Nate Silver, as always, has something useful and informative to say about the Occupy movement. After looking through hundreds of local media reports for global protests this past Saturday, he’s concluded that there were somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 protesters in the United States. New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle had the largest protests. For a city-by-city breakdown of attendance last weekend, look at this graphic. Meanwhile, several European cities kicked our Yankee asses with hundreds of thousands of protesters each.
Silver floats the idea that it’s mainly nonpartisan liberals out there:
I suspect that more than anything, however, it reflects the politics of the protesters. Specifically, they tend to be more liberal than they are Democratic partisans. Take liberalism, subtract the Democratic Party, and the remainder might look something like Occupy Wall Street…
So perhaps the protesters are more ideologically minded than they are interested in partisan politics. In fact, they may be relatively disengaged from “politics as usual.” In a somewhat informal New York magazine survey of 100 protesters in Manhattan, only 39 percent reported having voted in the 2010 midterm elections.
All of this could create headaches for the Democratic Party — and for the protesters — if it tries to co-opt the Occupy movement.
Read the whole thing.
Try this on, dipshits: the reason “politics as usual” is like that is because you don’t fucking vote.
The idea that people can encourage their representatives in government to be more to their liking by not voting is ABSURD. OCCUPY THE VOTE, nimrods.
Excuse me for saying this…wait, fuck that. Anyone who doesn’t vote can’t fucking complain when things go bad. That’s the way I feel about it. Our political system would look a lot more like they want it to look if they voted. So, if it’s true they don’t vote- fuck them.
I’ve voted in every single election I was eligible for since I turned 18. I carefully research who I’m voting for and read the endorsements from both very local and national sources.
And yet I think I hate every single elected official in both Washingtons. They are all part of the problem.
So, tell me again, what is the point of voting? Based on the actual evidence and results, there doesn’t seem to be much of one.
My vote is trivial compared to the billions of dollars corporations pump into politics. Until that situation is changed, until there is more separation of corporation and state (an obvious goal of the OWS protests), I’m failing to see the point in voting just because we were all told it was one of the most important aspects of American society in our 3rd grade social studies class.
Maybe it was… at one point. Times change, and not always for the better.
May be they don’t vote because neoliberals control both parties and the resulting policies aren’t very different? If nearly half the political spectrum of ideas wasn’t missing from national discourse, may be they’d go vote?
#1 – The problem lies with the American political system, which actively disenfranchises anyone who does not agree with the policies of the Democratic and Republican parties. In a parliamentary system such as the European democracies, it is much easier to remain engaged, to find a group that reflects your ideology or to start one up. In the United States, that is exceedingly difficult: the result has been that very large numbers of American voters just don’t vote, and typically see politics as a no-win game so why bother being involved.
And, of course, the Two Party goes out of its way to encourage such defeatist thinking.
So… one non-problematic thing the Democratic Party can do is register these folks to vote. We’ve had people registering at the major Eugene events and have had a fair amount of success (which, of course, means that there were fewer people registered than I would have suspected). Not that all (or even most) of the protestors will register as Democrats, but I suspect a voter registration drive at the Occupy events will ultimately benefit Ds more than Rs.
I hope the Democrats in Seattle (and in NYC for that matter) are doing the same (if not, perhaps Slog can encourage them to do so?).
so these worthless moocher shits want to throw out the system but they are too fucking lazy to even vote?
exactly what we would have predicted.
@3, “until that situation is changed”. There’s the crux of your problem. That situation isn’t going to be changed.
And if it is, it’s going to be changed by your elected officials — but since you have lost the capacity to distinguish between D and R, there’s no chance that can ever happen.
Similarly, @5, you are living in a dream world. The two party system isn’t going anywhere, and if it did it would never in a million years be because people didn’t vote. Also, your understanding of the level of “engagement” and the efficacy of finding a group that supports your ideology in “Europe” is mistaken. Someone still wins in all of those countries. And sometimes it’s Berlusconi, which is not an improvement.
@6, if voter registration results in more left-wing third party voting, it absolutely will help the Republicans over the Democrats.
Since only 35% of eligible voters in New York state voted in the 2010 midterm election, these Manhattan protesters are more engaged than your average citizen. Which is kind of pathetic.
Maybe they don’t vote because they understand the economics of voting means your vote doesn’t really matter, anyway. Every single one of these people could all have voted the same way on various issues related to the current financial/social situation, and not changed the outcome one bit.
I never get tired of the old “if you don’t vote you can’t complain” claptrap. It’s a perspective used to stifle action.
I prefer Emma Goldman’s take: “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”
For a more contemporary perspective:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blo…
“Take liberalism, subtract the Democratic Party,”
No need, that happened a while ago.
Um … fuck the Democrats. There are no viable third options. There are no other representative voices. The Democrats sell us out to monied interests faster than we can blink. There is no reason to vote because whether you do or don’t, it all goes the same direction anyhow. Maybe if President Perry gets this car in the ditch a little faster, it’ll end all the complacent bullshit from the armchair liberals on this blog.
@11 Yeah, there’s some bitter comments here. I’m sure this type of antagonism will help the Dems GOTV! Fuck ’em.
http://sinkers.org/stage/?p=975
@8 – I get that a left-wing 3rd party could take votes away from the Ds. But in a theoretical world, if all of the folks registered vote for a 3rd party, that doesn’t hurt the Ds at all, since those voters weren’t going to vote D anyways (since they weren’t registered). If there was a 3rd party that was large enough to be a viable contender with Ds or Rs, then the story would be different, of course.
In reality, I heard anecdotally that most of those registered were Non-Affiliated Voters (OR’s version of undeclared/independent), with the remainder being primarily Ds and secondarily Rs/Libertarian/other 3rd party. That fits with the Occupy narrative, I think (both major parties are the problem, etc.), and the fact that there’s not a single 3rd party stepping up to receive the protesters.
GAH.
It’s infuriating whenever I come across a statistic of how few people are actually voting. REALLY PEOPLE? WHY DON’T YOU VOTE?
If 100% of people voted I guarantee we’d be having a totally different conversation right now. The Bush Jr Years wouldn’t have happened, we wouldn’t have been in multiple wars for 10+ years and the nation would be in a very different place.
VOTE MUTHER FUCKERS.
I have to wonder how much of that reported 61% of protesters who didn’t vote in the last election can be accounted for by the fact that they were actually TOO YOUNG to vote last time. (We need to keep in mind the age demographic of the protesters here)
Also: Doug @9 FTW!
If you don’t vote, you’re part of the problem. It may not be perfect, but it’s sure as hell a lot more effective a means of change than sitting on your ass in a park.
In addition to voting, what if we 70-100K people all decided to occupy the Democratic party? Start showing up. Take it over. It’s just sitting there, all built and ready to use. No need to start a new party from scratch. It worked for the Tea People, and they reportedly only have about 20K.
“the reason “politics as usual” is like that is because you don’t fucking vote.”
Quite a bit of turnout in the last election for Obama, didn’t really change that much at all. Just hardened and normalized the neoliberal economic policies and neocon warmongering and police statism of Bush. In fact, on the police state front, Obama’s clearly moving in the wrong direction.
Since more people voted for Dems in 2006-2008, it doesn’t really hold up at all. We may have had a cosmetic reprieve from some things but it’s mostly been shit and these guys (THE FUCKING Rs AND Ds) are proposing austerity in the middle of a depression. There will always be an excuse for these bastards (and you’ll be the first one obediently pilfering it, Fnarf) to not do what you want. Let’s see, first they said they weren’t filibuster proof when they had four years to change the rules with a majority vote. Then they hastened to get their vote total under 60 (yes, I really think that) so they didn’t have to come up with some other bullshit nonsense. So, clearly, keep voting and keep voting D!
I challenge any of you to name ONE positive social change in this country that wasn’t a result of mass action. The empty suits you vote for only act out of influence. Usually that influence comes from the moneyed interests; the only way for us little people to have similar (if not more) influence is by taking to the street.
@11, everything Emma Goldstein ever worked for happened in the halls of elected government or it didn’t happen at all.
I understand the attraction of magical thinking. If we just want something hard enough, maybe it will happen! But it doesn’t work that way. The real problem for you is that most of the people in America don’t agree with you. Fortunately, we have a process established for deciding disputes between people who disagree on political matters. It’s called the American political system. It has been called “the worst of all possible systems, except for all the others”.
But if you don’t like it, you are screwed, and no amount of protesting is ever going to make a difference. If you want a real revolution, meaning kicking out the current government by force and replacing not just them but the system, you are never going to get your way. Almost no one agrees with you.
If you DON’T want to overthrow the government, but want it to be more responsive to your desires, you need to work the system. Period. There are no other ways around. And the fact is, people in government always, always, always ignore people who don’t vote.
@20, the policies that you want Obama to take, but which he hasn’t, ARE NOT POPULAR POLICIES. You folks always act as if only Ralph Nader would run for president, he’d win in a landslide and everything would be hunky-dory. But Ralph Nader HAS run for president, and the only thing he ever accomplished was GWB. If Michael Moore or whomever your current hero is ran the same thing would occur.
There are a number of things you can call people who take to the streets and demand political changes that the vast majority of people do not want. “Democracy in action” isn’t one of them.
@20,
Well gosh gee, we turned out for the Presidential vote, and since the President has unlimited powers, that’s all we needed to do.
OF COURSE NOT. There are tons of veto points in the American system, and many of them are occupied by Republicans or moderate/conservative Democrats. The Tea Party was successful because they put up primary challenges against Republicans that were deemed insufficiently conservative. Until this movement does the same against moderate Democrats, they’re not serious.
And for those of you who think voting can never change anything: just LAST YEAR there was an initiative in Washington to make our tax structure far more progressive by creating an income tax. It was crushed at the polls. If you didn’t bother to vote for that and are now in the streets protesting the distribution of wealth you’ve already blown your best chance to get what you want.
@22: It’s Goldman, FYI. Yes, often the RESULTS of protests and social movements happen in the halls of elected officials but it starts somewhere else. Those results are never possible without people in the streets. It’s not “magical thinking” it’s an analysis of social history.
@23 An argumentum ad populum is still a fallacy.
Unpopular policies (according to Fnarf):
-medicare for all
-Progressive tax fairness
-Actually doing shit for working class folks in a depression instead of being a complete clueless jackass
-recognizing basic Constitutional rights
-Labor rights
I don’t get how you think I’m a Naderite; actually the guy personally is not appealing. I don’t have any such “magical thinking.” We’re trapped. It doesn’t mean I have to buy into your magical thinking trap that voting will improve things. That’s bullshit that you can’t even coherently defend.
You’re wrong about Goldman, btw. She was an activist in every sense of the word and it’s only because someone like her ahead of her time was willing to do things outside of the system is how there was electoral change later on.
@24 FTW.
@21, ever heard of the Sixteenth Amendment? Remember all those discussions about how the top marginal tax rate is lower than it was under Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, or Bush I? (If not, I can wait). How do you think those earlier, higher rates got there? Direct action in the street? Uh-huh.
In contrast, I would defy you to name a single positive social change that DID come about because of direct action in the street.
@11,
Voting has been illegal or simply not existed through the majority of human history. People have fought and died for YOUR ungrateful ass’s right to vote. It was illegal for women to vote the entire time Goldman lived in the United States.
Fuck you AND Emma Goldman.
@23 I know I’ve read more than once that there is 60%+ support for things like pulling out of Afganistan, raising taxes on the rich. Many of Obama’s policies that anger liberals are things that benefit the power structure and monied classes and do not at all enjoy popular support.
Fnarf @27:
Is “The Suffragettes” too obvious an answer for you?
@24, This is one of the dumbest arguments I’ve ever seen. That those of us who don’t want the President to be a fucking Reaganite accuse him of having unlimited powers. Bullshit. We expect him to be the president though and not hold contempt for us. He’s also the head of the Democratic Party and can persuade people in his party to vote the way he wants. If you have a hard time believing that, just observe that the President worked very hard to get Congress to pass President Bush’s free trade agreements and when Kucinich was grandstanding and pretending he’d block Obamacare, Obama got him to turn very fast in a little plane ride on Airforce One.
There’s plenty in Obama’s purview, like:
-appointing neoliberal domestic cabinet members
-keeping the neoconservative appointees of the previous president
-signing death warrants for American citizens
-committing war crimes by refusing to follow the Geneva Conventions and obstructing justice
-signing an anti-choice executive order to get a Heritage Foundation health insurance and pharma bailout bill passed
You people think you’ve got some exclusive knowledge of how the system works–I’m not dumb guy, just aware.
But, no, just lazily say, “You guys expected the President to be Jesus! Doh!”
Anybody who doesn’t vote because they can’t get everything they want doesn’t deserve what they have. And that includes the Bill of Rights.
@27 You might want to look up The Bonus Army.
@32 Even idiots like you who don’t understand what “rights” are, deserve their rights.
@27: You can’t be serious, but here’s a big one: The Civil Rights Act.
Otherwise, off the top of my head: the 8 hour workday, the right to collectivley bargain with employers, EPA, the end of the draft, FMLA, gay marriage (where applicable), and women’s suffrage. Anyone else want to help?
@28: That little tantrum doesn’t even make sense.
(Nobody seemed to notice, but I said the Tea People had 20K. That was an estimate from when they were first forming and building their platform wiki. Silver says 300K as of 2009.)
Pardon my spelling of collectively.
@23 “the policies that you want Obama to take, but which he hasn’t, ARE NOT POPULAR POLICIES.”
That must be why Obama is now campaigning on the left while he governs on the right. You are either clueless or disingenuous. Have you looked at the ~60% (on average) of the population supporting single-payer healthcare, taxing the wealthy, stopping wars, gaining austerity policies, etc ..? It’s not because corporate propaganda successfully gets corporate tools elected that most people aren’t on Obama’s left.
@30, the sufragettes used the moral authority of their argument to persuade men to vote for the vote for women. But that’s about 1% of the story there. The suffragette marches were not the primary reason that laws were changed. The rights of women is an idea that had been coming into focus for a long time in many ways. History is complex.
If you want to pull out another example, try Prohibition. Wait — oops!
@31, it must be nice to live in a dream world where there are no Republicans and your 10% views always take precedence no matter how unpopular they are. “Medicare for all” is lovely but IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. You yourself are making it LESS likely, not more.
@27 “In contrast, I would defy you to name a single positive social change that DID come about because of direct action in the street.”
How do you think they “made FDR do it”? (clue: sitting on their couch until the next election isn’t the right answer)
@39 It must be nice to live in a dream world where voting is the end-all be all, even with obvious proof to the contrary.
Medicare for all is unlikely. Thanks for that. I get it, goddammity. But you said it’s unpopular. Is it?
In more useless studies, a statistical geek said that, in a survey of Mostly liberal users if the FourSquare app who checked in to Occupy locations, it was mostly liberals.
Duh.
Phone surveys of those who don’t screen calls revealed respondents to mostly by old white folks too.
Duh.
Only Feet On The Ground works any more, lazybones. Yes, that means you.
Remember, if you don’t have billions, you can’t complain.
Unless you’re a corporation.
Or shorter: What do with a problem like a two party political system + electoral college?
drink heavily then vote and hope for the best… seems to have worked out well for some 230 odd years, amirite?
If somebody really cares about something, it shows in their actions. Even if voting only makes a tiny, tiny difference, a person who was truly concerned would demonstrate that concern by expending the minimal effort necessary to check a series of boxes on a ballot. Somebody who claims to care deeply about their democracy yet can’t be troubled to participate in the simplest way is just preening.
Often it’s the combination of sympathetic public officials and a loud public outcry that produces change. Lyndon Johnson sure as hell wouldn’t have signed any civil rights legislation if his feet weren’t to the fire (he reportedly said “we’ve lost the South for a generation.” upon signing the Civil Rights Act, lamenting the bill’s political cost to the Democratic Party.) But sign it he did.
That’s how it works. Vote and make noise.
“Vote and make noise.” I agree with this to the degree that voting is consequential locally.
However, if someone wants to exercise their right to vote for somebody else that’s their right. If they want to dispose of their right to vote, that is also their right and they’re not somehow precluded from participating in the system. I don’t see the benefit of lecturing them on how they’re preening or supporting Republicans is even useful, especially given the argument above that only participating in Democratic politics is a worthwhile effort.
@35,
Right. It doesn’t make sense that I’m pushing back against your highly offensive, flat-out wrong, and just plain stupid assertion that the powers that be are absolutely happy to “let” us vote.
You have the intelligence and maturity of a spoiled, 5-year-old brat.
The majority of that 60 percent doesn’t vote. Why should politicians give a fuck what they think?
You know whom politicians listen to? The elderly, who vote in overwhelmingly large numbers and vote Republican. They’re what happen to idiots like bhowie when they *finally* grow up.
It should be noted when griping about how corrupt the system is: A major reason and very likely the primary reason corporate money has such influence over politics in this country is that it costs 8 arms and 10 legs to get elected to higher office and the reason it costs so much is that the majority of the American populace that actually gets out and votes lets their TVs tell them who to vote for. The ignorant electorate gets the government they deserve.
Can’t voting AND direct action in the street be effective? AND other things, like writing, etc.? I don’t get the black and white thinking. Fnarf, you say that history is complex but then you demand that people find some issue that was brought about by one type of action, in order to prove that protesting works. I don’t get it. You might as well say, “Name one law that was passed without politicians’ votes or a referendum” and use that to make your argument.
We definitely need to vote, but we also need to figure out a way to reform our system so that we actually have something to vote FOR, something our current system has been specifically corrupted to make it impossible to do. We need to make our vote worth something again by getting the money out of our elections, and just how the hell are we supposed to do that solely by voting, when the current system won’t tolerate candidates that run on a platform of completely publicly funded elections? Pretty much everyone here is madly in love with Elizabeth Warren, but she’s only a coherent MODERATE. She only appears radical because most everyone else in office these days has already drank the neoliberal kool-aid.
We need votes and we need protests. We need to change the political reality our politicians live in. But really, do people doubt we won’t get people w/ populist platforms primarying Dems AND Repubs out of this? If OWS keeps gaining steam, how could we not? Of course it will likely splinter the movement some because many won’t want to play the game while it’s still rigged, but it will happen. Then we’ll see what happens when they run, how effective OWS is at supporting them, how effective Wall Street is at destroying them, and how they act once they’re in office if they make it. We’re the underdogs, pitting ourselves against the most powerful forces on the planet, we need to be in this for the long haul.