Caitlin Hall

I have a good liberal friend ÷ we'll call him Kendrick Wilson ÷ who has been pitching Janet Napolitano to me for months. He claims that, as a liberal, it is my duty to vote for the only viable leftist candidate in the gubernatorial race. He frames the issue ÷ as do most political activists ÷ as a simple case of us vs. them, good vs. evil, liberal vs. conservative.

That logic has never appealed to me, and as I grow older and more fiercely jaded, it appalls me more and more.

We are brainwashed into believing ours is a system of true democracy; government by the people of the people for the people and so on and so forth. But in what sense do we truly have a representative system? In most elections, we are given exactly two choices ÷ "the puppet on the right or the puppet on the left," as my favorite flick puts it ÷ neither of which most of us care for enough to even vote. When there are consistently two candidates with negligible differences, is it any surprise that voter apathy is so high?

"Whoa there," all the good little Democrats and Republicrats protest in unison, "We're not anything like them! What do you mean, negligible differences?!" I'll confess that in some cases there is a palpable disparity in the political philosophies of the two major-party candidates. However ÷ and it pains me, a philosophy major, to say this ÷ what does philosophy buy? How often is it that an elected official's specific beliefs make a concrete difference in legislation, let alone governmental action, let alone the way we actually live our lives?

What we perceive as a striking difference between two platforms is often nothing more than a symptom of the way we confine our debates to trivial, valence issues.

That brings me to my real question: Why, if your vote makes such little difference, would you vote contrary to your own principles? We are trained to believe that to vote for a third-party candidate ÷ or a no-party candidate, or no candidate at all ÷ is to throw our vote away. I contend the opposite: The only way to truly waste a vote is to cast it in the much-mangled name of pragmatism, rather than doctrine.

Here's the paradox: Either your vote doesn't make a difference, in which case you should vote according to what lets you sleep most comfortably at night; or it does, in which case you have even more reason to vote according to your conscience.

I return to the case of Janet Napolitano for an illustration. I am vehemently opposed to the death penalty, which is not a particularly popular stance in our proud state. The ever-practical Napolitano not only supports it but has severely undermined, in her capacity as attorney general, legitimate attempts at reforming what is incontrovertibly an unjust ÷ if not unconstitutional ÷ system.

Any gung-ho Democrat will tell you she is merely doing what it takes to secure her position of power. However, even if she were personally opposed to the death penalty, I wouldn't care. I have no sympathy for politicians who pander to the voting public by touting false convictions. Should that possibility really convince me that she is worthy of my vote?

Furthermore, I resent having the question posed to me, as it has been time and again, "So you'd rather have Satan in office than Napolitano?" The question, translated into less fanatical terms, is whether I would rather have Salmon win the election than vote for Napolitano. The answer is yes. And I argue that that does not make me a bad liberal. On the contrary, I think it makes me a principled voter. I refuse to legitimize a monstrosity ÷ the two-party system ÷ that I don't believe in merely for the opportunity to choose the lesser of two evils.

We do have a choice, but it's something more meaningful than heads or tails on a single coin. We have the choice of whether or not we want to keep swallowing the slurry the two major parties feed us in an effort to perpetuate their chokehold on American politics. We have the opportunity to take a stand for something we actually believe in, even if the impact is merely personal.

We've been selling our votes, voices and souls to the fantasy of democracy for too long. It's time we traded our binary fiction for genuine conviction.