On Boycotting

Clinton ’92 was the first presidential election in which I could legally vote.

But I didn’t vote. Nor did I vote in several of the following elections.

It took the trauma of the Bush years and the subsequent Obamawave—not to mention many bouts of self-shaming along the way—to finally get me to the ballot box for the first time, when I cast my vote for Obama’s first term at the age of 34.

I try to remember the time that I grew up in, how different it was to today. You can only see it in hindsight, but being political back in the ‘90s was not the norm, at least not for people in my lower to mid middle class environs.

These were the so-called “End of History” days, a post-political era that began with the fall of the Soviets and a sharp upturn in the economy, which all had a sedative effect for suffrage. Political matters were interesting only to the relatively few for whom such civic engagement happened to be important, either because they came from families who were particularly politically engaged or because they were headed towards a life adjacent to political circles, as lawyers and consultants and so forth.

The rest of us sullen GenXers, the proverbial slackers, just didn’t care enough to vote. At the time the older folks and the talking heads also didn’t care enough to go out of their way to shame us into voting. The political culture was more muted. The kind of heightened volatility around the question of voting and who you were going to vote for, which characterizes American political life now at the end of this first quarter of the 21st Century, never rose to the current level of urgency and emergency.

And yet, for the first time since voting during the Obamawave, after voting Democrat for the last four elections, I now find myself returning to my old pessimism, although with much more information available to me, culled and processed over the course of three decades of consumption of books, news articles, podcasts and Op-Eds.

At the time of writing, I haven’t yet decided whether I will vote for Jill Stein or simply not vote at all. At the end of the day, to me there isn’t much of a difference between those two options, anyway.

Deciding between the two is going to have the same impact on the election. The American political system is built around the prevalence of two parties, so voting for a third party candidate is basically the electoral equivalent of not voting at all. In deciding not to vote for either one of those two parties come November 5th, whether it takes the form of the Stein vote or just staying at home, I am in effect refusing to participate in the election.

Or am I really?

The refusal to participate in the Manichaean binary of American political life, our national cage match of endless political battle, raises a nagging issue, one that seems to allay some of the lifelong embarrassment I still feel for having taken so long to habituate myself to voting.

It might just be the case that my early years of political apathy may have contained more wisdom than I had previously been willing to consider.

I have been coming to the conclusion that a boycott of an election is itself a form of participation, that you’re actually still voting when you refuse to vote.

When you don’t participate in what the majority of your fellow Americans believe to be the main issue being voted on, you are in essence still casting a vote. It’s a vote for the reconsideration of said issue, for insisting on looking at the issue through a lens that is not available on the ballot.

It’s taken me a long time of handwringing, but I have now come to believe that something like compulsory voting is unjust, precisely because it negates what I see to be an essential ingredient in democratic civic engagement, the right of the people to boycott an election. This means I can look back at my youth during Clinton/Bush and its political apathy as forms of just revolt (although in a much more childish way than I would ever choose to exercise that right today).

Today, the exercise of this right of boycott, whether it take the form of staying at home on Election Day or casting a third party ballot, surely needs some justification. Given today’s political climate, one exercises this right on pain of the sound of knives unsheathed. For my part, such a justification will come from the populist left, but I can easily see a similarly justified case coming from the populist right, since it would essentially turn on the same point: that the two parties are actually one party, that they are both undergirded by the same undemocratic, imperialist machinery and any differences between them that are supposed to matter to voters can be explained away as the successful suspension of disbelief one finds expertly accomplished by professional storytellers such as Hollywood screenwriters and playwrights on Broadway.

By this light, one votes for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump and accomplishes a different act of violence depending on who you choose, though the severity of the act will more or less be the same. I can vote for Trump and therefore choose to blow someone’s brains out with a Winchester or I can vote for Harris and thereby choose to starve that same person to death. Sooner or later that person will be dead, whether I’ve voted for Trump or Harris.

I do believe that Donald Trump, despite being an unserious amateur and a clownish entertainer, is the only legitimate and electable formulation of antiestablishment sentiment available to a voting American today. I also believe that Kamala Harris, despite being a holographic apparatchik of the establishment, would nonetheless maintain structures that I have come to rely on over the course of my life, such as the right to an abortion.

Yet, I can bring myself to vote for neither of them, because they both equally represent the continuation of the same exact undemocratic and violent system.

Neither of them have said a single meaningful word about the most critical issues when it comes to retaining true democratic power, namely antitrust, money in politics, the regulatory state, labor activism and other issues that are essential to a smooth running democracy. My view is that, without a real national conversation about these issues, any hope for a truly democratic polity is as illusory as the so-called threats to democracy I am supposed to believe one side constitutes and the so-called slide to communism I am supposed to believe the other side does.

Therefore, I will exercise my right and vote for the issue I believe is the most important. I will boycott the election and make my voice heard in said fashion. Silence counts. A man who does not speak when called upon to speak communicates much. If there are more of him a pattern takes hold. Patterns of silence in civic life are their own elections. The issue which they care about, but for which they have no microphone through which to transmit it, gains credence the more its omission is felt by the larger body and sets up an alternate discussion.

Electoral politics as such is bourgeois politics, a conversation about the positioning of the furniture in the dining room, not of the amount of food being served, and to whom, after the bell rings. The issue of the food itself is the real issue, but in a capitalist state, that issue is never on the ballot.

A boycott is not sufficient to register dissent, especially if you believe, as I do, that true change will not come through the ballot box. If you believe, as I do, that the next step towards a more just world is placed on the path of the struggle for socialism, then you must also believe that the election of a politician can never constitute the true site of democratic action, that the agitation from below must be trained chiefly on non-electoral efforts.

No one can ever be sure that one is in the right. It often comes down to a matter of the gut when it comes to choosing the course of right action. How many generals have won a war and looked down upon the battlefield at the hanging viscera and smoke entrails and said, “what have I done?” Probably more than we know.

When I hear people talk of Putin and unjust invasions I hear the amnesiac sound of words which issue from an alternate universe that never saw an Abu Ghraib.

I hear the same amnesia from Bibi who uses words like “terrorism” as though we have not already gone to the other side of what a so-called war on terror actually means.

When I hear the sound of jets purring every time the word Taiwan is uttered I am reminded that great power conflict is the prelude to wars fought over rights of way and this telegraphs not power but weakness. Nothing is more dangerous than a tiger that fears for its life.

But maybe it’s me that’s wrong: maybe history will prove incorrect my sentiments about NATO and Ukraine and Palestine and Iran and who is really evil and who is not. There are some beliefs that I really find basically impervious to the course of history, though these tend to rest on ideologies, such as anti-imperialism, that I hold as a result of spiritual reasons. These aren’t beliefs that are particularly susceptible to persuasion. Nonetheless, history continues to change minds and to prove people wrong about their priors.

In the meantime, I can only believe what I believe.

And I hope that on November 5th you vote for what you believe.

If your conscience says that you love Kamala or that you love Trump, God bless.

If your conscience says that you hate the other one more than you could possibly love the one, and that you must vote to do your part to keep him or her out of office, God bless.

If your conscience drives you to the belief that there might actually be a slim chance to elect someone like Jill Stein or any of the other third party candidates and you wish to register your intent to make that happen at the ballot box, God bless.

Whichever way your conscience takes you, I support your right to register it at the ballot box. God bless.

The meaning of our democracy, such as we have it, is not based upon the needs of a battlefield, but on the needs of conversation. The free exercise of the vote, universal suffrage, is the principal article of faith in this conversation, even if it will always be insufficient for the achievement of the greater democratic task, which requires so much more than traveling to a ballot box every four years. This conversation is predicated on the assumption of disagreement, on the right to be at odds and still be called an American, on the right to be misinformed without losing the right to participate. And, finally, on the right to refuse to participate.

It is a big ol’ mess. We should find a way to get dirty while also being civil. Maybe that’s naive, but that’s what I’m going to be saying to myself next Tuesday.