"Devine, James" wrote: > > In my much more humble opinion, I agree with Michael: it doesn't make sense to me > that non-voters and voters would vote in a similar way, since the former are poorer, > more minority, and less educated than the latter, and many votes correlate highly > with income, ethnicity, and education. > Jim D. >
Another thing left out. If Non-Voters were to vote it would be because something had happened -- but no conceivable question that can be asked a _present_ non-voter can throw light on those (hypothetical future) events which would have changed the non-voter to the voter. This error seems to me rather fundamental in bourgeois ideology. Consider a recent post on the Milton-L list: "If John Milton could observe the world of today (I mean the Milton we know from his writings, not Milton as he might have turned out had he lived today) would he take sides in the 'War on Terror?' If so, who would he support and why? Or would he call down a plague on both their houses?" I replied to this question as follows: ----- I don't believe your specification -- "(I mean the Milton we know from his writings, not Milton as he might have turned out had he lived today)" -- is tenable. The "Milton we know from his writings" (and the writings themselves to a great extent) simply could not exist abstracted from the ensemble of social relations which in a very real way constituted that Milton. And whatever principles we ourselves can abstract from those writings almost certainly could (and will be) used to ground all possible positions on the War on Terror. The difficulty in answering your question, then, is that the question is incoherent. I would even argue that prior to the last 50 years the verbal construct, "War on" follwed by an abstract noun, would not make sense. War on Poverty. War on Drugs. War on Crime. War on Terror. All these expressions are essentially incoherent. Your subject line, "USA v.Al-Quaeda," is a tacit recognition of the incoherence of "War on Terror." Al-Quaeda consists of a specific group of persons, organized around identifiable principles, and it was possible to imagine a _that _ war. (Cf. a "War on the Mafia" vs a "War on Crime.") But that (possible) war became impossible when the Bush administration, instead of launching a standard sort of criminal investigation, used 9/11 as an excuse for what is developing into a "War against Everyone." That war the U.S. will inevitably lose, though one may fear that in the process the whole human species may well be irreparably damaged. Carrol ------- A non-voter who voted would no longer be a non-voter; she would be the person who had undergone certain experiences that as a non-voter she would not have undergone. Hence her opinion in the present, in which she is a non-voter, throws no light on her opinion in a world in which she is a voter. Consider, similarly, the idiotic question often asked, "What would a revolutionary regime in the U.S. do about X?" -- X being a condition that exists now. All one need do to see the idiocy involved is to imagine the unimaginable changes which would have to have occurred in present conditions before a revolutionary regime could be even a remote possibility. It would be as though someone in 1787 had asked, "How can we get the votes in Oregon reported in time for the electors to vote in December when it takes a whole year to travel from Oregon to Philadepphia?" Try it another way. A world in which 20% of current non-voters voted would be a world radically different from the world in which public-opinion pundits arrive at their current conclusions. We simply can't even make rough guesses at how _anyone_ would vote in such a world without first making an accurate assessment (impossible I think) of what public events could bring about such a change in voting habits. Those events would of course have a profound effect also on those who are presently voting, so _their_ present voting habits give us no clue as to how they would vote under the (now unknowable) changed conditions. Predictions on how non-voters would vote if they did vote are grounded in the assumption that there has been history but no longer is any. Carrol
