Voting As An Expression of Personality...
or Why I Didn't Watch Chris Hayes last night.
From the reaction on DU, and social media in general, it was apparently a "kill me now" moment, as Charles Pierce succinctly described on twitter.
There are lots of reasons why voters end up not voting. They may be low information, or in a state where voter suppression tactics are practiced however for voters who had the means to inform themselves, could have voted but still didn't vote, "self-absorbed" doesn't go deep enough to describe them.
When a young man said he needed to be "inspired", he's saying he needed to be seduced and catered to, marketed to even. My generation has been aggressively marketed to since we were kids, is it any wonder he sees voting in this light?
I think this is a reflection of how our marketing models and economic structures embedded themselves in our politics and it reached its zenith in 2016. Chomsky's warning was prescient:
1) Voting should not be viewed as a form of personal self-expression or moral judgment directed in retaliation towards major party candidates who fail to reflect our values, or of a corrupt system designed to limit choices to those acceptable to corporate elites.
2) The exclusive consequence of the act of voting in 2016 will be (if in a contested “swing state”) to marginally increase or decrease the chance of one of the major party candidates winning].
so how did a society which hitherto understood the import of civic action as social action, descend to this point where voting becomes something akin to a vanity project?
Perhaps neoliberalism is partly to blame. The quotes below are lifted from a blog post and some thoughts the author shared on twitter I found insightful when Cornell West attacked Ta-Nehisi Coates as a Neo-liberal.
Neoliberalism was once understood to be an approach to economic policy which favored property rights, limited government intervention in the form of weak or non-existent regulatory frameworks, low taxes, and unregulated markets - in a word laissez-faire economics. Hayek devised this approach at a time when your capitalist was an industrialist and this philosophy was fully expressed in Reaganomics and Thatcherism.
The Neoliberal sees government intervention as tipping the scales in a particular direction. Less government intervention means more equitable outcomes. "The "equitable" here doesn't mean "everyone is equal". It means, "everyone gets what they deserve." Neoliberalism is dedicated to doctrinaire individualism; it assumes that without government, everyone has the same chance at success, so those who do succeed do so through merit"
It "denigrates structures in favor of individuals where deregulation allows everyone to maximize their potential and be their most successful selves. Turning a systemic critique into an individual moral failing is exactly what neoliberalism does".
So what is the net effect of this phenomenon?
The individual becomes a self-interested consumer who cannot see "the forest for the trees". Focus on structural issues are abandoned in favor of individual prejudice, and desires.
None of us are fully immune from this.
We ( royal "we" ) are all customers in a consumerist model where we brand ourselves and signal to the world who we are through our consumer choices. We don't buy things solely for their utility, we also buy things because we think they're a reflection of who we are and this makes us feel good. One of the best examples of this was the hugely successful Marlboro Man advertising campaign in the 50's- Men bought Marlboros not because they liked smoking, they wanted to become a Marlboro man. Today, some buy fair trade coffee because it makes them feel good to buy a product they think helps poor farmers. Pondering on how we all benefit from tariffs which hurt producers of all kinds in third world countries or Protectionist Policies which favor producers in powerful states over others is too grand a scale to consider because then you would have to look at structures and that's way too complicated.
Every advertisement for products focuses on how that product makes you feel and what kind of person you are for having bought it - utility is secondary.
This type of thinking has morphed itself into how civic action is perceived by many - a phenomenon I've observed more on the left than the right. The right has felt aggrieved since LBJ's Great Society Initiative and their reaction to losing ground has been a hyper-focus on recapturing power. They have longed to enjoy getting back at liberals for something long lost, it's why many Republicans are enjoying their little orgy of revanchism at the moment with Trump's vulgarity a minor concern in the big picture. However, on the left, there's been complacency. Rights that were won through blood, sweat and tears have been taken for granted.
Voting has morphed into an expression of Self and Personality. And the candidate must cater to "you" and "earn your vote", which means that the candidate must always fill you with bliss and make you feel "inspired", instead of voting seen as what it actually is - social civic action. One approach focuses on self, the other prioritizes community and best outcomes beyond one's self.
Third Party Voters and Non-Voters have nothing to show for their choices and indecision. For third-party voters, they knew their chosen candidates wouldn't win. Some liberals even voted for Gary Johnson's absurd platform which they ordinarily wouldn't agree with. Some non-voters didn't vote because a candidate wasn't appealing enough to them, she had to be sexy enough in their eyes. But on a deeper level, what is this voter saying to the world? They are branding themselves as "an iconoclast, a free thinker whose views can't be put into neat boxes, You can't force me to vote in either direction."
Sometimes Dems benefit from this kind of approach to voting. The "Obama Brand" symbolized a more diverse America with the promise of a progressive future, and Voters closely identified with this. Hillary would have expanded on what Obama achieved, which is typical for those rare Presidents whose predecessor was in the same party.
But who was the Hillary Clinton voter? did we ever really know? For decades, pundits insinuated that the only kind of Hillary voter was a vagina voter, or a bitter divorcee, or a nagging wife and/or mom. The Media did not really cover Hillary voters who were enthusiastic to vote for her. We either got lukewarm articles, or articles acknowledging support dashed with either antagonistic spin or snark. This erased her accomplishments and dragged her to Trump's level. Her "brand" was tarnished, almost non-existent. There are reasons for this, like sexism and so on, I won't delve into here.
When voting is seen as such an individualistic enterprise, systems and structures are ignored - Like the Supreme Court, the Importance of retaining Control in Congress, Threats to Democracy like Gerrymandering and Voter Suppression. I often heard in 2016: "You can't blackmail me into voting for her with warnings about SCOTUS" Now that Roe V Wade is in the cross hairs of the Federalists, and god knows what else, we may need to experience a whole lot of hurt before lessons are learned.
= new reply since forum marked as read
