Key Points from Conor Friedersdorf’s Principled Refusal to Vote for Barack Obama

I want to highlight and supplement a few points from Conor Friedersdorf’s post, Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama, that appeared yesterday in The Atlantic.

Friedersdorf wrote:

I don’t see how anyone who confronts Obama’s record with clear eyes can enthusiastically support him. I do understand how they might concluded that he is the lesser of two evils, and back him reluctantly, but I’d have thought more people on the left would regard a sustained assault on civil liberties and the ongoing, needless killing of innocent kids as deal-breakers.

Nope.

There are folks on the left who feel that way, of course. Some of them were protesting with the Occupy movement at the DNC. But the vast majority don’t just continue supporting Obama. They can’t even comprehend how anyone would decide differently.

Friedersdorf gets at one explanation for the surprising indifference of many Obama supporters to his civil liberties abuses and murderous foreign policies later when he writes:

The whole liberal conceit that Obama is a good, enlightened man, while his opponent is a malign, hard-hearted cretin, depends on constructing a reality where the lives of non-Americans — along with the lives of some American Muslims and whistleblowers — just aren’t valued, (emphasis added).

This point deserves repetition because it conflicts with typical “liberal” values.  Most liberal supporters of Obama that I have met will not claim that foreigners’ lives are worthless, or even worth less than their own.  Actually, most consider treating people equally, protecting human life, and valuing international law to be paramount values.  As Friedersdorf notes, however, violating those principles inheres in supporting President Obama in the upcoming election.  President Obama has ordered the drone strikes, for example – it is his policy.  To vote for him this election necessarily says that the lives of the foreigners already killed—and who will almost certainly be killed in the next four years—do not deserve much consideration.  By putting it in these terms, perhaps a few of President Obama’s supporters might feel shamed into changing their minds.

In response, some might say that the value of their lives is not at issue because Romney would in all likelihood pursue the same strategy or worse.  Even assuming that to be true, it does not follow that bi-partisan consensus on an issue excuses support for it.  There are alternatives to the two parties.  To deny this is not only to deny reality, it is to accept as valid whatever policies that the elites running the Democratic and Republican Parties choose to adopt.  This amoral, deluded, and irresponsible approach to politics leads to elections in which both major party candidates will “inevitably” attack foreign nations, violate the constitution, etc.  Clearly, such injustices are only inevitable because voters willingly close their eyes to alternatives.

One reason voters refuse to consider alternative candidates stems from their voting strategy.  Almost all voters bizarrely treat the next election as the last.  Every four years, they vote as if there will be no more Presidential elections.  Friedersdorf refers to this phenomenon, as well.  He asks:

Is anyone looking beyond 2012?

The future I hope for, where these actions are deal-breakers in at least one party (I don’t care which), requires some beginning, some small number of voters to say, “These things I cannot support.”

We at ACED have argued this point numerous time.  The crux of this argument is that there is no more potent political action that a citizen can take than voting.  The people determine who has power, ultimately, by electing candidates to office.  Votes carry more information than just the name of a candidate.  They also signal to future candidates what voters will accept.  If voters on the left continue to endorse the rightward shift in American foreign and economic policies, Democrats will keep moving to the right.  Not only because voters impose zero cost on them for doing so, but worse, because voters on the left send the message that the Democrats should move to the right to defeat the “greater evil,” in this case Mitt Romney.  That is why Friedersdorf ties rejecting the major party candidates with “looking beyond 2012.”  If people want change, they have to vote for it.  True, it may lead to a slightly worse result in the short term.  In the long term, though, it is the only way for citizens to alter the course of American politics.

Friedersdorf also makes a key point about the upcoming election and its relationship to the last.

Obama ran in the proud American tradition of reformers taking office when wartime excesses threatened to permanently change the nature of the country. But instead of ending those excesses, protecting civil liberties, rolling back executive power, and reasserting core American values, Obama acted contrary to his mandate. The particulars of his actions are disqualifying in themselves. But taken together, they put us on a course where policies Democrats once viewed as radical post-9/11 excesses are made permanent parts of American life.

This is the great risk of the two party system that most Americans seem loathe to discard.  If a policy of one party is anathema to the supporters of the other party, it only takes adoption by the latter party’s elite for it to become a “permanent part of American life.”  Obama was supposed to be different than Bush.  He was supposed to bring “Change.”  While President Obama is obviously not Bush, it is fair to say that he has betrayed most people’s expectations from 2008.  Accordingly, the expectations in 2012 have dramatically lowered.  Now, you vote for Obama just as the lesser evil.  And things like civil liberties become something we cannot concern ourselves with as mere voters.

Finally, here is Friedersdorf summing it up:

Sometimes a policy is so reckless or immoral that supporting its backer as “the lesser of two evils” is unacceptable. If enough people start refusing to support any candidate who needlessly terrorizes innocents, perpetrates radical assaults on civil liberties, goes to war without Congress, or persecutes whistleblowers, among other misdeeds, post-9/11 excesses will be reined in.

If not?

So long as voters let the bipartisan consensus on these questions stand, we keep going farther down this road, America having been successfully provoked by Osama bin Laden into abandoning our values.