Defeat Mitt Romney

6 Nov, 2012 at 09:27 | Posted in Politics & Society | 7 Comments

I am voting on Tuesday to defeat Mitt Romney and the Republican Party. In my view, Romney represents the very worst aspects of American capitalism … In his world of compulsive financial plunder, human beings and their labor are just chattel resources to be bought, traded, dismantled, used, abused, hired, fired and sold in the avaricious pursuit of personal gain. Now some might believe this approach to life is truly the American way. But whether that depressing proposition is true or not, the America of Romney’s hyper-capitalist pillage not the America I want to live in …

Romney famously expressed contempt for the 47% of Americans who do not measure up to his princely standards of serene and affluent independence from government. If anything, I believe that percentage vastly understates the number of Americans who mean nothing at all to him. And Romney is not the only self-satisfied sadist on the ticket. Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, is a man whose political vocation was inspired by his reading of the crackbrained hellion of egotistic individualism, Ayn Rand …

But Romney and Ryan are not just par for the Republican country club course. They are the prettified, airbrushed faces of a surly and slavering gang that is, if anything, even worse. Candidate Romney is the anointed leader of a party that is now vehemently dedicated to hatred, ignorance, backwardness, bigotry and fanaticism. The contemporary Republican Party has allowed itself to become a rolling, contaminated tide of stinking evil, and their representatives in Washington have spent the last four years doing everything they can to prolong and intensify economic pain in order to capitalize politically on our devastation. No one can doubt Republicans have pursued this course deliberately, and with zeal …

It is not enough to repudiate Romney and his ilk by voting for some attractive candidate from a small party, or by not voting at all. Elections aren’t exercises in self-indulgent self-expression. The point is actually to defeat Romney. And he can only be defeated by voting for the only candidate who can defeat him, that that is Barack Obama. Nobody needs to tell me how many failures and betrayals Obama has notched on his belt so far … But this is the hand we have been dealt …

So there is it. You will hear no peppy rallying cries and bandwagon boosterism from me in 2012. Some might say mine is not a hopeful message, and they are right I suppose. And purists might decry, as always, the sorry appeal to a lesser of two evils argument. But there is such a thing as evil, and some of it is lesser. That’s life. I do have hope that progressives – the same people whom the President’s former chief of staff derided as “retards” – can eventually win great victories for the American people and help create a more equal, decent, prosperous, sustainable and democratic society. But there are many enemies to defeat along the way.

Dan Kervick