I can choose between 180 channels on my television, 170 stations on my satellite radio, 10,000 books at my local bookstore, and millions of blogs on the internet. But on my ballot I have only two real choices. I can vote for a Democrat or I can vote for a Republican.
As divisive as politics can be, nothing else has such power to unite our nation.
Chances are that you don't watch the same television shows, listen to the same music, or attend the same concerts as your neighbors. In the 1950s, if you lived in Green Bay, you rooted for the Packers, just like everyone else in Wisconsin. Now, with satellite broadcast, if you live in Green Bay, your favorite football team could be Manchester United.
But in electoral politics you are forced to choose between the two dominant political parties. (Other parties are listed on a ballot but the choice is still effectively limited to the two major parties.) Whether you are a neo-Marxist, a Great Society liberal, or a Clinton-esque centrist, a theocratic Dominionist, a Russell Kirk conservative, or a socially liberal libertarian, your choice of parties is limited to the Democrats or the Republicans. You may be choosing nothing more than the lesser of two evils—a Beelzebub rather than a Lucifer—but in making the choice you are banding together with others of varying degrees of unanimity.
This is not to say that such unity is positive or can be used to good effect. In this case, I believe it is neither. Conservatives often scoffed at the political left’s deranged hatred of George W. Bush. Yet such raw emotion and focused animosity had an incredible ability to unite divergent factions within the Democratic Party. Now the same animosity toward Barack Obama is bringing together the fractious factions of the Right.
This unity in hatred does illustrate, though, the power that electoral politics can have binding an otherwise fragmented culture. It may lead to greater unity and friendlier relations in other areas of life—ironically, just because political differences matter so much.
Most of the choices we mmake we make in private and they affect other people, if at all, only indirectly. If I buy coffee at Dunkin Donuts rather than Starbucks, my choice has only a negligible economic impact and a statistically insignificant effect on your life. Even if millions of people choose Dunkin Donuts, their choice will not—unless you own stock in Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks—make much difference to you personally.
Political choices are different. My vote may be statistically insignificant but millions of people voting like me can change your life. You have a stake in my choice and therefore have more incentive to voice your opinion in the hope of confirming or changing it. This provides us a reason to engage and interact, even if we have nothing at all in common.
This is an admittedly thin thread for binding together a nation as diverse as ours. But just like a spider's web, the web of electoral politics is composed of fine threads that are surprisingly strong and elastic.
There are two reasons that this thin but durable thread of unity in political argument is important. First, a diverse nation needs to find common ground on which it can meet—even if it's only ground on which to argue. The argument itself requires and encourages not only shared concerns but shared values: a desire for the common good, for example, and some broadly agreed definitions of what that common good is, or at least the desire to argue over the definition.
Second, the clash of views often leads to discussion of other interests and topics. Liberals who come to this site to disagree with our writer's political views often find themselves engrossed in debates on cultural and religious issues as well.
Whether we find ourselves in disagreement or in harmony, in serious political argument we invariably find out more about other people than we otherwise would have done. We come to debate narrow political topics and leave knowing more than we did, not only about the issues, but about those with whom we are arguing and about the world we share.
It may not be much. Often the arguments will shed a lot more heat than light on the issues we were arguing about. Often that heat will burn. But in a nation of choices, where we can narrowcast our way past our neighbors, we need to find something that we have in common.
Addendum on Third Parties: Casting a “protest” vote for third-party candidates is essentially casting a vote for the major party you like the least. For example, say you prefer the Democrats to the Republicans but vote for the Green Party candidate. Since the Green candidate will not win, your vote effectively reduces the vote for the Democratic candidate (your second favorite choice) by one.
Joe Carter is web editor of First Things. His previous articles for “On the Square” can be found here.
Comments:
Get well soon!
When I vote for someone I like best, who isn't of either party, I'm expressing that they are the candidate I like best. Nothing more nothing less. Particularly if the alternative is just not voting at all.
Voting third party expresses my frustrations with each party. They will not get my vote unless they change. If they want my vote, that's what they'll have to do. Simply voting for them will not cause them to change. Voting third party is not a waste of a vote, it makes your voice that much louder.
the vote in this country is a joke. If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it (a well-known man once quipped.)
As long as welfare recipients can vote themselves a raise, as long as young ignorant college students can vote while wearing a "yes we can" t-shirt, as long as those who practically pay zero taxes can vote, as long as my elderly non-cable-television-viewing, non-internet-reading grandparents continue to be misinformed by prime-time network television & nightly news, the vote in this country will always be a joke.
there's a time for love, and a time for hate and the only thing i hate is the intolerance of the so-called tolerant. ...how about uniting against them?
so, with a half smile, let's go push our rigged voting machine buttons then have a stiff drink and watch the ship go down...
If one steps back and looks at elections in other countries, I think our perspective on what happens here changes. The countries with the greatest variety of parties are not the most stable, nor do they have the best government. Countries with three parties, or even four, do alright and may offer a better alternative than two. But perhaps not. Our stability in America may in some measure depend on the fact that our compromises bringing us down to two parties, so no one is willing to take to the streets and shed blood. We may hate the Other Side, but a large percentage of people who vote for Our Side do so half-heartedly - such people are unlikely to take up arms to enforce their opinion.
I agree that voting is more than numbers. It is participation, and the symbolic features are important in a representative government. But we need to be clear what we are doing when we cast a symbolic vote - we are betting that the power of that symbol will offset the loss of numbers. It is a calculation, and casting it entirely in moral terms has a way of disguising our true intent from ourselves. It is a strategy we use because we think it will work. For evidence of this, note the comments of third-partiers on this thread. The righteous indignation (which I approve of, BTW - I'm not making fun of it) is put forward as the only reason. Yet immediately, the idea that this will work and parties will listen slips right in.
Consider also in foreign countries who they have to vote for - far less attractive candidates than here. Do we tell all the sensible people in Ukraine to vote for parties with no chance of winning because the main two are so flawed? Then why would we do so here?
We are not "forced to choose" between only two political parties; we insisted it be that way. The founders allowed it to organically develop that way from the earliest days as soon as the unique figure of Washington departed the stage (and even before then, behind the scenes). Why did it develop into a binary system? Because that is the simplest. It bridges the constitutional (foundational) with the practical (political) with as few intermediary institutions as possible. The parties must be more than one for choice to exist. They must be less than three for maximum simplicity.
To distill the multitude of preference into the unity required for action, the parties first refine their priorities among their colleagues and collectively decide which preferences will lead the party effort. Third parties will never, ever exist in this country because of the malleability of the existing ones. One will disappear and another will step in to complete the symbiosis (such as in last year's NY-10 race between the Democrat and the Conservative). The dynamic does not afford room for three.
But, in exploring the contours of this dynamic, Mr. Carter is missing the larger phenomenon. Yes, political arrangements must largely be assembled negatively, but cultural and foundational arrangements must be sustained positively -- what principles and ideas we are for rather than what we are against. There must be consensus or near unanimity about what the republic is and what the culture will tolerate. These matters cannot be voted on, passed by simple majorities, and forgotten (cf. Roe). They will fester, and in festering, corrode our foundations.
Which is why it is a mistake to attempt cultural change through political processes. A tyranny of the majority solves nothing for very long. The culture must be persuaded into supermajorities rather than minorities coerced into contrary positions by political fiat. The mechanism of politics ends in legal coercion. The culture, on the other hand, is about quiet and gradual and individual persuasion yielding a certain general environment. Our politics must be a reflection of that cultural consensus, achieved through private and extra-political salesmanship, and there is no going around that frustratingly long process, though the temptation is always there for all parties: we were united enough to elect this guy, let's keep going and elect a new culture!
Now comes the tricky part. *This idea of cultural consensus above politics is itself foundational.* Our current crisis of deep partisanship is founded on the recent fracturing of such a foundation we had theretofore taken for granted. It cannot be solved by tweaking the party dynamic. It can only be solved by a return to foundational consensus.
Not coincidentally, this is the mission that spontaneously organized itself into the Tea Party, which is no political "party" at all but rather a primordial force that has nothing to do with formal partisanship. (The semantics of "party" makes this especially confusing: one connotation is an ironic gathering, a "festivity," as in birthday party, while the other connotation of the word is formal political "alliance," as in Republican Party. Don't underestimate the power of this confusion!)
We make the mistake of misapprehending a cultural and foundational force like the Tea Party as just another political phenomenon, like environmentalists registering Green. The only way for us to sustain "unity by our differences" is to repair the rupture in our foundational agreement, which cannot be done politically, and Mr. Carter seems to be taking this sustainment for granted. The crisis remains cultural because a substantial but influential minority, ensconced in positions that afford them outsized cultural power (enough to install a president, congress, and judiciary to exercise their will) have walked away from this foundational agreement.
Achieving nominal control through party mechanisms will not solve a problem like judges nullifying hard-fought political agreements by proclamation, such as redefining marriage, Arizona immigration, and most recently, Don't Ask Don't Tell. It will require a watershed change in the culture.
Also others reminded me that I think there are cases where both major party candidates are equally bad or the difference is so minimal it's irrelevant. If the Republican is Pro-Choice and favors cutting off welfare after the fourth kid (I seem to recall a Republican like that) while the Democrat is Pro-Choice and favors assisted suicide what do you do?
