A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
Today's piece is a reworked newspaper column dating to September of 2010. With another election season plaguing us, it seems appropriate to give it another look. When all the ballots have been counted, I suppose the best way to describe me is a perpetually frustrated fellow traveler. The national Democratic party at least has a platform, and for the most part, the party espouses it. At least we're in spitting distance, ideologically. At the same time, I believe that the real imperative lies at the grassroots, and is localized -- and hereabouts the Democratic party has no platform and stands for nothing, despite the presence of numerous party members whose beliefs indubitably mirror my own. When I ran for council as a Democrat, I made these points clear, spent no money, and garnered a respectable number of votes. It didn't change anything, but I'm proud of it nonetheless. Answers? I have none. Rationalizations? That's another story, entirely. Read on.
---
Once upon a time, in a moment of supreme weakness, I agreed to enjoy a Progressive Pint with a local politician – and in a tavern, no less. Inevitably, I was spotted in this most compromising of positions. After the glasses had been drained and the office holder departed, the voyeur sidled up and whispered something offensive into my delicate ears.
“What are you, some kind of Democrat?”
That stung. Being labeled as a Bud Light drinker would have been far worse, but I’m consistently hermetic on that count.
(Patience, please; Republicans are up for their ritualistic skewering in just a moment.)
Meanwhile, seeing as Indiana will not permit me to register for elections as a member of my own Pants Down Progressive Party (PDPP), I have permitted my status to remain vaguely Democratic. Beyond that mere technicality, I do not consider myself a true Democrat in the American two-party sense of the epithet.
The European political lexicon is more useful to me. There, I’d be a Social Democrat of some variety (cue ominous music of doom and grainy footage of the Kremlin’s May Day parade). When asked, I generally identify myself as a leftist, because it sounds more vaguely mysterious and threatening to the yokels than “liberal,” although the latter is far more entertaining when the goal is making American fascists abruptly disgorge their multitudinous and libidinal prejudices.
As a leftist, liberal, progressive, and as a reluctant capitalist, a secular humanist, and an irreligious heretic, the prevailing social order in the United States – either “us,” or “them” – never has been particularly friendly to me. In a world that revolves around gray nuance and eternal subtlety, parliamentary systems strike me as much more accurate representations of political reality than ours, which always reminds me of the bartender’s explanation about his redneck barroom jukebox: “We have both kinds of music, country and western,” and I prefer neither.
My fundamental position with respect to politics in the United States is somewhat that of a conscientious objector. In my view, the two-party system is completely and utterly fraudulent. However, in spite of my antipathy, it remains political reality, and until I “move to France if I don’t like it,” certain compromises are necessary. After all, if someone hands me a lemon, the least I can do is squeeze it into my adversary’s face.
Thus, I always can be relied upon, first and foremost, to vote against the political party that annoys me the most.
Historically, that’s been the GOP, whose positions generally are the polar opposite of my own beliefs, especially now that the party’s steering wheel has been seized (not for the first time) by Tea Baggers, Theocrats and Secessionists, all of whom need to be reminded at regular intervals that the majority of their issues were settled at Appomattox in 1865, following the blood sacrifice commonly known as the Civil War.
If voting against Republicans requires voting for the next best alternative, and precluding generally wasted votes for perpetually doomed third parties, then in most cases, I am compelled to vote Democratic. It is a choice that I am resigned to accept, owing in most cases to the extreme distastefulness of the alternative.
In local races, I will consider voting for a Republican candidate if he or she is a benign technocrat and eschews the ideological extremism of today’s GOP. Sadly, it’s only a matter of time until local Republicans begin staging made-for-non-news-television demonstrations about abortion on the lawn of the City-County Building, or introducing meaningless city council resolutions protesting NA-FC school textbooks that don’t tout creationism wile rejecting science, or erecting tablets of Ten Commandments and inviting roving bands of professional fundamentalists to camp out, chant inanities and defend the utterly indefensible.
Of course just as indefensibly, those local Democrats who most often are the beneficiary of my anti-GOP proclivities insist on avoiding positions of any kind beyond the imperative of re-election.
The party’s platform is invisible. It is a gaping chasm divided between equal parts impotence and vacuity, one that has led us to the current doltish impasse, whereby almost every elected city office is held by a card-carrying Democrat, and yet we suffer perpetual gridlock as the party stands by, mute, impassive, and apparently suffocating from the electoral delusion that having Bob Caesar as a “Democrat” is somehow useful to civilization in the broader sense, and for their own organizational prospects in the narrower one.
And so, faced with a local Democratic Party seemingly unable to reinvent itself, shall independents and contrarians like me grimace and give a second look to the Republicans and Dave Matthews for … um … er … well … on second thought, not at all.
There simply aren’t enough showers and cigarettes available to make that feeling of grimy dirtiness go away, and so inescapably, depressingly, I return to Square One. In the past, I’ve always rationalized my local voting choices by paraphrasing a Republican, Honest Abe Lincoln:
If I could defeat these Republicans without voting for any Democrat I would do it, and if I could defeat them by voting for all the Democrats I would do it; and if I could defeat them by voting for some Democrats and leaving others alone I would also do that.
They just don't make Republicans like Abe any longer. Regrettably, hereabouts, they seem not to be making Democrats in any recognizable form whatever. Bizarrely, I suppose it won’t stop me from voting for some and perhaps even all of them, while holding my breath – yet again.
No comments:
Post a Comment