It is urgently important to prevent a Republican administration under Romney/Ryan from taking office in January 2013.
The election is now just weeks away, and I want to urge those whose values are generally in line with mine — progressives, especially activists — to make this goal one of your priorities during this period.
An activist colleague recently said to me: “I hear you’re supporting Obama.”
I was startled, and took offense. “Supporting Obama? Me?!”
“I lose no opportunity publicly,” I told him angrily, to identify Obama as a tool of Wall Street, a man who’s decriminalized torture and is still complicit in it, a drone assassin, someone who’s launched an unconstitutional war, supports kidnapping and indefinite detention without trial, and has prosecuted more whistleblowers like myself than all previous presidents put together. “Would you call that support?”
My friend said, “But on Democracy Now you urged people in swing states to vote for him! How could you say that? I don’t live in a swing state, but I will not and could not vote for Obama under any circumstances.”
My answer was: a Romney/Ryan administration would be no better — no different — on any of the serious offenses I just mentioned or anything else, and it would be much worse, even catastrophically worse, on a number of other important issues: attacking Iran, Supreme Court appointments, the economy, women’s reproductive rights, health coverage, safety net, climate change, green energy, the environment.
I told him: “I don’t ‘support Obama.’ I oppose the current Republican Party. This is not a contest between Barack Obama and a progressive candidate. The voters in a handful or a dozen close-fought swing states are going to determine whether Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are going to wield great political power for four, maybe eight years, or not.”
As Noam Chomsky said recently, “The Republican organization today is extremely dangerous, not just to this country, but to the world. It’s worth expending some effort to prevent their rise to power, without sowing illusions about the Democratic alternatives.”
Following that logic, he’s said to an interviewer what my friend heard me say to Amy Goodman: “If I were a person in a swing state, I’d vote against Romney/Ryan, which means voting for Obama because there is no other choice.”
The election is at this moment a toss-up. That means this is one of the uncommon occasions when we progressives — a small minority of the electorate - could actually have a significant influence on the outcome of a national election, swinging it one way or the other.
The only way for progressives and Democrats to block Romney from office, at this date, is to persuade enough people in swing states to vote for Obama: not stay home, or vote for someone else. And that has to include, in those states, progressives and disillusioned liberals who are at this moment inclined not to vote at all or to vote for a third-party candidate (because like me they’ve been not just disappointed but disgusted and enraged by much of what Obama has done in the last four years and will probably keep doing).
They have to be persuaded to vote, and to vote in a battleground state for Obama, not anyone else, despite the terrible flaws of the less-bad candidate, the incumbent. That’s not easy. As I see it, that’s precisely the “effort” Noam is referring to as worth expending right now to prevent the Republicans’ rise to power. And it will take progressives — some of you reading this, I hope — to make that effort of persuasion effectively.
It will take someone these disheartened progressives and liberals will listen to. Someone manifestly without illusions about the Democrats, someone who sees what they see when they look at the president these days: but who can also see through candidates Romney or Ryan on the split-screen, and keep their real, disastrous policies in focus.
It’s true that the differences between the major parties are not nearly as large as they and their candidates claim, let alone what we would want. It’s even fair to use Gore Vidal’s metaphor that they form two wings (“two right wings” as some have put it) of a single party, the Property or Plutocracy Party, or as Justin Raimondo says, the War Party.
Still, the political reality is that there are two distinguishable wings, and one is reliably even worse than the other, currently much worse overall. To be in denial or to act in neglect of that reality serves only the possibly imminent, yet presently avoidable, victory of the worse.
The traditional third-party mantra, “There’s no significant difference between the major parties” amounts to saying: “The Republicans are no worse, overall.” And that’s absurd. It constitutes shameless apologetics for the Republicans, however unintended. It’s crazily divorced from present reality.
And it’s not at all harmless to be propagating that absurd falsehood. It has the effect of encouraging progressives even in battleground states to refrain from voting or to vote in a close election for someone other than Obama, and more importantly, to influence others to act likewise. That’s an effect that serves no one but the Republicans, and ultimately the 1%.
It’s not merely understandable, it’s entirely appropriate to be enraged at Barack Obama. As I am. He has often acted outrageously, not merely timidly or “disappointingly.” If impeachment were politically imaginable on constitutional grounds, he’s earned it (like George W. Bush, and many of his predecessors!) It is entirely human to want to punish him, not to “reward” him with another term or a vote that might be taken to express trust, hope or approval.
But rage is not generally conducive to clear thinking. And it often gets worked out against innocent victims, as would be the case here domestically, if refusals to vote for him resulted in Romney’s taking key battleground states that decide the outcome of this election.
To punish Obama in this particular way, on Election Day — by depriving him of votes in swing states and hence of office in favor of Romney and Ryan — would punish most of all the poor and marginal in society, and workers and middle class as well: not only in the US but worldwide in terms of the economy (I believe the Republicans could still convert this recession to a Great Depression), the environment and climate change. It could well lead to war with Iran (which Obama has been creditably resisting, against pressure from within his own party). And it would spell, via Supreme Court appointments, the end of Roe v. Wade and of the occasional five to four decisions in favor of the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
The reelection of Barack Obama, in itself, is not going to bring serious progressive change, end militarism and empire, or restore the Constitution and the rule of law. That’s for us and the rest of the people to bring about after this election and in the rest of our lives — through organizing, building movements and agitating.
In the eight to 12 close-fought states — especially Florida, Ohio and Virginia, but also Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin — for any progressive to encourage fellow progressives and others in those states to vote for a third-party candidate is, I would say, to be complicit in facilitating the election of Romney and Ryan, with all its consequences.
To think of that as urging people in swing states to “vote their conscience” is, I believe, dangerously misleading advice. I would say to a progressive that if your conscience tells you on Election Day to vote for someone other than Obama in a battleground state, you need a second opinion. Your conscience is giving you bad counsel.
I often quote a line by Thoreau that had great impact for me: “Cast your whole vote: not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.” He was referring, in that essay, to civil disobedience, or as he titled it himself, “Resistance to Civil Authority.”
It still means that to me. But this is a year when for people who think like me — and who, unlike me, live in battleground states — casting a strip of paper is also important. Using your whole influence this month to get others to do that, to best effect, is even more important.
That means for progressives in the next couple of weeks — in addition to the rallies, demonstrations, petitions, lobbying (largely against policies or prospective policies of President Obama, including austerity budgeting next month), movement-building and civil disobedience that are needed all year round and every year — using one’s voice and one’s e-mails and op-eds and social media to encourage citizens in swing states to vote against a Romney victory by voting for the only real alternative, Barack Obama.
Daniel Ellsberg
Kensington, Calif.
Editor’s Note: Daniel Ellsberg is a former official in the State and Defense departments who has been arrested for acts of non-violent civil disobedience over 80 times, initially for copying and releasing the top secret Pentagon Papers, for which he faced 115 years in prison. Living in a non-swing state, he does not intend to vote for President Obama.
I recently wrote a letter [“Left-Over Hubris,” 10/1/12 TPP] “slamming Jill Stein and Ralph Nader” (letter from Bernard Berg TPP 10/15/12)? No I didn’t. I wrote a letter slamming those who think that dividing the left into a silly Democrat vs Republican vs third party frame are idiots. Sorry that the strong language offended you; I was speaking to mature activists who, I thought, would have gotten the idea. I will overlook the puerile taunt about Texas; I frequently make a much more colorful analysis myself (but I am a Texan and you are not, so buzz off, buster!)
Yes, this country is a democracy, and a complex one which has to live with enormous screw ups, and a moneyed constituency with a Nietzchean will to power. Basic to the idea of democracy is the idea that its constituency stay informed, vote its own best interest (an idea totally lost on the Fox News viewer and many lefties like you as well), and requires its voters to make complex comparisons. To say that Democrats and Republicans are alike is a ridiculous overgeneralization, one which could once again prove fatal to a country fighting off a theocratic plutocracy.
As Greg Palast, BBC reporter and contributor to LINK TV, has recently pointed out, Karl Rove and his rich thug-friends have been purging the “blue” voters — read that black and Hispanic votes — from a large swathe of state voting rolls while pulling off criminal voter suppression scams all over this country. So, because of contrarians like you, the plutocrats, dirty politicians, and arrogant religionists, the Democratic Party, the only viable source of power for the Left, is fighting on all fronts for its life.
Let’s compare the two with easily acquired information: Which side (left or right) would be guilty of these offenses against the American people?
Voter suppression; union busting; destruction of the social safety net; a Ryan program that would force European-style austerity on the 99% and relieve its wealthy patrons and corporations of any tax burden at all (maybe that would be a plus for us in the case of EXXON, GE, etc., since they now pay nothing but get huge tax “refunds”}; would gut public schools so that for-profit “schools” could step in and destroy our own and our children’s futures; abuse immigrants to further their own power; and insure cheap, powerless labor on the American workforce like the sweat shops in China that Bain and Romney so admire. If you stay abreast of the news at all, you can add more evil to this list yourself.
Which side has the support of my personal heroes, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). (I leave that list to you, since I know we have many heroes on the left). Which side created the social safety net and the Affordable Healthcare Act, so, therefore, has no interest in gutting it; allows for independence among its legislative body members; respects women’s rights; wholeheartedly cares about the 99%, including the poor and ill; embraces the idea of income equality and tax reform; cares about the environment; supports getting money out of politics; has worked hard for job growth (the Republicans have obstructed any move by the Dems to create jobs for no other reason than to defeat President Obama, but he is still pulling that off); supports our returning vets; and, most of all, who cares about our beloved children? To claim that the Democrats and Republicans are alike is a false equivalency worthy of Fox News. Again, anyone informed and paying attention knows that our friends on the Left have fought heroic battles on our behalf.
The Democratic Party embraces dissidence but cannot afford stupidity. If you don’t like Tea Partiers and conservo-Dems running your life, get out and do something about it. Maybe go to a primary where our future leaders are really chosen and encourage people who have a chance in hell of voting your way and winning to run for office.
No, neither party is perfect, but in the real world, only one of these two will win. Go ahead, Mr. Berg, and vote for Jill Stein; I’d even advise your party to apply to the RNC for funds; the GOP is a big fan of yours. Meanwhile, if Obama does not pull this off, you may well wake up on Jan. 1 in a theocratic plutocracy. This vote could be the last you ever are allowed. Make it a good one.
P. Ann White
Meridian, Texas
From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2012
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