Cole Sear: I see dead people.
Malcolm Crowe: In your dreams?
(Cole shakes his head no)
Malcolm Crowe: While you're awake?
(Cole nods)
Malcolm Crowe: Dead people like, in graves? In coffins?
Cole Sear: Walking around like regular people. They don't see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead.
Malcolm Crowe: How often do you see them?
Cole Sear: All the time. They're everywhere.
The prevailing wisdom is that the so-called “Far Left” portion of the Democratic Party cannot win an election, and, therefore, the degree of its support is positively correlated with Republican victory in national and most statewide elections. History seems to uphold that theory, and the math backs it up, too. I will forgo examples, as I think most of us can agree on that. Recent history alone has shown how left-wing factionalism has split too many liberal coalitions, and how Republican fear-mongering has dissuaded the unaligned center of the spectrum from voting Democrat en masse. The dysphemism from 1988 and 2004, “Northeastern Liberal”, still rings in our collective ears. The obvious and standard conclusion is to move the Democratic Party toward the center to counter Republican attacks, never minding the Left, which will shoot itself in the proverbial foot to avoid winning an election anyway. This compromise of integrity has come at the expense of the innate liberalness of the American people.
So moving rightward politically makes a lot of sense. If you believe history and math. But I don’t.
It’s not that I believe in truthiness over factiness; I just don’t believe that history is a predictive medium. In fact, it’s not. History is the study of the past. Full stop. History may repeat itself, but only in a limited, selectively applied sense. When learning and applying the lessons of history, like the ghosts in M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense”, we see only what we want to see.
We also tend only to recognize what we have seen before. New phenomena are easily dismissible because we have no frame of reference in which to classify it. As Kierkegaard said, “Once you label me, you negate me.” The unclassifiable, on the other hand, is peremptorily negated, the victim of cognitive dissonance on the collective psyche of the nation. The effect of this strange psychological twist is that we have barely noticed the dramatic shift from the American historical precedent, the fault line between the future and anything we’ve seen before, and that, excuse the cliché, the times they are a-changin’.
In the last few years, Bush and the Republican Congress have worn out the American dependency on fear-mongering and scare tactics. We've hit bottom and are ready to recover. We’ve seen some new tricks from this administration, such as “pre-emptive war”, but they’ve not thrown out the old tried-and-true, such as election fraud, gerrymandering, and vote-buying (a.k.a. “bribery”). What has changed, however, is the American awareness, its consciousness. The Internet as a medium of sharing and disbursal of information, a conduit of participatory democracy, has recently become, and will continue to be, the keystone in a vast shift in the American voters’ modus operandi. They won’t be able to throw ‘em by us like they used to. We’re getting slick to their tricks. The effects of political blogs have already registered on the Richter scale in the careers of national news anchors, congresspersons, and political campaigns. The ripple effect of large scale participation in politics will continually echo and convulse outward, through, but not necessarily by way of, the mainstream media and political pundocracy, into the halls of power.
So what’s going to happen to politics as usual in the near future? Well, they won’t be so usual anymore. The problem for the last 230 years has been that politics has been too complicated for the average Joe; we’ve had to trust our elected leaders to make the right decisions; working those 14-hour days to keep the bank from foreclosing on the farm used to be all anyone could worry about. But now the working man and woman, who previously didn’t have time to keep up with all the backroom wheelings-and-dealings of their elected representatives, are more educated and aware. We know about the curve ball, and we know how to hit ‘em. The People are going to be progressively less and less likely to vote against their values and interests. Single-issue voting and divide-and-conquer will become largely a thing of the past. The bud of American populism will flower into full bloom, and corporate participation in politics and law will be stemmed.
It’s ironic, but in the Information Age, it’s the right-wing that shoots itself in the foot. Their cynical methods are quickly disseminated into cyberspace and beyond, and the typical American voter reacts with the appropriate revulsion. We’ve seen the early effects in Bush’s and Congress’ poll numbers lately. It will soon be learned that the old tricks are as counter-productive as they should have been all along.
I know some people are going to say it doesn’t add up. The Internet has been around since the mid-90’s, and Republicans have won every national election except Clinton, an incumbent, in ’96. But here’s the thing: it took until now, as a reaction to Republican dirty tricks, for populist media (not to be confused with the MSM) to gain traction among centrist Americans. Sure, the politically active have always known they were being tricked, but that middle forty percent didn't. And if there’s one thing Americans hate, it’s being fooled. That’s even worse than being lied to. This time we won’t go back to sleep like we did after Watergate. A permanent, albeit quiet shift has taken place in the electoral mathematics. We now have an archive and an instantaneous grassroots organizing device, easily accessible by almost everyone, to compile, list, and disseminate information, so that we never forget. Nevermind baseball. The Bush administration has single-handedly turned politics into the national pastime.
I'll be holding on to my Barack Obama rookie card until my grandchildren are old enough to appreciate it.
"So how is this 'a guide to practical voting'," you ask? Well, just that it’s not so impractical to vote your heart, your conscience, and in your own best interests anymore. You won't have to travel quite as far, politically, to find a candidate you really like who can raise money, get exposure, and stand a chance of being elected. Overall, that will benefit only the liberal, progressive, populist wing of American politics. This is not just an essay in positive thinking, detached from reality. I am being entirely practical and realistic. Supporting a left-wing candidate will be an expression of pragmatic politics, and not just ideals.
I see the old-fashioned lyin’, cheatin’, stealin’ politicos out there, and I can’t help but think I’m seeing dead people. Say buh-bye, liars. The American people are about to have their say: the American Quiet Revolution begins this year.
(edit: added subject line warning)
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