I am starting to see the memes that tell me to check my white privilege if I doubt Kamala Harris is the Second Coming. I am constantly told I have to vote for Biden-Harris if I want to save the Republic and the planet. I am voted shamed, complete with trolling-style worry about my soul thrown at me. I am then told Biden-Harris is the ideal ticket because "independents" and "moderates" constitute the majority of American voters, and that, sorry, Mitchell, the majority of Americans know--and mean they just know!--the problem with AOC, Bernie, etc. is they are too "far left" and out of step with that majority of Americans.
Never mind that the majority of Americans, and vast majority of Democratic Party voters, in any analysis of polling data over years now, are more in line with Bernie Sanders' agenda than Joe Biden's agenda (Forget the scheming, chameleon Harris for a moment). Never mind the exit polling data from the primary season just ended showing the majority of Democrats who voted supported Bernie's agenda, but were influenced by corporate media cable news pundits, who exhorted (in what Nate Silver called a "feedback loop") for over a year, that Bernie was not electable and Biden was the most electable. Oh, and never mind the delta or gap between various official primary results and exit polling. And, if you wonder, Why would anyone rely on exit polling data, let Time magazine explain it to you way back in 2008:
Yeah, never mind all that--though I agree with the Boston Globe Editorial Board the United Nations or a reliable international elections watch body should be brought in to monitor this November's United States' elections.
What I want to post about are two questions for those of us in the United States: 1. Who are independent voters? and 2. Who are the people who are eligible to vote, but don't vote?
Independent voters: Here is a nice summary from the Pew organization about independent voters. The key point about independent voters is they are people who vote, but are largely angry at the duopoly and feel frustrated. They are not your business colleague who claims he or she is "independent" and "vote for the individual." Those people are the lean Republican voters, and have selfishness as their lead value--meaning they almost solely think about themselves and their money interests. They are not the majority of independent voters, per the Pew study, though one can easily extrapolate they are the very people in gated or horse country communities who wealthy Democrats and corporate media executives and talking heads see. And what any good strategist should notice is what the Pew people noticed: the trend among independent voters is male and young. And you don't have to be Paul Goodman to see that those voters are increasingly going socialist or fascist--and Biden-Harris and the corporate Dems (and their handmaidens in corporate media) are not going to keep pushing, shaming, and sometimes fooling these voters for long. They will go for public populism (socialism in our time) or private populism (fascism in our time).
Who is eligible to vote in the United States, but don't? The Knight Foundation explodes the myth that it is comfortable, but empathetic progressives like me who, with race and gender privilege, refuse to toe the line in voting for corrupt corporate Democrats who don't give a damn about the working class for decades, and who love symbolism to substitute for true racial and ethnic reckonings in our nation--and therefore we are the ones responsible for the ever-increasing rightward drift into white nationalism and fascism. And of course we progressives are just a bit too close to racist or sexist or whatever some corporate media blowhard says about us.
But, let's take a look at what is buried in the executive summary is what the Knight Foundation found about who is the typical eligible voter who decides not to vote. Ready? Here it is:
...(N)on-voters are less educated, poorer, and more likely to be minorities, single and women. Sixty-two percent do not have a college degree, and 20 to 25 percent make less than $50,000 annually. Sixty-five percent are white – versus 15 percent Hispanic and 13 percent black – and 53 percent are women.So, the person not exercising the right to vote under this electoral system is not me, or anyone who looks like me. If anything, the typical non-voter looks more like the Bernie Sanders' constituencies (and let's remember Bernie's popularity among military personnel as part of our analysis). Now, I essentially vote on their behalf when I vote, and always have. For decades, I voiced loud opposition to corporate trade deals and global corporate trends undermining what we used to call the "heartland" of America. I showed up, with other "walking wounded" activists, in the 1980s and 1990s to protest in California against the War on Poor People--I mean, Drugs, and, in the early to mid 1990s, against "three strikes" laws. Can Biden and corporate Democratic Party voters say the same? And, if you can, ask yourself if you are typical in that regard. Also, please, don't compare yourself to a Republican voter right now. That is letting yourself off the hook when you need to look in the mirror and ask yourself, really, why are corporate Democrats, safe in horse country or behind gated community fences, so afraid of Bernie Sanders' agenda? What makes you complicit with the billionaires who are loving this year's presidential choices from the duopoly, as they loved the previous choices over decades or more--and who love Kamala Harris! Why are you so sure the propaganda you hear from fact-free pundits on corporate television is worthy of your trust?
So, let's stop the vote shaming. Instead, let's maybe apologize to our children and grandchildren how we messed up again, and didn't care to listen to them, when they were supporting Bernie in 2016 and especially in 2020.
We can say, oh, enough young voters and non-voters didn't vote this time. But, that also lets you off the hook. Have you ever heard of being a parent? I voted for those who don't vote or who are too uninformed, or worse, despairing, about the connection between their misery and the political-economic-and-social structures.
For me, I may end up voting for Biden here in New Mexico this November. If I was in North Carolina, where my son is, I'd vote for Biden. If I was still in CA, I'd be ready to vote for the Green Party presidential candidate, just as I did in 2012 when I voted for Jill Stein. Here in New Mexico, I just want to see the polling data by late October. If Biden is up by more than twelve points, as I don't even trust ten points when Trump actively wants to undermine mail in voting, and Republicans are going to station people at various places to scare people into not voting, I may well vote for Howie Hawkins, the Green Party presidential candidate. I am thoroughly disgusted with the national party known as the "Democrats." They hate people such as me, and the feeling is mutual.
George Carlin understood what the owners of this nation want. See this bit. And, more ominously, I have heard wealthy people over the years tell me they don't really want the great mass of people eligible to vote to in fact vote. They are secretly--perhaps even to themselves--proud of the fact the US lags behind most other nations in voter participation. Right now, I see the condescending smugness of those who want to vote shame people such as me, with their undefined definitions of "far left," "moderate," and "independent"--and fail to come to grips with the "reality" of electoral politics in our oligopoly posing as a Republic, where the disconnect is between what the majority of voters actually want and what they are herded or pushed into resigning for something else entirely. If anyone is not ashamed at what we just saw last week at the Democratic National Convention--forget the perverse show at the Republican National Convention this week for a moment--we are complicit in the undermining of our nation. There. How's that feel? That is where the shame should be.
However, if you want to keep telling me how I need to check my privilege, or you want to save my soul, at least tell me your data points. At least tell me what you are relying on for your opinions, facts, and conclusions. If you are not using polling data, with the wrong belief that polling is inherently unreliable (even though national polls were right Hillary won the popular vote, for example), then tell me the factual basis for your views about what the majority of the nation believes about various policy proposals.
Otherwise, as Cartman on South Park says, Namaste.
