The Values-Vote Myth

[John Kelsey]

>From: Eric Cordian <emc at artifact.psychedelic.net>
>Sent: Nov 6, 2004 5:57 PM
>To: cypherpunks at minder.net
>Subject: Re: The Values-Vote Myth

...
>Also, voting is in some sense political manipulation to blame the population for the 
>actions of their government.  Everyone who votes is a co-conspirator, and the 
>argument is made that those who don't vote have no right to dissent.

Yep, I always get a kick out of this line.  Alice says "if you don't vote, you have no right to complain about the outcome."  Bob says "if you don't volunteer for a campaign, man the phone banks, go door to door, and give till it hurts, you have no right to complain about the outcome."  Carol says "If you don't stockpile weapons, organize into cells, and run a campaign of terror bombing and assassination, you have no right to complain about the outcome."  Why is one of these people more obviously right than the others?  [I know you weren't agreeing with the quoted statement either.]

In practice, Alice's strategy has almost no impact on the result--nothing I did as a Maryland voter could have given Bush fewer electoral votes than he already got, and that's true almost everywhere for an individual voter.  This is especially true if you're an individual voter whose major issues are just not very important to most other voters.  Kerry spent essentially no time talking about the creepy implications of the Jose Padilla case (isn't he still being held incommunicado, pending filing in the right district?), or the US government's use of torture in the war on terror despite treaties and the basic obligations of civilized people not to do that crap.  I see little indication that Kerry would have disclaimed the power to do those things, had the vote swung a couple percentage points the other way.

Bob's strategy has more going for it, but it comes down to a tradeoff between alternate uses of your time.  You could devote your time to the Bush or Kerry or Badnarik campaigns, or you could improve your ability to survive whatever ugliness may come in other ways--maybe by making more money and banking it against future problems, or improving your standing in your field, so you're likely to be employable even in a massive post-terror-attack recession.  Maybe just spending quality time with your wife and kids, on the theory that the bad guys may manage to vaporize you tomorrow whichever clown gets elected Bozo-in-Chief.  

Carol's strategy seems doomed to fail to me--look how much damage has been done to the pro-life movement by the very small number of wackos willing to shoot abortion doctors and bomb clinics.  I'm always amazed at the revolutionary talk from people on this list, as though libertarian/anarchocapitalist ideas weren't an almost invisibly small minority in the US, as though some kind of unrest leading to a civil war would lead anywhere any of us would like.  (Is it the secular police state that comes out on top, or the religious police state?)  

>Eric Michael Cordian 0+

--John