time than ever. 

This time around, we don’t even have Ralph Nader running or anyone filling that role (at least not yet).  Back in ‘04, Ralph was someone whom I could vote for to defy a fake-oppositional “Democratic Party” that had done everything possible to suppress the democratic right of someone to run as a third-party candidate.  And Ralph was also kind of inspiring in terms of the way he raised issues (to a relatively large public) that the notoriously invertebrate John Kerry would never dare to  go near.  (Yeah, maybe that guy Kerry was some kind of war hero once(?), but by 2004, he had already become the guy who would later  be famous for looking the other way while a student attending one of his appearances was being given electric shocks by police storm troopers for exercising the right to free speech.)  This year, at least, there is not anyone like Ralph Nader even on the horizon.  (Certainly, there will be other parties on some ballots, but hardly anyone will be able to see them at all.)  But maybe this time, the politicians are getting dogged a little bit more by the idea that a lot of people don’t want to throw any support behind any of them.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but it seems to me that there is some real concern on the part of politicians and their media lackeys about the possibility of a low turnout and/or complete disenchantment with the “leaders” in both major political parties.  Polls are showing again and again that the vast majority of people have equal contempt for both the Republicans and Democrats, as Bush and the Congress compete to achieve the lowest approval rating of either branch of government in the history of the U.S.

I’m not somebody who thinks much about taking political opportunities, but this does seem like one time when there is going to be a bigger political opportunity to emphasize the fact that our “leaders” are giving us no choice at all, and that the whole presidential election is just a big joke.

This is especially true if we are stuck with the major candidates who seem to be the front-runners now.  And I have to say that, because I’ve lived most of my life in New York City (also the place of my birth), I am particularly dreading the appearance of a Clinton-Giuliani race.  It’s bad enough to suffer the embarrassment of being an American these days, with a presidential administration that is probably the most despised government in the world…  What are so many of us going to feel about being a New Yorker with these two jokers who have functioned as our ”leaders” waging a battle on the national stage?

We’ll have one guy with an extremely authoritarian personality, representing the authoritarian wing of the corporate class, running against a woman who’s merely a slicker and more conniving representative of those same corporate interests, a chronic triangulator who makes her husband Slick Willy look like a man of strong principles.    

And, as far as I can tell, there is extremely little difference between the real political beliefs of the two.

If there’s any time in the present era to wage a visible, vocal boycott of the presidential election, now might be it.  But the anti-voters have to get it together to make a little more noise about what they’re doing, to explain why staying home on election day might actually be the right thing to do even for people who are deeply politically invovled.   And that noise has to reach a little beyond your friends at the infoshop.