What a Waste! IV

Trey Smith

God is not going to deliver to us from the clouds the candidate of our dreams, the candidate who despite his (or perhaps her) wildly populist views somehow manages to win over the corporate powers we have allowed, through our own incorrigible stupidity, to control the political process in this country. If we are ever going to see real political change of the sort progressives purport to want, then we are going to have to be brave enough to risk losing an election. Which shouldn’t require all that much bravery when one thinks about it, because real progressives have been losing elections for as long as anyone can remember in that the democrats haven’t been genuinely progressive for as long as anyone can remember.

If you vote for a democrat because you think of yourself as progressive you are wasting your vote because what you are actually saying is that you are willing to support a candidate who is not really progressive, that the democrats can continue their relentless march to the right and that you will back them all the way. That is, if you vote for a democrat because you say you are progressive, you are saying one thing and doing another. But actions, as everyone knows, speak louder than words. You can go on posturing about how progressive you are, but if you vote for a democrat that posturing is empty.
~ from On Wasting Your Vote by M. G. Piety ~

What this really gets down to is one question: Are you willing to walk your talk? It's easy to say the words progressive or liberal, but if you vote for a candidate that doesn't meet the definition of either, what does that say about YOU?

If you have what you consider to be foundational principles and yet you are willing to toss them aside so easily, then I would say you really don't have principles at all or, at least, you have very weak ones.