Reply #59: You're right, not all non-voters are ignorant sheep

[Lydia Leftcoast]

One of the most interesting non-voters I knew was not only liberal and knowledgeable in an up-to-the-minute sort of way but had once been an advisor to a late, lamented Democratic Senator of the 1960s. He was so disgusted with the kinds of things that were going on in Washington that he refused to participate. In particular, he saw Bill Clinton as a fraud, a "slow-motion conservative" who pretended to be a liberal but was allowing the conservatives to frame the issues.

When the alleged opposition party is timid and not united, it creates cycnicism among the voters.

The same thing has happened in Japan, where voter participation is about the same as ours, around 50%. The Liberal Democratic Party is moving increasingly rightward, but the opposition is so disorganized and so dependent on personalities rather than issues that they've governed only for two brief periods since 1956. I've asked expats living in Japan who they would vote for if they had the right, and they've all said that all the parties are corrupt, except for the Communists. (I think it would be funny if all the disaffected voters voted Communist, just to scare the LDP, but I have no influence over there.)

It looks as if the same thing is happening in the UK, too, where Tony Blair has not undone any of Margaret Thatcher's work and has proposed more of the same. Yet voters who hate these developments have nowhere to turn.