He who is not with me . . . .

If You're Really Against Trump, You Have To Be For Hillary

Sure, if you don't like chicken and the fish looks suspicious you can pass on both.

But suppose you have to eat?

Then of course you take your least disliked option.

But given that voting is futile, anyway, for ordinary folk including ordinary Republicans it's more like a question about the weather.

Suppose the forecast is for drizzle or downpour, one or the other.

Well, you might well prefer one to the other, but you don't actually have to do anything about it.

Indeed, there's nothing you can do.

No election result has ever been alterable by one vote.

But that's not what Josh Marshall is on about, here, anyway, though he everywhere conflates supporting, endorsing, and voting.

He's actually talking about whom high-profile Republicans and conservatives should choose to publicly endorse and support.

And here is the hard truth of the matter.

The Republican leadership and Wall Street conservatives may loathe The Duce beyond measure, but if he wins they will get a lot more legislation through that they want than if Hillary is in the White House, affecting taxes, entitlements, and the regulatory state.

And there is, after all, the Supreme Court.

And the Democrats will get much less of what they want, if anything at all.

And, anyway, the Buchananites and tea-baggers who dominate the base though not the party are thrilled to have a shot at deporting all illegals, shutting out new Muslims if not getting rid of the ones already here, and throwing up trade barriers.

And many of their number are equally thrilled at the chance to get out of NATO, remove ourselves from the far Pacific, and return to the solid Republican isolationism of the years before The Second World War - and, indeed, before The Great War.

The Wall Street globalists, libertarians, neocons, and open-borders people of the establishment are in agony that they have been overrun by the party's trailer-trash, Buchananite base.

And they doubtless fear Trump in the White House will be able to strengthen the presence of that base among office-holders and party officials, thus giving a greater hold on policy in the Republican Party to Buchananism.

But surely they have to think sabotaging the campaign of their own party's nominee would do the party and their own future prospects far more damage than enduring the clown of New York.

They would have to be really, really scared, and not at all just embarrassed or in disagreement with Trump on policy, here and there, to not only stop supporting the man in public but actually go over to publicly endorsing and supporting the hated Hillary.

They would have to be scared stiff.

And mostly they aren't.

Now he admits it!

"My vote doesn't matter," he says. But Jonah Goldberg still won't vote for Trump.

An individual's choice whether or how to vote makes no difference, at all.

What matters, of course, are the choices of large numbers.

An interesting point is that he uses the insignificance of the individual vote as a premise in an argument against voting for the clearly preferable lesser evil in case the candidates are all evil.

During a panel Q&A, a passenger on the cruise made a strong case for voting Trump. 

He ably argued that we know Hillary will be terrible, while we can only suspect Trump will be. 

Trump will probably do some things conservatives will like — Supreme Court appointments, etc. — while we know for a fact Hillary will not. 

And here’s what I said: I agree. 

If the election were a perfect tie, and the vote fell to me and me alone, I’d probably vote for none other than Donald Trump for precisely these reasons. 

The questioner declared victory, and many in the audience applauded. 

And then I said, “But I will never vote for Donald Trump.” 

My vote won’t decide the election. 

And I am not bound by hypotheticals like that.

But that raises the question how does somebody qualify as not an evil at all, but a positive good?

Must we refuse to cast our meaningless votes except when it's a choice between saints?

On the other hand, I have been tempted by the idea of sitting this one out, myself.

PS, his push comes to shove hypothetical vote for Il Duce indicates, I think, that for a national security conservative he is seriously undervaluing that Trump as foreign policy leader is much more dangerous than Hillary.

A republic, not a democracy.

Hence, an oligarchy, rule by a few, given our office holders are a tiny minority of the population.

Too, it was a more plutocratic republic in the past than it is now.

But since the fall of communism the plutes have taken the gloves off and, allied with cosmopolitan liberals, have used immigration and trade along with their neoliberal monetary and fiscal policies to beat the hell out of the working class and, indeed, the whole body of the ordinary folks of America.

Jimmy Carter and the party line

Twice

As Think Progress irrelevantly "explains,"

Author Martin Gilens found that “ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States.” 

Meanwhile, “economic elites and interest groups, especially those representing business, have a substantial degree of influence.”

Recall that "ordinary citizens" have nothing with which to influence politics but their votes, or perhaps an ability to write a blog no one reads or letters to the editor of a paper or magazine no one reads.

Who does not know that such individuals and their individual votes cut no ice?

And in any case individually and in the mass they are only allowed to choose among candidates put before them by a process over which they have not the least control.

It was always thus.

Initiative and plebiscite do more than mere voting for officials to empower ordinary people, at least in the mass.

But these have no place in the federal government and terrify our post-progressive leftist hypocrites, anyway, who are forever trying to put their agenda beyond the reach of voters and, for that matter, even legislatures, just as far as they can.

None of this is new.

What's new is what I said.

The politically powerless

It is a common observation that allowing the president to nominate persons for various offices and the Senate merely to take or leave his nominees makes the president far more powerful than the Senate, with respect to that process.

But it could have been worse for the Senate.

And much worse for each senator.

Imagine that for each job he sent them two persons of whom they had to pick one.

That would make the president even more powerful vis a vis the Senate.

And now imagine there were eighty million senators.

And imagine you were one of those senators, and had not the tiniest shade of influence on the votes of others.

If nobody paid you to show up to vote, why would you, no matter how much you cared about the outcome?

And now consider the case of ordinary legislation.

Again, if you were a senator and there were eighty million senators and you had no influence on the votes of others and nobody paid you to show up to vote, why would you?

Henry Maine points out the vote is so contemptible the people commonly sell them for drinks, where this can be done without fear.

I once sold mine for a six-pack to a Democrat who wanted me to vote for Bill Clinton.

And I did.

And he paid on election night as we watched the returns.

Popular Government.

The norm for peace Democrats is war, anyway, isn't it?

Wilson, FDR, LBJ, and now O.

What the hell's the point of going to the polls to vote for peace?

And the GOP is no better.

I voted for Nixon in '72 and though he stopped using draftees pretty quickly the war dragged on through and beyond my entire term of service in the army.

I voted for GW in 2000, partly out of disgust with Bubba for so many things (don't get me started), partly because Big Al would not back away from liberal interventionism in the Balkans, partly because Al was such an arrogant blockhead, and partly because GW promised a less interventionist, "more humble" foreign policy.

And that worked out swell, too, didn't it?

Why do people vote at all?

O asks for broad congressional authorization for war on ISIS

He wants the resolution to neither exclude ground troops nor contain a time limit.

Joke's on you, Bill

Bill Maher Serves A Blow To Voters Who Don't Think It Matters If They Show Up On Election Day

The wife and I pulled the D lever in PA and it made not a whit of difference.

The only contested election on our ballots was for governor and the Dem won that one in a 2 to 1 landslide.

Truth to tell, our votes have never made a difference and never will.

Not since either of us began voting decades ago.

Not in any contest or with regard to any ballot question.

Ever.

Get used to it.

Update, later that same day.

Facticity.

Look it up.

The past is not of our choosing.

Neither is the present.

Neither are our bodies or our very selves.

And we have no fulcrum big enough to move the world.

Well, not as much as we flatter ourselves.

"My name is Ozymandias . .  . "

Anyway, a little closer to the point, these are not the parties or the issues I would have wanted to face.

But historically speaking it could have been a lot worse.

And as far as I can tell they will be, for Americans, again.

As we have seen in recent decades, rising tides need not lift all boats.

In coming times, for ordinary people, America is going to be a lot more
like Brazil.

And voters will not be able to stop it.

Talk about an irrelevant charade.

Democracy and mass propaganda

Parties and office-seekers and office-holders and factions and interest groups need your engagement, votes, and money.

Newspapers and magazines and other media need to sell news to sell their politics and their ad space.

Public school civics classes sell "good citizenship" and "Americanism."

Texts and classes in American history sell engagement and patriotism.

All of these people have their own reasons for cultivating your avid participation.

They have every interest in sinking every reason for disengagement and refusal to participate.

No one has a stake even in mentioning such things.

It isn't that voting is allowed though not required by reason.

It is condemned as folly.

No matter how great the threat of the worst or promise of the best.

Unless, of course, your vote will be decisive.

Engagement is by no means foolish for those with actual power.

For those with only a vote it is ridiculous.

All the same, humans regularly and quite generally participate in rituals in the efficacy or point of which they do not believe.

Witness not only our political but our religious institutions.

About that useful

Voting.

Doing a rain dance to end a drought.

Casting a spell to keep away tornadoes.

Cheering to help your team win.

Prayer. 

Another dose of realism

President Obama forgets to salute

It was a political mistake, only; and only in the lowest sense of the word.

And only because of the malice of his enemies and the fecklessness of the journo class.

It was not one of any other kind of mistake, and specifically not a mistake of protocol.

All which occasioned this post.

/ / / / / / 

Situations of special anxiety apart, when normal humans have nothing to talk about they stop talking.

Politicians and politics-focused journos don't have that option.

They have to keep flapping their jaws, the journos because they can't have dead air and the pols because they can't let somebody else take the mike, even for a moment.

But we don't have to listen.

Anyway, not yet, and not everywhere.

That's one reason why sensible people acquire the habit of ignoring politics.

Another is that the journos and pols talk such shocking codswallop when they do have something worthwhile to talk about.

And another is that we ordinary folk are only the victims of history, anyway, while the actors, those who make it happen, are monsters at worst and never better than the best roommate you ever had in college.

The journos are only the chorus.

And your roomie is out of his depth, a lamb among wolves.

Grandstanding, but what crackpots they must be doing it for!

'Let's abolish federal taxes,' say 69 House Republicans

In case you, an ordinary and so not rich American, thought there might be a serious alternative to voting for the Democrats in the future, within your lifetime.

If you vote at all, that is.

And if you normally vote for that candidate of the two offered by the major parties whom you would - or should, if you have an ounce of concern for your own interests or those of others like you - actually prefer to win the election and serve the term.

Nope.

Not even for dogcatcher.

The Republicans are getting more rather than less deeply committed to the conservative movement.

And there really was never any serious daylight between the movement according to the NR and WFB and the movement according to the John Birch Society.

All my life, in domestic policy I have prioritized support for the democratic, social democratic, and regulatory agenda of American progressivism.

Social liberalism embracing the racial, secularist, and sexual revolutions counts, but with reservations.

And in any case it comes in a distant second to the life-and-death, bread and butter basics of the historic movement, focused as it was on the economic fate of ordinary people and on enhancing democracy from the late 19th Century.

The same desire to protect the interests of working class and ordinary Americans motivates my support for trade protectionism and opposition to immigration.

And in foreign policy I have taken a "little America," isolationism-is-realism approach.

War is not good for little children or other living things such as Americans of military age.

Born in 1949 and politically aware since the very early 1960's, it's always been about lesser evils, for me.

And it's not going to change.

Update 02012013 1156 hrs EST.

You could go to the polls at every opportunity and always vote for the duopolitan candidate you least want to actually win and serve the term, for all the difference that would make.

Look back on your own voting past.

Did you ever vote (or not vote) in an election in which the outcome would have been different had you voted, not voted, or voted differently?

No way.

Is optional participation in democracy worth the trouble?

Main Page - Epicurus Wiki

Epicurus (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Epicurus and Epicurean Philosophy

Evidently, though as a youth he took the trouble to keep up his citizenship by showing up for required military training, Epicurus taught that seeking office or kingship is not worth the trouble or the risks involved.

Information is lacking as to what he did or would have made of optional participation in the rights (or rites) of citizenship such as voting.

Too, one has to wonder, if voting were a requirement, whether it could matter how one voted, in light of such arguments, commonly made, as appear in the following post.

Should we vote?

It's not that the outcome doesn't matter.

It's not that whether or not the people can vote doesn't matter.

It's that the vote of any given individual does not matter.

Would a like argument hold for individual military service?

Oh, yes.

Ordinarily, the contribution of the anonymous troop cannot be supposed decisive.

And ordinarily, the individual has better options available simply as ways to make a living.

At best, voluntary military service in war is way too much cost for the assured benefits.

They could perfectly well win or lose just the same without you, you know.

But that doesn't mean they could equally well win or lose without hundreds of thousands or even millions of draftees.

Hence despite the floods of propaganda they can and do release on the public in wartime, even democratic leaders generally have to rely heavily on a draft law to make the price of not serving if called at least apparently higher than the price of serving.

Does necessity know no law?

Government necessity, I mean?

Against Military Conscription

No, the 13th Amendment does not remotely mean that.

Why I am against conscription - John Reed, 1917

Speech Against Conscription and War - Emma Goldman, 1917

Webster's Speech Against Conscription - 1814

Perhaps the draft law is like law in general according to some philosophers who follow Hobbes.

Each troop, draftee or volunteer, is better off with a draft than without it if the conduct it requires is such that each is better off if all comply than if none comply.

At least in such a case the draftees are not being treated like so much canon-fodder entirely for someone else’s good.

But then whether it is so rather depends on what the draftees are forced to fight and die for, does it not?

A voice of frustrated liberalism

The progressive case against Obama

I think Stoller has it right about Obama not really being a very liberal guy, and in a lot of ways he is just a nicer 1 percenter than Romney.

There is no Zealot like a convert, they say, and no elitist like a climber; and that boy Obama is certainly a climber, and has been all his life.

But I think the idea that electing Mitt is a reasonable way to punish Obama is nuts.

As Obama has noted a propos this very matter, he and Michelle and the girls will be just fine, to put it mildly, no matter how this plays out.

What matters is what happens to the 99%.

And, sure, it won’t be pretty in either case.

But it will be worse, quicker, with Romney in the White House.

On the other hand, Stoller’s notion that an individual vote doesn't matter in solid states but does matter in swing states is an obfuscation.

Yes, he was thinking specifically of the votes of angry liberals, but that doesn't matter.

It's an obfuscation, either way.

The truth is that the vote could be close enough in a swing state for it to be true on the morning after that, had a thousand angry liberals stayed with Obama rather than going for minor party candidates, the state would have gone to Obama though in fact it went to Romney.

Or for it to be true on the morning after that, had a thousand angry liberals defected to minor party candidates Obama would have lost to Romney rather than beating him.

How can one not think of Florida in 2000?

In a swing state, in a tight race, it could happen that a relatively small number of votes together make the difference not only for how the electoral votes of the state are cast but for who wins the entire election.

So small that it could be made up of angry, disaffected liberals who defected to minor party candidates giving the state to Romney or of angry, disaffected liberals who stayed with Obama and gave him his victory.

But your vote?

Your one individual vote?

Pshaw.

Don’t ever premise your decision on the idea that your vote makes a significant difference.

That never happens, in any state.

Not only has no race been decided by one vote but a difference of one vote is well within the margin of error, anyway.

You are less than a number.

You are an accounting glitch.

You will never, on the morning after, face the amazing realization that, had you only done otherwise – voted, not voted, or voted differently, whatever – a different politician would be in the White House, the US Senate, the House, the governor’s mansion, the state senate, the state house of representatives, the county commission, the mayor’s office, the city council, the school board, or whatever.

It’s just not going to happen.

So when you think about what to do on Election Day put far from your mind the delusion that your vote will make a difference.

The rest of Stoller’s argument is just the sort of drivel you would expect from a political movement that insists, constantly and proudly, that it is uniquely "reality-based."

Not even worth a refutation.

But I will say this.

Stoller's argument rests entirely on the idea that the Democratic candidate is not a fully satisfactory liberal, as these things are measured by the orthodox.

If it is good against voting for Obama will it not be good against voting for any Democrat, for the rest of your life?

Hat tip to Booman, whose response to Stoller is largely one of moral declamation and hence, just to that extent, empty coercive bombast.

Wanker of the Day: Matt Stoller

Update, 11022012, 0916 hrs EDT.

On the other hand, in his heart of hearts Obama could be red as a fire truck and what difference would it make?

If he came out of the closet as a devout Marxist would it help the cause?

Hell, no, neither now nor after next week.

Should we vote?

I’m thinking maybe we shouldn’t vote.

For one thing, not voting in harmless.

I don’t mean that millions of people of the same persuasion not voting – a mass boycott of millions of devout liberals, for example – is harmless.

Such a thing could be very harmful, indeed.

Though a mass boycott could be a very good thing, too.

Imagine if the Nazi voters had sat out the German elections of 1932!

No, I’m not talking about a boycott.

I mean one person – you, dear reader, or me – not voting is harmless.

Truth to tell, one vote is far too few to be a significant blip at any level of government no matter how few or many other people vote, except in cases so wholly improbable that we can ignore them, such as the case in which everybody else decides to stay home so the whole thing is actually up to you.

So an individual choice to not cast one’s own single vote is harmless.

And voting is irksome.

Since it can’t do any good, anyway, why go through all that fuss?

Voting for the lesser evil, if that was your plan, is humiliating and certain to be falsely depicted as some sort of mandate to do something or other that’s disgusting and awful.

And even if not you’ll be supporting someone and some party that are openly dedicated to policies you actually disapprove, though less than those of the other, greater evil.

Voting for a minor party that actually mirrors your own political preferences in all or even just the most significant respects (good luck finding one) has value only as a protest vote and a declaration of principle that few will notice and none will take to heart except the party loyalists of the lesser evil who will furiously blame you for the misdeeds of the victor, should he or she not be the one they supported and insist loudly you should have supported.

Too, a decision not to vote is liberating in another regard.

If you aren’t going to vote anyway you don’t have to pay attention, subjecting yourself to lies, fallacies, stupidities, dishonesties, moral suasion (bullshit), moral threats (bullshit compounded with hatefulness), and the endless flow of at best annoying propaganda that never does you any good and always wastes your time and ruins your mood.

Like this, for instance.

Chuck Norris warns of '1,000 years of darkness' if Obama is re-elected

Bilge from a moron, addressed to morons.

That’s a hell of a lot of wasted, ill-spent man-hours, you know.

Political blogs are for preaching to the choir, like political magazines and their websites. Preaching is a form of propaganda.

In case there was any doubt which party is the party of plutocracy

David Atkins is right, I think, about there being significant differences between the parties having to do with their roles in the class war, though of course not only that.

But he writes at Hullabaloo,

"Even if the choices aren't necessarily between good and evil, non-participation in the process is inexcusable when it's so abundantly clear which side is the far greater evil."

Though I expect I will vote this fall for Obama if I vote at all, I must demur.

And I would have had to do so even in Germany in 1932 when it was the Nazis, the Communists, and the Social Democrats competing for power.

The reason is that, after all, I control only one vote, my own, and no other.

I don’t even influence other votes in any degree.

If I went into a coma in October and came out of it in December the outcome of the election would not be different for any federal, state, or local office.

Things would be otherwise if I could sway, say, hundreds of thousands of votes in a lightly populated swing state.

But I can't.

In fact, Atkins knows that is very likely true of all his readers.

But even if Atkins, like me, can’t personally sway hundreds of thousands of votes in lightly populated swing states, it is likely the major liberal blogs taken together may very well be able to do that.

No conspiracy is necessary, though there probably is one in the sense that all the major players are openly agreed in a common effort.

And that is an effort of propaganda to goad the mass of their readership and anyone else they may somehow influence into showing up and voting for the Democrats.

And an integral part of that propaganda is endless repetition that the outcome depends on each of us doing his part, that we are each responsible, that every vote is crucial, etc.

Right alongside the annoyingly stupid saw that no one who does not vote is entitled to complain of an adverse outcome.

Still, I am open to the suggestion to make voting mandatory.

Do we dare?