From: dalec@socrates.berkeley.edu
Date: Tue Sep 10 2002 - 20:06:43 MDT
On Tue, 10 Sep 2002, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
> dalec@socrates.berkeley.edu
>
> [Harvey's] is a properly political practice. I suspect that he
> is open to being convinced by a better argument to change any single one
> of the positions he delineated. To accuse him of cowardice when he is
> being realistic, is just to abjure the political in favor of a
> prepolitical stance that values moral or esthetic ideals over the fact
> that other people with real differences actually exist and must be engaged
> with as peers however unappealing one finds the practice.
>
> ### But isn't there something to be said about the virtue of abstention?
I don't doubt there is something to be said for abstention, but I doubt
what can be said is particularly political -- as opposed to the kind of
ethical or esthetic thrill that sometimes accompanies choices of purity or
"principle" over practicality in circumstances like these. I've been
voting for nearly two decades and cannot remember a single vote at any
level of institutional generality that did NOT feel like it could be
properly described to some extent as a vote for "the lesser of two evils".
Nevertheless, I have thought long and hard about my votes and usually am
satisfied I have made the right choices. And this of course includes
political activities beyond the sphere of voting -- so too I have agonized
over signatures on petitions for which the wording was a tad troubling, I
have made common cause with individuals I would not seek the company of as
friends, I have participated in activism for different reasons than those
expressed all around me. These sorts of complexities seem fairly typical
of political life to me. Maybe it's because I'm an atheistic
anti-authoritarian technophilic queer vegetarian viridian green, but
honestly I rarely find or expect universal assent when I wend my way to
the public square. This doesn't keep me from collaborating with my peers
in making a better future.
> Voting Democratic (or Republican), means, if you are truly a libertarian,
> forgoing a long term, if uncertain gain, a libertarian state, in favor of
> minor short term gains.
Not to belabor the obvious, but if one is speaking of a "libertarian
state" and voting for "libertarian candidates," one should already be
alive to the notion that the political is definitively about
compromise.
Best, Dale
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