No Real Choice?

I am sorry to say this, citizens, but the voting booth is a place where you have a job to do. The President will not be your father, your lover, your best friend, your therapist, or your first crush. The voting booth is not your confessional, it is not your burning bush, it is not your crown of thorns.

If you need more than this take an art class, volunteer at a hospice, start blogging, agitate and educate your fellow citizens about prison abuses, the horrors of the drug war or nuclear proliferation, or the inequities of education and health care in America. Don’t be fooled into diminishing the significance of what you do as a citizen in the voting booth by trying to imbue that act with the kinds of significance you can only find elsewhere.

More and more people seem seduced by the fantasy of imposing their moral vision unilaterally upon their fellow citizens – whether they pine for a socially conservative fantasy of a nineteenth century clambake with servile negroes, pregnant women, and unhappily married girly-men in the foreground, and a church steeple dolefully intoning in the background, or whether they pine to impose on the milky unimaginative morons of the Midwest a life in the United Federation of Planets.

Charley Reese has an editorial up at antiwar.com that expresses a sentiment that is commonplace among progressives (of whom, by the way, he is conspicuously not one) and others, but reading it among so many others this morning I have had a straw that breaks the camel’s back moment.

“Once more," he writes, "Americans will be forced to vote for a man instead of a policy. It doesn't say much for self-government that the American people are almost never given a chance to vote on major policy issues.”

It is surreal that anyone would still claim that the choice between electing (this time) George W. Bush President versus the presumptive Democratic Party nominee John Kerry does not represent a choice with radically different consequences to the actual lives of millions of human beings in the United States and around the globe. Anyone who claims that the differences between the Administrations of these two Presidents would not amount to a difference that would make a difference at the level of "major policy issues" is an idiot or a liar (and likely both).

This sort of argument was already palpably stupid when Naderites made it last time around. The fact that intelligent and well-meaning people are provoked to express comparable frustrations in the aftermath of the blunders and crimes of the Killer Clown Administration suggests to me that there is a deeper dissatisfaction in play here.

I think that the complaints that politics offers up “no real choices” to an important extent registers a misguided dissatisfaction with and misunderstanding of the realities of politics in a world where people are actually importantly different from one another.

Reese writes: “The trouble is that Sen. John Kerry, as his campaign has developed, is saying essentially this: I support the same goals as President Bush, but I can pull them off better than he can.”

This means, despite the innumerable differences in their records, expressed convictions, policy recommendations, and the manifold differences we can expect between them in literal outcomes, Reese inhabits a perspective from which all these conspicuous differences vanish to reveal some deeper “essential” similarity that matters more to him than these many "superficial" differences.

It is not that I think apathetic Democrats will stay away from the polls, or be distracted by the pointlessly quixotic support of Third Party candidates (who are literally unelectable without serious and difficult institutional reform first, and who could not govern even then without serious and difficult social and cultural change as well). No, I agree that Democrats are disciplined as never before in their shared opposition to the Killer Clown and his gang of cronies.

But polls suggest that Bush is the most polarizing President in living memory – and given that most of us remember Clinton this is a flabbergasting fact to contemplate. We need to remember what it means to accept as legitimate the governance of an Administration with whom we disagree.

Of course, I know that it matters that Bush was not elected by a majority of Americans and that he stole the Presidency by means of a compliantly politicized Supreme Court. Of course, I know that it matters that on most issues sprawling majorities of American citizens affirm progressive stances on both foreign and especially domestic policy issues, but that these people are systematically disenfranchized and these stances likewise systematically distorted and diminished by corporatized media.

But I disagree that this is the whole story or that it is even the most important dimension of the problem symptomized by ongoing political polarization. More and more people are expressing the attitude that compromise is unacceptable to their political sensibilities, when compromise is literally the essence of democratic politics.

Politics is significantly superficial, citizens. Voting, I fear, is drab. This does not detract from its dire seriousness or the seriousness of our duties in respect to it. The good that the North Atlantic democracies do, like the evils they are capable of and party to, are impersonal, compromised, and bureaucratic. If John Kerry is running for office in a campaign written in prose rather than poetry, be thankful you are being treated as a grownup for once.

Now weigh the consequences of your vote, set aside your dreams of unilaterally imposing your perfect vision of a perfect world upon a nation of millions of fellow-citizens with whom you know you disagree about that perfection, and just do your goddamn job and vote for Kerry.