I'm voting for the first time ever on November 8, in large part because I'm curious to see how it feels. I'm ready to witness how my identity, the ever-changing construct I like to check in on from time to time, conforms to the shape of Active Citizen in the most basic sense of the term. Mindful that my vote should be an informed one if it's going to do anything to awaken my Civic Mind, I started hitting the books in September. I was confident that two months of aggressive autodidacticism would be more than enough to make up for a decade of calculated apathy and abstention.
Growing up, looking on as the elders lost sleep deliberating over which of the two evils to put on their ballots, I couldn't imagine myself ever getting that into to the ritual. Going to the polls was some esoteric way for them to recharge civic batteries I didn't think I had, and to this day, I can't conceptualize any concreteness to the idea that I have, or ever had, a moral obligation to vote. I can acknowledge that it's odd to dip my feet in now, when the major parties' presidential candidates are the least liked in polling history, but I am, and I'm doing it for self-centered reasons that aren't entirely without principle.
I was prompted by my buddy and fellow comedian Dan Fox, who I suspect does feel a civic duty to vote, to do a 'Countdown to Voter Registration Day' series, starting September 1. For me, posting a satirical video a day for 27 consecutive days wasn't some stab at a Get-Out-the-Vote campaign; it was a way for me to try my hand at political comedy, capitalize on trending news items, and emerge as a constant and obnoxious presence on people's September news feeds.
Part of me also wanted to believe that if I dragged my apolitical brain through a strict regimen of election coverage while I scavenged for material every day, I could elevate my political consciousness at a rate that might lend itself to an almost psychedelic experience, like digesting the raw reality that we're part of something bigger -- in this case, a nation run by corporations. Anyway, the whole process was a chore, my videos were criminally under-liked, and if I do feel a buzz, it's negligible.
On September 6, I found myself at the 104th Annual New York Young Republican Club Gala & Casino Night at The Union League Club. What do young, urban conservatives look like? The easiest answer would be "yuppies", but if I had to paint a portrait of the ideal, I'd ask John Catsimatidis, Jr., the evening's Ace Event Sponsor, to be my subject. Son of the Greek-American billionaire who owns the Gristedes grocery chain, John has kind eyes and a twitter bio that reads: "No limit to what free men+women in a free market can accomplish".
Unfortunately, I've never read Atlas Shrugged, I don't know how to play poker, and I get uncomfortable in overt networking environments, especially when the bulk of the conversations center on things I don't understand (in this case finance), so, unable to process all the nuanced free-market talk in real time or drink booze at the open bar, I paced around with a club soda, chewing ice and feeling unqualified to uncover any real insights. If I had to guess, from what I did absorb, the vast majority of the people at the event were socially moderate, or if they weren't, they were putting their most inclusive faces forward, as evidenced by another one of the evening's sponsors, Allison Lee Pillinger Choi, author of a book entitled Bleeding Heart Conservatives: Why It's Good to Be Right. In the spirit of reading widely, I ordered a copy through Amazon for a whopping $22.84 after reviewing the product description: ". . . Harvard graduate Pillinger Choi, a first generation daughter of a Korean mother and a Jewish father, presents conservative views on social, fiscal and foreign policy issues from a modest and compassionate perspective. . . Bleeding Heart Conservatives will invigorate jaded conservatives, closet conservatives, and conservatives-turned-libertarian/independent, as well as enlighten curious apoliticals and liberals." I'll be the judge of all that, but it'll have to wait until after the election. Amazon estimates the delivery will go down sometime between November 11th and December 7th. But I digress... Back to the subject of Public Relations. It should be noted that, in all of my eavesdropping at the gala, I failed to hear Trump (the Republican presidential candidate) or Clinton (a former Young Republican) mentioned by name. To keep myself awake, I had to focus on the bush-league public figures in the room.
George McDonald, founder of The Doe Fund, a nonprofit organization that gives homeless people "a hand up, not a handout" accepted an award, and he made a speech about his Ready, Willing & Able Program. He dropped a couple one-liners that fell flat, but when he enunciated the words "900 million dollars in revenue" the crowd gave him the applause he'd been jonesing for. This was my cue to write "big numbers excite them" in my Notes app, and for a minute there I felt like a real journalist. This is where I could harp on the fact that a quick internet search would yield stories about the money Mr. McDonald and his family have pocketed from fat contracts funded by taxpayers, but following money doesn't excite me. News items like Hillary Clinton making $225,000 for a single speech or Donald Trump claiming a $916 million loss in 1995 interest me about as much as a rerun of Cribs would, i.e. not much.
As I put to rest the idea of exploiting these people in a way that would spark any appreciable interest among my blood-thirsty, progressive readers, I did note that there was only one black guy among them who wasn't working the event. But alas, this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. The Republican Party experienced a serious exodus of black voters around the time Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and Barry Goldwater called it unconstitutional. These days, only around 2 percent of the people who identify as Republicans are black. Anyway, this guy, a Trump detractor and 'advocate for progressive conservatism,' looked like a man who was comfortable wearing his politics on his profile, so I Facebook stalked him and read an op-ed he shared on his wall: What Black Republicans Care About. The piece didn't do much for me, and I had to look up what 'school vouchers' were. Nobody said refining my political palate would be easy.
One thing that has made this intensive learning process easier on me is that newspapers of record now deliver the same caliber of entertainment that tabloids do. It's refreshing to be able to catch up on the latest fifteen minutes scored by Gennifer Flowers while waxing philosophical about representative democracy and the debasing of American politics. Plus the whole thing will have been an acceptable, if not worthwhile, use of my time if I can trust the answer I've assigned to that nagging question "what's the point?" The paradox of voting, as explained by economist Anthony Downs, is that the costs of going out to cast your ballot will generally exceed the presumed benefits. Philosophers Loren Lomasky and Geoffrey Brennan, on the other hand, would say that voting is less of a rational choice than it is an expressive act, and that the intrinsic value of this expression does, in fact, exceed the costs of going out to cast your ballot. As someone who identifies as an artist (out loud and with obnoxious regularity), I'm all about expressive acts as ways to exercise and explore my own humanity, going to the polls with a head full of troubling intel is one solid, albeit basic, way to do that.
One might pose the question: when a major party candidate makes flippant remarks about nukes and pussies, the other is a bought-and-paid-for part to a dysfunctional two-party machine, and the most promising third party candidate keeps failing basic pop quizzes, what is the point of some expressive act? To which, I guess I'd respond: "If the choice is that hard, then it's probably good exercise." Facing facts, acknowledging evils, differentiating between countless shades of gray and coming up with a definitive decision by a fixed deadline seems like a good way to discover and/or prioritize self-identifying principles. But is that what I want? Is self-discovery a prerequisite to living life to the fullest if it means having to see where we fit in some heinous bigger picture? For me, it is. As much as I'd like to, I can't gloss over the fact that I didn't get rid of my iPhone when it came to light that whoever made it (conceivably a child) may have experienced working conditions that drove some to suicide, and I'm not going to fool myself into thinking I won't get the iPhone 7 when I'm eligible for an upgrade.
On a lighter note, some votes do, in fact, matter if we have the patience to get technical. On September 20th, I found myself eating nachos at a bar in East Village listening to peppy talk about how the Democrats have a real opportunity to win enough races in the state legislative elections to gain policy control over the State Senate Republicans, who happen to be in league with a faction of pseudo Dems called the Independent Democratic Caucus.
The Manhattan Young Democrats' Political Director, Mohammad Alam, stressed the tangible effects that the group's canvassing efforts could have in the elections, citing one Todd Kaminsky, who recently won his State Senate seat by only 780 votes in a special election following State Senator Dean Skelos' removal from office after being convicted of eight counts of corruption. Alam also pointed out that the New York DREAM Act, which would give undocumented students who meet certain requirements the right to access state financial aid and scholarships, failed to pass by only two votes in 2014, so, in short, paying attention to state-level minutiae and engaging with the system can make a difference. And the romantic notion of "making a difference" is a driving force for a lot of these young'uns with the politics bug, according to an entry in my Notes app. The attendees of this Young Democrats' General Meeting & Happy Hour were easy enough for me to taxonomize since I'm well versed in the language of my newsfeed, a liberal list of social ills that demands my immediate attention. I got the jist of what they were all about in well under an hour, and, after finishing my nachos, I left the bar to film an installment of the Countdown.
Ultimately, I'm a producer and consumer of escapism, a product and beneficiary of things I've only just started to examine in any palpable way, but now I'm looking to expand my repertoire- to try out the "meaningful" stuff. I bought a Cornel West book, Democracy Matters, to see if it could help me clear away some of the nihilism I've built up over the years, and I must admit, it did help. West, whose moral vision is contagious, says:
"Democracy is more a verb than a noun- it is more a dynamic striving and collective movement than a static order or stationary status quo. Democracy is not just a system of governance, as we tend to think of it, but a cultural way of being. This is where the voices of our great democratic truth tellers come in."
Reading the book, I felt like a little boy flattered at having been asked to help move a heavy object. It made me want to rise to the occasion, demonstrate my strength and be the democratic truth teller the old man was advocating. In keeping with the Emersonian tradition, West believes that the key to being a democratic individual is to "think for one's self, judge for one's self, trust one's self, rely on one's self, and be serene in one's own skin- without being self-indulgent, narcissistic, or self-pitying."
Well, I'm not self-pitying, and I can look into the other two if I have time. Or maybe I can skip that and ride the crest of our Narcissism Epidemic all the way to a new, contemporary style of exemplary citizenship. Alexis de Tocqueville believed that pride could be a force for cultivating civic virtue. In his seminal work, Democracy in America, he claims:
"Moralists are constantly complaining that the ruling vice of the present time is pride. This is true in one sense, for indeed every one thinks that he is better than his neighbor, or refuses to obey his superior; but it is extremely false in another, for the same man who cannot endure subordination or equality, has so contemptible an opinion of himself that he thinks he is born only to indulge in vulgar pleasures. He willingly takes up with low desires, without daring to embark in lofty enterprises, of which he scarcely dreams. Thus, far from thinking that humility ought to be preached to our contemporaries, I would have endeavors made to give them a more enlarged idea of themselves and of their kind. Humility is unwholesome to them; what they most want is, in my opinion, pride. I would willingly exchange several of our small virtues for this one vice."
As I ponder on what de Tocqueville's favorite Snapchat selfie lense would be if he were forced to choose, or which Stranger Things character he'd be according to Buzzfeed's survey, I, Alexander Hoard McKelvey, hereby welcome myself into the active citizenry.