By popular demand: This post gets its own thread -- Why US voter turnout is so low [View All]

Two whole people said this post should have its own thread -- two out of more than 100,000 -- which sounds like the will of the people to me. Anyway, the following was a reply to a thread re French voter turnout of more than 75 percent and contrasting that with the usual 45 percent or so who bother to vote in the US. Post follows:


I think there are at least two main reasons for low US voter turnout.

First, many people are just plain lazy. Many shun all things political, don't really know or care who represents them at local, state or federal levels, and just don't correlate voting with a citizen's obligation in a representative democracy. These people are the ones who say politics is boring, read the sports page or business section or comics exclusively, focus on job and/or family and/or acquisition of more and more consumer crap. Their only relationship to politics is when they bitch about taxes or some local bond issue that raises their property taxes a lousy five bucks a year to pay for a library extension or structural reinforcement at a local school.

They will never vote unless something horrible happens to them or their family -- like an assault on their wife or the kidnap-murder of one of their kids -- which will get them off their dead asses to vote for more money for the cops or stiffer jail sentences, like that three-strikes hog shit that was all the rage in the '90s. But that's it. They live like tourists, giving some money to a few local shops and driving the four blocks to the store for a big gulp and a couple of toxic-dogs. But they don't participate in the community and might as well be living in Uruguay for all sense of place they have, and their lack of connection with the locals and with their surroundings.

Secondly, and I'm getting closer to becoming a member of this group every four years, lots of people resent that the initial list of maybe 10 or 12 candidates, some of whom are fairly interesting and have actual ideas, is inevitably whittled down to the most mainstream, centrist, vanilla of the bunch -- first by the punditocracy, who tells everyone at every opportunity that so and so is unelectable, somebody else is too radical, a third lacks "gravitas," another voted against a DoD budget increase and is therefore "soft on terror," blah, blah, blah..-- and then that assessment goes on to pollute the primary system.

Because enough people believe this crap and take it to the voting booths with them on primary day, the mainstream, vanilla centrist always ends up on top and becomes the next useless, ceremonial head of state who won't deal with any of the problems that stem from America's enthusiastic love affair with radical capitalism. That love affair is exclusively a function of the American elite, corporations and others with wealth and power; the people would prefer a system that doesn't try to get them to work for nothing, denies them benefits, busts their unions, and uses the threat of "off-shoring" to keep them in line.

But the candidate who's been pre-selected by many of the very people with the most to gain from continuing the customary rape of the bottom 50 percent of the population is philosophically and politically incapable of effecting foundational change -- in fact, can't even discuss it without universal condemnation from the elites. So we're guaranteed another four years in which radical capitalism is deified; in which there's no possibility of true universal, single-payer health care; in which there's no possibility of legislation mandating public financing of campaigns; in which the Pentagon will get ever richer, at the expense of every single humanitarian program left standing after the republican chain saw clear-cut its way through town; in which more social control in the form of the idiotic "war on terror" will further repress the populace, even if the Oppressor in Chief is some Democratic smiley face claiming further repression is conducted with the very best of intentions.

And that's just the Democratic side. I suppose the same thing happens on the GOP side, except I imagine the search for the most vanilla centrist is replaced by the search for the most malevolent Himmler clone they can find.

But I object to a system that automatically excludes Dennis Kucinich from the "real" contenders just because some fucking lard ass think tank type -- usually from the Heritage Foundation or the AEI or some other Neanderthal group with a vested interest in weeding out any who might threaten the status quo -- says he's too far from the mainstream, isn’t tall enough and besides he doesn't have the greatest hair. Kucinich just happens to be the only candidate to advocate impeachment NOW, single-payer universal health care, getting out of Iraq NOW, impoverishing the Pentagon for a change, and using the money to fund sustainable energy research, ending the fictitious "war on terror" and going after the actual terrorists using proven police methods rather than invading armies, and reversing both patriot acts and the military commissions act NOW.

Now that's a candidate I can support and, in fact, have with money and other stuff. But we all know it's just pissing up a rope because we're going to get two pre-packaged cardboard cutouts -- one called a Democrat and the other a Republican -- who will stand for most of the same things, the Democrat a little lighter on domestic fascism, the Republican advocating spilling vats of blood all over the planet because "we're at war, dammit."

And, because we're treated as children by the US political movers and shakers, we're supposed to troop dutifully to the polls to ratify one of these two chosen representatives of the status quo. And we're even supposed to believe that, in a country with about 300 million people, these are the two best we could find.

If I didn't care about federal judicial appointments, creeping fascism at home, rampant acts of state sponsored terrorism abroad, state sanctioned ecocide, and the draining of what's left of the treasury to further enrich the execs and shareholders of the machinery of war, I'd damn well stay home myself.

wp