A short note about politics

I don’t think I’ll surprise anyone by noting that I’ve already voted in the US elections, and voted for Harris. I’m spurred to write, though, by encountering someone on the Furry Writers Guild Discord a couple of days ago arguing vociferously for the virtues of not voting. Their arguments are ones that I’ve seen before on the left: both parties are terrible, why should we always have to choose the lesser of two evils, etc., etc. I know those arguments because I was making them about a quarter-century ago, when the two major party candidates were George W. Bush and Al Gore. It was the argument that third-party candidate Ralph Nader very explicitly made, and explicitly made it to folks on the political left who thought the Democrats might as well be Republicans.

Did Nader cost Gore the election? I’ve gone back and forth on it myself over the years, and suspect the answer is “probably, but not definitively.” But I think the real question is: was Nader right about there being no material difference between the parties? If Gore had been elected instead of Bush, would we be in the same place we are now?

Well, if you know anything about Al Gore at all besides dumb jokes about inventing the internet, it’s that he was deeply concerned with climate change long before most other politicians around the world. If the United States had had a president who took climate policy seriously in 2000, that might have made a huge difference. (I could also make the case that with Gore in office, our Middle East policy would have been far less catastrophic, but I won’t get too far off track.)

You know full well the Republicans would never have legalized gay marriage. But the differences on the margins also matter. From health care to infrastructure to economics to climate, Democrats are closer to my beliefs than Republicans, full stop. I’m not unsympathetic to the “lesser of two evils” argument—again, Nader voter in 2000 here—but that all too frequently collapses into an “all or nothing” argument: if we settle for a compromise position, we’ll never get where we actually need to be, so we can’t have anyone in office who makes compromises. This just doesn’t match the reality I see on the ground. What I see, in practice, is that compromises that get you closer to what you want now make the next compromise just a little easier to get. And you keep inching closer.

But don’t take my word for that.

See, this argument about whether little differences between candidates matter has been going on since before that Bush-Gore matchup. For as long as I’ve been voting, I’ve watched voters on the far left look at two candidates, neither one of whom really matches their preferences, and say, “There’s almost no difference between these two, so why bother.” They make a protest vote, or don’t vote at all. When voters on the far right look at two candidates, neither one of whom really matches their preferences, they say, “There’s almost no difference between these two, but almost is not none.”

So the candidate they want gets in. A compromise they want gets made.

Repeat that over and over, election after election, for thirty or forty years, and you get to where we are now.

The Republican Party has, over the past fifteen years, essentially turned against small-d democracy: they don’t think they can reliably win elections fairly anymore. They wouldn’t be trying so fucking hard to keep you from voting—whether by making it literally difficult, or by convincing you that it’s pointless to bother—if voting didn’t matter. Voting has always mattered. It still matters.

But if a party that no longer believes in democracy gets enough power to change the rules, to keep voting from mattering in the future, that’s what they’ll do. If they get their way, this will be the last election in which voting matters for a long, long while.

There’s only so much any single one of us can do to fight against that—but let’s do all we can.