A REPLY TO ENGLISH JERK

In response to my post "Why Do I Work For Obama?" "English Jerk" wrote a long and very thoughtful comment.  Rather than respond to it in the Comments section, I have decided to write a separate post addressing each of the three points he [?] makes.  To obviate the necessity of switching back and forth between this post and the comment, I will reproduce the relevant portions as I go along.

After an opening remark, EJ asks three questions.  Here is the first one:

"1) What if Candidate X is better on, say, unions than Candidate Y, but is worse on foreign policy? As an option 2 guy who is in the process of organizing a union, that issue has immediate practical consequences for my political activities. But do I really want better labor laws in the US at the cost of millions of people exterminated abroad? For that matter, do I want better labor laws in the US at the cost of the US government supporting the violent suppression of unions in Colombia (where a few hundred labor organizers are murdered every year)? In other words, it seems to me that, in order to make this assessment, we'd have to determine in some detail what a candidate is likely to do (which is no easy matter) and then to find some way to compare (or even quantify?) his various evils so that we can determine whether it's a net gain to have X rather than Y in office. In Obama's case, of course, we could at least look at his past record and assume he'll continue in the same vein. So I'd like to see what it would look like if we really try to balance out all the good and bad things he's done and see where the scales fall. To put this another way: many of your arguments hang on an evaluation of Obama's specific policies, and I'd like to hear more about your views on those details."

EJ is completely correct in his description of the problem we all face when called upon to choose between two candidates, or even among three or more, each of whom in all likelihood embraces some policies and actions we approve of and some we do not approve of.  EJ is also correct that we are obligated to consider the long term and indirect consequences of these policies as well as the direct, short term consequences.  There is simply no way around this dilemma, given the nature of American politics.  A parliamentary system might offer the opportunity to vote for a party, however small, whose platform very closely approximates one's own convictions, but we do not have a parliamentary system.  Indeed, this is one of the many reasons, as I explain in In Defense of Anarchism, why the state is not, and cannot be, de jure legitimate.

As I hope is clear, there are many issues on which I disagree with Obama -- America's imperial foreign policy and America's capitalist economy, both of which he embraces, to name the most obvious and important of them.  For me, the relevant question is not whether I agree with him on these crucial matters, but what the alternatives are.  Today's Republican Party offers a worse version of American Imperialism and a worse version of American capitalism.  Of virtually all the choices facing America in 2008, when Obama first ran, there was only one -- albeit a very important one -- on which Obama proposed to move in exactly the wrong direction, from my point of view, namely his espousal of an escalation in Afghanistan.  With regard to every other important issue -- LGBT rights, health care reform, regulation of financial markets, tax reform, the environment, immigration reform, and so forth, Obama proposed to move in what I consider the right direction.  What is more, on every single issue, including Afghanistan, Obama's positions were better than those of his opponent.  So the decision to support him was, for me, a no-brainer.  I was convinced that the world would be better, or at least less bad, with him as President than with McCain as President.  And as things have turned out, I think that judgment was correct.

Four years have gone by, and once again I am faced with a choice between supporting Obama, supporting [as it turns out] Romney, or sitting out the election.  Once again, the choice is, for me, a no-brainer.  If you accept my argument that someone in my position is morally obligated to do what he can to advance the better of the available alternatives, then it is easy to see how I have concluded that I ought to support Obama.  And if I ought to support him, then I ought to work for him.  That is what "support" entails, at least for me.

Now, I confess that I did not anticipate just how bad the Republican Party would become in these past four years.  The full-scale assault on women's health is horrific.  The endless enrichment of the rich is appalling.  The punitive, racist attack on Hispanics is unconscionable.  This is no longer the Republican Party of Eisenhower, Rockefeller, or even Nixon.  Anyone who cannot see the difference between them and Obama just is not looking.

Here is EJ's second question:  [By the way, every time I wrote "EJ" I think for a moment that I am talking about E. J. Dionne, columnist for the Washington Post.  I apologize to English Jerk for that.]

"2) What if capitalism is more adaptable than Marx supposed precisely because of these "progressive" strands in government, so that encouraging them actually prevents radical change? I know this line of thinking can be harnessed to the "making things worse until they get better" strategy, but it doesn't have to be. We might, for example, opt for direct action that helps people in our communities while pointedly avoiding any participation with state-corporate entities. If all participation in government makes capitalism stronger, then we'd need to find other avenues of political action—and, in light of the infinite capacities of humans, I think there are always infinitely many such avenues."

The first thing I must say in response to this point is that political action for change is not like brain surgery, where the slightest wrong move can bring disaster.  It is more like an avalanche, with rocks, trees, pebbles, bushes, and debris all rolling down a hillside.  Only a few of us in such a situation are boulders -- Martin Luther King, say, or maybe Noam Chomsky.  The rest of us are pebbles and bits of tree bark.  The important thing is to be rolling down the right hill.  To put the same point another way, political action is like exercising:  you will only stick with it, year after year, if you can find some form of it that you actually enjoy.  There are lots and lots of things that need doing -- circulating petitions, organizing street protests, carrying signs, writing letters, raising money, giving money, running guns [maybe].  They all need to be done if we are to see real change.  Now, I, for one, hate to march in street protests, but I like to raise money.  So by and large I do not turn out for street protests, but I do raise money.  Even when it comes to raising money, I cannot raise money for all the good causes in the world, or even in America, so I make choices, hoping that others will cover the bases I am leaving uncovered.  The important thing is to find something you enjoy doing, so that in bad decades as well as in good ones, you will keep at it.  I was lucky enough to live through the Sixties [which actually mostly happened in the Seventies, but never mind.]   I have also lived through the Eighties, Nineties, and Oughts, which were pretty bad.  That's life.  You have to just soldier on.

Now, with regard to EJ's second point, I don't actually believe the story about how you make things worse by "cooperating" with the world, by trying to engage with it.  That is not why revolutionary change does or does not happen, but that is another story.  I agree entirely with the thrust of EJ's point.  If you are more comfortable with local action, then commit your energies to local action, not because of some speculative theory but just because, of all the options available to you, that is the one you are comfortable with.  If you like it, you will keep doing it year in and year out, and that is what matters.  As far as I am concerned, you and I will be rolling down the same side of the hill.

Finally, here is EJ's third point"

"3) What if it turns out to be necessarily impossible to determine what political outcomes these particular circumstances make possible? We would, in that case, lack information that is crucial to the kinds of moral deliberations you describe. Marx seems sometimes to have thought that a given situation was fairly deterministically related to what could come next, but Hegel (on my reading, anyway) thought that contingency itself was necessary, which makes all real situations deeply unpredictable. My thinking is that it might be better to devote our energies to local action, since we are more likely to have sufficient grasp of the local situation to make a good guess about what that situation calls for. The energy would thus be better spent locally. And I know that the act of voting by itself doesn't require much energy, if all one does it to pull a crank in a curtained booth; but surely if one engages in the careful research and deliberation required to reach morally justifiable conclusions (and even more so if one actually advocates for the candidate, as one should of one really wants the candidate to win), then voting actually is going to take quite a lot of energy. I'm still not convinced that the energy wouldn't be better spent elsewhere."

It is in fact impossible as a general thing to " determine what political outcomes these particular circumstances make possible?" but I think it takes almost no energy to figure out that Obama and the Democrats are a more progressive option than Romney and the Republicans.  I don't think that conclusion should cost you more than a New York minute's worth of deliberation.  So decide to vote Democratic, go back to your local action, and on Election Day take thirty minutes to vote.  Any local action worth doing will be easier with a Democratic government than with a Republican government.  If you have doubts about that, ask the folks in Wisconsin!

If you have doubts even about this brief summary judgment concerning the relative merits of the Democrats and the Republicans, let me suggest that you carry out the following thought experiment:

Imagine that America had a political system in which the party that wins control of the House, Senate, and White House gets to rule without any opposition whatsoever from the other party.  So, if the Republicans control the House, Senate, and White House, then the Democratic Senators and Representatives simply evaporate, leaving the Republicans with 100% in both houses.  And the same of course for the Democrats.  It would still require majorities to pass legislation, and 60% of the Senators to impose cloture and end a filibuster.  Now, in this fanciful situation, what sorts of legislation do you suppose would be passed and signed into law?  I suggest that if the Democrats were in power, you would see legislation that moved dramatically to the left, because the opposition would only come from relatively more conservative "Blue Dog Democrats" [there being no Republicans in either chamber, in this thought experiment.]  The legislation passed if the Republicans were in power would be horrendous -- the end of Social Security, Medicare, Unemployment Insurance, any sort of regulation of business, the outlawing of abortion, and possibly even of contraception, and so forth.

The point of this thought experiment is to make it easier for you to grasp just how different the two parties are.  I think you can do all the complex moral reasoning about this that you need to do while waiting for the light to change at an intersection.