{"id":6612,"date":"2010-08-03T12:42:38","date_gmt":"2010-08-03T19:42:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/?p=6612"},"modified":"2010-08-03T13:11:43","modified_gmt":"2010-08-03T20:11:43","slug":"candidacies-that-flicker-and-fade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2010\/08\/03\/candidacies-that-flicker-and-fade\/","title":{"rendered":"candidacies that flicker and fade"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s electoral universe, with its 100 million member “party of nonvoters”, took shape after 1896 and from its sequel — the demobilization of the mass electorate of the nineteenth century.\u00c2\u00a0 The legal barriers to voting imposed then have since come down, but not the major procedural one […]
\nThe party of non-voters haunts democracy.\u00c2\u00a0 “The present situation perpetuates a standing danger that the half of the American electorate which is now more or less entirely outside the universe of active politics may someday be mobilized in substantial degree by totalitarian or quasi-totalitarian appeals,” Walter Dean Burnham warns.\u00c2\u00a0 Strong attachments to party tend to “immunize” voters against extremist appeals.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Less-partisan or independent voters are more exposed.\u00c2\u00a0 Nonvoters are ripe for contagion.\u00c2\u00a0 Burnham uncovered that pattern in an analysis of the behavior of independents, weak partisans, and white working-class nonvoters drawn into the electorate in 1968 by the presidential candidacy of the segregationist governor of Alabama, George C Wallace.\u00c2\u00a0 Events in another democracy disclosed the same pattern — in the context of social polarization, weak partisans and nonvoters rallying to an extremist party.\u00c2\u00a0 In one sample constituency the percentage of nonvoters fell from 43.2 in one election to 28 in the next to 7.1 in the last — a 36 percent surge that went almost totally to the extremists. The elections took place in 1928, 1930, and 1933. \u00c2\u00a0 The constituency was the town of Westersteade in Oldenburg.\u00c2\u00a0 The democracy was<\/em><\/p>\n

Oh, you know the rest.<\/a> From The Age of Betrayal:\u00c2\u00a0 The Triumph of Money in America 1865-1900, Jack Beatty, published 2007.<\/p>\n

A fun thing to do: go through the archives of the NY Times, looking up “Adolf Hitler”.\u00c2\u00a0 People who know their nazi history in any depth\u00c2\u00a0 know this, but it fades past most people’s historical awareness.\u00c2\u00a0 The funniest articles are those that tell of a split in the ranks, where some nazi publication was taken over by a faction that brandished broadside attacks against Adolf Hitler — a splinter on tactics — the more moderate Hitler wanted to bide his time a little longer, not rush the capital, remain in electoral politics.\u00c2\u00a0 Anyway, the more radical (or at least impatient) Nazi Party faction was summarily dismissed, that printing press regained by the Hitlerites, and all Nazi publications all over Germany published lavished praise for the soon to be Fuhrer.
\nAlso amusing to see that the “Third Reich” was originally translated in American press as the “Third Realm”.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Once upon a time, I posted a reference to the “ghost” of this guy<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 I am not going to dare mention his name, as I don’t want to see him pop in again for a comment to clarify his continued pulse.\u00c2\u00a0 But this political run passed right by me:
\ntook out an advertisement in the Warsaw Times-Union<\/em>, in order to announce his intention to challenge U.S. Representative Mark Souder, a Republican from Indiana’s 3rd congressional district. “I’d go to Washington and get into Congress, and have a fistfight every day,”<\/em>
\nA publicity stunt.\u00c2\u00a0 Gets your name in the news.\u00c2\u00a0 Barely.<\/p>\n

Meantime, in other news — I think it’s safe to mention Tony Zirkle’s name, as his neo-nazi backer (another person whose re-appearance here I wish to avoid) won’t likely surface:<\/p>\n

You may or may not recall the controversy that his 2008 campaign for Congress engendered:
\nIn the 2008 election he garnered national attention by appearing at a Neo-Nazi celebration of Adolf Hitler’s birthday<\/em>.
\nFigures.\u00c2\u00a0 His personal website currently focuses on this personal strife<\/a>:
\nZirkle’s license to practice law in Indiana was suspended in 2009 for multiple instances and types of misconduct, including counseling his client in a dissolution case on how to evade a court order not to remove the couple’s children from the county, falsely telling the court that his client continued to reside in the county, and many instances of over-billing clients. Zirkle will be eligible to apply for reinstatement in October 2011.<\/em>
\nHe did run for Congress in 2010 on this platform:
\nThere’s no constitutional right for Porn Pimpery<\/em>.
\nFull of bible quotes.
\nI\u00e2\u20ac\u2122M ARGUING THAT OUR PORN-PROSTITUTION CULTS ARE THE MODERN EQUIVALENT OF ANCIENT ISRAEL AND JUDAH\u00e2\u20ac\u2122S BAAL FERTILITY SEX CULT WORSHIP.<\/em><\/p>\n

A steady drop from 2006 to 2008 to 2010 on down to 3 percent of the primary vote.\u00c2\u00a0 This is devastating, if you consider in 2010 he avoided giant pictures of Adolf Hitler.
\nIn other news of other candidacies from the Political Graveyard — there’s this item of predictibility<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There are a lot of these “Flavor of the Moment” candidates.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Some a bit more sympathetic than the three I just passed out.\u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0Here’s the one well talked about last week<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 The Internet is hyping them up and giving them national exposure.
\nMost notable is he stands against the “Gold Fringed Flag” problem, which is a fringe position that floats out there — next time you’re in court, try to argue that the case against you is illegitimate and this court has no jurisdiction over you because it’s being held under the “Gold Fringed Flag”, and see where that takes you.
\nHad the South Carolina television media run these profiles, the Democratic Senate nomination would have turned out differently.<\/p>\n

I can’t say whether they provide a decent enough spark against Extremism.\u00c2\u00a0 I want to note something, though.\u00c2\u00a0 This book — Mark Halperin and\u00c2\u00a0 John Heilemann’s Game Change?\u00c2\u00a0 First, wade through the pure cynicism of politics and the mass marketing that makes policy meaningless and turns everything into “signifiers” for politicians to appease blocks of the electoral market.\u00c2\u00a0 Then go to the index page.\u00c2\u00a0 Look up “Mike Gravel”.\u00c2\u00a0 John Heilemann and Mark Halperin have erased Mark Gravel out of the 2008 election campaign, those bastards!
\nHypothetical Presidency here<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s electoral universe, with its 100 million member “party of nonvoters”, took shape after 1896 and from its sequel — the demobilization of the mass electorate of the nineteenth century.\u00c2\u00a0 The legal barriers to voting imposed then have since come down, but not the major procedural one […] The party of non-voters haunts democracy.\u00c2\u00a0 “The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6612"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6614,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6612\/revisions\/6614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}