Electing Integrity over Party
Citizen Zeus has entered and left the voting booth, and you'll never guess what he found...
… his own moral agency and integrity.
Until someone comes along that merits an actual vote of confidence, I am going to leave all morally-blank candidates blank.
I’ve done what I threatened to do… this time after moving back to my childhood growing-up area of Central Ohio. I’ve spurned every political pitch, refused to donate a cent to either political party (after putting massive time, effort, and money for Bernie Sanders in 2020). The Republicans have failed. The Democrats have failed. The Progressives have failed. Heck, even the Libertarians have failed. The major parties, Democratic and Republican, are completely beholden to predatory, unaccountable multinational corporations and the minor caucuses, Progressive and Libertarian, seem to have no influence whatsoever. So where’s the suspense? Why vote at all? Why not kick up your feet and utter a pox on both their houses?
I found a different kind of reason to vote, a different kind of non-violent civil dissent. I marched in and left every Republican and Democratic office blank, and I wrote in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wherever I could. This is part of my promise to myself to never vote for the lesser of two evils when those two evils are racing for the moral bottom. Ohio’s U.S. Senate candidate, JD Vance thinks an embryo is a baby and that there ought to be no abortion exceptions period. His opponent, neo-liberal Tim Ryan (as bland as they come), thinks “my body, my choice” only applies to pregnant women’s medical choice for abortion, but apparently not to her medical choice to refuse possibly pregnancy-affecting experimental injections into her arms.
My excursion also brought me face to face with my fellow voters in uber-liberal Clintonville, a Columbus neighborhood just north of the Ohio State campus in Columbus, Ohio. The voting line was uncharacteristically long, but part of this was slower machines and a lot of initiatives and bond measures on the ballot. But I believe the numbers of voters will be significantly above average for a midterm election.
It will probably wash out with a small to medium-sized victory for Republicans in both the United States Senate and House of Representatives. The landslide I predicted has been notably complicated by overreach from both sides, Republicans (abortion bans) and Democrats (vaccine and mask mandates). When this happens, voters tend to moderate toward a smaller, mixed message, so as to not “reward” either party. My own reasoning was that vaccine and mask mandates, school closings, lockdowns, business closures, etc. made a much deeper impact on the lived lives of people. Therefore, it would have proportionally more weight at the ballot box. We shall see.
I was intrigued at the stakes. Almost everything now seems cast entirely in identity politics— Team Blue or Team Red politically. When stopping at Penzey’s to get some spices not far from where I live, I was “treated” to quite the swag bag— free spices AND a mug— with recipes along with a reminder about the January 6th storming of the Capitol building. I guess you may need the soothing spices to contemplate violence?
I couldn’t help thinking that all of this was so “virtual”: Identity-driven, virtue-signaling voters, “electing” sock puppet politicians, to enact a pantomime of policy. Research shows policy almost NEVER responds to the actual needs of ordinary citizens, but rather to the desires of moneyed special interests, who often end up literally writing the legislative bills to advantage themselves or exploit citizens for profit and power.
Professors Martin Gilens (Princeton University) and Benjamin I. Page (Northwestern University) looked at more than 20 years worth of data to answer a simple question: Does the government represent the people?
Their study took data from nearly 2000 public opinion surveys and compared it to the policies that ended up becoming law. In other words, they compared what the public wanted to what the government actually did. What they found was extremely unsettling: The opinions of 90% of Americans have essentially no impact at all.
The article concluded that “Nearly every issue we face as a nation is caught in the grip of corruption,” and that corruption runs deep not simply in the U.S. but around the world, including within the increasingly siloed, self-serving, and centralized governance entities controlling European economies and societies.
So why do I actually feel good about all this? Because even if we learn slow, and even if we learn hard, I believe we will learn well enough as citizens. Look at our instruction: First we had a neo-liberal out-of-touch Hillary Clinton losing to a brute (by any measure), Donald Trump, who promptly wrecked the Republican Party and handed it to the winds of irrationality, bombast, and a kind of fanatical triumphalism.
Then he got smoked by a guy, Joe Biden, who never really campaigned and finished an astounding fifth in the New Hampshire primary behind Amy Clobuchar. Joe became the “dead cat” that anyone would elect to get rid of the orange-haired wrecking crew.
Then Biden did Trump one better by delivering on absolutely nothing he promised, selling out American people to corporation lock-stock-and-barrel, and imposing the very mask and vaccine mandates he promised to avoid AFTER these mandates had been found scientifically to be completely ineffective at stopping infection and transmission. Tens of thousands of people have died as a result of these corrupt actions and millions have been injured.
Who would vote for either if they ran against each other? I won’t!
I’ll be writing in RFK Jr.
Yes, the world has kind of lost it, but is there a silver lining? I think we are witnessing the necessary loss of faith in the institutions that have given life structure and meaning at the cost of our own agency, critical thinking, creativity, and compassion for one another. First it was civic clubs, then churches, then political parties, and then even communities as people were uprooted from each other amid Covid isolation. There is a fertile trauma in all this. We know we can’t go back, but we don’t know what to go forward to, and we don’t know what can be used temporarily to fill the space. So like confused children we are grabbing at fantasies and tropes to substitute for the real pith of challenging growth.
We will eventually learn by the collapse of Trumpian neo-conservatism and Q-Anon crazy (pedophiles and pizza parlors), as well as the implosion of a hollow Biden-led neo-liberalism and “Blue-Anon” nuttiness (masks outside, everyone?) that we ought not lend our energy to those who promise much to us but have a record of doing nothing except larding trillions on their cronies. We will have to come together across ideological lines to confront manipulation, develop communities, and work together to throw out the political trash and make our own future.
To this end, I invite readers to watch the recent discussion my wife, Regina Meredith and I did on “REFUSE TO BE MANIPULATED!”.
Blessings, and happy Election Day, everyone— Citizen Zeus
Electing Integrity over Party
I just dropped my California ballot in the box and also left many tick boxes on the ballot blank. I even voted for a Republican who addressed the issues that concerned me for the first time in decades! Issues, not party, not personality. I’ve had it, thus am now registered and Independent.
Thank you - once again Zeus! And what a treat to listen and watch you and Regina.
And this too just came in too, what strange times these are.
"Voting Machines Stop Working Across America!" by Emerald Robinson
https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/voting-machines-stop-working-across?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2