I did not vote for either major party candidate in the last presidential election, and after it was all over I more or less concluded that was my last time for voting for president.
I had voted in three presidential elections in a row for the same third-party candidate. I finally decided that not only he, but also all the others standing under minor-party flags, were implicated in philosophical statism, along with the obvious wannabe dictators on the Dem and GOP tickets. All of them, I thought, wanted to be Führer, and to hell with that. I listened anew to the proposition: "Don't vote; it only encourages them."
Then I read Hoppe's great, ground-shaking book, Democracy: the God That Failed, and wrote about the revelation to me that was. And I settled back to watch our current Imperator go through his paces. This polite disengagement was rudely interrupted: Sept. 11, wars, and all that. And catastrophes aside, it is hard to stay unengaged as you see your once great nation dissolve, corrode, and collapse morally before your very eyes, in way less than four years, as it conducts a crazy crusade half way around the globe.
I am meditating these days on whether "Don't vote; it only encourages them" is a principle I am committed to or a mere expedient I have adopted. The reason for my dilemma is pointed up by Paul Craig Roberts in a piece LRC picked up Sept. 10 from vdare.com, where he says the Dems hold the trump card on the next election:
The U.S. invasion of Iraq has created many new problems and solved none. A real leader would stand up and state this obvious fact. A real leader would fire the neocon propagandists in high government offices who misled both him and the public.
A real leader would do this, that is, if the opposition party would allow him. This the Democrats will not do. The minute Bush admits the invasion was a mistake, the Democrats will destroy him.
Thus are the Democrats the staunch allies of the warmongering neocons. The Democrats poised to pounce keep the neocon strategy in place to admit no mistake and to continue with the conquest of the Middle East.
Speaking of meditating, meditate on that passage for a few minutes. If ever you thought the two-party system was a marvelous solution to political life, or even if you think, as I have long thought, that it is huge part of our problem, this twist in things, which I think Roberts has analyzed brilliantly, should give you advanced fantods. There is at present almost nothing to hope for from our assorted political mechanisms.
I had recently told a Gore-voting close relative that I was prepared to vote not only for a Dem next time, but even for the Hillary or Old Nick himself, if it meant bringing down the GOP and its neocon policy gauleiters. Now I am not sure it matters enough to give up principle and retreat from the "Don't vote" stance. There will be, if Roberts is right, as I fear he is, no effective opposition to what he refers to as the melding of
. . . Karl Rove's war leader strategy [for GW] with the neocons' agenda for American-Israeli hegemony over the Muslim Middle East.
Heads you lose; tails I win. I am reminded of the old joke where a guy asks a lady if she will do it for $1 million. She responds, "Well, yes." Then, "Would you do it for $2." She, "What do you think I am?" Says he, "We decided that, now we are haggling about the price."
So it's back to asking myself if my "Don't vote" is principle or expedient, and all I'm concerned about is the price of standing pat. I think at present I'll stick to it as a principle and look around for a monarchy to move to. And meanwhile let this insecure homeland's pot boil merrily, as it wants to do, and see what ruins are left when our sterling politicians are done with their next major sort-out.
I remember, I think, some old lines of, again I think, James Russell Lowell, from his Bigelow Papers: "The purpose of elections is to vote one humbug out and another in."
September 11, 2003
