Does Voting Matter?

This morning Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism re-posts Michael Olenick's "Voting Matters," a useful if partisan (pro-Democrat) sketch of the undemocratic (because of gerrymandering) voting system in the United States. Olenick makes a good point about California and New York:

If California and New York acted like red states they could theoretically flip 22 seats, enough to leave Republicans in the minority. Sure, they received more votes in 2016 but, at this point, that under Republican orthodoxy that’s a meaningless detail. Nancy Pelosi should not be winning her seat by 80.9 percent, which she did. She should win by 52 percent to ensure that California Republican Jeff Denham, who won by 51.7 percent, loses. Since the districts are nowhere near each other is that unethical? Ethics in gerrymandering? Yawn.

The national government is basically Dixiecrat 70 years after Strom Thurmond bolted from the Democratic Party and ran as a champion of segregation. How can this be if not for the complete failure of the two-party system?

One way out of the morass is through a proliferation of political parties, through a vibrant multi-party democracy. The parties don't even need to regularly field candidates for political office. So voting isn't a necessity.

Look at the Black Panther Party. They catapulted to national renown because of a press stunt at the California state capital and a great issue -- the 2nd Amendment for black people -- and then parlayed their popularity into a hot breakfast program, which further established the party in local communities. That's when the FBI declared war with COINTELPRO. Interestingly, it's only when the Panthers took a stab at mainstream politics, running Bobby Seale for the mayor of Oakland in 1972, that the party's terminal illness was manifest. (Watch Stanley Nelson's The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution -- the best thing I've seen on the Black Panther Party.)

A political party doesn't have to be explicitly electoral. Occupy Wall Street's error, if you ask me, was conflating the electoral with the political. Occupy was clearly a political movement, but the movement bent over backwards to eschew politics. What OWS was rejecting was electoral politics as practiced in our pay-to-play system. OWS should have embraced party politics, with the distinction that it would not have been concerned initially with elections. This would have allowed it to continue to organize after it lost its main squat in Zuccotti Park.