Lately I've been thinking about the place of dissent and protest during an election season, which I explored in a previous diary. It has seemed to me lately that a number of people whom I generally enjoy reading and often find myself in agreement with are receiving lots of challenge for any diary or comment that is critical of President Obama or his administration along the lines of, "you're negging out the vote." In other words, those who are critical of President Obama are guilty of a thoughtless, selfish crime of turning voters away from what is currently the best (or least evil) candidate on offer for President.
Many of those who say that criticism and protest of the President are bad and suppress GOTV efforts also mention that they too have criticisms of Mr. Obama, but are stifling them due to the odiousness and danger that the other candidates for the office represent. Those are the more reasonable arguments.
Then there are other, less reasonable criticisms like this unfortunate and divisive attack on the entire Occupy movement that appeared in a popular diary recently:
"This is what happens when you go from being a 99% movement channeling the broadly accepted views of the American people to just another leftwing white liberal bitchfest."
This broad-brush tarfest was posted because some people affiliated with Occupy Harlem had the audacity to protest at an Obama fundraiser at the Apollo Theater and some Larouchie lunatics showed up with some extremely unpleasant signs and protested nearby people from Occupy Harlem and MoveOn.org. Frankly, I would just chalk it up to the diarist having a bad day and posting an emotional response in some haste if it weren't for the fact that others picked up his unfortunate characterization of OWS in the comments and ran with it. (See here and here, for example.)
Suffice it to say that any criticism or protest of Mr. Obama on this site has become pretty unpopular with a large and vocal part of the community for the stated reason that it allegedly drives voters away from the voting booth.
This is the wrong way to think about dissent and protest in relation to voting in my opinion because if the whole of our ability to affect our system is subsumed in the act of choosing one candidate or the other, then voting is irrelevant and stupid.
A vote is an inarticulate thing. My vote for Mr. Obama looks exactly the same as the vote cast by some fawning, low information voter who believes that Mr. Obama can do no wrong.
How will Mr. Obama know, come election morning that my vote is not a mandate to: codify the worst interpretation of the AUMF, including indefinite detention into law, or make a secret kill list, that includes American citizens, to assassinate without due process, or continue and enhance Bush's policy of warrantless spying on American citizens, or prosecute whistleblowers who have disclosed significant abuses of power and illegalities for violating state secrets, using those prosecutions sometimes as thinly-disguised retaliation to create a chilling effect, or reinterpret the War Powers Resolution such that entering a war of choice without a Congressional declaration is permissible, or run a virtually unaccountable secret drone war in countries we have never declared war upon, killing untold numbers of civilians, or invoke the state secrets privilege to sweep the wrongdoing of previous administrations and his own under the rug contrary to his campaign pledges, or reauthorize the Patriot Act including controversial portions he pledged to change as a candidate, or appoint Wall Street insiders to key economic and administrative positions in the White House, or appoint an attorney general with links to banksters and keep him despite his reluctance to pursue their crimes, or constitute commissions that are hostile to traditional Democratic values and programs, or continue the Washington tradition of favoritism to large donors despite campaign rhetoric about change, or create a jobs council dominated by 1%ers and their concerns?
If I don't speak up, how will Mr. Obama know that I pulled the lever next to his name with greater reluctance than that which he claimed when he codified contempt for civil rights enshrined in the Constitution and the rule of law when he signed the most recent NDAA?
A vote for a candidate looks like all of the other votes for the candidate and is prone to be taken as approval for all of the things that the candidate has done and says that he will do.
Dissent and protest do not diminish a vote - they give it meaning. After all, no elected official is going to exactly represent your interests, that's just the nature of representative government. So it is incumbent upon us to instruct the candidates as to what it is we want. At a time when no candidate for office is really meeting our needs or fully representing our interests, it is even more important to do that. Further, election time is the time that candidates are most susceptible to the demands of those of us who don't have $35,800 to fork out to eat dinner or listen to a candidate sing his favorite hits in the same room with him. Election time is the time when candidates sometimes get out and rub elbows with some real people and the candidates minions scour the media, the internet and the phone lines to find out what it is we little people think about them and what they do.
Election time is precisely the time when it would be incredibly stupid to shut up and go along to get along.
That said, this means that there is bound to be conflict here in the community between those who have an agenda of getting the President reelected at any cost and those that want something more from the President than we have been getting.
I suspect that this will also bring relations between some here and the Occupy movement into conflict as the OWS movement, by protesting at Democratic events continues to press many elected Democrats to stop servicing the 1% (at the same time that OWS continues to protest at Republican events).
Participation in the OWS movement by supporters of fringe political movements like the Larouchies and followers of the Republican candidate for President whose name must not be mentioned, will also likely become a bone of contention for some. OWS is an attempt at a broad-based progressive grassroots movement. In order to have a movement with a broad base, the public must be invited in. Unfortunately the public includes people that are on the fringes of ideology (and sometimes rationality, too) like the Larouchies. These folks and their beliefs certainly don't represent the beliefs and opinions of the majority of those that support and participate in the Occupy movement, but when you engage the public in public spaces, you can't really keep them out. It's a problem that will eventually get solved by the ingenuity and social skills of those in the movement, but at this point when the movement is building and refining itself, there will be problems.
Some folks here who have a short-term electoral agenda will have to decide whether supporting a long-term effort to create a broad-based progressive grassroots movement is worth the near term irritations and conflicts. There will likely be a conflict for those whose hope is that OWS as a movement will solidify its support behind Democrats during this election season. OWS is still building its constituency and fostering an internal educational dialogue through sharing and debate and does not appear to be ready to coalesce behind a party.
I guess then that the question is, do you believe that we as Americans have enough in common that we could actually have a broad-based grassroots progressive movement that has real political power due to public buy-in or should we all just go back to our corners and come out fighting like the deeply riven polity that the powers that be and their media have created when pavlov rings the powers that be ring the bell ?
So, there you go. If you're still reading, there's my case for why you should not only vote but you should speak out vociferously during an election season - because it gives your vote meaning - and that's why it's dumb, if you're a progressive (and this is a site for progressives, right?) to attempt to hector, silence or shout down the folks who are trying to push the candidate into more progressive actions.
Your mileage may vary, feel free to express yourself in the poll and/or the comments: