[Xmca-l] Re: Why I Won't Vote for Sanders

[Andy Blunden]

If I had a vote in the US, I'd vote for Sanders, for his 
character and his policies.
But not "because I agreed with his policies" - Goodness, in 
the Australian context his policies are right-wing! But in 
the American context, his campaign has proved to be 
transformative. Millions of young people are deciding not to 
follow their old Socialist parents and stand on the side 
lines waiting for the Messiah to fix American politics 
before they become engaged. A Sanders Presidency would 
likely not achieve a single one of his policies (so Bernie 
tells us) but it would be even more transformative.'
Nor would I vote for Sanders because like me he's an old 
man. Lots of young women in the US are voting for Bernie 
though, because of his policies. Fortunately this generation 
seems also to be breaking from their grandparents' idea of 
voting for someone because of the candidate's personal 
characteristics. The candidate's honesty and authenticity 
however seems to count for them. A ray of light!
It is a great pity, that the way politics has developed in 
the US is that you can't advocate for the poor against the 
rich, without this coming a across as a "dog whistle" 
against women and "minorities." And you can't advocate 
against racism, without this being taken as an attack on 
"white" workers. And that US Blacks on the whole vote en 
masse for the candidate who is supported by Wall Street. 
These divisions are sooo deeply engrained.
In Australia, I will not be voting for the Socialist 
Alliance, even though many of them are personal friends, for 
reasons I feel it would be unseemly to spell out, but for 
the Greens, who have found a way to "connect" with masses of 
people in a progressive direction and break the working 
class from the ALP, I want to be part of that.
Voting is a practical action, not filling out a survey.
Andy
------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden* http://home.mira.net/~andy
http://www.brill.com/products/book/origins-collective-decision-making 

On 23/04/2016 8:38 AM, David Kellogg wrote:
> Although I haven't lived in the USA since 1980, I am still an American
> citizen; every year I file my income taxes, and every four years I
> dutifully vote in presidential elections. This is because I think of
> elections as civil war carried on by other means: it's what happens to
> politics in non-revolutionary periods, and I want to be a part of it, just
> as I would like to a part of politics during revolutionary developments.
>
> Like many people on this list, I am a socialist, and I don't want to see
> socialism disappear as a remote but real choice in political life. So I
> usually vote for some extreme left wing party like the Socialist Workers
> Party. There are many things I dislike about the SWP, but I like the fact
> that they actually run candidates who are not US born, and who would be
> constitutionally disqualified from becoming president; they are actually
> running not just against the other parties but against the US Constitution.
> I also like the fact that they ran a black man against Obama; they
> correctly understood that Obama was a conservative politician, that
> conservative hatred of Obama was therefore racial and not political they
> saw that this was a clear way of trying to introduce politics into the
> discussion again.
>
> But why not vote for Bernie, as Andy would if he were an American? Well,
> for one thing, I don't agree with his policies. For example, I am not in
> favour of "breaking up the banks": I am in favour of nationalizing them
> under workers control, and that's something very different--"breaking up
> the banks" is actually a step in the opposite direction. I certainly do not
> agree that the USA should be at war with "ISIS", in alliance with Israel,
> or in support of South Korea, all of which Bernie believes.
>
> But precisely because elections are really civil wars carried on by other
> means, I don't think disagreeing with a candidate's politics is enough to
> disqualify voting for them. After all, I don't agree with the SWP's
> policies of "tax the rich" for the same reason I don't agree with Bernie's
> policies on banking and I still, reluctantly, vote for them. If I woke up
> in a one party state (say, North Korea, or Texas), I would have to say that
> on most social issues (health care, tax breaks, social security) and even
> foreign policy issues (Iraq, Libya, Syria) I am a lot closer to Donald
> Trump than to Ted Cruz, but I would still refuse to get out of bed and vote
> for him.
>
> And that's the real reason I won't vote for Sanders. He's a Democrat. I
> know, he says he's "independent", and a "socialist"...and similarly, Donald
> Trump says that being a lubricious lump of demagogic white lard is all just
> an act, and he intends to behave like starched shirt in a stuffed suit just
> as soon as he gets elected, I am confident that President Sanders means to
> do exactly the same. But Sanders is running on a ticket, and that ticket is
> the party of the Confederacy, of Jim Crow, of the Treaty of Versailles, of
> Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of Vietnam and above all of the indiscriminate
> slaughter that was the obliteration from the air of every standing building
> in Korea and all of the people in it. Until there is a real reckoning for
> every single one of those atrocities, I will never ever vote for a Democrat
> of any stripe. To do so is to give up our only real chance for change--a
> working party for working people.
>
> So I will vote for some far left candidate in November, and I will continue
> to do so until they actually win, i.e. forever. What was it Eugene V. Debs
> said? Better to vote for what you want and not get it, than to vote for
> what you don't want and get it.
>
> David Kellogg
> Macquarie University
>
> PS: On the "other" question: that is, the question of manologues; I note
> three curious and I think very closely related facts:
>
> a) Bernie is running against a woman--but this is correctly seen as
> irrelevant. I think we can thank Republicans like Condi Rice,  Herman Cain,
> Ben Carson for the death of all sorts of silly tokenisms. The Republicans
> always knew that skin was just skin deep.
>
> b) Prince just died. He is the SECOND dead person this year (after David
> Bowie) to build a tremendously successful career by "bisexually" flirting
> with gay and straight audiences and then politically betraying gay people
> in their struggle. When people do this in racial or gender politics, it is
> rightly condemned; somehow it's considered brilliantly shape-shifting and
> gender-fluid and cool to do it with sexuality and in pop music.
>
> c) There ARE real discussions of politics AND ideas about mind, culture
> and human activity going on right here on the list right now. I think that
> carefully purging our psychology of the sexist notions of Freud and the
> racist ideas of Kardiner, no matter how they are disguised in the work of
> Merleau-Ponty, is a more real, if somewhat nerdier and hence less cool, way
> to pursue these discussions than simply purging our ranks of white male
> voices. We need to get beneath the skin of these questions and even beneath
> the shifting alliances and policies and look at their ideological
> essences. By doing that, we will find the issues that Annalisa is raising,
> but we will find them as real issues of mind, culture, and activity and not
> as mere styles and stances.
>
> dk
>