Voting: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, October 2024

Every four years I write variations on the same old crap. Parsing reformism versus revolution, critiquing “diversity of tactics,” quipping “I vote and I riot.” My usual “Lefty” Hooligan election year themes. So let me discuss my experiences with electoral politics.

I started voting once the Twenty-Sixth Amendment was ratified on July 5, 1971, that lowered the voting age to 18. I was a dyed-in-the-wool anarchist at the time, but I never subscribed to the sentiment “don’t vote, it only encourages them!” At first, I saw voting was one the many ways, one of the many tactics and strategies available on the New Left to decide our future, both as individuals and collectively. I worked with fellow youthful anti-war activists in the Action Committee for Peace and Social Justice to run for city council and school board in Ventura, California, under the tutelage of a New American Movement (NAM) organizer in 1971. I also voted Peace and Freedom Party, an inveterate California socialist third party, through the seventies and eighties and I participated in George McGovern’s 1972 progressive Presidential campaign.

The appeal of alternatives to the American two-party monopoly-independent third parties, insurgent grassroots electoral movements, major party candidates challenging the status quo, etc-is that they can present attractive comprehensive platforms and mount hopeful campaigns against the corrupt system we called Amerika back in the Long Sixties. I said hopeful but not credible. I now admit believing that such electoral alternatives were at all viable constituted extremely long odds. When third parties succeed they replace one of the two dominant parties. The Whigs replaced the Federalists, the Democrats replaced the Whigs. Renegade major party candidates who attempt to win control over their respective political party are almost never successful. The Democratic Party in the 20th century with Eugene McCarthy’s idealistic campaign pushing Lyndon Johnson to resign but losing to Hubert Humphrey, Bobby Kennedy getting assassinated, and George McGovern succeeding in capturing the party but guaranteeing Nixon’s ultimate victory. And when candidates unaligned with the two-party monopoly attempt to run campaigns, they don’t win but they often act as spoilers: William Jennings Bryan with Woodrow Wilson; Ross Perot with Bill Clinton against George H.W. Bush.

The enduring American two-party stranglehold is grounded in our 50%+1 winner-take-all system of voting. About the only remotely viable way to circumvent this control is insurgent grassroots electoral movements: Bernie Sanders democratic socialist campaigns in Vermont; Kshama Sawant’s Socialist Alternative campaign in Seattle. Changing this arrangement to a parliamentary one, let alone something more participatory, decentralized and democratic or national in scope, is a pipe dream. Our Ventura city council/school board elections and our attempt to propose a kind of municipal socialism (tax and regulate the county’s over 3,800 active oil and gas wells, fund a county-wide bus system with free rides for youth and the elderly, approve the People’s Peace Treaty against the Vietnam War, advance Summerhill-based educational reforms) proved more than mere whimsy. Ventura County now has a functioning bus system. The real fantasy however is any form of third party politics with its inability to deliver anything more than spoilers in tightly-run major party races. Jill Stein and Cornell West are shills for campism, and Robert Kennedy is just an outright anti-vax conspiracy lunatic. The P&FP was a publicity machine for celebrity candidates like Eldridge Cleaver, Dr. Benjamin Spock and Leonard Peltier in its heyday and has become a lickspittle front for the Stalinoid Tweedle-dee/Tweedle-dum Workers World Party and Party for Freedom and Socialism.

There is little doubt the gung-ho get-out-the-vote (GOTV) electoralism of the two-party monopoly is all about coming up with the enthusiasm, engagement and investment of time, energy, resources, money and attention to maximize that effort while lying about history and hyperbolizing the potential for reforms, concessions and progress. The various factions of the voting Left-from the progressive Democratic “Squad” to the handful of independent third parties (Green Party, People’s Party)-are as deeply invested in voting as are the Democrats proper. GOTV consumes vast amounts of the Left’s precious political space. It riles people up and confuses them about what and how to genuinely affect social change. Yet there is also a growing dissatisfaction with the system, from a sense that electoralism is deeply dysfunctional, at the very least, to being outright beneficial for the American empire at best.

Voting isn’t going to stop global warming. It has never ended wars, stopped genocide, prevented racism or sexism, none of The Really Big Issues. Yet voting remains consequential. Black people and their white allies died for the right to vote during the Civil Rights Movement at the hands of white hooded racists, and voter suppression by like-minded thugs continues to this day. I admit I was gullible in voting for George McGovern and the P&FP believing they would deliver us the revolution. And I might yet be credulous to hold two strategies simultaneously-electoralism and radical organizing/activism for revolutionary social change.

What I don’t do is buy into the metaphysical nonsense that the dilettantish anti-authoritarian Left promotes as hardline anti-voting politics. From whining about the “fundamental contradiction” between “misguided” electoralism versus “superior” forms of organizing/activism to the mandatory “don’t vote” Libcom crowd who chide Democratic voters with “why don’t you phone bank for the Democrats if you feel so strongly about them?”, these folks buy into all sorts of claptrap. These unyielding, holier-than-thou purists insist that workers and the oppressed must act “by any means necessary,” except when it comes to electoral politics. Voting is meaningless yet for them NOT voting is mandatory. No real change can occur through electoral politics yet it is necessary to abstain because to vote is to automatically legitimize the bourgeois state and its violence. We must organize against capitalism, the state, politicians and bosses when our only alternatives are sold-out political parties, moderate social movements and capitalist unions with the same mainstream politics. To vote for the lesser evil is an unmitigated horror but presumably to allow a fascist movement to seize power is the sham lesser evil.

“Voting is not the end of our work,” Noam Chomsky has said. “It’s only the beginning.” According to the old-school anarchist Chomsky, voting shouldn’t even be an issue. Just do it and then get on with the real work of education, organizing, protest, anti-racist work, class struggle, the like. I’m not keen on the slogan that “voting takes 5 minutes.” I check out the League of Pissed-Off Voters website and download their voting guide every four years, taking 15 to 20 minutes to fill out and mail in my ballot. Then I get on with my other political activities. Aside from an occasional column like this, disabusing the rest of the population of their delusions about electoralism is beyond my pay grade.

Because I’m a lifelong California resident in the bluest of blue states my individual vote for up-ballot Federal candidates matters little. I basically vote for propositions and for state and local candidates. For mostly progressive Democrats. On that local level voting can offer a modicum of change, and act as a statement, public protest, collective responsibility or community care. But on a national level I vote simple harm reduction, the classic lesser-of-two-evils strategy. Voting is frequently frustrating nowadays, feeling too little and too removed from what I want. So I vote on the national level not to get what I want, but to keep things from getting worse. It’s damage control. I don’t want a fascist USA, nor do I want the death of the last remaining vestiges of our liberal democracy. To be clear I’m not endorsing the Democratic Party. I’m using one small lever of power to protect billions of lives from the far worse slaughter they’ll face under the reactionary Republican Party and a globally winning Far Right if we allow them to win electorally in the US.

My political résumé has been quite varied over the past 56 years beyond my involvement with electoral politics. I organized, rallied, demonstrated and protested against numerous wars, among them the Vietnam War, First and Second Gulf Wars, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I committed civil disobedience around various causes; anti-conscription, tax resistance and jury nullificaton among them. I rioted against war and injustice in Ventura, Isla Vista, Santa Cruz, San Diego, San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley. I occupied campuses at UC Santa Cruz and UC San Diego. I fought against Reagan’s and Trump’s reactionary regimes, against Nazi skinheads through San Diego Anti-Racist Action and against fascist Proud Boys in Berkeley and San Francisco. I’ve been an active member of the Industrial Workers of the World, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and the National Writers Union to which I still belong. And I’ve expressed solidarity in actions and with individuals, organizations and movements too numerous to list. So when I’m not slavishly voting for Democrats I’m building dual power based on direct action, independent mass movements, autonomous institutions unbeholden to capital, and working-class self-emancipation.

Yes, the Democrats still suck. For one, they’re responsible for backing Israel’s continuous slaughter in Gaza and the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. But the people who make opposition to voting a BFD are actually the ones who use the issue as a litmus test for their ideological purity, whether that’s “authentic anarchism” or “class war communism.” As Ian MacKaye once said: “ At every election, my vote goes to the candidate less likely to declare war. You’re dropping hugely expensive pieces of exploding metal on a population. America deserves the president it gets, whether the country votes for them or allows their vote to be stolen, and the least we can do is to elect someone who won’t do that to other people. “ This goes to press October 1 and by November 6, 2024-the day after the election-I’ll return fully to my well-lived political eclecticism.

A tip of the gauchiste chapeau to Comrade Motopu whose help with this column was invaluable.

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Originally published at http://leftyhooligan.wordpress.com on October 1, 2024.