In the United States there are two political parties of equal size. One is the party that votes in presidential elections. The other is the party that does not vote in presidential elections. This year the party that votes is divided into four parts: the Democratic, Republican, Libertarian and Citizens—and a number of fragments, including the independent candidacy of Republican John Anderson. Forty-eight percent of the party that votes are blue-collar or service workers; the rest tend to be white, middle-class and over twenty-one years old. Seventy-five percent of the party that does not vote are blue-collar or service workers in combination with most of the eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds—whatever their estate.
Presidential elections are a bit like the Grammy Awards, where an industry of real interest to very few people honors itself fulsomely [correct use of this adverb] on prime-time television. Since the party that does not vote will never switch on, as it were, the awards ceremony, the party that does vote has to work twice as hard to attract attention to get a rating.
As a result, media-men, -women and -persons analyze at length and in bright shallow the three principal candidates of the one party. To read, hear and watch the media-types, one would think that the election really mattered. Grave subjects are raised: Will Ronald Reagan get us into a war with the forests once he has unilaterally zapped the trees in order to stop the pollution of Mount St. Helens? Will Jimmy Carter be able to balance the budget as he keeps, simultaneously, the interest rates high for the bankers and low for the homeowners? Will John Anderson ever again debate anyone on prime-time television, other than Regis Philbin, who is not national? These are the great issues in the year of our Lord 1980.
And it is the year of our Lord, in spades. Once- and twice-born Christians haven’t been on such a rampage since World War I when they managed to add an amendment to the Constitution making it a crime for Americans to drink alcohol. Ironically, the Christers seemed to have turned away from their own twice-born Carter and twice-born Anderson. They prefer once-born Reagan (presumably, the rest of him is with the Lord), because Reagan is against Satan as represented by rights for women and homosexualists—two groups that get a bad press in the Old Testament, and don’t do much better in the New. In fact, every candidate of the party that votes is being forced this year to take a stand on abortion, and if the stand should be taken on law and not on the Good Book, the result can be very ugly indeed for the poor politician because abortion is against God’s law: “Thou shalt not kill.” Since this commandment is absolute, any candidate who favors abortion must be defeated as a Satanist. On the other hand, any candidate who does not favor capital punishment must be defeated as permissive. In the land of the twice-born, the life of the fetus is sacred; the life of the adult is not.
Were the United States in less trouble, this election would be treated the way it deserves to be treated—like the Grammy Awards: those who are amused by such trivia will tune in; the rest will not. But the next president—even though he will simply be a continuation of the previous president (“clones” was the apt word used to describe Reagan and Carter by clone Kennedy) will have to face: 1) A nation whose per-capita income has dropped to ninth in the world; 2) A working population whose real discretionary income (money you get to spend out of what you earn) has declined 18 percent since 1973; 3) An industrial plant with the lowest productivity growth rate in the Western world—yes, we’ve sunk below England; 4) Double-digit inflation and high unemployment that, according to the latest Nobel prize person for economics, will go on into the foreseeable future; 5) A federal budget of some $600 billion, of which 75 percent can never be cut back (service on the national debt, Social Security, congressionally mandated programs, entitlements); 6) A mindlessly wasteful military establishment whose clients in Congress and in the press can always be counted on to yell, “the Russians are coming,” when it is appropriations time on the Hill. And so the military budget grows while our military capacity, by some weird law of inverse ratio, decreases. The national debt increases.
The party that votes (to which I no longer belong) is now offering for our voting pleasure a seventy-year-old clone (if you’re born in 1911, you are now in your seventieth not sixty-ninth year) whose life has been spent doing what a director tells him to do: Hit the mark, Ronnie! He has now played so many parts that his confusions and distortions of fact are even more surrealist than those of Carter, and need not be repeated here. There is no reason to assume that Reagan’s administration would be any different from that of Carter any more than Reagan’s administration as governor of California was much different from that of Brown, Senior—or Junior. The party that votes knows what it is doing when it comes to giving awards on the big night. Also, the magnates who control the party that votes are now acting upon Machiavelli’s advice to the Prince: to gain perfect control over the state, keep the people poor and on a wartime footing. Between the extortion racket of the IRS and the bottomless pit of the Pentagon, this is happening.
What to do? A vote for Carter, Reagan or Anderson is a vote against the actual interests of the country. But for those who like to vote against their interests, I would pass over the intelligent but unadventurous Anderson as well as the old actor who knows nothing of economics (“Parity?”), foreign affairs (“Well, I’ve met the King of Siam”), geography (“Pakistan?”), history (“Fascism was really the basis of the New Deal”) and return to office the incoherent incumbent on the ground that he cannot get it together sufficiently to start a war or a Lincoln-Douglas debate. But this is to be negative. To be affirmative—for a compulsive voter, that is: vote for the Citizens or Libertarian parties; each actually means something, like it or not.
Finally, if I may speak ex cathedra, as a leading—which is to say following (we’re all the same)—member of the party that does not vote, I would suggest that those of you who are accustomed to vote join us in the most highly charged political act of all: not voting. When two-thirds—instead of the present half—refuse to acknowledge the presidential candidates, the election will lack all legitimacy. Then we shall be in a position to invoke Article Five of the Constitution and call a new constitutional convention where, together, we can devise new political arrangements suitable for a people who have never, in 193 years, been truly represented.
The Los Angeles Times
OCTOBER 26, 1980