Catholic and Enjoying It!
is, surprisingly, conservative. It actually allows a diversity of opinion and is not just a search for heretics and a bullhorn for herding the masses into lockstep with Movement Conservatism (crony capitalism and warmongering with an Evangelical-flavored veneer) like FOX. Here’s a fun little piece by some guy whose politics I don’t completely track with (I don’t support Johnson), but who gets that the problem is not Left vs. Right, but our Ruling Class vs. the Rest of Us:
In his memoir If You Don’t Weaken (1940), Oscar Ameringer, witty and humane radical from the erstwhile hotbed of American socialism, Oklahoma (it really was!), professed a “rule of never voting for a presidential candidate who had the slightest chance of election. The ballot is too precious lightly to be thrown away on candidates selected and financed by the ‘angels’ and archangels of the two historic old parties which have managed my adopted country into the condition it is in today.”
Oscar’s statute remains sound. We are facing in 2012 the worst Democrat-Republican twosome since, uh, 2008? 2004? 2000? I detect a pattern.
A state’s electoral votes have never been decided by a single popular vote, so as history is our guide your vote for president does not matter.
Choose not between two evils: the candidate of crony capitalism and war with Iran or the candidate of crony socialism and smug anti-Catholicism. Groove instead to the old Prohibition Party hit: “I’d rather be right than president/I want my conscience clear.”
Strategic voting is for Board of Education or City Council elections in which you and your franchise actually matter. As a citizen, you can play a role, even an essential role, in the affairs of your place. But as a subject of the Empire, you count for nothing. You’re not even a brick in the wall in our quadrennial king-making charades.
So cast your ballot to satisfy your conscience. Obey the injunction of John Quincy Adams (whose son, Charles Francis Adams, bolted the Whigs to serve as Martin Van Buren’s running mate on the 1848 Free Soil ticket): “Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.” That might serve as an epitaph to Ron Paul’s congressional career.
Vote for the Doomed Quixotic Candidate of your choice, but vote!
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