Reply-Reply to NatasNocturn: Voting and the Citizen
natasnocturn replied to your post: Link
Dafuq is a protest vote? A vote for the candidate of your choosing is an expression of democracy.
Except elections are popular contests, not popularity ones. They aren’t about who we like, they’re about getting the closest we can to the policies we want. Voting for people who we know have no chance of winning, or refusing to participate, because we don’t like people who more or less agree with us and do have a chance of winning doesn’t accomplish that. By definition it can’t.
And choices have consequences. Which, yes, is a very banal thing to write and there’s basically no way to write or say it that doesn’t sound condescending but causality is A Thing and this is important to keep in mind at all times. A person may like cheesecake more than they do, say, oatmeal, but if they, for the purposes of this exceedingly limited Model, eat cheesecake every morning for breakfast and never eat oatmeal they’ll ruin both their health and their budget. So, even though they don’t like it that much and maybe even hate it, they mostly eat the oatmeal because its cheap, lasts forever, can be bought in bulk, is easy to change up, and is better for their health. And other people will call them responsible for doing that because it displays an awareness of the consequences of their choices and that’s what “responsible” means; being aware and accepting, precisely, how much control, and the nature of it, that you have in a given situation.
So what’s a protest vote? A protest vote is voting for a candidate with no consideration given to the strategic aspects of that choice, or the potential consequences of it on your society and the sort of society you want it to be. In some sense a protest vote could be said to be an irresponsible vote; a vote that rejects the precise nature of the control one has as a voter in a democracy, choosing instead to treat a vote as a personal declaration rather than a political act. Every vote matters, but they matter through addition. Their importance is cumulative. “One vote” can decide an election, but only because innumerable other “one vote”s boost it over the top. Politics is a communal field(it literally means “of the people/polis/community”) and a vote is a collective act; committed by individuals, but measured by its multitude.
You frame voting as the personal act of an individual choosing between individuals; as discrete and personal and individual in both cause and effect, and you call that an “expression of democracy”, but this is mistaken. That is a conception of voting stripped of its essentially collective nature, stripped of its consequences and policy/social context; that attempts to strip it from “politics” completely and render its meaning entirely moral. It is a conception that pretends to place voting and democracy outside of politics, of collective action and society and community life and the lives of others, and place them instead within a self-contained, limited, individualist, consumerist model of the world, where voting is not defined by its empirically likely outcomes, nor the constituencies and institutions it empowers, nor democracy by its plurality and breadth, but both by the internal -unknowable to others- intentions of each Individual voter. The vote’s consequences are erased, and how well it defines and expresses the ineffable “Meness” of the Voter is given primacy in their stead. It’s not a surprising development because this is how voting is sold to the public, just like clothes and cars and foods and everything else is. As a Brand, and not just any Brand, but Your Brand. The vote transmogrified from political choice, from “rule by the people”, to a personal Statement.
But voting is Not a Statement, anymore than those candidates are Products(even alienated from their personhood as they are by elections), regardless of how the powers that be present and attempt to sell them. Those candidates are not just actors but standins -representatives- of larger social institutions -Political Parties- with clearly defined ideologies, goals, histories by which they can be judged, and constituencies which they serve and answer to. This, behind the anger and despair, is Eichenwald’s point: that elections aren’t a choice between Candidates Red, Blue, Green, and sundry, but between whether poor children will be able to go to the doctor when they’re sick, or Not. Between whether rural communities will have cheap, reliable, land-line access to the internet, or instead be denied any access beyond their cell-phones, and be absolutely fleeced by the telcos paying for these grossly subpar and overpriced services by the minute and megabite, as a result. Between a Consumer Protection Board that protects Consumers, or one that helps Merchants cheat them; Between an Environmental Protection Agency that protects the People through Protecting the Environment, or one that actively helps to Poison both; Between a Justice Department that prevents voter-disenfranchisement and investigates civil rights violations, or a Justice Department that encourages and abets both. A vote may be attached to a candidate’s name, but what it is really for, what it really decides, is the goals to be pursued and the sorts of people to do the pursing. The constituencies to be served, and the constituencies to be ignored; or, in the case of Republican victories in the US, actively persecuted.
A “Protest Vote” denies that politics is a communal field and that political actions, while committed by individuals, are collective acts with collective consequences. A protest vote is one cast thinking it is about saying what you think rather than actively creating the society you want. As such it is one that actively undermines the practical enactment of your declared values, while simultaneously asserting that it(and you by extension) is Truer to those values and More Noble than Compromise votes for Compromise Candidates who, while less satisfying personally, still represent most of the constituencies, values, and goals you wish to promote and protect.
So what’s a protest vote? A “protest vote” is bad and counter-productive praxis, based on conservative distortions of “personal liberty” and “politics” that, by divorcing individual behavior from “responsibility” and its inescapable social, political, and causal context, hides an essentially aristocratic and reactionary agenda and worldview within the language and values of liberalism.
