We do, as citizens. We have our representatives hammer out a short and clear list of what constitutes a real campaign as opposed to someone just out for shits & giggles (or the publicity).
A number of other countries actually REQUIRE citizen participation in elections. When did we stop teaching civics in grade schools in this country? Voting is a responsibility of being a citizen. If you don’t want to vote or be involved in elections, go live in a country with a monarchy or dictatorship.
OK, progress! Yes, I hadn’t said that specifically, but I agree with what you’ve just written.
Note: In Chicago, they used to use voter registration as the basis for requesting jury duty. Now they use possession of a driver’s license instead, because significantly more people care about having the right to drive than care about their civic duty to vote.
I hear you, but then I have to point you back to my higher-taxes-to-support-churches complaint earlier in the thread…we’re already in a dictatorial country!
Doesn’t the first amendment cover that? I mean, I think the opposition to gay marriage is ridiculous and counterproductive, but don’t they have a right to protest it based on their political beliefs?
The problem with the lesser of two evils, especially as advocated here (in the familiar, intolerant context in which even suggesting something else is a “pipe dream” and draws insipid ad hominem attacks), is that it is part of recuperating movements for change into supporting the appearance of an alternative in the form of Democrats. While it is sound to push forward with movements that include as one part, but not all, of their strategy pressuring government for concessions through direct action, what usually happens is that many people in these movements lose sight of other goals, especially during election season–and their leaders misdirect their resources–so movements are “channeled” into supporting Democrats. This is such a common occurrence that their party has for a long time been known to community organizers as “the graveyard of movements.”
One of the most famous examples in recent years occurred as a result of the massive demonstrations in Wisconsin against Governor Scott Walker’s successful bill to erode collective bargaining rights for public employees. These demonstrations showed a popular will to organize, but when the movement was channeled into a failed recall election to replace Walker, and when the bill was upheld in court, the movement died out, which was an effective waste of mass mobilization and energy that could have been used for direct actions to empower the participants and continue building the movement.
This article delivers an excellent analysis of Democratic failure in the Wisconsin uprising, and includes details of how Democrats actively tried to shut it down in addition to funneling it into yet another election to die the slow death:
This one goes into more historical detail on the Democratic Party as the “graveyard of social movements”:
On an ideological level, the disavowal that takes place in the lesser of two evils argument–I know that the candidate and their party are “evil,” I don’t have high hopes for their term(s) in office, but I will vote anyway because they are marginally less catastrophic than the other candidate–allows the voter to think that they have gotten “outside” of the ideology of that party, that they are maintaining some critical distance. However, this cynical disavowal is the precondition, in this case, for ideological belief. The voter does not believe in the political process, in their candidate of choice, in spite of their cynical disavowal, but precisely because of it, because it provides a perpetually convenient excuse for their misgivings and, as I argued in my previous comment, has no upper limit (it will always compromise and allow the “alternative” to keep pulling toward the right). For this reason, the cynical disavowal is part of what the leadership and planners of the two-party system are counting on.
Indeed, Democrats know they can get away with just about anything, for decades and decades, because of a dedicated base that lives and breathes the lesser of two evils, even as we have a situation like last year’s elections in which as many as two thirds of the electorate stayed home (which shouldn’t be dismissed or derided, but which should be seen as a popular judgment and a sound rebuttal to popular Democratic supporter refrains about them having “majority” support with “realistic” goals). How anybody can praise, for example, gay marriage and pot laws (neither of which are attributable to Obama’s presidency, and neither of which do anything to erode the capitalist status quo, but in fact give it a shot in the arm with such token concessions) while failing to make the ongoing genocide in the Middle East their top priority is reprehensible. Democrats are just as guilty of war, mass deportation, and mass incarceration as Republicans, and when they hold majorities they don’t follow through on their promises and the excuses fly (Democrats held majorities in the Senate and House when Obama’s severely underwhelming signature health bill passed). Reform efforts have done nothing to stunt the tide of state violence in these fronts, whether from Democrats or Republicans.
In fact, when Democrats are in power, they actively crush social movements and get away with it (whereas their supporters raise hell when Republicans do it, which is a dynamic that also occurs when either party helms the war machine). It is well-known that Obama’s administration coordinated the national crackdown on Occupy with mayors and banks (raising the spectre of fascist tendencies that Democratic supporters will only acknowledge in their opposition):
In two of the cities that saw the worst police violence against protestors, the mayors were prominent Democrats–Jean Quan (Oakland) and Kasim Reed (Atlanta). I wasn’t on the ground in Oakland, but Reed’s misinformation campaign and capacity for quiet but violent and sustained repression was extensive. Before attacking our encampment twice, in the days leading up to the first attack, Reed had the area fenced off with metal fences and removed the porta-potties, all the while saying (quite incredibly to anybody observing the fences going up and the bathrooms taken away) that he was planning to open negotiations with us and had no intention of carrying out an eviction. He wound up sending a group of right-wing preachers who had nothing to do with the movement to “negotiate” with us when practically the whole encampment was away on a march against closing the local homeless shelter where many of the occupiers lived and worked. The delegation was asked to stay but left before the march returned. Reed then declared that we refused negotiations with this delegation, which (as he knew it would) stoked the ire of metro Atlanta’s religious populace and gave him popular support for eviction, not that it was necessary.
Later, Reed went on TV to praise the police force’s lack of violence, saying nothing of the beatings that took place and the two people who were hospitalized after the second, violent attack. On that night, a police officer drove a motorcycle into a crowd of people, running over several of them. One young man caught on the wheel was, after the crowd defensively pushed the motorcycle over, swarmed and beaten by police, and later charged with felony assault against a police officer (a charge that was later dropped, but not before being pimped on TV). He was one of the two people who were sent to the hospital.
In jail, we were forced to stay awake for the whole night, and when we were released and got our things back, the two reporters who were arrested with us found that their cameras had been wiped. Indeed, the mainstream media also turned its cameras away from the beatings during the night. My own phone was wiped as well–rendered totally inoperable; I had to use almost a whole week’s pay to buy another (it was a “dumb” phone). Later, the charges against all of us had to be dropped because the police had erased and “lost” all available video footage. This dystopian catastrophe all happened under the heavy-handed leadership of a Democrat who was actually there in person during the attacks.
I could go on about the police infiltrators and sabotage, about being followed home from demonstrations by the DHS, about my acquaintances being accosted by strange men in public places and interrogated about my whereabouts and political tendencies, about mysterious nobodies coming into our meetings talking about bombs (sounding a lot like the FBI entrapment model that had been used successfully in other cities), etc. But these are all well-known clichés and don’t compare to the size and scale of what happened in Oakland under Quan’s leadership.
Occupy was a serious if deeply flawed attempt at forming a nationwide, no-holds-barred response to the financial crisis and the excesses of capitalism, and it was crushed at national and local levels under Democratic administrations. People can and have argued extensively about the causes for Occupy’s downfall but I think it would have been able to work out its problems if it hadn’t been so quickly and savagely repressed.
(On the positive side, the extensive networks formed and nourished during Occupy are in some ways still going strong and feeding into ongoing movements, which is how such things should work.)
For insight into the ongoing Democratic recuperation of a more current movement, BLM, Glenn Ford offers some sober analysis:
In the way of an alternative to the current two-party dynamic–earlier I raised the issue of Spain’s elections that are happening today. Since the transition from fascism in '75, the electoral system here has been ruled by a two-party system, the Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), and the Popular Party (PP) founded by former dictator Franco’s henchmen. Just like the US, when the PSOE takes power, they don’t follow through on their promises. Politicians from both parties have been caught up in spectacular corruption scandals.
Well, this year two new parties have entered the fray–right-wing Ciudadanos and anticapitalist Podemos. The latter party is less than two years old and developed out of the indignados movement in 2011, in which 20% of the population participated, occupying public squares across the country. Podemos’ popularity has been sliding as they go back on some popular promises (like fighting for a guaranteed basic wage), but their rapid ascendancy from a vibrant milieu of mass movements for change (in a country with a staggering unemployment rate of around 25%) shows what can happen, and how fast, when movements dedicate themselves first and foremost to direct action, and when anticapitalist reformist elements within those groups dedicate themselves to breaking with decades of failed two-party politics.
In the U.S. the lack of a parliamentary system makes such change more difficult (by design) but examples such as Spain’s point the way forward and give the lie to the old and tired claim that we absolutely must throw our support behind a corrupt two-party system.
That said, I don’t hold much hope for electoral politics but view the “Syriza effect”–and quite possibly, after today’s elections, the Podemos one–as a necessary step in the cyclical downward spiral of capitalism’s political institutions. I think that the best that can realistically happen with a Sanders presidency is a similarly bitter disappointment that underscores the need for strong, independent movements based on direct action.
It’s becoming obvious that the leadership of the Democratic Party is doing all it can to steamroll Hillary’s path to the nomination. And many Sanders backers will respond to that nomination by…voting for Hillary.
The steamroller metaphor was popular last time, but of course, it ran out of gas. At this point back then, the idea of a first-black-prez seemed as unlikely as a Bernie prez. But yeah, even if Bernie does get elected, I’m only slightly optimistic that the results would be any better than what Obama has produced.
Which I recognize… it’s indeed a key part of modernity. Balancing democracy with Weber’s monopoly on violence is the key, here. A monopoly on violence, without a robust democracy is really just an authoritarian state. I think you’re also presuming that people get nothing out of the modern form of state. The question, I think rests in who within a state gets to wield the monopoly on violence (in the US, it’s historically been elite, rich white men, who are working in conjunction with working class white men to reinforce what they see as their privileges). It doesn’t have to be the people who have always done so, because it’s not now.
See, I agree with most of what you say, except I’d argue this is putting the blame in the wrong place.
The Democrats know they can get away with just about anything because if they were to lose, the Republicans would get in and do all the same things – and genuinely much worse, as @Cowicide’s links about war should make plain. They stay in power not because progressives prefer to compromise, but because they are terrified into doing so by very real threats like all-out war with Iran, that other people support. That support is the underlying problem we need to work at.
Or to put it another way, what makes no sense to me is to blame what we have on “lesser-evilism”, when the salient feature of American democracy is that people vote for the greater evil half the time, when they vote at all. America is what it looks like when people are indifferent to the lesser or greater evil, and so there is no reason not to converge on what donors want instead. Were that not so, I find it hard to believe the Democrats could actually get away with anything, because without the even-more-war-mongering alternative standing a chance they should be abandoned as the greatest evil in short order.
I am certainly not advocating against having the better options ready. Just, like I said, while the current system is in place we should use what options it does provide to prevent things from becoming much worse much faster. I entirely agree that we need to do other things to actually make things any better.
You should propose that the US government provide relocation vouchers for those that don’t want to be part of the educational electoral process.
No. I actually like a candidate that runs on what they stand for. I refuse to join you in cheerleading for more bullshit and bullying in selecting the next leader of the free world.
Barack Obama is the first President in living memory that makes me somewhat fantasize that he could run for another term. I wouldn’t be for it, as I think the current term limits are working. To be sure, B.O. under-delivered on Guantanamo and Iraq and Afghanistan and civil rights and healthcare. But his progress on healthcare and non-CIS in the military and women in combat roles and marriage equality and the economy and, most importantly, Supreme Court nominees is better than I think either Clinton or Sanders would achieve.
The Democratic party — most political parties — is a negotiated coalition of fragile agreements, not a monolith.
Some Dems predictably helped repress those of us who participated in Occupy movements.
I say predictable partly because some Dems helped repress SDS and the IWW … many others. We know that sort of sad, repressive collaboration by some Dem caucuses — liberals generally — is not new or surprising, is it?
It’s not a strong enough reason to disengage from the entire party, unless it’s to align with a project that has a chance of achieving a better outcome.
Do other work too? Yes. But let’s don’t ignore what can be done by electoral process.
The grassroots movements that surround Sanders are very widespread and powerful.
Don’t look to the media to show this reality directly – look at results. For example, look at the minimum wage increases across this nation. That’s incredibly powerful grassroots at work.
This is the same grassroots organizations and activists (like me) that are ready to kick some serious ass after Sanders is elected to the White House.
Unlike Obama, Sanders will work with us after he’s elected. That’s why a major Black Lives Matter activist is already a part of his team, for example.
Corporatists will find this terrifying, but Sanders is bringing progressive activists who are normally forced to the outside of government right into the fold.
This is absolutely NOTHING like Obama’s administration which pushed most of us aside after he was elected.
The corporate folks that own the corporate media are absolutely terrified of this situation. You will not hear much about this from them at all.
Show up to some of our meetings across this nation if you doubt this.
This is not a drill. This is not a trendy, hipster pretense. We are going to battle against the establishment with the largest, most powerful, nationwide alliance of grassroots Americans never before seen in the history of this nation.
There’s multitudes of evidence of our enormous presence if you look beyond corporate media narratives and antiquated, wildly inaccurate mainstream polls that still rely too much on landlines and on little or no social media indicators.
Here’s yet another massive indicator of our presence --see my post above about our nationwide, landslide DFA win for Bernie. The polls and punditry said this was impossible. They were both dead wrong on a laughable level.
We’re here, just don’t count on the corporate media to tell you about us directly and /or honestly.
No, but obviously someone builds the road, and the government has to pay that someone to do so.
So supposedly “everyone” benefits from a road, but that’s obviously not true. For the most part, only people who live and work near the road will benefit from it. Except for the people who build it – they benefit even more than the people who use it because they got a bunch of sweet government money to make it.
So it’s really not black-and-white that a “road, building, or organization” will benefit everyone. In actual fact, almost every public expenditure of money will help some people, hurt others, and have almost no effect on the vast majority.
Public financing of campaigns: helps the candidate (supposedly), hurts the other candidates, and by your reckoning has no effect on the vast majority. Just like a goddamned road.
But other people seem to think that public financing of campaigns could potentially help principled candidates who don’t want to become beholden to campaign funders, hurt candidates who are only candidates because they suck up to campaign funders, and help all the people who want to elect candidates from outside of the two-party death spiral.
I don’t see how your objecting to campaign finance regulation but not to other aspects of government can be anything but arbitrary. Any action of government helps some, hurts others, doesn’t affect still more. This is true of roads, buildings, organizations, and would be no more or less true of public financed elections. To assume that campaign finance regulation only helps the candidate is begging the question entirely.
You completely discount the difference highlighted by Thomas Jefferson (which he said when the founders debated — and discarded — the idea of publicly funded elections):
But let’s continue with your example of roads: a road in Baltimore obviously benefits people in Baltimore more than it does me, in Brooklyn.
But it’s still a public good — if I went to Baltimore, I would be able to use that road, like everyone else.
Political campaigns are not run for the good of the public — they are attempts by people to get into political office for their own reasons and ends. In a proper democracy they are supposed to appeal to us, to win our support, not appeal to the government for money.
1: I run for political office, on an electoral-reform ticket: I pledge explicitly to replace the present funding system with candidates whose only source of finance is a limited public subsidy. I win, and (by the rules you’ve agreed upthread) I get to play with the piggy bank by public mandate. What do you think I should do?
2: What if subsidising candidates exclusively from the public purse (as opposed to the legalised bribery which is serving at present) resulted in a better political system? Would you be prepared to compromise your high ideals, for the good of the country?
Morally, if you ran under the present system with that explicit pledge and are elected, you have the right to pass that law, if you can convince a majority of your fellow lawmakers to agree.
It’s the Supreme Court’s job to invalidate that law if they deem it unconstitutional.
Three points:
(1) I have a feeling you and I would not agree on what a “better political system” would look like;
(2) Suppressing fundamental rights “for the good of the country” is illiberal;
(3) You worry about theoretical corruption (“legalized bribery”), but public campaign financing has a pretty well-documented history of actual corruption:
Last summer, Margarite Dale went on a spending spree.
The 44-year-old Glendale mom bought two computers — a monitor, desktop, and laptop, plus a full set of software for both. Total cost: $2,409. And she didn’t stop there. In just a few weeks’ time, Dale also purchased a $709 camera and $1,323 in office supplies.
So is Margarite Dale a compulsive shopper? A desperate housewife with a yen for Fry’s Electronics?
Not even close. Dale was a Clean Elections candidate for the Arizona House of Representatives. As a member of the Green Party, she didn’t have a chance of winning, but she still qualified for full funding under Arizona law. So when it came time to foot the bill for her schmancy new electronic equipment, the taxpayers of Arizona got stuck with the bill.
More? No problem!
A New Times review of campaign reports from the most recent election cycle found plenty of publicly funded expenditures that, at minimum, raise questions.
Candidates seem to have the philosophy that if the money is there, they might as well spend it. And that’s led to some dubious outlays:
• Doug Quelland, a Glendale Republican, spent $795 at a bicycle shop.
• En route to winning his seat in Mesa, Republican Cecil Ash spent $323 on Segway ramps and $384 for a video camera.
• On the final day of a hotly contested Republican primary in north Phoenix, now-state Representative Carl Seel lavished $405 on a GPS unit for his car — along with a two-year service plan.
• Tempe Democrat Ed Ableser drew scorn in a previous run, in 2006, for spending $287 to rent a “frozen drink machine” from Cactus Rita. But his report in 2008 shows the lesson went unlearned — it’s a near-endless list of foodstuffs. Blessed with $41,517, Ableser managed to spend $886 on “staff dinners” and food for himself, dining everywhere from RA Sushi to House of Tricks. At one point, Ableser even charged his campaign $4 for a cup of coffee at Xtreme Bean Coffee Company.
I have to say the taxpayers losing a few grand from people wasting public election funds pales in comparison to the public losing even a semblance of representation in the government by private donations on top of the give-away of many millions in quid-pro-quos. I’d be happy to wager that Archer Daniels Midland’s abuse of the current system alone would amount to more than all of the candidates abusing public campaign funds. There’s no theoretical risk of regarding campaign donations being used to buy policy contrary to the public interest, that’s the status quo.
