Cheer Up and Vote?

Wow – it’s like this was written just for me:

This is not an article for those who are unabashedly in love with democracy, who look forward to election year with patriotic zeal directed first of all to the nation and second of all to one of the political parties. I write instead for the genuinely dispossessed: for those who feel deep in their bones that the entire political process is a sham; who think that our country, whatever its previous merits, is accelerating in a decades-long slide; who grant that Americans enjoy great blessings, but do so in the midst of self-inflicted moral and spiritual deprivations; who believe that voting for either candidate is merely a decision about the handbasket in which to ride to hell. In short, I write for those who, faced with the prospect of choosing between President George W. Bush or Senator John Kerry, are nearly in despair about democracy and who are consequently planning to skip the whole sordid affair rather than soil their consciences.

The author goes on to make some of the same points I made here. For instance:

One of the most distorting errors as regards our perspective on anything is to view it from the wrong angle. We may gain the proper perspective on things political, not by going to Washington, but by taking a journey with the greatest poet, a man who, crushed by politics, turned inward and upward, and created the magnificent Divine Comedy. Dante’s ultimate perspective is revealed, not in the Inferno or the Purgatorio, but in the Paradiso, as he looks back during his climb amid the glories of heaven, and seeing below him the real smallness of earth, smiles:

So with my vision I went traversing …till this globe I saw,

Whereat I smiled, it seemed so poor a thing.

Highly I rate that judgement that doth low

Esteem the world; him do I deem upright

Whose thoughts are fixed on things of greater awe.

Dante does not look at humble earth with a cynical grin but a smile of pity at the ultimately fruitless efforts of mere mortals to redeem a fallen world, especially through the feverish machinations of politics. This was not an abstract smile won through detached philosophical speculation. Born in Florence, Italy, Dante was a prominent White Guelf in the famous political struggle with the Ghibellines. Exiled in 1302, he became a wanderer, settling finally in Ravenna where, divested of all political power and cleansed of all political ambition, he completed his Divine Comedy.

That is the proper perspective on earthly things, especially on political things. It is the view of a pilgrim, of a resident alien in the City of Man whose ultimate allegiance has been transferred to the City of God. The great moment of transformation came at Calvary, where all mere earthly patriotism was crucified, died, and resurrected, and citizenship was transferred to a kingdom not of this world.

For those who are considering not voting or voting for a third-party candidate he says:

For different reasons, both parties and both candidates thus seem unappealing. All too many with whom I have spoken—including my wife!—are either not voting or throwing away their votes on no-win, third-party candidates. To all the politically dispossessed, aliens in their own land, I offer the following consolations and admonitions….

…We shall be judged on how well we acted amid the political imperfections into which we are cast, the very imperfections among which we are called to vote. Voting is a sloppy, ineffective way of setting and resetting the political order, supremely subject to manipulation, flattery, and demagoguery. That is why the partisans of extreme democracy generally avoid it, preferring to use the courts, misuse the legislative process, and abuse executive power. But voting is still the way that we’re called to exercise what political power remains in the hands of ordinary folk, and it’s our duty to use this power as best we can.

Not voting means handing power to those in either political party who make us feel so uncomfortable about voting.

What he doesn’t address, though, is whether there might be particular cases where both candidates take positions that render one unable to vote for either one in good conscience, what Paul Griffiths, in his essay from the Commonweal symposium, called “deal-breakers.” Might there not be cases where abstaining is the only honorable option? Even if we concede (as surely we must) that politics will always be imperfect, does that mean that some situations might not call for conscientous objection? As Griffiths puts it:

A deal is broken if one of the parties to it does something that makes it improper for the other party to continue in it no matter what the ancillary circumstances. If one spouse uses physical violence against another, this breaks the deal of living together: you don’t go on living with someone who hits you on a regular basis, no matter what other virtues they might have. If someone starts screaming insults at you during a conversation, that deal is broken: the conversation is at an end until they’ve calmed down. And in the case of voting (which is also a deal: I vote, as I hope you do, in response to what a candidate advocates and has done), there are also deal breakers, which is to say actions done or positions advocated sufficient to make voting for someone improper, no matter what other good policies that person may advocate and no matter what other good things he or she may have done. …

…You might object to this line of argument by saying that there are no deal breakers in politics, that we have to look at the whole picture and make prudential, calculative judgments about what will, on the whole, be best for the country. On good days, I find this line half persuasive. But it really won’t do: if the two candidates were Hitler and Stalin, would you feel that you had to vote for one of them?