Susanna J. Sturgis   Martha's Vineyard writer and editor
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Sheep

July 06, 2007

"Here's a riddle: What's an "independent"? More and more, it's an American who holds positions we associate with Democrats but who refuses to call himself by the name."*

That would be me, at least when I'm registered to vote -- except that I'm not a "him." I cast my first vote for president in 1972. Bill Clinton, in 1992, was the first presidential candidate I voted for who actually got elected. Trouble was, the guy I voted for wasn't the one who moved into the White House and took the oath of office. Still, holding my nose, I voted for him again in 1996. Never, ever again will I vote for anyone I don't trust or agree with just because the other candidate is worse. I bet there are a few million people out there who feel about Bush II the way I felt about Clinton: that isn't the guy I voted for. Voting, at least in national and statewide elections, is like a religious ritual, like going to services or taking communion. If you don't have faith, it's pretty meaningless. And there are plenty of other ways to work for change.

Entities as big as countries, or even fairly small towns, don't "swing to the right (or left)" or "become much more socially conservative (or liberal)" overnight, or even over a year or two. Those who specialize in reading sacrificial entrails (in this country we call them "polls" or "election results") mistake the glints on the surface for what's happening in the depths of a great body of water. Those who rant on and on about how the entire citizenry is a flock of sheep are just as wrong.

Once upon a time, when I was a devout (dare I say "dogmatic"?) practitioner of Electoralinanity (which, truth be known, probably has as many adherents as any other religion practiced in the U.S.), I believed something similar. I thought that if I knew how a person had voted, or if s/he hadn't voted at all, I knew something significant about that person's beliefs and values. Have since learned (over and over and over) that this is crap. As far as I can tell, how we vote has as much to do with how the people around us are voting as it does with anything else: either we vote like them because they're like us, or we vote the opposite to show our independence. (When everyone in the vicinity is sporting a Kerry button, it may well be the person with the Bush bumper sticker who's the least sheep-ish of the flock.)

There is a famous Washington story, perhaps apocryphal, about jovial, "all politics is local" Tip O'Neill. After his first run for local office, O'Neill was gabbing with a neighbor, perhaps someone he grew up with, with whose family his was entirely interlaced in that Boston, Irish Catholic way. He asked if she had voted for him. She answered, "No." Shocked, Tip demanded to know why. "Because you never asked," she replied.

I love that story. Even if it's apocryphal, it's true. I also appreciate the reminder about Reagan and Berkeley:

More and more I find myself telling a story I consider the key to understanding modern American political history: that of Ronald Reagan's 1966 California gubernatorial campaign. His expensive, top-drawer consultants had hired a company formed by psychology PhDs who promised that Reagan's would be the first campaign run "as a problem in human behavior." Many liberal interpreters of Reagan's career have pointed to this to suggest that he was plastic, or a pawn, or a manipulator of voters. Not so. In fact, he was the opposite. One of the first things he did was tell all these fancy pollsters to shut up. In his early, exploratory campaigning, he'd been attacking the insolence of insurgent Berkeley students -- who "should have been taken by the scruff of the neck and thrown out of the university once and for all." His consultants told him to knock it off, pointing to their data: Berkeley didn't even show up as an issue. Reagan threw the polls back in their faces . . .

Reagan followed his heart, of course, made Berkeley his signature issue and thumped Edmund Brown in one of the greatest upsets in modern political history . . .

As a student antiwar activist in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I knew the names of all the Free Speech Movement leaders. They were the trailblazers for me and my friends. Of course Reagan and everyone who voted for him were counterrevolutionary scum. Over the many years since then I've developed another take on the situation; it hasn't replaced the one I had when I was 18 or 20, but it runs alongside it, argues with it, and points out its flaws. That older, wiser view notices not just the expressed politics of liberals, progressives, and leftists; it also notices their attitude toward those of us who have had different opportunities and made different choices and (in many cases) are struggling hard to just get by. The short version is "If you insult me and show no interest in listening to what I have to say, I don't want to be part of your revolution."

* * *

* The above was inspired by "Will the Progressive Majority Emerge?," by Rick Perlstein. It was first published in The Nation and posted to AlterNet on the Fourth of July. That's where the opening quote and the two subsequent indented quotes come from. Italics mine; I'm just a girl who likes to fuss with fonts.

 

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