Democratic Politics, First in a Series

I have promised to write a post on why I think it is almost always a mistake to vote for a third-party candidate in a U.S. presidential election.  I am finding it remarkably difficult to articulate my point, though, so I will write a series of posts outlining my broader beliefs about democratic politics (short version:  I think its merits are greatly under-appreciated).  Instead of mounting a concise, rigorous argument, I will try to make my point more obliquely, by way of several historical examples.  However, I will start with a simple statement of my argument.  And that argument is that democratic politics, however flawed, is among the most powerful institutional safeguards of human dignity, and that third-party candidates in the United States are generally not engaged in democratic politics.  Candidates like Jill Stein, I will argue, are not so much politicians as they are repositories of moral rectitude.  In the same way that Wu Tang Clan ain't nothing to fuck with, moral rectitude is nothing to sneeze at, but in most circumstances it can't compare to the sheer power of electoral politics.

On the day after the 2012 election, Matt Yglesias posted this to Twitter:

Sorry, America. François Hollande still had the best campaign video of the year by a LARGE margin: youtube.com/watch?v=BOXhp0…
— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 7, 2012

Now clearly the concept is inspired, and the video makes excellent use of American music.  But what actually moves me the most about this video is the way all the people proudly hold up their voter registration cards.  If you are a French conservative, that is the scariest thing in the video, because it is a demonstration that these people have power and intend to exercise it.  This is what is so beautiful about democracy, for all its flaws.  Power flows through the people and reflects their values and interests.  Injustice can still happen, but if people can vote, they are much, much less vulnerable to oppression.  And the resources of the French state are deployed in a decent, humane way that would have been unimaginable in the days of French monarchy.  That's democratic politics, and that is what people like Jill Stein are asking voters to turn their backs on in the name of moral righteousness.  That's a trade I can imagine making in extremis, but Stein has a very high bar to clear, a very high burden of proof.