Throw me in that briar patch
I can only be amused by the prospect of young people with absurd notions of effective public policy announcing that they're going to give the finger to all us old jerks by declining to vote this fall. That'll teach us to have bequeathed them a world in which the government doesn't supply all their daily needs.Baby child, you just go right ahead and finish up that 10-year degree in Self-Actualization. Under no circumstances produce anything of value to others in order to procure the kind of unfair perks your elders lucked into. Never run for office or support anyone who does. That's society's job.
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8 comments:
Preach it, Sister.
I generally ignore the blatherings of the willfully ignorant. It'll be even easier when they stop blathering at the voting booths.
Maybe ignoring their silence will have beneficial effects downstream. A very isolated anecdote: during my first year in gradual school a while ago, the university enacted a policy of allowing students to be elected to department faculty boards, with full board member powers including passing on or rejecting tenure decisions. That first year, I was elected to the board by a vote of 1-0 out of about a dozen of us grad students in the department. About halfway through the year, I was confronted by two classmates who opined that I wasn't doing enough to represent the students. My response was that I represented 100% of those students who'd cared enough to vote. The next year, when I stood for reelection, I was defeated by a vote of 2-1. Grad student election participation had risen by 3x.
Eric Hines
I have long voted for the lesser of two evils, and while I think that is defensible philosophically, I still don't like it. And as the years have gone on, Evil A and Evil B seem to have worsened. Yet I remain cognizant of the situation inRomania when I was there shortly after the Revolution, when the choice for president was literally between a fascist and a communist, with a Hungarian rights party siphoning off 11% from the overall total. What to do? You can't possibly be right. Yet if all the people who deeply hate that choice decide not to vote at all, the election will be decided by the people who liked one of those choices.
It's not pretty, but reality seldom is. I still recall the supposed "purist" conservatives who stayed home rather than vote for McCain and Romney. How'd that work out as a practical matter? Did anyone remember your noble stand, staring off into the horizon? Thanks for ACA, extra and invisible small wars, and Joe Biden, dude.
In fairness, you can also thank McCain for the ACA.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/25/17782664/john-mccain-legacy-obamacare-repeal-thumbs-down
Romney too, really.
https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/10/23/451200436/mitt-romney-finally-takes-credit-for-obamacare
So I get the allergy. I just don't know what the right medicine is.
Conventional wisdom claims any ( US ) third party vote is a waste. On the other hand, the Perot /Reform third party effort (focusing on debt and budgets) led, two years later, to the "Contract with America" focusing on line item budget veto, etc. Seems a sufficiently large faction clearly "up for grabs" does gather the attention of the majors.
McCain gets a lot of blame for the ACA, but in truth, he was just one of three Republicans who voted for it. If the two other Republicans had voted no, his vote wouldn't have mattered. Only thing he did was grandstand with his vote.
Eric Hines
Only thing he did worse.
I still recall the supposed "purist" conservatives who stayed home rather than vote for McCain and Romney.
Per Pew Research from surveys taken during the 2008 primary when both McCain and Romney were running.
McCain receives solid favorable ratings from all key groups of Republican voters. Republican-leaning independents offer nearly identical ratings of McCain as do those who identify as Republicans. Fully two-thirds of conservative white evangelical Protestant GOP voters have a favorable view of McCain, as do nearly three-quarters of other conservatives (72%), and moderate and liberal Republicans (74%). McCain also receives virtually identical ratings from younger and older voters, men and women, and voters of different educational backgrounds.
By contrast, Mitt Romney’s best ratings come from conservative Republican voters who are not white evangelicals; about two-thirds in this group (66%) offer a positive view of him. On the other hand, just over half (51%) of white evangelical conservatives rate him favorably, while three-in-ten have an unfavorable view.
Romney is even less popular among moderate and liberal Republican voters; fewer than half in that group (43%) have a positive opinion of the former Massachusetts governor, and nearly as many have a negative opinion (39%).
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2008/01/16/in-gop-primaries-three-victors-three-constituencies/
I had my issues with McCain, but I sure as heck didn't stay home. How hard was it, really, to opt for him over Obama?
Certainly it's annoying to have to choose between two candidates I dislike. What that might have to do with concluding it's OK not to vote at all, I can't even possibly imagine. I wouldn't even cast a protest vote for a third party unless I had concluded I could live with the likely winner, knowing the third-party candidacy was a complete fantasy from the start.
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