One good thing about an election (or any legally-enforced decision) is that it requires argumentation to end and a choice to be made.
I suppose court decisions are more definitive regarding who is right and who is wrong about a specific issue since judges and juries are usually deciding between two choices, each supported by opposing sets of arguments. But, then again, most court cases can be immediately appealed (which can keep the question open for months or even years) while an election at least definitively tells us who won and who lost, a result that can’t be appealed until the next election rolls along.
I’ll leave it to others more informed and better paid than I to describe the political significance of last night’s Obama win (although I will highlight some broader political themes related to our subject on the final podcast coming out this Sunday).
But I will note that out of the 115,000,000+ votes cast last night, it looks like the ones that really mattered were the third that were cast in those battleground states of Florida, Ohio, et al where the real campaign for the Presidency took place. And if you spent time watching news anchors break down those state maps voting district by voting district, it’s clear that the battle was actually within the subsets of those states whose political fate could be swayed since they were not already “landslide districts” (i.e., districts where voters had not already sorted themselves into like-minded communities whose votes could be taken for granted).
Which means that close to a hundred million of us were primarily bystanders to this national election, not due to the cynical calculation of campaign consultants and candidates, but because we have decided to sort ourselves into neighborhoods, towns and even states where our existing biases will largely go unchallenged.
Now some of you dealt with this lack of impact of your own vote by finding something productive to do during the months before the election (i.e., participate in this Critical Voter program). But given the stubbornness that a heated political campaign demands, I suspect that most people interested in sharpening their critical thinking skills will find it safer to study this material once that heat subsides.
Time will tell. And, in the meantime, most Massachusetts voters seemed to agree with my 8th grader on which argument worked best with regard to a “right-to-die” ballot initiative, although not so much with the analysis I did on another vote regarding medical marijuana (listen to last week’s podcast if you don’t know what I’m talking about).
As we continue our post-election wrap up, I’d like to talk next about the role technology played this election in circumscribing some of the things we were “allowed” to think about during the run-up to last night’s vote. So drop by tomorrow to find out what the machine might be telling us about ourselves.
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