It would probably be vicariously fulfilling to be a supporter of one of the two main parties. But given the fact that I can't get excited about supporting imperialism in Afghanistan, the SPP, the tar sands project, and neoliberalism, I just can't bring myself to turn off my brain and vote for one of the winning teams.
Perhaps both Harper and Dion could self-destruct on the campaign and perhaps produce an even weaker minority government and a stronger NDP, but that's nothing to get excited about either.
I'm going to quote something that Scott Neigh said recently about elections and the electoral process, and which I've long meant to send words of agreement for:
It's a puerile liberal fantasy that they constitute genuine decisions for us by us. Yet within narrow bounds, we get to choose -- criminally narrow bounds that mean elections cannot touch the things that mean life or death, more suffering or less suffering, for many, but can make small but real changes that mean life or death, more suffering or less suffering, for others. We get a certain level of influence over certain narrow aspects of how our opponent functions. It would be politically foolish and morally dubious to ignore that.
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I'm not saying don't vote. I'm not saying don't care about who wins. I'm not even saying don't intervene in the election somehow, though generally I don't beyond voting.
What I am saying is that we all need to take a good, long, critical look at our words and our other actions and figure out what external cues they respond to. We need to ask, "What organizes my political life?"
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It is in lowering our expectations, closing off our sense of possibility, making us believe that this is it, that so much of our potential to make the world better is stolen from us. Or, as I tend to see it in my more depressive moments, how so much of that potential is simply surrendered by so many of us.
5 comments:
I'm glad someone out there is fighting the good fight against the Liberal's myth that they need NDP voters to stop the Conservatives. Paul Wells has pointed out on a number of occasions that this Liberal tactic has siphoned enough votes away from popular NDP candidates to elect Conservatives, rather than (in enough cases) considerably less popular Liberal candidates.
What do you think the NDP MPs have done for Hamilton? How have things improved from the federal level for Hamilton since the NDP replaced the Liberal MPs?
Thanks mark.
"anonymous," - what have NDP MPs done for Hamilton? What can they do? As individual MPs, I know they're very conscientious and hard-working, and have helped constitutents negotiate the maze of federal government to achieve individual needs.
But not forming the government, ever, has obviously limited their ability to deliver on broader issues.
But you don't get a prize for voting Liberal do you? Hamiltonians voted Liberal to get out of NAFTA and to "kill" the GST and how'd that work out?
Hamiltonians suffering from de-industrialization didn't get protections when Liberals sat on the Mountain or in the lower city. The Liberals were out in front or complicit in the policies that have hurt Hamilton voters.
Neoliberalism isn't popular in Hamilton. It's one of the poorest cities per capita in the country.
All we can hope to be is an island of sanity politically. A stronghold for the only party that actually admits there's a problem.
The Liberal Party of Canada is a goddamned disgrace and I wish it would die.
Very poetic post Thwap. It puts an explanation to the feelings I've had about elections, although I've always thought that elections are the first step. I'm not sure the explanation fits me completely, but I'll try it on for size.
The question that haunts me is, where is the vision for the future? Sure everyone has policy for the "future contingency" but what of Canada? We are so sound bite oriented now that perhaps the vision that is missing for politics is simply the result of the blender of our thoughts, the entertainment industry...
That's the poverty of Blairite "Third Way" betrayal. It's a concession to the nonsensical delusions from the end of the Cold War that the fall of the Soviet Union meant the complete failure of any and all conceptions of socialism.
We can't be afraid to dream of revolutionary transformations.
Democracy still has a lot of room for growing. Anyone not wedded to the impoverished vision of capitalist politics can see that.
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