Lifelong Republican, Voting for Obama

With two weeks left until the Presidential election, I have remained up until now an undecided voter.  I have been a lifelong republican (for reasons I’ll allude to below), but am a now a true independent with a particularly integral view of the world.  This election I will be voting for Barack Obama.

First, before I summarize why I’ve chosen to vote for Obama, let me add a few points of preface.  First, our form of democracy was established such that change occurs very slowly, regardless of who is in office or congress.  This characteristic, thus far, has worked well by ensuring that competing forces and a moderating structural system has kept the country largely on a plodding but improving course through history.  All of this to say that the rhetoric about this being the most important election in a generation is not a statement of fact but a statement of passion.  I think all elections are of some importance, but none are of particularly great importance.  This is actually the deep brilliance of our system of government.  So I don’t believe that an Obama administration or a McCain administration will be a final and grand deciding factor of our fate in the 21st century.  Also, I think this view enables a more rational, less emotional, less biased, and more integral capability of evaluating the candidates given the current conditions we face.

Second, both candidates and platforms are flawed in ways that a transpartisan voter will find conspicuous.  To the extent that both candidates are political products from our two major political parties - who by definition have enacted the values of their respective socio-political movements, with all their attendant historical baggage and political IOUs - both bring deep limitations to an integral voter seeking a transpartisan approach that can transcend and include the valid but partial strengths of both traditional conservatism and traditional liberalism.  And it is obvious to the integral voter that who we will choose to vote for is the person who best reflects back to us our most strongly-identified part of ourselves - much like the choices we make in fashion or autos or jobs or houses is one where we see some idealized version of ourselves identified with and reflected back at us in those products and lifestyles choices.  So awareness of how we strongly identify, and conversely disassociate, with the different reflections we see is a critical capability of the integral voter.  And a state practice where we begin to build a transpersonal view of self will serve to make us better voters as it diminishes the influence of political rhetoric and lessens the passions born of fear as we react to the partiality of any candidate.  If America at large were capable of voting this way, we’d see political discourse become smarter, deeper, more evolved, and more significant.

What follows is a summary of how I made my decision to vote for Obama.

Because he is black.  I disagree with several of Obama’s policies and philosophical presuppositions, but I am not a party voter nor a single issue voter.  In this election we have been given an opportunity to symbolically and in the most potent gesture available to a body politic heal a wound that has existed since this country’s birth.  If America is a young adult, then real and perceived racial bias is our first and final major developmental pathology, and this opportunity to heal it is in the grand scope of America’s life story a benefit that by orders of magnitude outweighs all other policy and party differences.  This is not a political vote, it is a vote to heal the human race.

Because capitalism will have to be forced to grow up.  Capitalism (along with religion, art and education, in my view) is the most powerful force for change for good in the world.  It is also just a system, values-free and brainless. It produces what it is told to produce, which is dictated by the values of the people who operate within the system (values which aren’t changing fast enough).  Capitalism is not capable of accounting for the externalities (hidden costs) of natural environment degradation and climate change, nor, as a blind system, does it have any real incentive to do so.  Solutions to environmental degradation are the most pressing and legacy-defining issue of our time (another degree or two of increase in average temperature on earth and we probably reach a self-propagating tipping point of accelerating heat-capture), and I believe that Obama understands the complexity of what’s at stake and has the political backing in the liberal movement to effect the changes that will only come through political force domestically and, globally, exemplary leadership on behalf of the world’s largest economic superpower.

Obama evidences a later-stage of human development than McCain.  It is fairly clear that in general McCain tends toward absolutistic language and caters more to security and self-esteem needs.  Obama tends to more nuanced, more contextually-sensitive, more cognitively complex (all of which he has been criticized for), and tends to evoke themes of self-actualization.  Incidentally, I think this is why Obama attracts younger voters.  (Though the downside of the self-actualizing levels is narcissism, I believe this level is the leading-edge from which our culture is conditioning our youth’s view of themselves.) Now, I admit to not knowing whether later-stage development is better in our President at this stage in history.  I believe that it is.  But I think George W. Bush might be the best thing to have happened to this country in a long-time.  At least in my lifetime I cannot recall the country being so introspective about our role in the world, our values, and our relationship to the constitution on which we were founded.  In a larger time-scale view, great growth is always preceded by great suffering, and it is hard to know which leader will be more pivotal to our long-term development.  But as I haven’t seen any data to inform this decision otherwise, I’ll bet on Obama’s integral capabilities as immensely important to the successful navigation of the Iran problem, climate change, human rights and moral leadership, better global governance and others.

McCain’s judgment in Sarah Palin is problematic.  I think McCain made a choice that was smart in the short-term and fatal in the long-term.  I made this prediction in these pages two months ago and it has played out as I expected.  She energized the base and put the Democrats back for about a month as they tried to figure out how to respond to her choice without sounding marginalizing.  And they did the smart thing: by ignoring her they allowed her lack of credentials to become her undoing.  But this also bespeaks too much about McCain: he is impulsive and ultimately by choosing Palin evidences a traditional worldview that is problematic and underqualified for the complexity and progressivity of America’s badly-needed global leadership at this juncture.

In fairness, here is where Obama worries me.

Philosophy of culture.  I worry about Obama’s capability to understand the philosophical problem inherent in the financial meltdown and our responses thereto.  The meltdown has not been a problem of deregulation or capitalism gone bad.  Those are mere symptoms of a culture that has been conditioned to believe that consumerism is what will fill the existential void that accompanies rejection of the interior life.   The financial meltdown was stupid and avoidable, but also warranted.  I am disappointed in both Obama and McCain for voting for the bailout.  We needed to learn that choices have consequence and that populist solutions that just seek to protect American citizens from the values-growth they inevitably have to undergo is only postponing this growth.  This whole episode and the attendant bailout may have retarded the values-growth of our citizenry for another generation by teaching them that instead of saving money, living within their means, and seeking the deeper compensation of the inner life, that instead government is where we look when we need protection.  Obama might really believe in the liberalism that holds that broader social policy is a cure for this disease, but it is obvious that it does nothing but address the symptom and pass it on for another generation to solve.  Of course, McCain didn’t vote against the bailout, so he failed, too.

Tax and fiscal policy.  McCain is right to look to incentivize saving (i.e., prudence and delayed gratification) by lowering the capital gains rate.  Instead of replying that this benefits the rich, we should be asking how do we encourage everyone to live in such a way that over time they too develop wealth.  Higher savings would also help us to lower our trade deficit, strengthen our currency, and keep interest rates manageable.  So I think Obama’s just wrong on the capital gains rate increase (though he has made it more populist by only imposing on those with more than $250,000 in annual income).  But, among the many other reasons Obama is getting my vote is that right now there is no true fiscally-conservative party in the U.S. Republicans of the past ten years don’t even recognize their own party - we talk about teaching creationism in school and we spend like our children don’t count - so I’m part of the missing middle that is hoping that Obama will demonstrate constraint and fight his own party’s deeply entrenched interests to spend our way through this downturn (though evidence suggests otherwise, like the hundreds of billions of pork that was tacked on to the bailout).

Economic ethnocentrism.  If the republican party has the corner on social bias/discrimination in the U.S., from positions on homosexuality, to traditional values to gender roles, the democratic party has the corner on economic bias/discrimination, from support of ethnocentric unions, ethnocentric protectionist trade policies, and judgmental marginalization of people because of their income or wealth.  I think about what the planet needs over what just Americans need, and I don’t believe that policies that unfairly preserve American capitalistic interests at the cost to African farmers (or others) is the type of economic discrimination we should accept, and I hope that over time the democratic party begins to find a worldcentric sensibility in its economic policies (which won’t happen anytime soon given its union base).  Globalization is a tremendous force for good if we can balance our needs with others’ while also accounting for environmental impacts.

So my vote is for Obama.  Even as I write that I am surprised of just how much of a mess the republicans have made of their own party.