Two different things can be true at the same time: The lesser of two evils is still evil; the lesser of two evils is lesser. More than one thing is happening at once. Contradiction—the universal experience of all humanity.
Think about the coming election: There are many, many reasons not to vote. Perhaps you’re disconnected from politics and turned off by all the phoniness and mindless bickering; perhaps you recognize that the options are almost indistinguishable on the big issues—a choice between Teweedledum and Tweedledummer—and you agree with Karl Marx that bourgeois democracy offers nothing more than a ritual to decide, in effect, which member of the ruling class will misrepresent us; perhaps you see the ways that voting is corrupted by big money and manipulated by power, and you note that the political class represents a monied minority and that the electoral college makes voting irrelevant; or perhaps you’re organizing and acting toward more substantive change, and you embrace Rosa Luxemburg’s insight that if we could bring about a revolution through elections, voting would be illegal.
I get all that.
You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you
Still, I’ll go out and vote on election day, as I always have. And I always will. Here’s why:
- Because I work as an organizer, activist, and engaged citizen, and I fight for a world at peace and in balance, a community built on joy and justice and powered by love for 365 days a year, and because voting takes 15 minutes and in no way distracts me from the substantive work I’m committed to doing day in and day out.
- Because for me voting is, in the words of Rebecca Solnit, a chess move and not a valentine. My vote is not a love letter to any candidate, and it never has been. It is, rather, a tactical decision about the preferred landscape on which I’ll carry out my political work—my movement-making, community-building, abolitionist organizing, and pivots to peace. It’s also a recognition that, while the difference between the two major capitalist political parties is only an inch, a lot of vulnerable people exist within that inch. I also like Barbara Ransby’s analogy: Voting is like brushing your teeth—it takes only a few minutes, but if you don’t do it, bad things could happen.
- Because non-voting doesn’t strike a blow for reform nor does it do a thing to diminish or abolish the core archaic institutions of anti-democracy—the Electoral College, the Supreme Court, the Senate—nor does it gesture toward a robust or participatory democracy. A coordinated collective campaign can be powerful—the movement to write in “Undecided” or “Gaza” during the 2024 Democratic Party primary was a brilliant tactic, and part of a larger strategy to put genocide and occupation on the national agenda. But not voting does not stick it to the man—it doesn’t even send a message.
- Because you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. See cataclysmic capitalist climate collapse, for one clear example, or see the Dobbs decision for another.
- Because voter suppression is real—blatant ideological gerrymandering, new registration and ID requirements, shortened voting periods and fewer voting sites, limits on mail-in ballots, intimidation and bullying, felony disenfranchisement, vast sums of money poured into colorful and entertaining but rarely educational or illuminating ads, and more—it’s clear that the ruling class doesn’t want people to vote. So I’ll vote.
- Because voting is a practical, not a moral matter, and it takes nothing away from my deeper and more sustained forms of engagement: organizing, demonstrating, acting up, and acting out.
- Because we are living in perilous times: A new and escalating cold war with China; a hot and destructive proxy war in Europe, and a preannounced genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza underway; raging and racialized police violence unchecked; environmental collapse on full display; fragile and often anemic democratic institutions on life support; religious authoritarianism on the rise; women’s bodily integrity under sustained assault. And because we’re also living in hopeful times—26 million people took to the streets in 2020 in response to the police murder of George Floyd, the largest public outpouring for racial justice in history; the militant resistance to the U.S. partnership with and complicity in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, including the brilliant campus encampments and the widespread public disruptions; women across a wide political spectrum have refused to accept a medieval definition of their rights; labor has won historic, game-changing victories, from the Writers Guild of America to the United Auto Workers, and from Amazon to Starbucks; and broad forces are on the march worldwide to resist plunder and extraction and to preserve life on Earth. Once again, more than one thing is happening at once, and so I wake up every day and glance at these words written on my wall: “Just to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world.” Contradiction.
- Because I worked shoulder to shoulder with people who fought and died for our right to exercise the franchise, and I take that seriously. I think about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the civil rights martyrs James Chaney, Micky Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. My vote is a blood debt to them.
- Because people all over the world are dying—literally dying—for the right to vote. Voting is a fundamental right and responsibility in a free society—without the right to vote, and without exercising that right, we’re all a little less free.
- And, finally because I think self-righteousness is annoying and always wrong, and so I don’t want to unite with my comrades and friends who are acting holier-than-thou as they smugly announce, “I’m so smart and wide awake that I didn’t even vote—like you suckers and pathetic sheep. How cool is that?” Not that cool.
So, here we are—in a place not of our choosing. And no matter what you do, and no matter what I do, there will be a national election in November. Among other things, a president will be elected. I don’t actually think democracy is on the agenda as the Democrats say—and I wish it were—but a unique American fascism is surely on the agenda.
