An Engagement with Reality

(Adapted from my side of a dialog with a Green of my acquaintance concerning the above video*)

A recent Minority Report segment touched on a few things I’ve been thinking about and that otherwise hit me as particularly salient re what voting does.  For instance, Sam Seder and I are 100% on the same page about why (given our ridiculously intentionally undemocratic political system) Democrats winning is always a better outcome than Republicans winning: because it relieves the otherwise relentless rightward pressure on the discourse. Bill Clinton didn’t suck only because he was a Democrat.  He sucked because he followed 12 years of Republicanism and preceded another 8 years of it.  (And that was all that was needed to get us in the fucking state we’re in.)  This fact as Sam laid out very well is ignored or misrepresented by Greens and other anti-Democrat voters on the left.  Democrat victories don’t absolve the left from activism but they make activism more liable to accomplish some of its goals.  It’s just a fact.

Beyond that, I thought Emma Vigeland was completely on point about what the task of voting is about.  To wit: “Engage with the fucking reality.”  I’ll be honest, that’s it in a nutshell.  One of two parties is going to win.  One is a major ass disappointment that is not what anyone wants.  The other is an evil anti-majority force that is exactly what the tiniest worst minority wants.  One is ineffectual and obtuse.  The other is laser focused on getting exactly what they want.  That is the choice.  That is the fucking reality we have to engage with.  You are free to vote Green to register your disapproval of the choices.  Either way, on January 20,  American foreign policy continues, but with one of the possible outcomes you didn’t have anything to do with, it continues with a misguided (corrupt even) idealism and ideology, and with the other it proceeds with a plan.  Notice I’m not saying this is good.  But one is better because it can be influenced; the other is hopeless. For those who are letting themselves off the hook for not voting for Kamala Harris because of Joe Biden's accomplice-role in Israel's genocide in Gaza, while I can't fault you for your instinct to punish,† as a way of explaining my own thinking on it, I would like to know how a vote for Jill Stein brings an end to Israel’s genocide if Trump wins. To Stein voting vote shamers of those voting for Kamala Harris, if you can’t answer that, then how will I ever be convinced not to care about the outcome of the election?  You may tell yourself that a vote for Stein is a vote against Genocide, but what good is a vote against genocide if you are convinced that you can't win regardless of the outcome?  Is it worth it if abortion rights are removed across the country, tax breaks for billionaires cut deeper into benefits for the rest of us, the Supreme Court becomes irreparably antagonistic to the non-millionaire majority for decades more to come?

Tell me this Green-voting lapsed Democrats: When you voted for Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry and Obama were you saying “go ahead, evil neoliberal sham democracy, here's my consent.”?   Were you ever in your life voting FOR the status quo, even when you vote-shamed me for voting for Nader in 2000?  I can tell you what I was thinking when I voted for Clinton—the first time it was “Die George Bush!!” I had registered as an independent by Clinton's second term because of my disillusionment with his first, but I still voted for his re-election as a way of saying “Fuck off Dole, you fuckin’ creep!”  True for Obama I, I was hopeful for change. (and eager to put a knife between John McCain’s ribs).   My point which is getting lost is, voting to me is not about consent.  It’s about engaging with the fucking reality that Democrats winning is better for the people than Republicans winning.  Always.   Sometimes just marginally, always never enough but it’s Always better.  I’ve never in my lifetime known a case when that wasn’t true.  Even in 2000, I voted for Nader but on election night when the outcome was in doubt and for the month after I rooted for Gore.  Because the reality was never going to be Nader brings down the duopoly.  I’m sure I thought I was sending a message to Democrats, but as Sam Seder often says, before the election the Greens are all about their votes sending a message to Democrats (never to Republicans for some weird reason), but when Democrats lose, no Green (least of all the Green candidate) says, “See?  We are why the Dems lost!  Blame us and learn our lesson!  This is the outcome we helped make happen!” Do you take credit for Trump’s victory in 2016?  (Because if you do, shame on you!)  Did Democrats learn a damn thing from the 2016 2% Green vote in Wisconsin?  No they did not veer left in 2020-- when Bernie Sanders won a few too many primaries in a row, they got their shit together and crammed the chronic pathologically unilateral bipartisan down our throats. But it was still better than the alternative. Again, voting is not about my feelings about democracy, it’s about the least harmful one winning.

You anti-Dem leftists who are still voting Green may think you're voting for democracy, but democracy is not on the ballot.  The truth is if you want to change electoral politics, the odds are pretty good you’re not going to be able to do it within electoral politics.  It’s not impossible but would require a groundswell – e.g., if Bernie Sanders had won the Democratic primary in 2016 or 2020 or Marianne Williamson had won in 2024.  The time for expressing yourself with your vote is the primary.  If you’re not “engaging with the fucking reality” on election day, it may feel good but you’re too late.

My bottom line on this is I don’t care necessarily how or whether people vote if they just keep it to themselves  (Personally, if you don’t want to engage with the reality, non-voting seems a bit purer of an expression to me). But if they are not advocating for the least harmful of the two possible outcomes, they better not be shaming those of us who are actually trying to actively mitigate the outcome.

A post-script about my 2000 Nader vote—I don’t know how I would have voted if I had lived in a swing state.  Probably for Gore, but not necessarily.  I was disgusted with the democratic party.  I honestly thought if Gore lost, so there.  I thought George W was a fuckup who would be a dopey one-term president.  I was obviously not looking at the big picture.  I was not looking at who would be in his cabinet and who he’d nominate to the Supreme Court.  I think we know what Emma Vigeland would say about that.

Truthfully, I don’t care who you vote for—it might be personally meaningful to you to vote Green, and that I think you’d agree is maybe a more immediate effect for you, maybe the sum total of what it does, a good in and of itself for you irrespective of what it means for anyone else, but it’s a different effect from what votes are traditionally supposed to do in an election.  That’s fine.  Here's a proposition, you don't have to apologize for your feel-good vote if  I don’t have to apologize for my nose-holding one.  

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*The Green is the one who brought it up.  I was merely responding to his reaction to it.

† There is a precedent.  Anti-war voters punished Lyndon Johnson's Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968 for Vietnam by withholding their votes for him-- and for their protest they got Nixon and Henry Kissinger and escalation instead.