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The following discussion was originally
rooted in the 2000 c.e. political situation in the U.S.A., however,
the principles hold for most other Western
“two party” democracies as well. I’ve
now put much of this into the past tense, even though the future
is also looking very tense… I will update
this with some post-election comments Real Soon Now.
Demopublicans and Greens
In the last American Presidential elections,
I supported Ralph Nader, Winona LaDuke and all the other Green
Party candidates of whom I had knowledge in 2000 c.e. They were
the only candidates whom I believed genuinely intended to put
the environment, citizen/consumer power, and human rights issues
— including the critically important separation of church
and state — at the top of their priority list. The Green
Party movement is, in fact, the only one I know whose core
principles agree with more of What
Neopagans Believe than they disagree. This is in contrast
to Libertarianism, which I’m often asked to support, but
which seems to me, with its dualist ideology of “Individual=Good”
and “Government=Evil,” to be far more Mesopagan
than Neopagan.
It still seems clear to me that the differences
between most Republicratic candidates, from the Presidential
ones on down to those running for local dogcatcher, are meaningless
in terms of what we can expect them to actually do once
elected. The same wealthy corporations and individuals support
both major parties and will continue to receive the political
and economic favors for which they pay. Neither Republicans nor
Democrats will make any serious changes that will benefit the
average American, because such changes would require offending
or inconveniencing the Power
Elite who have been running the U.S.A. for the last
200+ years.
And yet... this year may be different.
As I predicted before the election, Bush did
change the rhetoric coming from the White House to please the
Christian theocrats more than Gore would have done — and,
I must admit, a lot more than the “marginal” amount
I expected. While Bush is far more concerned with pleasing the
plutocrats (his wealthy friends and puppetmasters) than the theocrats,
and is simply contemptuous of non-monotheistic citizens, he has
done far more kissing-up to the Religious
Reich than I would have believed possible, nominating their
judges and fighting their anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-feminist,
anti-minority belief system battles for them.
I really shouldn’t have been so astonished
that the mass media did nothing with the story of a famous
“third” party presidential candidate (Ralph Nader),
with a paid ticket in hand, being prevented from even attending
the presidential debate he’d been excluded from. The Demopublicans
were so terrified that Nader might “make a scene,”
or ask an “outrageous” question from the audience,
or do something else to remind the public that he was a candidate
too (and that Bush and Gore were too cowardly to debate him),
that they conspired together to violate his most basic constitutional
rights.
A friend, who originally planned to vote for
Gore, was outraged a few weeks before the election when a Public
Radio news broadcast spent ten minutes on detailed coverage
of a Gore speech in the Pacific Northwest, and then spent ten
seconds on a passing reference to unspecified Greens protesting
outside the hotel. There wasn’t a scrap of information on
what and why they were protesting, nor Gore’s reaction to
them. Like most of the supposedly “liberal” media,
even the Public Broadcasting System has gone along with the Republicrat
party line that there were/are “only two real candidates,”
and that votes for anyone else are “wasted.”
Voting from Fear Rather than Conviction
Related to this “everybody knows”
assumption is the scare tactic of characterizing all votes for
third party candidates as “throwing the election”
to the Evil Opposition, a tactic that all too many
Neopagans, feminists, environmentalists, gay and lesbian activists,
and others fell for in the 2000 campaign, and probably will fall
for in the future. The mass media actively promoted this image
of Nader as a “spoiler,” using that specific term over
and over again, more frequently in each news story as the election
drew nearer (some graduate journalism student somewhere will
get a Masters degree by documenting this). While the mass media
supposedly didn’t have the airtime or print space to discuss
his ideas and proposals, they had plenty of both for stories
repeating the assertion that Nader’s only role was to give
the Presidency to Bush. Some of you may recall exactly the same
tactic being used against John Anderson and Ross Perot in previous
elections. It certainly is being used in the 2004 election coverage.
Rooted in this tactic is the argument trotted
out every four years that “the next President could nominate
enough new members of the Supreme Court to change its voting
majority for the next twenty years, so we must make sure that
the Evil Opposition isn’t the one nominating them!”
This argument ignores the fact that the Supreme Court judges
who have decided major cases involving hot topics like abortion,
separation of church and state, environmental conflicts, and
civil liberties, often in ways that most Neopagans would appprove,
have been nominated by Republican Presidents as often as by Democratic
ones. It also ignores the fact that, as Ralph Nader said,
The Democratic Party allowed what, in their
own opinion now, are the two worst justices, Scalia and Thomas,
to be confirmed in the senate. People sometimes forget that Scalia
was confirmed ninety-eight to nothing in the senate with every
democratic senator supporting him, including Al Gore.
And Scalia never hid his ideology; he flaunted it everywhere.
Clarence Thomas won after the Anita Hill hearings, no less, 52-48.
Eleven democratic senators voted for him and took him over the
top in a senate where the majority was the Democratic Party.
(Press conference, Oct. 25, 2000)
Once they are in office, Supreme Court justices
can and sometimes do surprise the people who thought they knew
how they would vote. That said, the justices of the Supreme Court
tarnished their honor forever by voting along strict party lines
to abort the vote counting in Florida and give the White House
to “their boy.” We can only hope that the Democratic
senators who kissed up to the Republicans by voting to approve
all Bush’s candidates for cabinet positions will have a
bit more backbone if a Supreme Court position becomes vacant,
and we had better plan on taking major political action then
to make sure that they do!
As for the importance of electing “an
environmental President,” that was yet another good reason
to vote for Ralph Nader, as the only candidate from a political
party that has environmentalism as a core value, rather
than as a gimmick to trot out for elections and ignore afterwards.
Gore said some very pretty things about the environment
in his book, and during the end of his campaign, but he did
almost nothing positive about it for eight long years. Instead
he concentrated on “reinventing government” to make
the Republicratic ideals of robber baron capitalism even easier
to attain, by figuring out ways to hamstring the very people
whose jobs are to keep dishonest and greedy corporations from
ripping off the public and raping the Earth.
Bush was blunter about his contempt for environmental
concerns (as shown by his choices for Secretaries of the Interior,
Energy, and Environment departments), but Gore and he are both
multimillionaires with heavy investments in, and obligations
to, the very industries most responsible for the worst amounts
and kinds of pollution. If the environment was your major election
issue, your choice here was between a nasty Tweedledum and a
nice Tweedledee.
And yet... and yet... this year may be different.
The Mess in Florida
“Whining liberal pundit-bots” (as
cartoonist Tom Tomorrow calls them) have been loudly blaming
Ralph Nader and the Greens (“Are you happy now?”) for
the debacle in Florida. It’s odd that these professional
“news analysts” have been so reluctant to point their
fingers at Mr. Bush’s friends and relatives in Florida’s
state government for their pre-election efforts to “disqualify”
tens of thousands of legitimate African-American voters or their
post-election foot dragging on the recount. Nor have they said
much about the Supreme Court Justices who voted for the party
that appointed them rather than insisting on a full and fair
recount of the state’s entire votes.
As Nader commented after the election,
Gore ran a poor campaign, failed to attract
new voters and remained a captive of the conservative Democratic
Leadership Council and the corporations and the special commercial
interests that financed his campaign. (Press conference,
Nov. 10, 2000)
Nader campaign manager Theresa Amato added,
The idea that all the Green Party votes would
have gone to Gore had Nader not run is not supported by the facts.
A significant part of the Nader vote comes from new voters and
voters who would not have voted without Nader on the ballot.
Gore would not have attracted many of these votes under any circumstances.
Personally, I think the razor thin edge in
the national popular vote between Bush and Gore provides even
more evidence that American voters couldn’t find a significant
difference between the “Big Two.” After all, they would
have gotten similar results if they had all just flipped coins!
I do find it interesting that four years after
various mass media news departments declared that they would
do their own recounts of the Florida ballots to see who “really”
won there, nothing seems to have been done. I guess the media
have become as good as the politicians they cover at ignoring
their promises after the elections are over.
I have been told that the counties in Florida
that have been repeatedly hit by hurricanes this year are all
ones that voted heavily for Bush in 2000. Is this a coincidence
or is Gaia trying to get a point across?
An Interesting Perspective from Abroad
I have yet to trace the original publication
of the following, which arrived in my email with the above Subject
listing. It is said to have come from an interview with an unidentified
African politician, and may be entirely apocryphal, but what
it says is worth thinking about, regardless of the source. Additional
comments by myself are in [brackets].
Imagine that we read of an election occurring
anywhere in the third world in which the self-declared winner
was the son of the former prime minister and that former prime
minister was himself the former head of that nation’s secret
police (CIA).
Imagine that the self-declared winner lost
the popular vote but won based on some old colonial holdover
(the electoral college) from the nation’s pre-democracy
past.
Imagine that the self-declared winner’s
“victory” turned on disputed votes cast in a province
governed by his brother.
Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of
one district, a district heavily favoring the self-declared winner’s
opponent, led thousands of voters to vote for the wrong candidate.
Imagine that members of that nation’s
most despised caste [African-Americans], fearing for their lives/livelihoods,
turned out in record numbers to vote in near-universal opposition
to the self-declared winner’s candidacy.
Imagine that hundreds of members of that most-despised
caste were intercepted on their way to the polls by state police
operating under the authority of the self-declared winner’s
brother [while those who could get to a polling place found few
or no state-mandated translators available to assist them if
they did not speak the majority language].
Imagine that six million people voted in the
disputed province and that the self-declared winner’s “lead”
was only 500 votes. Fewer, certainly, than the vote counting
machines’ margin of error.
Imagine that the self-declared winner and
his political party opposed a more careful by-hand inspection
and re-counting of the ballots in the disputed province or in
its most hotly disputed district.
Imagine that the self-declared winner, himself
a governor of a major province, had the worst human rights record
of any province in his nation and actually led the nation in
executions.
Imagine that a major campaign promise of the
self-declared winner was to appoint like-minded human rights
violators to lifetime positions on the high court of that nation.
[Imagine that the self-declared winner’s
final victory was handed to him by a majority of that high court,
who had all been placed there by his father and other prime ministers
from his own party.]
None of us would deem such an election to
be representative of anything other than the self-declared winner’s
will-to-power. All of us, I imagine, would wearily turn the page
thinking that it was another sad tale of pitiful pre- or anti-democracy
peoples in some strange elsewhere.
This is very much what our last presidential
elections looked like to outside observers, as well as to a growing
number of Americans. The belief that crooked elections only happen
in other countries or specific big cities is yet another ethnocentric
Americanism.
Now we have had four years of an unelected
President, with perhaps the lowest I.Q. of any President in the
last 100 years, eagerly using the “War on Terrorism”
as an excuse for giving away even more billions to his wealthy
friends and giving our secret police unbounded power to violate
most American’s civil liberties in the name of protecting
us. This, of course, is not to mention the illegal war he lied
the American people into undertaking, with over a thousand young
Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead, our
nation $200 billion further in debt, our civil liberties more
in danger than they have been for several decades, Islamic terrorists
multiplying like rabbits, and more bad news to come.
Gee, maybe this year is different...
Evolving Beyond the Two Party System
The insistence of reducing all races for public
office to two and only two “important” participants
is rooted in the Dualism that has
saturated Western culture for the last 1,500 years — not
to mention the relative ease for the Power
Elite of controlling two political parties rather than
several — and is not going to go away until it is challenged
directly, on philosophical, religious, and political grounds.
Such a challenge would have to be made in simple language, to
produce catchy sound-bites the media might carry and the voters
would remember. Maybe a slogan like, “The universe can count
higher than two!” would be a good beginning.
Rather than trying to get the media to let
a “third party” into a “two party” race,
we need to promote the meme (or core idea) that all these
political races are really multi-party contests. It won’t
really hurt a Green candidate to mention that there are other
“outsiders” running, even if this does go against the
Dualist political culture that says all competitors must be demonized.
As ecologists (or Neopagans) we have a perfect metaphor available
to us that most other parties don’t — healthy political
systems need a variety of different social and political
ideas and organizations, just as all healthy bioregions need
a multiplicity of species. (That’s a point the Greens might
want to take into consideration in the future, when dealing with
the dualist history, worldview, and tactics of the “purist”
parts of the Green movements.)
In the future the Green Party should get together
with a half a dozen other minority parties from across the political
spectrum and webcast our own debates, preferably with
the help of the League of Women Voters and other organizations
that used to sponsor the big Presidential debates. Who knows,
maybe some of the media (who haven’t been purchased by multinational
conglomerates yet) would show up and cover the story of independent
American citizens doing an end-run around the Demopublicans.
We could use the principles of memetic engineering
and attempt to create and spread simple yet powerful, multilevel
concepts in words and images, blanketing first the Net, then
other forms of broadcast communication, eventually manifesting
in laundrymats, playgrounds, bars, and dining rooms around the
nation and the world. I’m suggesting a kind of verbal and
visual subversion of the dominant paradigms. We could start simply
with, say, phrases like “Just two sides is just two simple,”
or “If elections could change anything only the rich would
get to be candidates … hey!” or “If the Republicrats
have all the answers, it’s time to come up with new questions.”
Obviously, this is a useful role that artists and intellectuals
could play in Green strategy teams. If creative shills in the
advertising and public relations industry can get everybody in
the country repeating the same slogans or associating incompatible
concepts as if they were natural (like smoking and atheletes),
then creative evolutionaries can plant our own life-affirming,
healthy, progressive memes and help them spread.
And in 2004?
What should Neopagans do this year?
After much thought and internal debate (with more than two voices!)
I have decided that this year is different! Why?
- Because George W. Bush is personally dangerous
to the American people and the rest of the world — do we
really want a genuinely stupid person, who doesn’t read,
who is appallingly ignorant about other countries, and who ignores
advice from his own military experts, running America?
- Because if he wins he will owe major favors
to the theocrats who want to overthrow our democracy and destroy
our civil liberties in the name of their God.
- Because Bush’s foreign policies will
create far more Islamic terrorists than we can ever kill, since
he is stuck in a Christian Dualist worldview that sees the “War
on Terror” as a Crusade — which makes fundamentalist
Muslims see their side of it as a Jihad, like those they have
been fighting for centuries.
- Because his neoconservative puppetmasters
will drag us into one profit-driven war after another, trying
to create a worldwide American Empire, so they can live out their
lives in obscene wealth and luxury, leaving the rest of the world
in poverty and ecological collapse afterwards.
- Because if Bush is elected, my son will eventually
be dragged into one of these neanderthal religious wars and his
life be thrown away for nothing — just like those brave
men and women who have already died for Halliburton and Texaco
(while being told they were defending America).
- Because while mainstream Democrats and Republicans
aren’t much different from each other, extreme right
wing Republicans are significantly different from moderate
left wing Democrats.
So this year I am going
to vote for Democratic candidates in all the federal races I
can, while voting Green or Liberal
in state and local races. I recommend this admittedly “horrified”
policy (see below) to all American Neopagan voters. This approach
is called “tactical voting” and is being promoted by
organizations such as Greens
for Kerry, Republicans
for Kerry, and Independents
for Kerry. Many political organizations outside the Democratic
Party are arranging presidential vote-swapping between Democrats
voting in safely “Blue” states and others voting in
“Red states;” be aware that this may be illegal in
some states.
As for what others might do, I have suggestions
for different groups of voters:
- For the pure of heart — if you believe that your votes should be based on
what you really believe, rather than on matters of tactics and
strategy, and you believe third party candidates represent your
values better than the current Democratic or Republican candidates
do, then vote for those third party candidates you truly support
in every available contest.
- For the apathetic and disgusted — you are a majority! If
you belong to the 55% of eligible voters who don’t vote
at all because of disgust with the current two party system,
then just go out and vote after all, but vote for the third
party candidates who you think represent your beliefs best.
This won’t “throw the race” to any Demopublican
candidates but will strengthen third party movements in general
and the ones you vote for in particular. Staying home is exactly
what the bastards want you to do. Going out and actually voting
for third party candidates sends a clear message to the Big Two
that they don’t represent you, no matter what the
Electoral College says. (Speaking of which, amending the Constitution
to get rid of that Power Elite anachronism should be on our agendas
Real Soon Now — not fours years from now when we remember
again.)
- For the nervous — vote for third party candidates in every contest
in which you’re sure the Less-Awful Republicratic candidate
has a strong lead over the More-Awful one. You won’t
“throw the race to the Evil Opposition” that way either,
and again you’ll strengthen third party movements in general
and the ones you vote for in particular.
- If you are horrified at the thought of four more years of the Republican
Party controlling all four branches of the government — you can still vote for third party
candidates for state and county legislators and executives, as
well as for city council, utility district, library, and school
board members, etc., while voting Democratic for the federal
contests. Remember
that you will not be struck by lightning if you vote for candidates
from more than one party, that is, “split your ticket.”
Personally, I believe that the third party
Neopagans should support is the Green
Party, as the one most in keeping with Neopagan beliefs and
practices. Some Mesopagans may prefer the Libertarian
Party.
But even if you don’t choose the Greens
as your preference, vote for third party candidates in every
appropriate situation (and there are a lot of them in state
and local races). It is going to take several election cycles
of third party candidates winning at the state and local levels
before any of them will have a prayer of winning on the federal
level. With patience and determination we can build a political
system that matches Neopagan principles of pluralism and multimodel
problem solving, instead of the mainstream paradigm of The Forces
of Good™ (us) vs. The Forces of Evil™ (them).
But what about Nader?
Here’s what I suggest on my Spells
for Democracy page:
[Cast a spell to] give Ralph Nader a vision of what will happen if he takes enough votes away
from the Democratic candidates to allow Bush and company to win
this year. As much as I admire the man (or used to), this year
I’m going to support the Presidential, Vice Presidential,
Senatorial, and Congressional candidates who can actually defeat
the Religious Reich and the Neo-Con imperials, which will be
John Kerry, John Edwards, and whoever the other Democratic candidates
are (I’ll vote Green or Liberal Party for all the other
races). This spell is the magical equivalent of giving Nader
a really impassioned lecture about why his run is a Bad Idea
this year. (I’ve also heard the idea that he
just needs a lover to boost his ego enough to not need to run
for president every election—in which case, prayers to Aphrodite
and Eros to help him out in this department might just do the
job!)
This year, unless you live in a state where
Bush or Kerry has a twenty point lead over the other, a vote
for Nader (or any other third party candidate) really is
wasted — and you’re going to hate yourself if you wake
up on November 3rd with Bush having won...
Changing the Way We Vote
The Center
for Voting and Democracy is a non-partisan,
non-profit organization that studies how voting systems affect
participation, representation and governance. Their website has
a lot of very good, very practical ideas of how voting procedures
can be made more representative of how voters really feel about
candidates. Most of those ideas would allow multiple parties
to flourish and non-millionaires to get elected. I especially
recommend their discussion of Instant
Runoff Voting.
Americans United
for Separation of Church and State
has an annual campaign to fight the Religious Reich’s use
of tax exempt churches to support rightwing candidates.
Unfortunately, all this only works if people’s votes actually get counted correctly...
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