"I have solved this political dilemma in a very direct way: I don't vote. On Election Day, I stay home. I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain. Now, some people like to twist that around. They say, 'If you don't vote, you have no right to complain,' but where's the logic in that? If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent politicians, and they get into office and screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain. I, on the other hand, who did not vote -- who did not even leave the house on Election Day -- am in no way responsible for that these politicians have done and have every right to complain about the mess that you created." - George Carlin
The question is not so much whether you vote (most people will) but what you vote for.
The U.S. system of government is deeply rooted in an English common law and constitutional framework. In its U.S. variant, it became a constitutional republic, with the broad idea being that power within the government is divided by design so as to help prevent its abuse. That means a federal system premised on the legal principle that governmental power resides by default elsewhere than with the centralized authority - meaning, the federal authority is strictly limited to the powers expressly granted to it by the constitution, as implemented through three branches of government (executive, legislative, judicial) that check and balance each other even with respect to the limited power resident within that federal authority. Any power not expressly granted to the federal authority belongs to the states and to the people. On top of it all, the very notion of government as a compact derived from the foundational principle that it is the individual, not the state, that has inalienable rights that cannot be impaired by any government, no matter how benign its stated motives or noble its stated goals. All in all, this began as a bottom-up system with a tremendous respect for the rights of the individual and a tremendous distrust for the power of the state.
While that was the theory, the practice did not often match and major faults such as the slave system and the legally sanctioned taking of lands from the "pagan" residents who preceded the European migrants led to many convulsions by which, in time, the federal authority itself - which had often been the cause of the abuses - came to be seen as the cure for the problems and therefore came to be seen as an authority that should be given broad, largely unchecked, and very vague grants of power with which to accomplish its newly-defined goals. Couple this with the move from a formerly isolationist America (Monroe Doctrine, etc.) to one that saw its role in the world as that of an exporter of democracy and defender of a democratic system of government around the globe, and you perforce have a massive further expansion of centralized authority via the build up of a massive military, in contrast to the time of George Washington where even the very idea of having a standing army was hugely controversial and defense was handled mostly by loosely formed militias organized by the colonies and then the states.
And so, two-plus centuries later, you have a system in which modern conservatives ask for virtually unlimited authority by which to achieve largely military aims and by which modern liberals ask for virtually unlimited authority by which to achieve social aims. With that massive build up of federal power, we all wake up one day and find that the central government has become rather full of itself, arrogant, and unaccountable, with those in charge - of either of the major parties - now quite comfortable with the idea that the rights of the individual are far subservient to those of the state, at least as seen by those in charge. And we all wonder how this happened.
I see this as a system that is wildly out of control in its expansionist aims at the expense of the individual and, given the historical arc, don't hold out a lot of hope that the problem can be reversed unless people's thinking changes significantly.
Yes, by all means vote, but do vote with discernment and with a sharp eye to those who would protect the rights of the individual and not based on the cliches of the day regarding the modern political parties. Maybe that will in time help to turn it around. In any case, that is how I see it.
I'll defer to your knowledge of law, but what stands out for me is the lack of focus on individual liberties, among both parties. Everything is now couched in the phrase "for the public good", etc. To paraphrase your comment...So, we get liberals saying things like "it takes a village to raise your kids" and conservatives saying "the village must be defended at any cost and spread the democracy." That's over-simplifying things, but my worry has always been that the concept of individual freedom has morphed into some collectivist concept that no one can precisely define and has no limits. It even expresses itself socially within urban areas. Schools are now childcare facilities, and everyone is looking to the government (local, state, federal) to solve the problem.
This is why I vote for those who try to protect the individual's rights. Unfortunately, many times they're looked at as kooks (see Ron Paul, etc.).
When people ask who I voted for they make funny faces. I vote across parties lines because I don't think either party has my allegiance. I disagree with individuals and subscribe to cross cutting concerns of which neither party wholly captures.
The present reality of our government's structure is certainly nothing like it claims in its charters and bylaws. America is best described as a post-democratic state. The permanent bureaucracy is the largest and most powerful branch of government and it is never subject to elections. From the Washington Post editorial desk[1]:
"Our carefully constructed system of checks and balances is being negated by the rise of a fourth branch, an administrative state of sprawling departments and agencies that govern with increasing autonomy and decreasing transparency.
For much of our nation’s history, the federal government was quite small. In 1790, it had just 1,000 nonmilitary workers. In 1962, there were 2,515,000 federal employees. Today, we have 2,840,000 federal workers in 15 departments, 69 agencies and 383 nonmilitary sub-agencies.
This exponential growth has led to increasing power and independence for agencies. The shift of authority has been staggering. The fourth branch now has a larger practical impact on the lives of citizens than all the other branches combined.
The rise of the fourth branch has been at the expense of Congress’s lawmaking authority. In fact, the vast majority of “laws” governing the United States are not passed by Congress but are issued as regulations, crafted largely by thousands of unnamed, unreachable bureaucrats. One study found that in 2007, Congress enacted 138 public laws, while federal agencies finalized 2,926 rules, including 61 major regulations.
The judiciary, too, has seen its authority diminished by the rise of the fourth branch. Under Article III of the Constitution, citizens facing charges and fines are entitled to due process in our court system. As the number of federal regulations increased, however, Congress decided to relieve the judiciary of most regulatory cases and create administrative courts tied to individual agencies. The result is that a citizen is 10 times more likely to be tried by an agency than by an actual court. In a given year, federal judges conduct roughly 95,000 adjudicatory proceedings, including trials, while federal agencies complete more than 939,000.
These agency proceedings are often mockeries of due process, with one-sided presumptions and procedural rules favoring the agency. And agencies increasingly seem to chafe at being denied their judicial authority.
Of course, federal agencies officially report to the White House under the umbrella of the executive branch. But in practice, the agencies have evolved into largely independent entities over which the president has very limited control. Only 1 percent of federal positions are filled by political appointees, as opposed to career officials, and on average appointees serve only two years. At an individual level, career officials are insulated from political pressure by civil service rules. There are also entire agencies — including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission — that are protected from White House interference."
And some reflections from a government worker[2]:
"The most fascinating thing about working for the government for the last 6 or 7 years has been learning how government really works. Almost no one has any idea how government actually functions.
We spend inordinate amounts of time and money determining who will occupy short-term elected positions in government. Once there, people make a living thinking about what these politicians should be doing. On the other hand, we spend almost no time thinking about who will permanently occupy the bureaucratic positions that are actually responsible for implementing governance.
The vast majority of the employees of the government, like me, are unelected and – for all intents and purposes – cannot be fired. Focusing on the 0.0001% of government employees that get elected (obviously!) misses the remaining 99.9999%. Virtually everyone thinks that its possible to "change" government while maintaining 99.9999% of its employees. This belief is obviously retarded.
I should also note that people are not used to thinking about working environments in which employees cannot be fired. This situation changes the employment dynamic in many ways. Outside of the government, a "boss" is in charge. However, once the power to fire employees is removed, how is it possible for a boss to really be in charge? In a sense, this creates a situation in which the employees are – in reality – in charge.
When we are taught how laws are made, we’re told something like: someone writes a bill, both houses of Congress vote on the bill, if it passes it’s signed by the President and then it’s law at which point it might be interpreted by the courts.
This is correct as far as it goes. However, have you ever asked yourself who that "someone" is who’s writing the bills? Seems like a powerful position, no? That someone is generally unelected and cannot be fired.
The common story also doesn’t go far enough. Regulations are now, by any serious metric, more important than laws. Regulations are written and implemented by agencies, often with little or no judicial oversight. Modern laws aren’t even really laws anymore, they’re just lists of regulations that Congress hopes agencies will implement.
In ancient Rome, the Senate governed until Julius Caesar took power. However, emperors kept the Senate around for a few hundred more years (at least until Diocletian). Are you so sure that the system of government that you believe in hasn’t already been overthrown? Are you like a Roman in the 200s AD who believes in the power of the Senate to appoint an emperor?"
If you adjust for population growth, your numbers suggest the government significanly shrunk from 1962 to now.
182 million :2.5million in 1962 vs 312 million:2.8million in now. Granted you don't need to double the size of government when the population doubles but you do need significantly more people.
Carlin was a great comedian and I'm a big fan but I'm not about to agree with this simply because the late great George Carlin said it. This is totally backwards and you have to do some mental gymnastics to believe it. In the end, this is what it is, a joke.
If you don't vote you have done nothing to even try to elect someone who you, in good faith, believe will do what you deem the right thing. Yeah, politicians are fucjing scum a lot of the time and lie to the point where its easier to trust the devil himself rather than a politican. That said, totally dismissing the system as one big huge scam is the lazy, cheap, and easy way out of your duty as a citizen. It's a total copout that lets you feel superior but in reality makes you completely inneffectual. The electorate may or may not have much power but it still has some. Voting is just one method of exercising your will over your government. It's important but we also need to be active in lobbying our government in other ways too.
Those in power want you not to vote. To take on this "I don't vote because its a sham" mentality is to play right into their little game. When enough people fall for it that's when it becomes a reality. I'd say its close to being a reality but it isn't too late to turn the tide. It's going to take some time which requires patience, something Americans don't have much of.
If you vote you always have the right to complain. If your guy loses you get to complain about how the other guy would've done things differently. If your guys wins and doesn't fulfill all his promises you still get to complain about how you were sold a bill of goods. If you don't vote, you're still entitled to complain but I personally won't take you as seriously because you haven't tried to affect change. This is supposed to be government for by and of the people but if you believe that Carlin joke (its a JOKE by the way) then it will no longer be that.
No, those in power very much want you to vote. Voting is a great feel-good process that gives the illusion that the people are sovereign when in reality we have practically no power and the government can do whatever the hell it wants as long as both parties agree on it. If this wasn't a democracy it would be quite clear where the power really lies, but since it is a democracy, this problem is obscured quite nicely. A thought-provoking thread from a few days about about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5801276
Then beat them. Let them spend all the money they spend trying to get you to vote, then use that vote to cast a ballot for a third party candidate that best reflects your beliefs.
Being able to get a substantial number of votes is a HUGELY BIG DEAL for third parties, as at some point (I can't remember the number exactly, I think it's 4%) they start getting federal funds to aid in future elections.
A viable third party, or even better, a variety of parties would provide the electoral market place more competition, potentially stop all politicians from positioning themselves in the middle, and free politicians with real views from needing to pander to party lines.
The problem is that FPTP mathematically guarantees a 2 party system in a steady state. So long as you own the 2 parties, you effectively own the government. What's worse is that it also actively works against additional parties.
We also have a rampant issue of uninformed voting. I'd bet there are close to 50M people who just "vote with the party" and follow their biased news network rather than learning about the candidates and issues, then forming their own opinions.
I think you're overstating the situation there. My understanding is that FPTP tends to result in a 2 party system, but I have not heard it asserted that it guarantees such. And there are counter-examples listed on the Wikipedia page for Duverger's Law[1], so we know it doesn't always happen.
It's also important to keep in mind what "two party system" really means. In the US, for example, it is not the case that every elected official belongs to one of two parties. There are both independent ("unaffiliated") office-holders (in what would be considered partisan positions) and 3rd party office-holders. The Libertarian Party, for example, usually claims approximately 600 elected officers nationwide (not all in partisan positions however) in average years.
So, net-net, while FPTP is a bad system in many ways, one should not feel that there is no value in voting for 3rd party or unaffiliated candidates in such a system. Under some circumstances they do win, and in other cases they at least affect the outcome, which - in turn - affect the public discourse - and they may impact the Overton window as well.
Mindcrime has already said much of what I would have, but ignoring FPTP has advantages as well, mainly, that it allows people actually vote their conscience, for better or worse.
I can't argue that it isn't 'throwing away' your vote, in the short term, but over the very long term, there needs to be some people throwing away their vote in order to encourage more to do so such that eventually the landscape changes.
I was involved in marking a standardized test for high school students and one question involved inventing a story on an (unspecified) election. What shocked me the most, aside from the poor writing ability, the unintentionally unbelievable facts of the stories, and the surprising amount of confusion and internal contradiction within the students' responses, was that although remarkably few students demonstrated much awareness of politics or the political process, despite having taken a mandatory course on this subject, nearly all of the students regarded voting as a mystical or near-spiritual experience of civic involvement, social communion, and individual empowerment.
Some students were probably 'sucking up'. But nearly every student?
Or don't vote, and take every opportunity to peacefully undermine the government by educating people, participating in alternate currencies and black markets, striving to be self-sufficient, etc.
I don't believe in this. It's not that it doesn't make sense it's that it seems like fighting a losing battle. To me it seems the only way to change things is from within. Trying to affect change the way you describe makes you the "other" and its easy for them to take steps to either make your life harder or shut you down completely. It's this same kind of mentality that I think makes the whole copyright issue a losing battle. The more you fight it the more everyone loses. The minute you win a battle they make the means by which you won it illegal or a tedious process.
Don't get me wrong, you're definitely fighting a losing battle. Even (especially!) those who have utilized violence for their supposedly revolutionary goals are fighting a losing battle, and I'm suggesting foregoing violence.
But I completely disagree that the way to change things is from within. When has that ever actually worked? Sure, governments get overthrown from within, but that just results in another government (that may be better, but which also may be worse), and it doesn't change the attitude of the people toward the very concept of government, which in my opinion is the problem. Governments don't get smaller and more respecting of civil liberties. The United States is arguably the most valiant and educated attempt at creating a small and unobtrusive government, and in a very short period it has grown into arguably one of the largest governments ever to grace the Earth.
I think the only hope for lasting change is for the attitude of society toward government to change, and I do think that education and counter-economics are the best ways to show people that the roles that are supposedly only accomplishable by government in fact don't require government at all. That said, the likelihood of any measurable change happening in my lifetime is low, but I suppose that's just part of the human condition.
Yeah, they want people to vote because then they can say: "will of majority". If only 1 person voted, the so called democracy would fail (people would eventually get it), because 1 person is not representing majority and majority is what democracy is all about (with all respect to minorities). They only made semantic switch saying that if you don't vote then you don't care -> not true because what if you are against (for example corrupted?) system and want real change -> should there be an voting choice: "this is not working, change the system"? :-)
Of course they want you to vote. Only they don't vote. They just prepay all politicians so that whichever of them wins the election is already in their payroll. Units of power are not people, are cents. When did this start?
If you so choose not to give your mandate to anyone, that is up to you.
It is the only political power I have, and even though the statement is ignored or interpreted as apathy, the statement that you don't believe in any of those arseholes is just as valid as the statement that you do.
I, personally, cannot stand the "then vote for the least worst because at least the other guy won't get in" argument either. To me that's the root of the terrible politics we have in the UK and the US now.
Your vote is not the only political power you have. You can organize people, even if it is only at the local level. Once you do that, you have begun to gain political power, and that is how political careers are started. We do not have titles of nobility here; nobody is more entitled to be politically engaged than anyone else.
In practice, it is hard to take power from the established parties. It is hard to get past the local level without being well-connected. Hard, but not impossible.
Organizing people isn't the only power you have beyond your vote, either. Issues are complex, and I feel like I couldn't reasonably vote FOR something I want without also voting against many things I want. I could spend countless hours tracking down the candidates who, on average, best served my personal interests and preferences, all so I could cast my one little vote...but that wouldn't make much sense for me. There are better ways to spend the time.
If you care about animal rights, you can spend that time volunteering or making more money to donate to DIRECTLY support the causes you care about. You can pay closer attention to the dollar votes you're casting (which can't be discounted as a means of political influence).
If you're bothered by GMOs and factory farming, you can help set up local gardens to reduce reliance on conventional produce. You can educate people around you so they understand why it's important to maintain the integrity of our food supply.
If you don't appreciate companies turning over your information to the government, you can (try to) find one that doesn't, and let the company you're leaving know why. You can donate to the EFF and similar organizations.
As much as people like to get emotional about voting, it's not terribly effective as a means of bringing about change - especially once you take into account that politicians often mislead people about their intentions or change them completely once they have more power.
How is voting (in the way you describe it) for the sake of voting and supporting a corrupt political system knowing it WILL NOT affect change your duty?
Your duty as a citizen is to support the other members of your society, whether it be by voting in politicians you think will lead the country towards better times for everyone or just following the laws and not interfering with the rights of others. The state and political structure is only a means of choosing organized leadership towards that end.
If voting inevitably leads to a government that blatantly disregards the overall interests of its society, what purpose does voting serve in your "duty as a citizen?"
I personally think that none of us have a right to complain for our own complacency is to blame, but I take issue with the idea that voting is somehow a citizen's duty, even if it's inevitable result is explicit support for violence and corruption.
(yes, "inevitable" is a gross exaggeration, although with these last two presidents it looks quite bleak)
> To take on this "I don't vote because its a sham" mentality is to play right into their little game. When enough people fall for it that's when it becomes a reality.
This could apply to the opposite perspective just as well.
>This is totally backwards and you have to do some mental gymnastics to believe it.
I think he was pretty much dead on on this one. Swap Republican/Democrat politics for another any other choice and the "you have no right to complain" point makes less sense. Take a fictional encounter with a Doctor...
Dr: You're going to get testicular cancer. Would you prefer it in the left testicle or the right?
Me: I don't want cancer in either testicle.
Dr: You don't understand, if you don't pick a nut then you don't have the right to complain about having testicular cancer.
Dr: Congratulations. You are no longer at risk of cancer.
Seriously, if this were a real conversation and given that I'm going to get cancer (per first line), I'd pick one testicle and then have them remove it.
Meanwhile, you'd 'choose' not to get cancer and get it anyway, but without any control whatsoever.
In reality, I could write in my neighbor's dog on the ballot, to demonstrate I am a politically engaged individual who is likely to vote for a human candidate if the candidates change their tune.
That is the superior answer to the mythical doctor visit, as well.
I would further argue that refusing to be involved may have resulted in cancer in both the left nut and right nut.
Unfortunately the analogy may be a bit too applicable for comfort, eh?
>In reality, I could write in my neighbor's dog on the ballot, to demonstrate I am a politically engaged individual who is likely to vote for a human candidate if the candidates change their tune. That is the superior answer to the mythical doctor visit, as well.
Does anything you say have anything have to do with addressing the point that making a choice somehow magically correlates to the ability to hold an opinion? Because politics or your dog doesn't really have anything to do with it.
>I would further argue that refusing to be involved may have resulted in cancer in both the left nut and right nut.
Well for anybody that insists on flogging the cancer/politics analogy then this would be impossible, assuming you are a member of the US electorate, as a viable candidate from either party would never pick a running mate from the other side of the aisle (right nut cancer would be mutually exclusive of left nut cancer).
The analogy has nothing to do with political thought, it's to demonstrate the flawed logic that not making a choice somehow deprives one of the right to hold an opinion. No need to get testy.
My problem with "I don't vote because it's a sham" is in two parts:
1. It's very often just a pseudo-intellectual justification for not bothering to educate yourself about any of the issues, politicians or policies at hand, or to actually define your own philosophical/policy position and have it subjected to possible challenge and critique. It's laziness and cowardice masquerading as superiority.
2. It's also very popular as a defense mechanism for fantasists and fundamentalists who refuse to accept that: reality is messy, none of us has all the answers, none of us has quite the same experience or expertise and thus even those disagreeing with us have much value to bring to the table, that there's no rational reason to expect 300 million people with different experiences with different policies and different parts of the country to ever agree on where the problems are nor how to fix them, and -- most of all -- that we ourselves might actually be wrong about some of our fundamental assumptions and the people disagreeing with us might not only have a point, but that we might be standing behind the wrong policy.
If you can accept these things, you can accept that compromise is not awful or evidence of failure in and of itself and that democracy is very rarely about 'right' and 'wrong' choices. You would recognize the messy process of compromise and politics is itself a feature.
Progress is a messy, irregular march not from A to B, but from A[n] to B[n], where not every path is straight, or known, or necessarily moves forward on each tick of the clock. Much of the time the destination isn't even known when we have to decide a course (whether it exists, where it is, whether it's fixed or floating -- even whether it's fundamentally knowable) and sometimes we're not even sure where it is that we're starting from.
Now, if you want to argue that there are problems (primarily, that money has corrupted the system) I will enthusiastically agree. But there's no solution to those problems that hinges on not voting.
There are things that we can do other than and in addition to voting. But they don't in any way preclude voting or benefit from our abstaining from voting.
George Carlin is (was) a right fool. The whole problem is that people don't have enough control over the government. Not voting only allows those who would have control over you to have more power. Even a protest vote or a third party vote is worth more than no vote.
> Even a protest vote or a third party vote is worth more than no vote.
Actually, it's not. The US election process operates under the Electoral College[1], so a state majority vote changes all votes to that majority vote (eg: Democrats win majority in Illinois, so all votes in that state end up voting for Democrats in the presidential election).
The disparity between the electoral vote and the popular vote is usually not wide enough to cause controversy, however it's still offensive to realize that your vote changes without your consent.
Gerrymandering[2] is a whole different topic, however it is just as galling.
Actually, it is. If a third party gets more than 5% of the popular vote, they have rights to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund[1] which can further help in future years to get said third party elected.
I will chime in with how it is too. Since there are such tight margins in the popular vote, and large percentage participation gaps, when people vote a protest candidate it has the effect of 'pulling' votes from one of the two mainstream candidates. Ross Perot in the 1992 and 1996 Elections was credited or accused of changing the outcome of the election by taking votes away from Bush (the elder).
The result were more Perot like ideas being pushed into both parties to prevent that from happening.
Protest voting, even in rigged elections like Putin's election in Russia, are very effective political action.
If the sole effect of voting is to choose a winner, then you're probably right. But I think that's not the only effect that comes out of counting the votes. It's the one place where voters actually lay their cards on the table, or rather cast their votes in the ballot box. Votes are not a limitless resource to voters, unlike words or even opinion polls, and it is an important form of communication to other voters in the next election.
This is where gaming the voting system hurts democracy. Simply voting for the biggest bloc that is not your vision of pure evil is short-sighted, and causes the voters lose their independence - important for a voting system to arrive at an optimum result [1], and it also destroys the only credible method of communicating the lack of confidence in the system to each other [2]. Everybody knowing that everybody else knows that everybody have lost faith in the main blocs is not sufficient to create real change, but it certainly is necessary.
>The US election process operates under the Electoral College[1]
No, the US presidential election process works that way; that's one election for one office, there are many more offices you vote for than just president and all that voting matters and is absolutely worth more than a no vote.
Do you know how often an Electoral College delegate changes his vote? It's extremely rare. Most of them are bound and even the unbound ones nearly always vote as directed. Personally, I've always like the idea of the Electoral College because voting for a president is a complex issue that usually comes down to the talking points on television. Electing a delegate from my own community to take on the challenge researching the candidates for me is a much more manageable task, like electing a representative to vote on laws.
But your missing broader picture. This is not just about the presidential election. You also have a senator, a representative, a state representative, at state governor, a mayor, a sheriff, a town council leader, a school board leader, (maybe not all at once,) for whom you can vote. Too much power is concentrated in the presidency and this is a result people neglecting the importance of other elected offices, most of which have more of a direct influence on your life anyway.
Even beyond that, if you believe that your vote is so worthless that you may as well not cast it, that's a sign that you should get more involved in politics, not less. It's not hard to join your local party chapter and to start making changes as an 'insider.'
The difference between a third party getting 1% of the vote versus 10% could have some impact on politics even if it doesn't affect the outcome of the election.
But just voting to vote is useless. People seem to have the mentality that you pick the lesser of two evils, which is BS. I'm not going to vote for somebody if I don't feel like they are completely up for the job. I'm not going to vote for a 3rd party just so they can get funding because guess what, this years candidate may be great but the funding would be for the next round and who knows who they will have then.
If you're left with the choice between the lesser or two evils on how to run the country. It is very _very_ important that you get the _lesser_ of those two evils.
For that matter, why even bring up the electoral college? Even if the president were elected by a majority vote, the odds of the election being a tie or decided by a single vote is incredibly small—almost certainly too small to be able to rationally justify the time spent researching candidates or even traveling to the polling location.
It looks like in my state about 1,500,000 people voted in the 2012 presidential election. So if a few hundred thousand people decided to not vote because their one vote doesn't matter, it's conceivable that the result in a state could be swayed.
So why try to persuade people their vote doesn't matter? If enough of them (an admittedly large number) listen, it will matter.
> So if a few hundred thousand people decided to not vote because their one vote doesn't matter, it's conceivable that the result in a state could be swayed.
Yes, but it's extremely unlikely that your vote would sway the result, and I'm operating under the assumption that you can only control your own decision to vote.
> So why try to persuade people their vote doesn't matter? If enough of them (an admittedly large number) listen, it will matter.
You're confusing two things. I would never try to persuade people that the sum of everyone's votes doesn't matter, because it obviously does (discounting for the moment the possibility of election fraud). But I would try to persuade individuals that their vote will not matter with a very high probability.
Even though this is often phrased in such a way that it almost sounds like a contradiction or paradox, it's not at all. It's analogous to the lottery: the more people that play, the higher the chance that someone will win (assuming random picks), but one person buying a single lottery ticket has such a small probability of winning that I would recommend against relying on the lottery to change one's financial situation.
The sum of everyone's votes is made up of a bunch of single individual votes. If you persuade enough individuals to not cast their single vote, then the election outcome could be swayed.
So sure, telling individual people their vote doesn't matter is basically true. But how many people have you told?! :-)
Wrong basis. By voting for someone who won't win you can claim that you tried and failed to improve things, and that it was everyone else (who voted for the winner/mainstream candidate) who causes all our problems and is responsible.
A large non-voting would-be constituency means that there is little mandate for politicians to drive policy.
If say 90% of the population didn't vote, plus there were public demonstrations of discontent, officials would be so afraid of a revolution (or other radical action) it would in theory temper their ambitions.
Tocqueville touches on this in Democracy in America.
Politics is how complex societies make decisions at the largest scale. Despite the wet dreams of the tea party contingent, politics and government-by-mandate aren't optional in the 21st century and haven't been for a long time. Tocqueville died in 1859, back when things were simpler.
If 90% of the population refuse to vote then you would end-up with one of two outcomes:
1. A minority government governing with a mandate from <= 10% of the population. Cue politician saying 'look, I got 80% of the votes cast'. Expect: extreme social unrest, dictatorship by minority, authoritarianism.
2. No government. Not as great as some might think. Expect: nothing-gets-done, social collapse, power vacuum, enemy nations sharpen their knives.
First-world politicians in this century won't have their ambitions "tempered" by large scale withdrawal from voting - all this would do is remove the main mechanism that restrains them. Even in a society that has backed itself into this kind of local minima, politics and politicians would still exist.
The reality of voting is that you pick the least worst choice. "Representative democracy" isn't democracy. It's bloodless regime change. You get a choice of who you can work with.
Actual liberatory politics begins the day after the election, and involves things like pressure groups, petitions, protests and lobbying.
You're begging the question. Why are the choices the way they are?
You see a status quo where neither major party cares about electronic privacy. Is it because there is a vast conspiracy between media and government to only present these two viewpoints? Is it because huge amounts of money go into getting people to support NSA surveillance? Or is it because opposing NSA surveillance is not an issue that reliably yields votes?
Which voting bloc can you capture by supporting the scaling back of NSA surveillance? Angry nerds? Not a big demographic. If your issue doesn't get old people, blacks and hispanics, religious conservatives, teachers, union workers, small business owners, or one of the other big demographics like that to go out and vote based solely on that issue, then there is not enough votes in that issue for any politician to care about it.
And the thing is, that's arguably how democracy should work. Why should politicians in a democracy cater to the pet issues of an ideological minority?
> Why should politicians in a democracy cater to the pet issues of an ideological minority?
From a human and Constitutional rights point of view, they have an obligation to respect the views of those ideological minorities when their main agenda is defending their rights (right to privacy, free speech, or whatever it may be). A pure democratic system is little more than a (usually peaceful) mob rule, but in a representative democracy there is at least the expectation that elected representatives, by virtue of being middlemen between the people and the laws that govern them, as well as only having to risk their job every few years, will be able to reflect on more than what the majority wants at the present moment.
However, if your point was made more from the perspective of maintaining power and control, then I don't disagree with you.
> they have an obligation to respect the views of those ideological minorities when their main agenda is defending their rights
Ideological minorities don't get to make up "rights" and then demand the government defend them. The government has the obligation to defend free speech rights, even against the wishes of the majority, because there is ancient recognition of that right along with explicit adoption of a broad statement of that right in the Constitution.
But, there is no such thing when it comes to "privacy". See: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/rightof... ("The U. S. Constitution contains no express right to privacy. The Bill of Rights, however, reflects the concern of James Madison and other framers for protecting specific aspects of privacy, such as the privacy of beliefs (1st Amendment), privacy of the home against demands that it be used to house soldiers (3rd Amendment), privacy of the person and possessions as against unreasonable searches (4th Amendment), and the 5th Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination, which provides protection for the privacy of personal information.")
There is nothing in the Constitution that says "you have a right to privacy", and it's really very difficult to extend one of the explicit provisions to get you to something that would prohibit the government's collection of information that you voluntarily put "out in the world" by giving it to entities like Google or Facebook, or information (like call records) that aren't even yours but rather information about you gathered by a private company. You have to resort to something worse than Griswald's "penumbras" to get from the 4th amendment, which concerns the sanctity of one's house and physical person, to such a broad privacy "right."
There's not even intellectual consensus on the issue. Academics disagree vigorously about the appropriate level of "privacy rights" and foreign liberal democracies often collect as much or more information than the U.S. does.
The right to privacy falls under the "human rights" part of my comment. You are free to disagree that privacy in some meaningful sense is not a human right, but the very fact that so many other rights (both legal and human) are easily compromised when it is not present is a strong hurdle to overcome, should you wish to make that argument.
As an example, you have the right to criticize your employer (freedom of speech). For obvious reasons, this right is best exercised in private, where the employer cannot overhear the conversation. If the employer operated a massive surveilance network that recorded your supposedly private conversations, you could then suffer punitive consequences and be denied career opportunities merely for voicing an opinion.
You have a legal right to an attorney, but that right is only useful because your discussions with your attorney are confidential. Without that privacy, the whole value of the right simply evaporates.
My view is that the right to privacy is such an obvious prerequisite for most, if not all, of our legal rights to have any value that it shouldn't need to be explicitly detailed in the Constitution or in any specific law. Furthermore, the world the Founders lived in was a world in which privacy was easy to safeguard, and the few obvious ways to violate it (e.g. unreasonable searches and seizures) were addressed by the Bill of Rights.
> You are free to disagree that privacy in some meaningful sense is not a human right
I don't disagree that privacy in some meaningful sense is a human right. I disagree that a "privacy" right that is broad enough to encompass information about me collected by a private company based on my voluntary use of its service (i.e. phone call records) rises to the level of human right. To me, that's instead a matter of balancing of competing interests to be handled through the democratic process. When I think of privacy being a "human right" I'm thinking more of the government not invading the sanctity of your home, not how it can access information you already freely share with others.
One of the main problems with privacy today is that your rights to privacy are typically enumerated in lengthy terms of service or user agreements that can and do change without notice. If these documents truly do enumerate "rights" they shouldn't be so easily changed whenever the company finds it convenient or profitable. What you initially agreed to was a 20 page document written in legalese that few will bother to read through.
If you truly want to be informed and up to date on your privacy rights for all of the services you use, you basically have to make it a full time job. It's not a sustainable system. What we need is some sort of societally accepted norms, and possibly laws, regarding privacy so that you don't have to hire a lawyer to give you a monthly update explaining what Facebook can and can't do with the data you and your friends provide them.
My point is that whatever norms or laws that result from those considerations will be arbitrary unless they are based firmly on a respect for an individual's human right to privacy.
It seems to me that we do have "societally accepted norms, and possibly laws, regarding privacy." The norms/laws are that the information you share freely with Google/FB/Verizon/etc can be passed along to the gov't in support of national security.
These norms/laws aren't arbitrary, they're based on the views of the majority of the citizens of this country, expressed through the democratic process.
> Ideological minorities don't get to make up "rights" and then demand the government defend them.
Sure they do; their right to make such demands is fairly explicit in the First Amendment (both the right to assemble and the right to petition apply to it.)
Now, the answer to the demand may be "No", but that's a different issue.
I was under the impression that the Constitution explicitly granted the federal government certain powers, and the 10th amendment clarified that if a power wasn't granted to the fed in the Constitution, it was because the power was retained by the states and the people. So the Constitution wouldn't need to grant the people a right to privacy. It was implicit, and even further emphasized by the 4th amendment.
In the Constitution, the federal government is given broad, exclusive, power over national security and defense. Intelligence-gathering has always a part of national security and defense. That was a key purpose of the documents, to address the failure of the Articles of Confederation to provide for a robust centralized defense. Intelligence gathering has always been a part of the historical understanding of defense and national security. Therefore, the federal government can conduct intelligence gathering unless some affirmative right prevents it.
The 10th amendment just says that a right need not be enumerated in the Constitution to exist. However, you still have to prove that such a right exists, say by pointing to its recognition in English common law. Just because it isn't mentioned in the Constitution doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but it also doesn't mean that it exists and is just "implicit." The idea that communications are protected by a broad "privacy right" that protects even information you share with others just can't be traced back to something the founders would have understood to be a "right" much less something so fundamental that they might leave it implicit.
> In the Constitution, the federal government is given broad, exclusive, power over national security and defense
Like "privacy", "national security" appears nowhere in the Constitution. The federal government is given certain specific powers that can be grouped under the umbrella "national security", just as it is given certain specific limits based on particular rights that can be grouped under the umbrella "privacy".
"National security" falls under the umbrella of "common Defence" (which appears twice in the Constitution). Indeed, one of the motivating forces behind the creation of a stronger federal government under the Constitution was Shay's Rebellion, which was a purely internal threat.
The term ("privacy") does not appear in the Constitution, and the specific limits on federal power that do appear can't be generalized to fit under the umbrella of that term. There is no indication that e.g. the founders intended the 5th amendment protection against self-incrimination to be rooted in a "privacy" concept. It's clearly based on a "due process" concept, which explains why there is no general right to refuse to testify (which is what you'd have if the right was based on privacy) but only a right to refuse to testify in a way that might incriminate yourself. The concern is about he extreme persuasiveness of confessions, and the potential for abuse from coerced confessions, not about the right to keep information from a government investigation.
Similarly, the 3rd and 4th are better understood as rights based on the sanctity of the home and person (notably since the 4th conspicuously omits any reference to communications).
Attempts to find a right of "privacy" in the Constitution are extremely strained, for the simple reason that there isn't one. The founders just weren't thinking of this overriding concept of "privacy" as an umbrella concept for rights as disparate as protection against search and seizure, self-incrimination, or a right to an abortion.
> National security" falls under the umbrella of "common Defence" (which appears twice in the Constitution).
Both in reference to the purpose of the Constitution and the scope of purposes supported by Congress taxing power, but neither reference is to a general federal blanket power with regard to "common defense".
Powers under the Constitution are generally read to be complete within a particular domain except to the extent they are counter-balanced by affirmative rights. See Gibbons v. Ogden ("If, as has always been understood, the sovereignty of Congress, though limited to specified objects, is plenary as to those objects...").
Yes, but you missed the part that "common Defense" occurs in the preamble discussing purpose, not powers, and in a phrase limiting the purposes of the Taxing power. Its not itself an enumerated Congressional power (Congress does have more narrow enumerated defense related powers), so its irrelevant, in discussing it, that grants of power to Congress are generally plenary except within express limitations.
"To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States..."
By your method of interpretation, this clause gives Congress the right to exercise legislative jurisdiction over D.C., but not the right to build the city. A more sensible interpretation is that it grants Congress the power to build the city in the same breath as granting it exclusive legislative jurisdiction over it. The embedding of the power to provide for the common being embedded within the power to tax can be seen as operating similarly. Note that this drafting reflects history. There was no doubt under the articles of confederation that Congress had the power to provide for the common defense. The sticking point was that it did not have the power to tax to achieve that end.
Also, the preamble is not legally inoperative. It can be read as establishing "common defense" as an umbrella term for powers mentioned within.
Finally, providing for the common defense was considered at the time and today an inherent aspect of sovereignty, and the Constitution through the preamble shows the intent to invest that aspect in the federal government.
I can see the point you're getting at, but I don't think it works. You're comparing a power that's mentioned twice in the Constitution (archaic drafting aside), was considered an inherent function of government at the time, and was clearly motivated by by contemporary events as supported by the historical record, to an umbrella "right" that isn't mentioned explicitly by the Constitution, isn't a neat generalization of the rights that are explicit in the Constitution, and wasn't part of the historical understanding at the time.
I think there's some Occam's Razor analysis that needs to happen here. The simplest explanation of the text is that the common defense was intended to be a fundamental function of the federal government, while the various rights that arguably go to privacy were really derived either from a response to specific injustices at the hands of the British or from common law understandings of due process rather than some unstated general umbrella right of privacy.
> By your method of interpretation, this clause gives Congress the right to exercise legislative jurisdiction over D.C., but not the right to build the city.
No, it doesn't. Legislative jurisdiction over the territory itself includes the ability to build the city.
> You're comparing a power that's mentioned twice in the Constitution
The phrase is mentioned twice, but neither is a grant of power (one is a statement of the overall purpose of the Constitution, the other is expressly a limitation on the scope of another grant of power.)
There is no mention of "common defense" as a power anywhere in the Constitution.
> No, it doesn't. Legislative jurisdiction over the territory itself includes the ability to build the city.
No more or less than the power to tax for the purpose of providing for the common defense includes the power to actually provide for the common defense.
Which it doesn't, any more than the power to tax for the purpose of general welfare (which is part of the same phrase as the "common defense") gives Congress independent non-taxing power to provide for the general welfare outside of the grants elsewhere in the Constitution. There's quite a lot of conditions, etc., you can apply to liability for taxes, etc., that allow some substantive regulation to be plausibly included under the taxing power, but if you read the purpose limitation of the taxing power to instead be a positive grant of power independent of the taxing power, as you suggest, that one clause alone would shift the federal government under the Constitution into one of universal plenary power with only negative restriction instead of one of specific positive powers, and its quite clear that that was never the intent of that clause (as well as that interpretation being completely inconsistent with the actual words of the clause.)
Even if you accept the idea that your vote has some tiny marginal effect on the outcome (which, in the electoral college, is usually not the case), you still have to weigh the opportunity cost of voting (and of the time spent deciding who to vote for) against what you would have been able to do with that time had you not bothered. You could spend more time with your family, with friends, learn a new skill, enjoy a more peaceful state of mind by not feeling obligated to follow the news 24/7, and more. Which of these do you think will most improve the state of your life? Especially when you factor in the probability that the person you vote for will renege on many of his or her promises?
Local elections are a more worthwhile, due to the increased influence of even a single voice and the fact that they are usually decided by popular vote.
Local elections are a more worthwhile, due to the increased influence of even a single voice and the fact that they are usually decided by popular vote.
And this might really be the place to put most of your political thought and effort. Getting good people into local offices can be a first step to getting those same good people into regional, state, national offices. If we want until the presidential election to care, it's likely too late.
As far as spending time on the major elections... I don't watch the news 24/7. I spend maybe ten hours during "election season" watching debates and reading articles, and a lot of that is done socially with friends and family. I enjoy it, and do not consider it time wasted. My polling place is about two blocks from my home. It takes me ten minutes to go vote. I do not see elections as a worthless drain on my time, even if my one vote, by itself, doesn't matter.
Is it the case that people don't have enough control over the government? As far as I can tell, we have exactly the government we want, or at least exactly the government you might expect to get in a compromise between rural middle America, suburbanites, christian conservatives, and urban yuppies.
The people who strongly oppose the security measures taken after 9/11 are in the minority. They were part of Obama's coalition, but were almost certainly outnumbered by teachers or blue collar factory workers. I bet if you polled the public, "NSA surveillance" wouldn't rank among the top 3 concerns of even a sizeable minority of the people.
So when the government engages in legal (at the edge of legality, to be sure, but at least colorably legal), and the people don't strongly oppose the measures, why do we treat it as some sort of failure of democracy?
See: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/rightof... ("The U. S. Constitution contains no express right to privacy. The Bill of Rights, however, reflects the concern of James Madison and other framers for protecting specific aspects of privacy, such as the privacy of beliefs (1st Amendment), privacy of the home against demands that it be used to house soldiers (3rd Amendment), privacy of the person and possessions as against unreasonable searches (4th Amendment), and the 5th Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination, which provides protection for the privacy of personal information.") (emphasis added).
The NSA's actions seem pretty precisely tailored to stay on the "right side" of the Constitutional line, avoiding the specific aspects of "privacy" protected by the Constitution.
It could still be regarded as a failure even if it is not a breach (and I hold no position on whether it is or isn't a breach).
Electronic communications were clearly not considered by the authors of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (understandably) but they were clearly trying trying to impose limits on the power of the state and I think the idea that the government should be allowed to track all of everyone's associations would have been abhorrent but that is the practical effect of the monitoring that has been revealed.
> Electronic communications were clearly not considered by the authors of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights
But they did have communications and publications, yet they didn't put anything in the Constitution suggesting you have a right to privacy with regards to those things. And it's not like bank records, insurance records, etc, didn't exist back then. In the founder's day, the police could have asked a barkeep for his records to see when you came and went. Why is it suddenly so "abhorrent" when the government asks AT&T for the same sort of information (i.e. not your information, but information AT&T keeps about you)?
The issue here is that all of these data sources are third parties.
> the police could have asked a barkeep for his records
Asked. Asked. And he could have said "come back with a warrant".
You continue to ignore the distinctions between:
* A party voluntarily cooperating with law enforcement.
* A party being coerced to cooperate with law enforcement by court order.
* A party being coerced to cooperate with law enforcement because law enforcement officers say so.
You keep insisting the government has a right to access any information someone reveals to a third party without a warrant, even if that third party did not intend to and does not wish to reveal it.
What precedent exists for this? If there is any at all (and this will be the third time I've asked you for it), does any of it pre-date 2001?
> Asked. Asked. And he could have said "come back with a warrant".
But if he said "here they are" or they came back with a warrant or a subpoena, there is nothing you could've done about it.
With regards to the NSA accessing call records, there is a warrant from the FISA court (which itself dates to 1978). In case of PRISM, there is voluntary cooperation by the companies involved. There is no indication that third parties are being coerced to cooperate just "because law enforcement officers say so."
The government accessing the information without the consent of the third party would be a 4th amendment violation, not of your rights, but of the third party's rights. But that's not happening here.
> But if he said "here they are" or they came back with a warrant or a subpoena, there is nothing you could've done about it.
Assuming lack of contract, absolutely correct. I've never disputed that, I don't think anyone else has, either. Have you been attacking a strawman all this time?
> With regards to the NSA accessing call records, there is a warrant from the FISA court
A very broad warrant. A general warrant. Precisely what the founders forbade in the 4th Amendment.
> In case of PRISM, there is voluntary cooperation by the companies involved.
I decline to speculate on what PRISM does or does not include, as the reporting right now is an unclear mess.
> There is no indication that third parties are being coerced to cooperate just "because law enforcement officers say so."
Since FISA obviously can't be trusted to provide meaningful oversight, I think the general warrant issued for the Verizon data qualifies.
> The government accessing the information without the consent of the third party would be a 4th amendment violation, not of your rights, but of the third party's rights.
I still haven't seen you cite any actual precedent explaining this.
> But that's not happening here.
The general warrant is an obvious 4th Amendment violation, whether it's violating Verizon's rights, their customers', or both.
NSLs are clearly "because law enforcement says so", so now I wonder, on what basis do you defend those?
What I like is that people don't know what surveillance means. it's a french word, and being french myself, I happen to know that it means to oversee, to control, as in work, or to monitor, as in a medical patient. I think people think of surveillance as simply passive, but in French, it has an active component, to rectify wrong events. To me, NSA surveillance means NSA monitoring for the purpose of control.
a compromise between rural middle America, suburbanites, christian conservatives, and urban yuppies
Left out a few parties there ray. What about the military-industrial complex? Don't they get a vote? (Maybe two or three?) What about all of those whose paychecks appear magically from "black" appropriations? How about LEOs? Are they not voting now? That would be a pretty sizable class to which to deny the franchise. You think the people who make house payments based on subverting the general welfare of the nation might be a bit more focused on what horrible program they can impose next than is "rural middle America"?
"Let's be clear" though. The current embarrassment is a paragon of "democracy".
The problem with voting is your choice is the lesser of two evils. If you dont vote, you're saying that the choices you are given aren't good enough and dont deserve your vote.
No, he most certainly was not. His point was that it didn't matter, and as we are seeing, it doesn't. You can vote for one of two flavors, but both of them taste like shit. You can go to the polling booth believing the fiction that your vote matters, but it does not. Nothing ever changes because both mainstream candidates are always essentially equivalent in most of the ways that really matter - they're always just two sides of the same shitty coin.
But it doesn't though. It's not like _not voting_ is doing anything to change the system. You're not legally required to vote, so even by just staying home, you're still part of the system. You're still a part of the game, even on the sidelines.
It's better to cast a protest vote. It is slightly easier to interpret protest votes (and realize "we might have won if") than it is to interpret non-votes.
Sorry, I strongly disagree. The people are not responsible for the actions of their representatives. That's the same logic that terrorists use to rationalize their attacking innocent civilians. It's also the same sort of "with us or against us" kind of thinking that he criticized Bush for.
At least voters are trying. They're trying to make the best of what they have. These people with day jobs, barely scraping by to support a family, take the time out of their day to try to make the country better instead of giving up and going home to avoid blame, like Carlin. And then he criticizes them. That irritates me.
Great, so he has solved his own problem of feeling responsible for what politicians do if he elects them. Now the only problem left is what politicians do.
I hate that attitude so much. Abstaining from voting is just lazy, it's not activism, in fact it's inactivism. You don't have to vote for the two major parties, if you can't find a candidate you like then at least show up and vote for yourself.
You have NO right to complain if you didn't vote. Not voting causes cronies like Obama to get in office. It was obvious from the start that Obama was going to multiple all of the evil Bush policies. By not voting you consented to that happening.
Nobody I've voted for in a Federal election has ever won that election. I often vote for third-party candidates with the knowledge that they have as good as zero chance of winning, but sometimes I vote for major-party candidates who seem mostly reasonable. None of them have ever won either.
I disagree, that's blaming the wrong people. The voters don't necessarily create any mess. In one way or another some politician will get into office, and sometimes people just have to choose between the lesser of the evils available.
If you don't vote there's nothing distinguishing your non-vote from that of an apathetic non-voter. At least go and vote for a non-Republicrat, or even just write in your own name...
Not to vote is a free choice, but with this you exclude yourself from the democratic process. You become a bystander and then indeed have no right to complain.
Look at Facebook, for instance. I'm seeing splinter social networks that generally rip off its UI so they can develop their special interest via their particular domain name. Let's look at a pessimistic utopia where Developer == Plumber: everything eventually becomes decentralized because of the dividing and conquering of the digital laborer. In an optimistic utopia where Developer == Artisan: everything eventually becomes decentralized because each small team or developer group manages some autonomous function of digital society.
None of this national stuff really matters unless we're talking about a Nation-state divided. In which cases, we're talking the worst case scenario, and any pretense that rational debate will absolve these architectural problems of "the State" fails to acknowledge the already unfit architecture of the State, wherein direct action is necessary.
'The unfitness of the object may cause one to overlook the unfitness of the means.'
