Politics for Anti-Politicians
Posted by Thomas L. Knapp on Dec 30, 2009 in Commentary • 7 commentsYou’ve heard it all before, I’m sure:
“If you don’t vote, you don’t get to complain.”
“Not voting is a vote for the winner and whatever his policies may be. If you don’t like him and them, you should have voted for the other guy.”
These little pieces of the conventional wisdom are based on the claim — sometimes explicitly made, sometimes just implied — that not voting constitutes consent to the choices made by those who do vote. That same conventional wisdom generally attributes the decision not to vote to “apathy.”
I’m not going to try to tell you whether or not you should vote. There’s plenty of reasonable disagreement within the movement for a stateless society on the subject. If you’re interested in the arguments, I suggest that you read Carl Watner’s “A Short Introduction to Non-Voting” on the one hand and Murray N. Rothbard’s “The Problem of the Libertarian Party,” which constitutes chapter four of his essay “Konkin on Libertarian Strategy.”
Whether or not you vote is a personal decision. If you decide not to vote, however, I’d like to suggest that you make that decision more meaningful by turning it into an anti-political turd in the political punchbowl. Or, to make myself more plain, you should make every effort to get your non-vote interpreted as you intend it to be interpreted rather than simply allowing the conventional wisdom claim of “tacit consent” to go uncontested.
The conventional wisdom says that not voting for anybody is “voting for the winner.”
The conventional wisdom says that if you don’t vote, it’s probably because you don’t care.
Stand up for yourself!
Declare clearly and publicly that your decision not to vote, if it’s to be considered a vote at all, should be considered a vote for NOBODY. And, further, insist that that vote for NOBODY should be … counted!
You’re not apathetic. You just don’t like any of the candidates. You don’t believe that any of them can represent you, or should be held out as doing so. You do not consent to be ruled or represented, at least not by any of the people applying for the job of ruling or representing you.
In any given election, those votes for NOBODY — votes not cast by registered voters, votes not cast by those eligible to vote who choose not to register, and votes not cast by those barred by the election laws from voting — would, if counted, generally constitute at least a plurality and usually a majority of all votes.
Your alleged representatives will, of course, studiously ignore you, and go about their business of pretending that they represent you, if they can get away with doing so.
If you don’t let them get away with it — if you and other non-voters make some real noise to the effect that these guys aren’t “your representatives” by any reasonable definition — it should get fun. Ever heard an egg-stealing dog yelp when the farmer catches it near the chicken coop and unloads shotgun shell full of rock salt at its ass? It’s very much like the sound a politician makes when forced to contend with the claim that his “services” are neither needed nor wanted. Personally, I find that sound curiously musical.
If you’re not going to vote, publicly declare before each major election that you’re not going to vote. Write a letter to the editor. Call a local talk radio show. Comment on your local newspaper’s web site beneath an article on the forthcoming election.
After the election, follow up in the same way: “Of the 400,000 people living in this district, more than 300,000 did not vote for candidate X. More than 200,000 voted for NOBODY. The ‘winning’ candidate received the support of less than 25% of his alleged constituents. If this is really a democracy, shouldn’t that seat remain vacant for the term? That’s the unambiguously expressed will of the majority, after all.”
No, you’re not going to “win” an election in this way — the system is set up to prevent that from happening at all costs — but that’s beside the point. If you’re going to refrain from voting as an expression of your rejection of that system, the next step is to use that expression as an outreach tool. Raise your voice so that others like you can hear it and join in!
The Vote for Nobody Campaign
http://anti-politics.ws/
Tom, part of the problem with replicating the “non-voting”/”vote for nobody” meme is that people don’t just want something to be against; they want something to be for. I think it’s always wise to present an alternative when you tell people that you’re against voting. That’s why I endorse the use of the following pamphlet before that of any others I’ve come across: http://zinelibrary.info/dont-vote-organise
Andrew,
Cool flier!
Just a bit of clarification, since some Facebook readers seem to have misunderstood my point:
I am not urging anyone either to vote or to abstain from voting. I vote regularly — and run for office occasionally — myself. There are persuasive arguments in favor of, and against, voting, and everyone’s going to have to figure which side of those arguments they come down on for themselves.
What I’m saying — all I’m saying — is that if you choose not to vote for any reason other than simple apathy, there’s a “next step,” and that is making your decision not to vote part of a larger communications/outreach strategy for your preferred outcome.
My analogy cupboard is a little bare at the moment, so this is the best I can come up with: If Thoreau had gone to jail for the night over those taxes, gone home and kept his mouth shut about it, that would have been that. Nobody would have ever noticed or cared. When he sat down and wrote his essay on the subject and put that essay in front of people’s eyes, he turned his night in jail into something that had an impact.
Ditto for non-voting. Tell people why you’re not voting. Explain how the society you’d like to live in differs from the society bound up in voting. And so on and so forth. Make something of it!
Mr. Knapp writes, “Tell people why you’re not voting” (emphasis added).
A very good point.
See also, What is Non-Voting?, 24 November 2008.
Best,
Alex Peak
Interestingly, in Argentina, where according to “the law” you have to be excused not to vote (and in spite of this over 20% manage not to show up) it is possible to vote for None of the Above (”voto en blanco”) and it does get counted (in the 2007 presidential election 1.3 million people or 6.44% did so–and it wasn’t because of lack of choices), but a vote for “nobody” (nadie) gets counted as a null (invalid) vote. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Argentina and http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voto_nulo, particularly the image, which says at the top “NOBODY is going to save you.”
Aargh…
Democracy has devolved to a periodic contest regarding which team are legitimate predators (most guns) and, who are legitimate prey (weakest, least politically popular) using ever changing pretexts. The current system is on the same extermination path as the Nazis and differs only in degree and therefore, the amount of time it takes social / economic collapse to occur. The Nazis were fools. It is more economically efficient but equally foolish to enslave as opposed to exterminate your prey.
I agree wholeheartedly that the reasons for “none of the above” votes (no valid choices able to achieve “consent of the governed”) needs to be expressed, however, the system is FUBAR.
The system is insane because it lacks the discipline of reality and is therefore at war against reality. In any contest with natural law (actions have inevitable consequences), REALITY wins, a “slam dunk”. The only question is: who benefits by the choices and who pays for the consequences?
The “rule of law” used to insure that those who made the choices, reaped the consequences, good or bad. No more. Now, some are able to make and profit by choices which are illegal to all persons but the state and their connected cronies. Since all such profit resolves to theft from the productive, the grim reaper of “Mathematics of Rule” is and will continue to determine consequences:
http://www.cli.gs/MathematicsOfRule
Our far wiser ancestors correctly diagnosed the root cause of the rise and fall of civilization (the rules by which we cooperate for MUTUAL self-interest) as perpetual war between the productive (those who produce more than they consume) versus the greedy (those who consume more than they produce). They discovered and enforced the “rule of law”, to protect civilization (honest people trading) from criminals (predators, who achieve goals by force / fraud). This is now rationalized away, by criminals on the bench:
http://www.cli.gs/RuleOfLaw
Justice Defined: We are all free to profit or suffer and learn (adapt to excellence) by facing the consequences of our OWN choices. Injustice is to be forced to suffer the consequences of choices of unaccountable (irresponsible) others..
“The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class.” ~ Lord Acton
Charles Darwin also warned us: Survival EQUALS ability to adapt to environment EQUALS ability to choose correctly EQUALS freedom:
http://www.cli.gs/DarwinReconsidered
Returning to the democracy topic, there are two basic problems: choice is limited (a survival hit) and politics is not limited to “common interest” (all persons EQUALLY benefit and pay), creating a perpetual “divide and conquer war” between predators vying for “legitimacy”, to prey on the people. Until these two problems are solved, there is zero possibility that democracy can be “fixed”, ever. Natural factors “the unseen hand” are manifesting as social / economic collapse which MUST continue until the “rule of law” is re-asserted (or total collapse to anarchy) and predators reined in and democracy limited to “common interest”. Our ancestors suffered from “rule of corrupt man” and chose peace and survival for all over unchecked greed which inevitably leads to “survival for none”.
Think about it:
http://www.cli.gs/IntelligentChoice
“In any given election, those votes for NOBODY …would, if counted, generally constitute at least a plurality and usually a majority of all votes.”
This statement seems to speciously assert that “all votes” may be found by finding the total of all persons. Yet we know that many votes are cast every election by dead persons and by non-existent persons. We also know that valid votes cast are not counted, as members of the Boston Tea Party reported extensively in 2008, having cast valid write-in or ballot votes in counties where none were counted. It would be mistaken to suppose these two numbers (those dead or non-existent not entitled to vote and those entitled to vote not counted) are equal.
So figures found on pages like this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_presidential_election
tell us something about reality, but we really don’t know what. It is hard to assign an error bar to any of these figures. But the claim is that counting the dead, and not counting the valid votes cast but not counted, Obama got 69,456,897 million votes representing 52.9% of a long and hotly contested race for president. It seems likely that anyone inclined to vote in 2008 did so in November.
Using those two figures as if they were meaningful, we come up with the doubtful proposition that 131,298,482 entities of any sort “voted” whether living or dead, voting one time or many, less however many weren’t counted.
FYI the votes for McCain are listed at 59,934,814 which suggests that 129,391,711 votes were counted for the two major party candidates. So 1,906,771 were counted for other candidates for president among perhaps two or three million votes cast for other candidates.
At the time, November 2008, the census bureau listed the population at 307.5 million. This means that 42.7% of the population had their votes counted. So about 57.3%, or a very substantial majority – a majority greater than the percentage of the counted votes which were counted for Obama – chose not to vote or were not permitted to vote.
Most Americans don’t vote. Most don’t file taxes, either.
According to this page: http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=177056,00.html
“The IRS expects the total number of individual tax returns, both electronic and paper, to be about 138 million in 2008.”
I’ve read elsewhere, but cannot just now recall where, that only about 130 million individuals filed any sort of tax form by April 2009 (including extensions), and that the IRS was surprised by this lower figure. Of course, 2008 was a year of tremendous economic dislocation, as we know.
And, again, most Americans aren’t included. Americans have already withdrawn from the system. Does it make sense to be confrontational about this fact?