Robert Reich and the Liberal Myth of Wasted Votes
I recently had a friend post the following post written by Robert Reich, the author of Beyond Outrage, pleading for people to vote for Obama and save the country. His post has slowly been accumulating Facebook “likes” to the tune of some 3,200 likes last time I checked. His post is indicative of the contemporary state of US politics from the liberal Democratic perspective, and in it we find most of the common talking points about why voting for someone other than Obama is not only bad, but a sign of a general lack of political engagement. As I’m tired of hearing this liberal dribble spewed more and more as the election approaches, I wanted to address these issues head on, and point out just a few of the many flaws in this logic and his overall argument.
Reich writes as follows in his post:
“This is for those of you who consider yourself to be progressive but have given up on politics because it seems rotten to the core. You may prefer Obama to Romney but don’t think there’s a huge difference between the two, so you may not even vote.
Your cynicism is understandable. But cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophesy. If you succumb to it, the regressives who want to take this nation back to the 19th century win it all.
The Koch brothers, Karl Rove, the rabid Republican right, CEOs and Wall Street titans who want to entrench their privileges and tax advantages – all of them would like nothing better than for every progressive in America to throw in the towel.
Then America is entirely theirs.
The alternative to cynicism is to become more involved in politics. Help create a progressive force in this nation that grows into a movement that can’t be stopped.
We almost had it last year in the Occupy movement. We had the arguments and the energy. What we lacked was organization and discipline.
I’ve spent years in Washington and I know nothing good happens there unless good people outside Washington are organized and mobilized to put pressure on Washington to make it happen.
This isn’t new. In the election of 1936, a constituent approached FDR with a list of things she wanted him to do if reelected. “Ma’am,” he said, “I’d like to do all those things. But if I’m reelected, you must make me.”
We must make them.
I suggest a two-step plan.
Step one: Vote for Barack Obama for President and vote for every Democratic senator and representative in Congress. Get off your ass and make sure your friends and relatives do the same.
Step two: Starting Election Day, regardless of who’s elected, commit at least three hours every week to political organizing and mobilizing. Connect with other progressives in your city and state. Help find and recruit new progressive candidates to run against Republicans in swing states, and against conservative Democrats. Support the members of the progressive caucus in Congress. Raise money. Raise a ruckus.
Make it our goal to reverse Citizens United, even if it takes a constitutional amendment. And have public financing of elections (including requiring the media to provide free political advertising as part of their commitment to public service).
Also break up the biggest banks and resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act.
Put a 2 percent surtax on wealth in excess of $3 million. And a one-tenth of 1 percent transaction tax on every financial transaction. And restore top tax rates to what they were before Ronald Reagan became president.
Use half this revenue to pay down the national debt and half to make sure every American has a world-class education.
Put a tax on carbon, and use the revenues to reduce or replace payroll taxes.
Have a single-payer health-care system that delivers care at far less cost than our current balkonized and inefficient one.
And much else.
You say it can’t happen — the system is too rotten.
It won’t happen if you wallow in the comfort of your cynicism. But it will happen if you and others like you get fired up.
We’ve done it before.
I remember when progressives joined with African-Americans to get enacted the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. I remember when progressives stopped the Vietnam War. When women finally got freedom of choice over their own bodies. When the Environmental Protection Act became law.
Who would have imagined two decades ago that America would elect an African-American as President of the United States? Who would have supposed gays and lesbians would begin to achieve equal marriage rights?
Of course we can take America back.
Stop complaining and start organizing.
And by all means, vote.”
The problem with this argument are so many, it’s hard to know where to begin, but let me raise some basic points of distinction and disagreement that will help tease out some of my concerns.
1st Problem: The Myth of Radical Cynicism
“This is for those of you who consider yourself to be progressive but have given up on politics because it seems rotten to the core. You may prefer Obama to Romney but don’t think there’s a huge difference between the two, so you may not even vote. Your cynicism is understandable. But cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophesy. If you succumb to it, the regressives who want to take this nation back to the 19th century win it all.“
This is classic liberalism at its best, and a fundamental misunderstanding of radical politics. We view politics (progressive, radical or otherwise) as not just about elections and Congress, and therefore not only about Republicans and Democrats (cf: “Three Face of Power” debate). Our cynicism has nothing to do with the individual candidates for the two parties, but with the entire two-party system and the larger cultural dynamics in which American politics unfold. Advancing a systematic critique of liberal capitalist society and the Anglo-American myths of industrialism leading to progress and free market peace is not cynicism, it is a radical political rejection which posits that these same politics are morally, ethically, socially and spiritually bankrupt and politically offensive. We want nothing to do with these politics. From this political perspective, the Democrats and Republicans are identical twins, equally corrupt and equally detestable. This has nothing to do with political cynicism, and has everything to do with a defense of the political principles we believe in, which are opposed to that of contemporary Anglo-American societies in which many of us live.
2nd Problem: Bait and Switch Liberalism
“The alternative to cynicism is to become more involved in politics. Help create a progressive force in this nation that grows into a movement that can’t be stopped. We almost had it last year in the Occupy movement. We had the arguments and the energy. What we lacked was organization and discipline.“
Another way to state the implicit claim here is that “the alternative to bad cooptation of good cooptation.” What the author fundamentally fails to understand is that Occupy, of which I have been involved here in NYC, was precisely about rejecting the institutionalization of radical social movements into hierarchical and “disciplined” forms of liberal “politics.” What Occupy truly lacked was not organization or discipline, it was mass support. Organization and discipline will not achieve greater numbers, as if having a better organized “Occupy campaign” would somehow turn out more “Occupy voters” in the streets. This is a sloppy attempt to impose liberal notions of politics onto a radical and embryonic social movement opposed to state-based politics.
3rd Problem: Pre-Planned Politics Always Fail
“I suggest a two-step plan.
Step one: Vote for Barack Obama for President…
Step two: …commit at least three hours every week to political organizing and mobilizing.“
If there is one thing we can say with a high degree of certainty, it is that history is the great proving ground for failed ideas. And one of the most colossal failures historically has been any political program that starts with a list of the “steps” to make political change possible. It not only breeds some of the nastiest politics–witness the failed Socialist, Communist and Capitalist experiments of the past–but it reinforces the illusion that politics is an organized and well-structured process of negotiations and arrangements, like taking turns rolling the dice and moving you little silver dog in a game of Monopoly.
Secondly, this is speaking to the politically apathetic liberal voter who has either never been involved politically to begin with, and is unlikely to begin now, or else is speaking to the disenfranchised Democratic/Independent voters who are all effectively in agreement already with the definition of “politics” offered above. This is not the same understanding of politics we hold on the actual left.
This gap in political understanding and analysis is most clearly evident when the author says “commit at least hours every week…,” which fails to recognize that many of us on the left are already putting in way more than three hours a week, much of which has to be spend defending against both liberal and conservative politics!
4th Problem: Reform versus Reimagination
“Of course we can take America back. Stop complaining and start organizing. And by all means, vote.“
If going out and voting actually made the impact the author claims it did, the US of A would look like a radically different place. But the harsh reality of US politics is that voting means very little, and does very little, other than changing the party label that has the majority in Congress or state legislatures. All of the really big issues of our times–growing militarism, growing power of finance capital, growing income inequality, declining living standards, etc. have continued unimpeded through Democrats and Republicans alike. This is perhaps THE FUNDAMENTAL POINT that the author is blind to–things have gotten progressively worse under both Democratic and Republican control over the past 236 years, and there is absolutely nothing to indicate that this trend will change by voting for Barack Obama for a second term. If anything, Obama has moved even further to the right in order to try and hold an increasingly conservative-center politics against an even further right-leaning Republican fundamentalism driving the party.
Listening to the 3 Presidential debates was proof enough of that. Obama and Romney are more alike than distinct in their foreign policy views, their chest-thumping American exceptionalism bravado, and their ridiculous talk of “clean coal” and increasing dependence on fossil fuels and outmoded manufacturing jobs that will never revive a slowly imploding national economy. They are both living in political fantasy lands. Compared to these debates, the 3rd Party Presidential Debates on Oct 16th were a breath of fresh air.
While some of the later suggestion that Reich makes are fine, and generally point to a view of politics as gradual improvement rather than a return to a more “traditional” conservative notion of politics (ie. Reaganomics reborn a la Romnomics), they still ignore the internal contradictions I have noted above. Voting for Obama will not solve any of these structural critiques, they will only reinforce them further.
And ultimately, Reich’s pleading amounts to more liberal pining for a Left political re-integration with the Democratic Party that never existed historically, and never certainly never emerge in the future. Regardless of their shared views on some issues, the Left and liberal Democrats are too far apart to every unify behind a Presidential candidate, and in my view, that’s a good thing. The Democrats are part of the problem, not the solution. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we can seriously expand the already present and active progressive social movement in America striving to reclaim politics for, by and of the people. And that won’t happen until liberal apologists like Reich understand that the Democratic Party will never be that vehicle.
Until next time…remember, “A vote for liberty is not wasted.”
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