There are times to vote. There’s little harm in throwing your vote away on a principled third party candidate. Call it speech, if nothing else.
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And every now and then, a major party politician is worth the trouble. You’d better believe I would go down to the polling place and vote for Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich) if I could.
But the majority of Congress is made up of power-hungry, spineless creeps who care most about their own reelection. And, in order to be president, you have to do bad things either by omission (wave, 2.2, million people in prison!) or by virtue of the job as it currently exists.
The solution? Stop voting for these people. And stop pretending that to vote is to be good, noble, and civically engaged.
This brings us to Rock the Vote, the nauseatingly unhip 25-year-old attempt to equate punching a ballot with the awesomeness of music and celebrities. As Reason’s Anthony L. Fisher (a friend) noted, the allegedly nonpartisan Rock the Vote has been awkward since the days of Madonna and The Ramones being its stars.
Today’s youth? They get Lil’ Jon and Girls creator Lena Dunham. In the video Lil’ Jon goes down to his local voting precinct and has an awkward conversation with Dunham. She dances, as do other celebrities, to “Turn Out for What” instead of “Turn Down for What.”
Celebs say they are “turning out” to vote on reproductive rights (Dunham), marijuana (Lil’ Jon), and prison reform (the more difficult to mock woman from “Orange is the New Black”). More painfully, we must vote for “climate change awareness” (thanks, Alec Baldwin’s daughter) and vote to be cool (shut up, guy from Portlandia).
Music video-style cuts of a globe with an ice pack and a gun with a lock suggest other things to vote about.
Despite the presence of Dunham, the democracy fetishist, the ad at least tries to hint that voting isn’t just some kind of feel-good activity or a metaphor for losing one’s virginity.
And yet, as Rare’s Matt Naham pointed out, the clearly liberal-slanted ad also manages to exclude leftist causes that Obama has been a complete wash on, namely war and civil liberties such as the right to privacy.
Whoops! Better not mention the NSA or the wars if we’re trying for a new strain of Obama fever.
There is also no mention of the economy. This avoids the issue of massive youth unemployment, uncomfortable disagreements about the economy, and the suggestion that someone, somewhere might not be a Democrat.
Here in Rock the Vote is the familiarly obnoxious, two-faced quality of both most celebs being Serious and of the small liberal arts college version of democracy.
Some years ago, as a young libertarian with a column in my college paper, I tried way too hard to irritate my left-leaning campus. The only time I ever succeeded was when I suggested that I planned to vote for “None of the Above” in November, 2008.
An Obama volunteer stopped me in the coffee shop to suggest that she was deeply offended by what I wrote, implying that I may have thought out my reasons carefully, but readers would just take it as an excuse to be thoughtless or apathetic.
Obama voters: smarter than the plebes who just read the Chatham Communique.
When I approached the music building at college to vote on November 4, a chipper girl who must have been a schoolmate asked if I wanted a piece of paper to tell me how to vote straight Democrat. She looked crestfallen when I declined.
Was I a Republican? No. She looked more hopeful. Green? No. She looked confused again. Libertarian. Oh. Now completely disinterested, she pointed me to towards my booth.
That was college, and that is Rock the Vote. Obviously, simplistically left-biased, and assumes you are as well, but unwilling to really discuss it in depth. You have just GOT to vote!…for a Democrat.
Mysteriously, lefties are always the staunchest advocates of voting. Doesn’t matter who you vote for, just vote! They don’t mean that, and they shouldn’t.
And yet, they pretend that voting is like a virtue, only better. It’s sexy, and it’s cool, just like Madonna! I mean, Lena Dunham!
Obviously, this country’s history of blocking minorities from voting was a bad thing. Letting only white men – properly-holding ones, if you want to go back far enough – vote doesn’t fix anything, and was a good cause to fight for during the Civil Rights era.
But pretending that voting is a panacea doesn’t bring anyone freedom.
People really do need to demand to be left alone by government. Only then will powerful people listen.
Why, for example, have mainstream politicians suddenly discovered that the war on drugs is bad? Because 100 million Americans have tried marijuana, and because hard-working people managed to put ballot referendums to legalize it in two states. Politicians know which way the wind is blowing.
That doesn’t mean that pulling a lever will get you anything except another Sen. Harry Reid or Lindsay Graham most Novembers. And it doesn’t mean that checking a box will solve the world’s problems.
We blame our presidents for everything, yet want them to chime in on every local problem. Our Congress has legendarily low approval ratings, and we still have glossy propaganda outlets like Rock the Vote pretending that the power is all in our hands. It isn’t. We have the power to mostly re-elect politicians who may or may not eventually come around to our favored policy positions, provided doing so will not endanger their jobs.
Voting is a cumulative power. Which is why we should stop gritting our teeth and stop voting for whomever seems less vile that day. We could even consider not voting at all, if every candidate is a statist. And in most places, during most elections, they are surely that.