I wholeheartedly endorse Jim Henley’s endorsement of the Libertarian Party candidate, who just happens to be Michael Badnarik, for what it’s worth. Radley and Megan must explain (“must explain” in the sense of “need to explain in order to satsify Will Wilkinson’s curiousity”) why Jim is wrong.

I especially like Jim’s point about the direction of causation for the LP: not lack of votes because of lack of good candidates, but lack of good candidates because of lack of votes.

A thought: Could it be that the sort of person likely to be “intimidated” out of voting isn’t in general the sort of person who you want to be voting?

A lot of the coverage, both formal and informal, of the forthcoming apocalypse in Ohio strikes me as implicitly accepting a really quite stupid bit of democratic romanticism: that it is better that 100 illegitimate votes be counted than to let one legitimate vote go uncounted.

The implicit picture is that voting is a sort of magical expression of citizenship that mystically confers “legitimacy” upon democratically decided results. If some citizens vote, but have their votes tossed out, or if some citizens decide it is too much hassle to get to the polls, then each lost vote is a drop drained from the bucket of legitimacy.

This is an utterly bizzare way of looking at democratic legitimacy, but seems to be part of the civics course democracy catechism, about which journalists especially pretend to be devout. This is why we hear cries of lament if there is low voter turnout. How can democracy be the people’s authentic voice if the people refuse to speak! How can we frolic in the sparkling waters of democracy if the bucket of legitimacy is but half full?

The strange thing is that the press seems to treat illegitimate votes as a kind of noise, a kind of tolerable if unfortunate democratic static, while intimidated no-shows are a travesty against all that is holy. Yet, and this should be obvious, in terms of the aggregative democratic procedure, an unnoticed illegal vote for one guy (in a two horse race) is EXACTLY EQUIVALENT to scaring off a voter for the other guy.

If somebody’s dog manages to vote for John Kerry, then, in effect, Velma Thompson (or whomever) failed to vote for that nice man, George W. Bush, even though she tried. Whiskers cancels out Velma. Here’s another way to make the same point. Each Bush vote is paired with a Kerry vote and they’re both thrown away. The winner is the one who has votes left on the table after all the other guy’s votes have been chucked. Pairing legitimate voters with voting felons, dogs, corpses, and Frenchmen has precisely the same effect on the outcome as shooting legitimate voters before they can get in the door of the high school gym.

Republican vigilance about keeping illegal voters from voting is democratically equivalent to Democratic vigilance against Republican attempts to suppress the legal vote. Republican vigilance has the semi-intended side-effect of suppressing likely Democratic votes. And huge Democratic registration and GOTV drives have the semi-intended side-effect of canceling out a large number of Republican votes with illegal ballots. I bet I can tell from your party affiliation which you think is worse.

The press, as far as I can tell, seems to think Republican vigilance is worse. If one has the popular magical view of democratic legitimacy, Velma’s participation itself sprinkles a bit of fairy dust of legitimacy on the entire proceedings. Voting dogs, lacking the relevant legal status, have no fairy dust to contribute, but their votes don’t take any fairy dust away. Velma expressed herself, that’s what matters, and you can’t take that away! Because we want the MAXIMUM AMOUNT OF DEMOCRATIC FAIRY DUST, we shouldn’t complain if a huge turnout, and a huge amount of fairy dust, also entails a sizable turnout of the dead, canine, and alien. And, anyway, why shouldn’t their votes count?

Eric Alterman’s series on the devious, conspiratorial funding of “right wing” organizations is a great example of the left’s misguided retardo-Marxist cui bono obsession. It absolutely mystifies me why the left spends so much energy tracking down funding sources of the right. I always detect in these things a ostrich-like refusal to seriously engage the fact that the left has for the last 20 years been getting its ass handed to it intellectually.

This is so noxious to the left’s self-image that they can do nothing but go deep into denial, and complain incessantly about, what? . . . Just how smart those the right-wing plutocrats are? Concede relative strategic incompetence in order to preserve the illusion of the moral/intellectual high ground? I really don’t get it. What, really, is the point of this stuff?

(I mean, think about it this way: if I was paid to kick Eric Alterman’s ass, but I had very much wanted to kick Alterman’s ass anyway, and I proceeded to kick Alterman’s ass, Alterman’s pointing out that I was paid to kick his ass neither shows that I wouldn’t have kicked his ass if I hadn’t been paid, nor that his ass wasn’t, in fact, kicked, nor that Alterman could have kicked my ass if only he had been paid. So why bring it up? Does it make him feel better? [By the way, I do not, in fact, have any desire to kick Alterman's ass.])

The best I can do for Alterman is to see him indirectly prodding left-wing plutocrats to give more money to people like Eric Alterman. Alterman seems fairly non-plussed that Charles Murray gets so much money from the Bradley Foundation. If only Eric Alterman could be paid so well!

But, of course, one Charles Murray is worth a dozen Altermans in intellectual terms, no matter how much you pay him. The fascinating thing about a guy like Murray is just how independent a mind he is. He’s very much his own man. He’s too libertarian for conservatives; he’s too conservative for libertarians. His concern for the poor and the conditions necessary for a meaningful life are deep, genuine, remarkably sensitive and, yes, relatively non-ideological. By comparison, a guy like Alterman is an ideologue you can set your watch by. The point being, that you can’t explain much about Charles Murray by looking at the signatures on his paychecks. The signatures tell you rather more about the tastes of the folks who sign them.

I’m reminded of Michael Novak’s characterization of the left’s reaction to The Bell Curve:

the message cannot be true, because much more is at stake than a particular set of arguments from psychological science. A this-worldly eschatological hope is at stake. The sin attributed to Herrnstein and Murray is theological: they destroy hope.

The thing to remember is that there is more than one faith-based community. Alterman’s assumption is that he who has the funding, he who controls the media, controls political reality. The “right-wing” foundations and tanks have been using their power to replace our theology for theirs. So we’ve got to understand how they do this, how the right constructs reality, so we can beat them at their game. Because we know in advance that it can’t be the arguments. Charles Murray couldn’t possibly be right.

This is the sort of annoying my-party-is-pure-as-the-driven-snow their-party-stinks-of-sulfur attitude that I was complaining about below.
Lindsay bitches about GOP voter suppression in Ohio. I don’t believe I remember her complaining (correct me if I’m wrong) about DNC voter suppression (successful or not) in every state in which they tried to cripple democracy by sueing Nader off the ballot. (If I ever hear high-toned democracy rhetoric from Larry Tribe, I’ll throw up a little in my mouth.) Second, Lindsay simply assumes that stationing people in polling places to challenge fraudulent voters from voting is an ploy to suppress Democratic votes. But why not assume instead, or in addition, that the huge Democratic voter-registration drives really were riddled with malfeasance. Indeed, I assume both. The Democrats have been signing up dead people, felons and non-citizens in an attempt to steal the vote. The Republicans want to stop Democrats from stealing the vote, and so want to guard against dead and illegal voters, and, as a bonus, to suppress the legitimate Democratic vote–in an attempt to steal the vote.

Now, I want to emphasize that I don’t think any of these shenanigans even approaches the seriousness of the DNC’s effort to make it impossible for American citizens to vote for a candidate who represents their views.

The left likes to wax elegaic about the “sanctity of democracy” and the “integrity of the democratic process,” especially when Republican schemes to supress the minority vote are afoot. Yet, in terms of the sanctity of democracy, the Democrat’s concerted assasination of the Nader campaign is no better than stationing a Klansman, an INS officer, and and a dozen Nazi alsatians at the door of each polling place.

But I’ve yet to encounter anyone on the mainstream left who is even a skoche guilty about this utter travesty of democracy. Fuckers. The notion that Nader votes belong to the Democrats is so obnoxiously offensive that I can only wish that Nader voters who, thanks to the Democrats, are unable to find Nader on their ballot, vote instead for Michael Badnarik, constitutional scholar, and champion of the people. Or, to put a fine “fuck you” on it, George W. Bush.