There’s little that can be said about the 2014 election that hasn’t been repeated seventy or eighty times by now. Did we get the Congress we deserve? Perhaps so. It’s the largest Republican majority in the House since the Second World War. So, expect the same — and more of it — as you saw from the present Congress. It also means that Barack Obama will soon be the only thing standing between us and massive cuts in social programs, vastly expanded militarism at home and abroad, and reactionary policies on a range of fronts, from abortion rights to immigration to health care and beyond. That’s where we stand.
At least, that’s what’s left to us after a remarkably lackluster election in which about 37% of the American voting populace voted. That’s the lowest turnout since 1942, and it bears remembering that a lot of voting age men were in he military at the time. So if we can’t summon the will to vote, do we have the right to complain about the outcome? Sure, the Democratic party — including many of last Tuesday’s also-rans — is less than inspiring. But there is a small difference between the parties, and small differences can sometimes have an enormous impact on the nation’s most vulnerable. We owe it to them to go and mark the ballot, even if it means voting for some jerk-ass.
Of course, in my own upstate New York congressional district, our Republican House member ran unopposed. The Democratic party didn’t think the race was worth contesting, probably because our last Democratic congressman, Michael Arcuri, only held the seat for four years (2007-2011), barely winning a second term in 2008 and losing narrowly to Richard Hanna in 2010. Sure, the national Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee probably didn’t want to throw good money after bad, but the upshot is that we had no one to vote for. That was not the case everywhere. In Syracuse, Democrat Dan Maffei lost by close to 20 points to a Republican who pledged independence, moderation, and a commitment to aiding inner city communities.
Bullshit. Maffei’s replacement will vote to make Boehner Speaker once again. That will produce austerian policies that will extend and deepen the misery in Maffei’s district. The only way to avoid that was through voting. If I’m wrong, tell me how, exactly.
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That can only serve as an endorsement of the GOP’s strategy of doing absolutely nothing and letting nothing be done by anyone else. Here we are, at a time when interest rates are at historic lows, letting our national infrastructure rust away when we could be rebuilding it under very favorable terms, putting people to work, and investing in the future. Instead, we’ve opted for austerity at both the federal and the state level, laying off people instead of putting them to work, squeezing the air out of the economy years after the financial crash.
I know – that doesn’t sound like a gee-whiz, hyper positive, up-with-people rallying cry of the sort we have all grown to expect since our kindergarten days. It’s merely the truth – the vote is a right people have died defending in this country (see Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney), and we need to exercise it. We also need to encourage those around us to do the same thing. Because if we stay home, sit on our hands, choose to watch the game instead of marking the ballot, our opponents – those who are part of the wholly-owned corporate subsidiary known as the Republican party – gain even greater influence and power. Elections always have consequences.