A nonvoter's manifesto

"A funny thing happened to me on the way to this year's presidential election," Erwin Knoll, editor of The Progressive, writes in "Wake Me When It's Over," his cover essay. "I made up my mind not to vote." Noting that he has voted in every presidential election since 1952, he explains that "I won't vote for George Bush and J. Danforth Quayle Jr. because they are the intellectually enfeebled mouthpieces of a party profoundly committed to everything I detest: militarism and war, cheap-shot jingoism, greater privilege for the rich and deeper poverty for the poor. I won't vote for them because they are proud of the deterioration and decay wrought during the Reagan years, and promise more of the same. And I won't vote for Dukakis and Bentsen because they bear more resemblance to Bush and Quayle than I can stomach." Launching into a litany of shortcomings shared by the two dominant tickets, and the failure of both to address the most fundamental and substantive challenges confronting the U.S., Knoll concludes: "The most pernicious aspect of the electoral system is that it induces those few organizations and individuals who do useful political work to suspend their efforts for at least one year out of every four so that they can focus, instead, on electing somebody. There is serious political work to be done in our schools and workplaces, in homes and churches, on the streets and in our neighborhoods. We can speak and write, meet and march, agitate and demonstrate, educate and organize. And eventually, when we've built a constituency for change in this country, we can even start thinking again about electing people to office who will actually address our needs and carry out our wishes. Then it will make sense to vote." Knoll's manifesto provoked a hailstorm of letters to the editor and won a Milwaukee Press Club award as the best analytical article published in Wisconsin that year. The Bush-Quayle ticket won the election. Knoll died on Nov. 2, 1994.