Political Legitimacy: The Appearance of Goodness

Issue 19 of The Voluntaryist, dated June 1986, begins with the feature article “Legitimacy and Elections.” This piece, written by Theodore J. Lowi, a professor at Cornell University, was originally published in The Baltimore Sun.

The current event trigger for this article was Ferdinand Marcos’ struggle to maintain his power in the Philippines. He desperately needed legitimacy. But what does legitimacy mean? Here’s what Mr. Lowi has to say about it:

“First of all, legitimacy is not mere popularity, although popularity helps. Legitimacy is not mere acceptance; acceptance is an outcome of legitimacy. Legitimacy is not the mere absence of disorder, although the presence of disorder can be taken as an indication of illegitimacy. And legitimacy is not the same as goodness or virtue, but that does point us in the right direction: Legitimacy is the next best thing to being good or virtuous. Legitimacy is the appearance of goodness.

In government, legitimacy is the establishment among the people of a sense of consistency between government actions and some higher principles that the people already accept. Because appearing to be good is easier to accomplish than being good, we tend to speak of legitimacy rather than of goodness in government.”

I’ve been thinking about this idea of goodness in relation to legitimacy and voting and it does help explain beliefs surrounding the idea of voting. People who vote are considered “good.” They are “good” people, performing their “civic duty” by this form of participation in government which of course means that the government they vote for must also be "good." No one who votes could ever think of the government as something "bad."

Many don’t want felons, the “bad” people, to be able to vote. This makes sense because that would dilute the appearance of the goodness of it all.

However, there have been moves in states to change this and give felons the right to vote. Why do you think government officials are willing to do this? Certainly it means more people available to bribe in order to get more votes in general for any individual candidate, but could it also be the need to keep the voting numbers up in order to keep up the appearance of legitimacy?

Then we have more "bad" people, the nonvoters. They are very troublesome to those who want to maintain our government’s legitimacy which is why we see “get out the vote” campaigns. Presenting the message that it doesn’t matter who you vote for just as long as you vote is a clear attempt to maintain legitimacy. (There are many people who say this who don’t really think too much about it though, they are just being the “good” citizen and parroting the message.)

There is one voting option that I don’t think the rulers would ever go for though, even if it creates more voters and that is a “none of the above” option. That would just careen too close to the cliff of losing legitimacy. I’m sure it would scare the bejeezus out of them to have a “none of the above” option after doing a strong get out the vote campaign.

Of course the push to get nonvoters to vote doesn't work on everyone so government supporters still have to figure out what to say about them so they are automatically considered to be apathetic. Apathy is an important characteristic to attach to these folks because it implies that they are willing to accept any of the candidates and this gets us right back to legitimacy.

This is why I think it’s important for those who don’t vote for principled reasons to say so. I will no longer voluntarily trudge down to the voting booth because I don’t want to legitimize a system that depends on the acceptance of the initiation of force upon my neighbors.

To me, that’s just not a “good” thing to do at all.

The Greatest Benefit of Not Voting

In Issue 17, a short piece titled “Living Slavery and All That,” written by Alan P. Koontz discusses Murray Rothbard’s “slavery analogy” and whether or not this analogy is useful to determine the morality of voting.

Here is an excerpt from Rothbard’s book The Ethics of Liberty, Chapter 24, (The Moral Status of Relations to the State) which helps explain Rothbard’s view:

“Many anarchist libertarians claim it immoral to vote or to engage in political action–the argument being that by participating in this way in State activity, the libertarian places his moral imprimatur upon the State apparatus itself. But a moral decision must be a free decision, and the State has placed individuals in society in an unfree environment, in a general matrix of coercion. The State—unfortunately—exists, and people must necessarily begin with this matrix to try to remedy their condition. As Lysander Spooner pointed out, in an environment of State coercion, voting does not imply voluntary consent.3 Indeed, if the State allows us a periodic choice of rulers, limited though that choice may be, it surely cannot be considered immoral to make use of that limited choice to try to reduce or get rid of State power.4”

Koontz disagrees with Rothbard and gives several compelling reasons why this analogy is insufficient. One I find particularly interesting is the idea that voting does not just affect the individual voter, voting also affects others.

However, I’m not too concerned about convincing people of the morality of voting or not voting based on the idea of whether or not it is affecting (and thereby possibly harming) others, I’m more about non-voting as an individual act of defiance.

Not voting is the easiest way to start withdrawing your consent and removing yourself from state control. Oh sure, your individual refusal to vote will not do anything to change how the state treats you. They won’t suddenly leave you alone because you do not consent by voting.

But there is one major positive result when not voting is done as a conscious, principled act of defiance against the state: you begin to free your mind.

This is where all change begins. A free mind thinks more creatively. A free mind is open to investigating and critically examining ideas which can lead to fresh alternatives. A free mind is more at peace and naturally compassionate towards others.

So why continue to do what the master wants you to do? Free your mind. Don’t vote, and do it as a conscious, principled act of defiance to the state.

The Anarchist Insight

I’ve finished the first issue! I’ve discovered that this publication is not like reading the newspaper. Newspapers give me highly processed and pre-digested information, sugar-coated to make it go down easy, even to the point of telling me what to think. But when reading this publication, I have to really take time to chew on thoughts and ideas and so my brain can digest them and I can mentally process them to a conclusion.

Wow, look at all those eating metaphors. Who knew how much this project would actually mirror Julie and Julia?

This first issue contains a feature article written by George H. Smith called “The Ethics of Voting.” This is noted as part one, so there is more to come. So I guess we can consider this the appetizer.

In this article Mr. Smith wants to speak to the group he calls “political anarchists.” (And yes, he does mention the contradiction.) He uses this article to set up definitions and ideas for a discussion of whether or not voting is ethical according to the ideas that political anarchists hold.

He goes into a lot of detail setting this all up and I am not going to repeat it here. That’s not the intent of this blog. The intent is to share what I found interesting, what hit me, and why. Past that, you can choose to read the article yourself and/or discuss with me the points I bring up here. So to that end, here’s what I found interesting about this article.

* First of all, I was intrigued by the term “political anarchist” because I really never heard that term in the discussions I had over the years. In the groups I participated in, these types of debates were generally labeled as “purist” versus “pragmatist.” Same idea I suppose.

However, it did make me wonder if the anarchistic folks moved to the word purist because anarchist just really made what they were doing there look so much more obvious in its contradictions. I don’t know, but if I had heard the term political anarchist more often, maybe I would have moved through my process faster.

Eh, probably not, I’m a slow learner.

* Secondly, he discusses the idea of vicarious liability and how important it is for all libertarians, anarchistic or not. This is the understanding that people can play an important part in the aggression even when they are not the ones actually performing the aggressive act. You can probably see why he’s pointing this out as an important piece if he’s going to talk about voting and its possible implications.

Finally, what I found most interesting about this article is this:

Voluntaryists are more than libertarians; they are libertarian anarchists. They reject the institution of the state totally, and it is this element that is not contained (explicitly at least) within libertarianism.

This is the anarchist insight, recognizing the institution itself as invasive.

Libertarians in general do not necessarily analyze and reach the conclusion to reject the institution. This was an important point for me to understand because it helps to see how my communications with those in the party changed after I started realizing this to be the case. It was like speaking a different language after a point.

When someone knows something is wrong within an institution but does not reject the institution itself, what they naturally conclude is that the people in charge just aren’t running it “right” and if only the “right” people were in there, it would be okay.

One reason I think I was able to eventually reject the institution is that, over time, I had already done that with schools. I began to understand that real education could never really happen in an institution because they simply could not hand over enough freedom for that to occur.

So perhaps that’s one thing to consider for anyone who is interested in communicating these ideas to people: find the ones who have been harmed by institutions in some way and use that to reach an understanding. Has anyone else though of that and tried it? If so, what happened?

Smith says if an institutional analysis can get us to anarchism, then it can also get one to voluntaryism. I think I see where he is going and am curious to read what he says next in this series.

In other words, I’m hungry for more.