Tag: democracy

Fool Me Once

I’m going to start with a confession of something I’ve come to regret immensely. And please, stick with me as I go through this, because I’m using this to illustrate a point. Some time in early 2016, January or February if memory serves, I created a poster supporting Donald Trump for president. The assignment had been to create a poster for a candidate, any candidate. The assignment was very explicit that we didn’t have to agree with what we were writing, and I didn’t, we just had to make a poster. 

At this time in high school, I was used to completing meaningless busywork designed to justify inflated class hours. It was frustrating, soul-dredging work, and since I had been told that I wouldn’t be graduating with my class, there was no end to my troubles in sight. I relished the chance to work on an assignment that didn’t take itself so seriously and would allow me to have some fun by playing around. 

The poster was part joke, part intellectual exercise. Most everyone in my class picked either Clinton or Sanders; a few picked more moderate republicans or third party candidates, not so much because our class was politically diverse, but either out of a sense that there ought to be some representation in the posters, or because they believed it would make them stand out to the teacher. I went a step further, picking the candidate that everyone, myself included, viewed as a joke. I had already earned myself a reputation as devil’s advocate, and so this was a natural extension of my place in the class, as well as a pleasant change of pace from being called a communist.

It helped that there was basically no research to do. Donald Trump was running on brand and bluster. There were no policies to research, no reasoned arguments to put in my own words. I just put his name in a big font, copy and pasted a few of his chants, added gratuitous red white and blue decorations, and it was as good as anything his campaign had come up with. If I had been a bit braver, a bit more on the ball, or had a bit more time, I could have done proper satire. I was dealing with a relatively short turnaround time on that assignment, but I tried to leave room for others to read between the lines. But the result was half baked, without the teeth of serious criticism or parody, only funny if you were already laughing, which to be fair, most of us were. 

The posters were hung up in the classroom for the rest of the year, and I suspect I dodged a bullet with the school year ending before my work really came back to haunt me. I’m not so self-indulgent as to believe that my work actually swayed the election, though I do believe it may have been a factor in the mock election held among our students, where my poster was the only one supporting the winner. I also think that my poster succinctly represented my place in the general zeitgeist which led to Trump’s election. I learned several lessons from that affair. Chief among them, I learned that there is a critical difference between drawing attention to something and calling it out, since the former can be exploited by a clever opportunist. 

Relatedly, I learned that just because something is a joke does not make it harmless. Things said in jest, or as devil’s advocate, still carry weight. This is especially true when not everyone may be on the same page. I never would’ve expected anyone to take anything other than maybe a chuckle from my poster, and I still think that everyone in my class would have seen it that way coming from me. But did everyone else who was in that classroom at that time see it that way? Did the students in other classes, who saw that poster and went on to vote in our mock election take my poster to heart? 

Of course, that incident is behind me now. I’ve eaten my words with an extra helping of humble pie on the side. I won’t say that I can’t make that mistake again, because it’s a very on-brand mistake for me to make. But it’s worth at least trying to lear from this misstep. So here goes: my attempt to learn from my own history. 

Williamson is using dangerous rhetoric to distinguish herself in the Democratic race, and we should not indulge her, no matter how well she manages to break the mould and skewer her opponents. Her half baked talking points rely on pseudoscience and misinformation, and policy designed on such would be disastrous for large swaths of people. They should not be legitimized or allowed to escape criticism. 

Why do I say these things? What’s so bad about saying that we have a sickness care system rather than a healthcare system, or even that Trump is a “dark psychic force” that needs to be beaten with love? 

Let’s start with the first statement. On the surface of it, it’s a not-unreasonable, logically defensible position. The structural organization of American society in general, and the commodification of healthcare in particular, have indeed created a socio-professional environment in the healthcare field which tends to prioritize the suppression of acute symptoms over long-term whole-person treatments, with the direct effect of underserving certain chronic conditions, especially among already underserved demographics, and the practical effect that Americans do not seek medical attention until they experience a crisis event, leading to worse outcomes overall. This is a valid structural criticism of the means by which our healthcare system is organized, and something I am even inclined to agree with. So why am I against her saying it?

Because it’s a dog whistle. It refers directly to arguments made by talking heads who believe, among other things, that modern illnesses are a conspiracy by Big Pharma to keep patients sick and overmedicate, that the government is suppressing evidence of miracle cures like crystals, homeopathy, voodoo, and the like, that vaccines are secretly poisonous, and the bane of my own existence, that the pain and suffering of millions of Americans with chronic illness is, if not imagined outright, is easily cured by yoga, supplements, or snake oil. I particularly hate this last one, because it leads directly to blaming the victim for not recognizing and using the latest panacea, rather than critically evaluate the efficacy of supposed treatments.

Does Williamson actually believe these things? Is Williamson trying to rile up uneducated, disaffected voters by implying in a deniable way that there’s a shadowy conspiracy of cartoon villains ripping them off that needs to be purged, rather than a complex system at work, which requires delicate calibration to reform? Hard to say, but the people she’s quoting certainly believe those things, and several of the people I’ve seen listening to her seem to get that impression. Williamson’s online presence is full of similar dog whistles, in addition to outright fake news and pseudoscience. Much of it is easy to dismiss, circumstantial at best. But this is starting to sound familiar to me. 

What about the second quote, about psychic forces? Surely it’s a joke, or a figure of speech. No one expects a presidential candidate to earnestly believe in mind powers. And who is that meant to dog whistle to anyways? Surely there aren’t that many people who believe in psychic powers?

Well, remember that a lot of pseudoscience, even popular brands like homeopathy, holds directed intention, which is to say, psychic force, as having a real, tangible effect. And what about people who believe that good and evil are real, tangible things, perhaps expressed as angels and demons in a religious testament? Sure, it may not be the exact target demographic Williamson was aiming for. But recent history has proven that a candidate doesn’t have to be particularly pious to use religious rhetoric to sway voters. And that’s the thing about a dog whistle. It lets different people read into it what they want to read. 

Despite comparisons, I don’t think she is a leftist Trump. My instinct is that she will fizzle out, as niche candidates with a, shall we say, politically tangential set of talking points, tend to do. I suspect that she may not even want the job of President, so much as she wants to push her ideas and image. Alongside comparisons to Trump, I’ve also heard comparisons to perennial election-loser Ron Paul, which I think will turn out to be more true. I just can’t imagine a large mass of people taking her seriously. But then again… fool me once, and all that. 

The Protest No-Vote

Among my friends, the most common excuse I hear for not voting is spite. People think that not voting is a form of protest. In their minds, the system is deeply flawed, all of the candidates are bad, and so the only way to have a truly clear conscience is to abstain entirely. With respect to my friends who believe this, and I do indeed respect them, this behavior is childish and self-defeating, and needs to stop.

Now, to be clear, if you honestly believe that all of the candidates are exactly equally bad on all matters; that they are truly not only morally equivalent, but morally identical, and if forced to choose, you could genuinely do no better than tossing a coin, except that presumably you respect the process enough to feel shame at being so capricious, then I will begrudgingly concede that indeed, you oughtn’t vote. If you tragically lack the comparative reasoning and foundational convictions to come to any inkling of a preference, then I suppose it would be above you to fill out a ballot paper. You leave me disappointed, but if you genuinely can’t see a difference, I won’t ask you to fake it.

Fortunately, I have met exactly no one who believes that at their core. Everyone has some set of beliefs and values that they reckon are fundamentally correct, and want to see in the world. Some people are more upfront, some are more nuanced, but everyone has an idea of how the world ought to be run.

There are two main arguments I hear in protest non-votes, both of which are similar, but subtly different. The first holds that withholding one’s vote is a radical act of defiance by refusing to participate in the system. This is seldom justified, but when it is, usually has something to do with “the system being rigged and elections are all for show” and “by refusing to vote, we send a message that the government doesn’t have the consent of us governed”. The first justification is, at best, misleading, and at worst, a conspiracy theory. If rigged refers to gerrymandering and biased voting laws, then this is a great reason for voting and changing the system. If rigged refers to a conspiracy to prevent change, then there’s not really anything to be lost by voting, is there?

The second justification has a little more to unpack. It refers to the language used in the founding documents of the United States and the philosophical writings it draws upon in turn. If you never learned civics, the basic idea is that government derived its power from the consent of the governed, and this consent is required for the enforcement of laws to be justified. This is most directly exemplified in democratic elections, but theoretically can be more abstract, like a popular revolution that installs an unelected government (this usually works better on paper than in practice).

The idea here is that not voting is a way to undermine the whole system; that if enough people don’t vote, the government won’t have the legitimacy to pass and enforce laws, and presumably those who don’t vote won’t have to pay taxes. The myriad problems with this line of thinking are apparent, but here are my two big ones: First, this bets a lot on everyone interpreting your signal the same way and agreeing to act on it. In practice, this is like trying to make a speech without talking. Politicians don’t put in the effort for people who are t participating. And second, it doesn’t really undermine the legitimacy of the government so long as you willingly waived your right to vote.

The second main argument I hear for not voting as a moral stance holds that voting is a moral exercise, and that a person casting a ballot must be willing to accept all of the elements of a candidate: policies, character quirks, scandals, and the like, good and bad. The argument goes that if you don’t accept all of this, then you have no moral standing to say that one person is better than the other. You have to own your choice, and if you can’t get behind it one hundred percent.

This is a classic argument in philosophy, deontology versus consequentialism. The argument boils down to: it is morally worse to add any amount of evil to the world than to do good at the cost of some small evil. This is the line of thinking that says that it is immoral to divert a runaway trolley from hitting five people to hit one person instead, because the act of diverting it is a moral choice as opposed to a consequence of existing factors.

I am not totally unsympathetic to this argument. But it falls apart when applied to elections. The underlying moral argument here presupposes that everyone is supposed to act in this way, always behaving according to strict and inviolable principles of right and wrong. The argument holds that a bad person being elected is not an individual wrong so long as a given person did not endorse them by voting; it is mere circumstance. But elections are precisely the summation of individual choices. There can be no mere circumstances in elections. They are always the consequences of moral choices.

Sometimes these choices turn out to be wrong in retrospect. But if a lack of hindsight can be called a failure, it is a failure of analysis, not of morality. Failing to vote does not disclaim responsibility, but actively avoids a moral choice out of cowardice. Let me submit then that the superior maxim is to always vote in the manner which best aligns with one’s own sense of morality. Your goodwill does no good if you do not express it in your actions.

The lesser of two evils is still the less evil choice. You will not find a flawless human being, let alone a politician, but someone has to be elected, and you have to do your part to decide who, and hold them accountable. Failing to do so is a failure of your moral obligations as a citizen. You don’t have to make the perfect choice. But not making the choice of voting is abandoning your good will and intentions in favor of the security of cowardice. If you decide you truly can’t live with any of the mainstream candidates, there are always third party and write-in candidates. Or failing all else, a spoiled ballot is a far more effective protest than inaction. But do not allow yourself to give up your choice because the choice is hard.