Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 05:44:32 -0400 (EDT)
From: Nacho Cordova <cordova-AT-wam.umd.edu>
Subject: Re: FW: Election 2000


Fellow List-Members:

	There are good questions about whether we should include
e-pamphleteering in the list or not. At least that kind of pamphleteering
devoted to political party recruitment. We do allow it for other
things. Not that it is necessarily bad, but perhaps we should take a good
look at it. Anyway, it allows me to note briefly something which I have
been working on for the ALTA conference on Argumentation, namely "argument
from conscience."

	On the letter directed at Nader:  I find the letter particularly
insulting. As a voter and citizen that has tried consistently to combat a
creeping cynicism about our politics-as-usual and campaigns in this
country the letter reinforces two ideas that I find... well, yes very much
compatible with a colonial state of mind:

1.  That citizens in this country owe a vote to some party and that a
certain party (here the Democratic party) is guaranteed any number of
votes from the electorate. 

Responding to the attack that states that he would be weakening Gore,
Nader responded recently that nobody is guaranteed votes in this country.
You as a candidate and party have to work for them and earn them. The
Democratic party is not guaranteed my vote just because I happen to have
more liberal leanings and not want to see Bush elected. If Gore wanted my
vote, he should have earned it and convinced me it was right to give it to
him.

2.  A vote considered the way the letter presented is a commodity to be
traded and negotiated. It is taken from the realm of what we've understood
so far as "conscience" and in a quite anti-democratic way inserted as
another sign of consumption. It does this by faking an argument from
conscience.  Granted, this might not be new, nor just happening in this
election season. But, the argument of the letter brings it to the fore;
this campaign is about citizens as consumers of political products which,
if anybody pays attention to campaign funding, will recognize that more
and more these "products" are corporate goods. If this is the argument,
then by cracky, Gore, Inc. has not sold it to me.

The letter is a thinly disguised fear appeal. To the extent that it
demands a response perhaps we can take it up in terms of the symbolic
violence it does to the citizenry in the ways outlined (in very drafty
mode yes) above.

Best, 

Nathaniel I. Cordova
University of Maryland
cordova-AT-wam.umd.edu



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