Saturday, August 11, 2007
(5:13 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
"Vote Accordingly"
We all know what we can do to become politically involved. The easiest way is of course to blog, becoming a kind of armchair editorialist and media critic, helping our comrades to keep informed. Similarly, one can write letters to the editor or even op-eds, to make one's convictions heard in the public sphere. One should also make sure to stay informed about the issues that matter most and vote accordingly -- perhaps even going so far as to donate money or time to campaigns. And when a big vote is coming up, it is one's civic duty to write to politicians, encouraging them to vote the right way.All of these methods of political involvement are widely discussed on blogs, and the blogosphere has probably led to more political involvement among young people in this sense. That is all to the good. Yet something is missing here -- namely, the idea of actually running for office. There are all kinds of practical reasons why people don't often talk about running for office, but I think that the total absense of the topic from the conversation is deeply symptomatic of the utter passivity of our political culture. Everything is about the choice between the options that are presented to us. When the Republican/Democrat dichotomy doesn't work well enough, there might be talk of "supporting a primary challenger" -- but hardly anyone will even jokingly say something like "Hell, I'll run against the guy myself if that's what it takes." People who complain about the range of choices tend to be derided as naive Naderites, who will one day likely betray the better of the two realistic options in our professional political class.
To extrapolate from the existing pattern, it seems that even if the "netroots" started directly producing candidates rather than simply funnelling support to candidates who already exist, the implicit goal wouldn't be directly to take power, but to put pressure on the "real" politicians. The idea of actually intervening in a way that might alter the coordinates -- even on the comparatively minor level of attempting to insert oneself into the system -- is radically absent from anyone's mind. Instead, all political activity falls within the basic frame of the informed observer. We might offer occasional feedback, but we remain essentially spectators.
