Michael Mochaidean, Morgantown
A recent editorial (DP-Tuesday April 10) entitled “Taking a knee on voting unpatriotic” begins with the statement that, “A lot of bad public officials get where they are because a lot of good people never vote.”
Throughout this editorial, the newspaper outlines seemingly shocking statistics that the drop in registered voters — on the magnitude of around 12,000 from 2017 to 2018 — combined with a decline in voting percentages year to year means that, according to the editors, a small sliver of the population is deciding who our leaders are.
This bourgeois political analysis assumes that a decline in voter turnout is indicative of a culture of apathy, rather than lambasting the fact that voter apathy is indicative of our political state of affairs.
Take, for example, the most recent election for governor. On the one hand, voters had the choice of Jim Justice, who had only switched parties a few months prior to deciding to run; the wealthiest man in West Virginia. Justice’s wealth comes from expressly exploiting the working class of this state to further his own ends.
On the other hand, voters had the opportunity to vote for Bill Cole, whose main campaign contributions came from the natural gas and coal industries. The only viable third-party choice voters could choose from was Charlotte Pritt, who garnered almost 6 percent of the vote and who had been previously snubbed by the Democrats in 1996 for being too pro-labor.
Voters were then presented with only one option — which of the wealthy candidates would they prefer to have rule over them? Regrettably, Justice chose to yet again partake in one of West Virginia’s time-honored traditions of switching political parties from Democrat to Republican post-election.
Instead of pushing for greater involvement in electoral politics, why not emphasize the militant unionism that forced an overwhelmingly conservative Legislature to make concessions to the working classes of both West Virginia and now Oklahoma?
After all, in the soon-to-be post-Janus (an anti-union case before the U.S. Supreme Court) world, labor only has two options: Resist or perish.
