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With strange ambiguity, McCarthy has also endorsed Edmund Muskie for Vice President while leaving out Hubert Humphrey. Since a vote for Muskie is recorded as a vote for Humphrey, McCarthy is either kidding or indirectly supporting Humphrey. In fact, he may yet endorse the Vice President before the election. Numerous Democratic dissidents, including California Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh and Historian Arthur Schlesinger, have already followed that path. Many others, however, are resolutely unreconciled. For the first time since it began endorsing candidates in 1932, The New Republic refused to make any choice. Novelist Mary McCarthy writes bitterly: "Far from being a sign of apathy, [not voting] points to an aroused nation, resentful of the insult offered to the intelligence by the Humphrey-Nixon alternative handed to the public like a stacked deck of cards."
Foes of the Viet Nam war bitterly remember the 1964 election in which many voted for Johnson because he promised peace, even though they had reservations about him in other respects. As they see it, Johnson went on to adopt Barry Goldwater's war policies. This time, they see no significant differences between the candidates on Viet Nam. To register a moral protest, many war dissenters plan to boycott the polls entirely on the theory that a huge nonvote will somehow shock the new Ad ministration, or at least free dissenters from complicity in electing Nixon or Humphrey, both of whom vaguely promise only "an honorable peace."
Other dissidents will get their dissatisfaction on the books by writing in Eugene McCarthy, Black Panther Leader Eldridge Cleaver or Comedian Pat Paulsen. Another tactic is to vote only for congressional and gubernatorial candidates who reflect dissenting views. Among anti-Humphrey Democrats, the hope is that all this will help speed old-line party leaders out of power and permit insurgents to take over by 1972.
The national malaise poses a civic puzzle: Are Americans obliged to vote, even for candidates they dislike? Purists have sometimes overstated a yes answer. Dictatorships often force people to vote for handpicked candidates and then proudly proclaim that participation hit 95% or more. By contrast, the U.S. right to vote carries with it a right not to vote, to register a negative protest, and most Americans would balk at hav ing it any other way. Even so, they sometimes forget that people the world over have often died fighting for even the crudest kind of franchise. Well aware of that struggle, some democracies impose fines on nonvoters. 2% for 98%
Freedom from any such pressure has blinded the nonvoters to a key point. A leader can shape the country's moral choices by taking a no-compromise stand on a great issue, such as the Viet Nam war. Both McCarthy and Lyndon Johnson did just that, risking their political careers in the process. But voters have a different role: to convey their positions through the ballot, the most effective weapon they have. A conscientious citizen can hardly pass off that role easily. Surely the U.S. right not to vote, or to write in sure losers, also carries with it a duty to weigh the consequences, to consider the axiom that inaction is a form of action. A single vote for President is so minuscule among millions that hectoring any individual to vote may seem futile. But is it?