Oh yeah? Back in August, I wrote a post responding to the Republican presidential candidates’ debate, suggesting that the Republicans’ views were insane but not much worse than the Democrats’, so that the best bet was to vote third party. That was before October 7 and before Gaza, when my main objection was the Democrats’ involvement in Ukraine. Since then, I’ve only gotten more adamant about it: I had no intention of voting for either Biden or Trump then, and have even less of one now. 

When I offered that view on Facebook (which I’ve since abandoned), one of my Facebook “friends,” Roman Altshuler, had some vituperative things to say in response, vaguely (inscrutably) inspired by Wittgenstein’s private language argument:

You may believe that you are registering some disagreement with both parties. But the rest of us don’t. And because what you believe you are doing, in this case, is worth absolutely nothing, talking about it the way are you are is absurd. Nobody gives a shit why you vote for Cornell [sic] West. Nobody should give a shit.

Yeah, yeah. You can read the whole thing here.

In the nine months since then, activists across the country have done the hard, thankless work of putting an Uncommitted option on the primary ballot in various states, including New Jersey, where I live. These Uncommitted votes have had a real effect. It’s now an open question whether the Uncommitted vote will cost Biden the presidency. We’ll see. 

The New Jersey primary election is this coming June 4th, with early voting starting on May 29th and extending to June 2. The sample ballot just came in yesterday’s mail. Here are the options under “US President & District Delegates” for the Democratic candidates.

So you no longer need Wittgenstein to figure out which way the votes are blowing: a vote for Uncommitted is a vote against Biden in favor of ceasefire in Gaza (and with any luck, the West Bank). 

In truth, Wittgenstein’s private language argument wasn’t all that relevant to anything before Gaza, either. Pseudo-Wittgensteinian bullshit aside, most people grasp that a third-party vote is a way of registering disaffection with the two mainstream parties. Even before October 7, it was fairly obvious what that meant: a vote for a left-wing candidate like Cornel West (or Jill Stein) was a vote for the positions Cornel West (or Jill Stein) holds, as against the ones held by Democrats and Republicans. 

West has described those positions in public in a fashion that’s accessible even to the most ignorant academic philosopher. To access his views, you go onto the public phenomenon called “the Internet,” point your browser in the direction of the publicly-accessible thing called his “website,” and read the publicly-accessible words that are on it. Once you do, you can, on reflection, grasp that West’s views are incompatible with those of, say, Joseph Biden and Donald Trump. That permits you to infer that a vote for Cornel West is a vote for views incompatible with, say, Joseph Biden and Donald Trump. The same procedure will work for Jill Stein, or whatever. 

Suppose that that’s too much empirical research for you? In that case, the activists of “Justice for Palestine” have eased your burdens. If you inspect the photo above, you can see that a vote for option 3A is a vote for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza rather than one for Biden or Bukovinac. That’s because Biden is against a permanent ceasefire, and Bukovinac’s signature issue is opposition to abortion rights. 

I don’t know where Bukovinac stands on Gaza–her website doesn’t say, and a search turned up nothing–but I don’t think it matters. Bukovinac obviously doesn’t regard Gaza as her highest priority issue; Justice for Palestine does. So even if Bukovinac turned out to be pro-ceasefire (which I highly doubt), that would come well after her opposition to abortion. To give you an idea, she hasn’t made clear where she stands on ceasefire in Gaza, but has made clear that she’s against abortion there. So you couldn’t plausibly say that a vote for Bukovinac is a vote for ceasefire. Put it this way: if the Israelis re-conquered Gaza and installed an anti-abortion regime there, Bukovinac would be committed to supporting it. If that sounds outlandish, it’s no less so than identifying Bukovinac with ceasefire. 

If you vote for 3A, which I suggest doing, “you may believe that you are registering some disagreement with both parties.” And believe it or not, your belief will be true.  

You don’t “give a shit” how we vote? You might want to start.