Why I'm Not Voting

This is the one day of the year where people feel no shame about encroaching on strangers with personal questions laden with implicit moral judgements.  I lost count of how many times random people asked me if I'd voted yet. Equally irksome, I spent the entire day listening to trite sermonizing on the importance of voting. Of course, I never told anyone I wasn't planning to vote. That offense is ranked, I think, slightly below pedophilia, and I am not prepared to destroy my reputation.

Why does voting fill people with such a sense of pride? Why is it justified on moral terms? After all, most any close-minded ignoramus, misanthrope, or psychopath can go to a local high school gym and bubble in a scantron. Any person can vote with the most self-interested, destructive, hateful ends in mind. Following dominant logic, someone who voted for George Wallace purely on account of being racist still performed a noble deed. Why is the value of voting never questioned? Voting is a hallowed sacrament in modern societies because it serves an important ideological purpose: sustaining illusions of progress, enlightenment, self-determination, and empowerment in the midst of historically unprecedented conditions of oppression.

The brainwashing has been quite successful, aided of course by the blunting of most people's capacities for critical thought.  Anyone who believes our education system and national media are eroding in effectiveness need to think again.  They are doing their jobs very well.

1. People either do not consider the fact that campaign rhetoric does not predict real actions, or they deem this fact to be ultimately irrelevant.

2. People do not realize that important decisions are shaped by external factors and institutional constraints, and NOT by a person occupying an office; they are ignorant of the continuity across different presidential administrations, Democrat and Republican (the Obama administration was a continuation of the Bush administration, which was a continuation of the Clinton administration, and so on.)

3. People are not phased by the limitation of having only two viable options (in most cases); the fact that these choices have been selected for them by party leaders and corporate kingmakers is of no concern; and the frustration they feel that these options do not reflect their own interests and desires does not give people pause.

Let me emphasize this point. Voting is a selection between two corporate-sponsored options that will both serve the same corporate-driven interests. Voting allows people to participate in their own oppression. What shelters this reality from popular recognition is the spectacle of political campaigns.

Campaigns serve two key functions:

1. They camouflage reality (i.e. the fact that the candidates are not fundamentally different) in order to persuade people that they have a "voice" (whatever that means...). Campaigns create the illusion of variety and choice.

2. They set the terms of public discourse. The hegemony of modern thought is constituted by a complex of ideologies and discourses that is structured around two oppositional nodes.  Campaign rhetoric is critical to the process of redefining the bounds of modern discourse and reorienting the nodes to suit changing circumstances. In essence, the debates, stump speeches, and ads serve to determine what sorts of things the public thinks and how they talk about it, and equally important, what they cannot think and say. The heart of public discourse, the structured opposition, is created by distorting the significance of small details, thereby allowing many significant matters of foundational importance to fly under the radar as "givens" and thus effectively block them from reaching the level of conscious reflection. The domain of popular consciousness is entirely saturated with inane, trivial details. As a result, most people are not able to think critically about social reality. The liberal/conservative dichotomy actually curtails freedom of thought more than it represents any real flowering of opinions.

Real change goes beyond the political process. It radically transforms all institutions, economic, political and social. I'm not going to thank the people who voted today. I thank all the people who refuse to accept the "options" that are given to them, who take the time to think past the sound bites with which they are saturated, and who will not compromise what they know is right.

What Would Ron Paul Do?

This is no doubt that Ron Paul is an "exceptional" political figure. The fact that he doesn't fit the typical molds has made him seem a non-viable candidate to some, and yet very popular to others.

What I find most interesting about Ron Paul has nothing to do with his platform or him as a person, but the fact that so many people claim to disagree with him in significant and fundamental ways, yet still sing his praises. Oh, he's honest; he always follows his beliefs; he's consistent; he's going to bring all our troops home and won't involve the country in any more wars.

It says something about the sway of the ideology undergirding our political system (social contract theory, ideas of "democracy" and the like) that people can "feel good" about a person whose beliefs completely contradicts their own values and principles, just because they are so enthralled by his transparency. People are that determined to have some sort of political power, for their vote to mean something (and certainly, voting for a person who renegs on all their campaign promises in some way invalidates the vote), that knowing what to expect trumps actually liking what is expected. Isn't this just a sign that our political system doesn't really work in the way in which it's ideologically justified?

I will say this, though. I wouldn't mind if Ron Paul made it to the White House, if only because it would satisfy my own curiosity. I have argued before that it doesn't really matter who is president. All the supposed power of the government and the presidency is wielded by a gigantic corporate-bureaucratic apparatus which comprises and extends beyond the government, and which serves an array of conflicting capitalist interests. Presidents are mere figureheads. If one looks at actual policies, there is no real difference between political parties or among individual presidencies. There have been more abrupt changes within presidencies than across presidencies.

So I wonder. It does seem that, up to this point, Ron Paul hasn't allowed himself to be absorbed by the system. But he has been a lowly congressman. Would he really have any influence over anything if he were president? Would he actually be able to carry out any of the agendas that he so passionately desires? Or would the ruling elite make him insignifant and impotent?

So, sure... why not Ron Paul?  If it generally doesn't matter who is president, why not solve an interesting theoretical question?  And if it turns out he's not impotent, then how much more fascinating to watch the entire world deconstruct!