Anti-Climacus

SO: (caution: extended rumination involving contrasting theories of democracy. you've been warned)

If you subscribe to a liberal view of democracy (basically, that people make more-or-less rational political decisions based on calculations of their preferences), you'd expect that any potential voter in any election would look at all the issues, figure out where they were on them, and then find the candidate who best matched up with those, regardless of party affiliation.

But then, you'd be wrong.

Look at Michael Totten, or Jeff Jarvis, Armed Liberal, or myself, all of whose politics seem to have gone on a serious whack since Sept. 11. For me (and presumably for the others, though I don't want to speak for them), I'd say that what has happened to my politics since then is not so much a repudiation as a reaffirmation of all the things I thought, especially on foreign policy, etc etc.

Similarly, it's hard to argue that Bush is exactly anathema to the FDR -liberal tradition: first new entitlement since Gerald Ford? check. huge increases in foreign aid? check. deposing nasty dictators for the heck of it? check. proposing massive new government programs to further things whose immediate benefits to the american people as a whole are not at all clear (Mission to Mars, meet rural electrification)? check.

And if you happen to also believe, as I do, that the inertia in the American legislative system is immense, and it serves the larger interests of the country to disrupt it as little as possible, you'd have another reason not to want a change in 2004.

So, if I'm a liberal (I'd still probably self-describe that way, despite some reservations), shouldn't I be voting for the guy who's going to make all the things I want happen?

Maybe.

But let's suppose, instead of a liberal model of democracy being the correct explanatory one, that a realist model is correct. You'd then believe that one of the first things children get socialized into when it comes to politics is party affiliation. I can remember proudly marching down the hall in first grade to vote in my school's mock election for Dukakis, and being aware that I was a Democrat because my parents were (well, my mother was. To that point, the only political figure my father had expressed respect for was John Anderson). I'm guessing everyone probably has a story similar to that. Studies by my own fair University of Michigan have shown a strong tendency for children to retain that initial party affiliation throughout their life, and you certainly can't get it when you're young from having a concrete grasp of the issues.

So why do I bring this up?

Watching all of the abovementioned fight, despite whatever they've written, to be allowed to retain the titles 'liberal' and 'Democrat' happens to mesh very nicely with my increasing uncertainty that I can actually break down and vote for GWB, even as he continues to pile on more policies and proposals I agree with. My list of people I would vote for if they got the Democratic nomination has been slowly expanding over the past few months (though will likely never get so big as to include Howard Dean). And I'm beginning to feel like I'll vote for the Democrat even if I hate them and love everything Bush does between now and then.

The conclusion I've drawn from all of this is that there simply can't be such a thing as a truly independent voter--the pull of one side or another is too strong, and the leap from one to the other is the most impossible feat in politics. Realist theory predicts all of this--all other theories do not.