Politics: Dirty Hands
Does it trouble people who vote Republican that their party has a (recent) past that included being appealing to pro-segregationist southerners -- the Dixiecrats who left the Democratic party during the civil rights movement? Now it is true that the Republicans had traditionally been better friends of the African-Americans -- representing as they did New England's merchant interests and ideology over southern agrarian interests and ideology. That counts for something. But the more recent history -- from the 60s -- seems to trump that. Moreover, the Dixiecrat tradition seems to be alive and well in the Republican party. Vote Republican and throw your hat in with the Klu Klux Klan!
So one worry about voting Republican is the following: Voting is an expressive act and, as with expressive acts generally, it is beyond the power of the individual to determine their content. Voting Republican may very well express solidarity with anti-segregationism.
Voting for Democratic candidates is similarly fraught, by the way. There is a tradition of anti-anti-communism among some Democratic constituencies. Anti-anti-communists were, as far as I can tell from the historical record, willfully blind to the mass murder typical in Stalinist dictatorships. Vote Democrat if you advocate willful blindness to the starvation/torture of millions! You jerk.
Of course, as the history of the Republican Party suggests, traditions change and with them (I guess) the expressive meaning of partisan acts. There are interesting questions, then, about the precise expressive meaning of voting one way or another here-and-now.
So one worry about voting Republican is the following: Voting is an expressive act and, as with expressive acts generally, it is beyond the power of the individual to determine their content. Voting Republican may very well express solidarity with anti-segregationism.
Voting for Democratic candidates is similarly fraught, by the way. There is a tradition of anti-anti-communism among some Democratic constituencies. Anti-anti-communists were, as far as I can tell from the historical record, willfully blind to the mass murder typical in Stalinist dictatorships. Vote Democrat if you advocate willful blindness to the starvation/torture of millions! You jerk.
Of course, as the history of the Republican Party suggests, traditions change and with them (I guess) the expressive meaning of partisan acts. There are interesting questions, then, about the precise expressive meaning of voting one way or another here-and-now.
posted by Idris at 11:42 AM
2 Comments:
Of course, voting third party is problematic in its own way, Grak find. Grak generally like to imagine Grak have impact on electoral outcomes. This pretense is especially difficult to maintain without a little hand dirtying.
-Grak
PS: Grak find that sucking brains of peasants help with political guilt.
I'm inclined to find the Republicans' recent past more disturbing than the Democrats', I think because it seems that Republicans had more power over the course of segregation than the Democrats had over the run of communism. Whatever Democratic congressmen had done, communism would have still killed millions of people. Of course, Democrats did always expect the best out of communist regimes (e.g., John Kerry's attitude to the Sandinistas), which regimes were far worse than Southern segregationists...but I'm missing your point.
Well, political parties are big organizations, and insofar as you want your party to win, you're going to have to make deals with distasteful elements (the same holds for foreign policy, and, presumably, with all politicking). Now, there's presumably some threshold of distastefulness that you can cross where it no longer becomes acceptable to either (1) vote for that party as long as it contains those elements or, at least (2) stand passively by while your party contains those elements. To elaborate upon (1) and (2), if the Republican party made common cause with, say, Operation Rescue, that might be reason to protest the party's collusion until the party expels those elements (in accordance with (2)) or leave the party if it becomes clear that this is the new course of the party (as (1) recommends).
And let's also make clear that the party might take a stnad on a position for different sets of reasons. For instance, the Dixiecratic Republicans would oppose desegregation measures bcause of, say, cultural concerns, racialist concerns, or whatever, whereas libertarian Republicans would have opposed strong government interference in that area.
But you know all this.
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