Attention nonparticipants

[substitute]

This is for all you Green-voting, non-voting, "anarchist" types who don't vote because "they're all the same".

Wake the fuck up.

They're not all the same. The people who won yesterday want to take away reproductive rights, roll back civil rights, dump a huge tax burden on working people, strengthen entrenched monopolies, chop down every tree in North America, and send us to war for little reason.

I see the arguments that "I can't give my vote to the opposition because they're slimy and annoying" and I have to laugh. Folks, politics is not about whether you feel beautiful and pure and ideologically correct leaving the booth. Politics is practical. It's about what you can accomplish with that vote, in the real world where we all live. It's not about reading 'zines and drinking wheatgrass juice and being part of a totally ignored nouveau hippie subculture. This stuff has real-world consequences, and not just for you and your painfully correct friends.

So I hope you get what you wanted, anyway. Maybe at the next party you can put on your hemp cap and sweet talk some girl into bed with your tales of how you stood up to the Man and didn't cave in and vote for some compromise candidate because you're keepin' it real. Or maybe you just got to stop off for a latte on your way to work instead of punching a hole in some cardboard.

In any case the rest of us are going to be spending the next two years watching George II and his cronies take away our country. Thanks for nothing.

Comments

Re: ahem.

[substitute.livejournal.com]

No, I don't. The Green party is a protest vote. I understand being disgusted with the two-party system and the often supine behavior of the opposition. But the stakes are so high right now that I consider a Green party vote to be a throwaway.

I would urge anyone who cares about reproductive rights, peace, or civil rights to hold their noses and vote Democrat rather than making a symbolic gesture that brings victory to a truly terrible enemy.

So it's not a matter of "ok" in any ideological sense. I just have a different idea about what voting means.

simply torn

[isidorenabi]

So it's not a matter of "ok" in any ideological sense. I just have a different idea about what voting means.

point taken. but when is it *ever* a good time to vote for a third party? when they have a shot at winning? how will they ever get to that point if we don't start with a few 'throwaway' and 'protest' votes? i hate to think we should just resign ourselves to a two-party system. but neither am i so attached to my idealism that i want to put up with the current state of affairs much longer.

i agree that the stakes are particularly high right now. interesting that this surge of green party votes came at the same time. why couldn't they have mounted this campaign in say, 1996?

Re: simply torn

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

Ditto that. It's always a crisis. I don't believe in Democrats less than I don't believe in Republicans, but If You're Not With Us You're Against Us has never gotten any respect from me. I don't vote straight tickets. I'm quite active in local politics and have chaired the local Democratic caucus in the past, because that way I can get my voice heard more loudly, but I vote Green, because someone's got to.
For that matter, if you don't vote Green, you're part of the problem, because unless you start, it's never going to get better.
Judo rhetoric, baybee.

Re: simply torn

[substitute.livejournal.com]

So.. which problem are you solving? Your own moral purity and the right to look down your nose, or the real problems real people have deal with out here in the world?

I'm sure all the migrant workers, single mothers, pregnant teenagers, and 18 year old draftee cannon fodder kids will be delighted by another 50 Green Party bumperstickers on cars in college towns much more than they'd like a living wage, the right to their own bodies, or another year without war.

I hope you understand that your vote means something more than feeling good, because that's all you're going to get from it with a third party in these times.

Re: simply torn

[nosrialleon.livejournal.com]

I totally sympathize with the sentiment. I voted for Nader when President Numnuts slipped into office. I have spent most of the last decade voting for the farthest left candidate I could find from every last minor little party I could find (unless it was an important election and the Republican is far scarier than the Democrat. And how the Republicans keep finding scarier people than Diane Feinswine I will never know, but I've voted for her an alarming number of times...)

And there have been several periods when third parties, win or lose, did change the shape of America and American policy. The major parties are not so stupid as to not know a large social movement when they see it.

And it MAY always be a crisis, but I've never felt it was a crisis along the lines of "lots and lots of people are going to die if these fucktards get there way" like I do right now. I voted straight Democrat yesterday for the first time in a decade. I don't expect that act to change the world, but I'm looking at it this way:

The Democrats ACTUALLY ONCE WERE the liberal party. Recent enough for me to remember in my lifetime. They only became smiling waffling Republicans-lite when people consistently did not vote for them during the 80's. The only thing that is ever going to change them back is massive, emphatic public support.

And if you've spent time in the trenches, surely you've noticed that there are more of 'us' than 'them', but that a shockingly large number of 'us' 1) don't vote; and/or 2) allow ourselves to be splintered by flavor-of-the-week political thinking. And I will stand on my high horse because I have been that. The American left has been in a ridiculous torpor over nothing for 30 years now and the right has RAN with it. Voting Green now helps nothing. Unity, or we lose. Rebublicans/the right don't care if it's fair or not and are more than happy to watch us fall out with each other and create an unorganized mess. It makes it easy for them to get their way.