voting

A common chant at U.S. demonstrations for a while now has been "this is what democracy looks like." I disagree. Marches are a patch for when democracy on its own doesn’t deliver the "will of the people". Ideally we wouldn’t be in the streets; we’d all have a our voices heard in the room. But we march anyway. We understand that sometimes you have to pull on the levers of power you can reach, even while you work to dismantle and rebuild the machine.

The U.S. is, if we are being wildly generous, a deeply flawed democracy. Power is concentrated and fortified by money and violence. Most folks are left out in the cold. We all know this. And yet elections happen. Maybe the outcome only matters a little and maybe the process is warped by the flows of power. But elections still happen. They are still a lever, however inconsequential, that can be pulled.

Some of you are thinking “If voting mattered it would be illegal” and that’s half right, but only half. Power isn’t monolithic. There is a tendency to build up the enemy as a pervasive suffocating power. But in the real world everything is a bit more squishy and porous and human than that. That’s why organizing and demonstrations and all that good stuff sometimes work. Why oppressive power still sometimes inexplicably leaves itself open would require a whole line of analysis that is way beyond the scope of my rant here. The point is that, for now at least, elections are still a thing in the U.S. and, while the process is shit, they’re not yet 100% a puppet show. We have to hit them any way we can, however small.

And some of you are going to start talking about not wanting to consent or be complicit in the horrors of the next administration. There will be horrors. I agree. But voting isn’t a pledge of loyalty. You already don’t believe that the U.S. is a democracy, you already don’t believe that they particularly care about your consent or are in need of your complicity. I know the Liberals like to attach moral baggage to voting. But why would we, as anarchists, accept that? All that talk about “earning” and “deserving” your vote, about the patriotism of participating in the process, about democracy … fuck it. Your vote isn’t any of that. It’s just a thing you can do to maybe make the world slightly better. It costs you practically nothing. At the end of the day those in power are more than happy to take abstention at the polls to mean that you’re basically fine with whatever. Voting is only being complicit if it’s the only thing you do; what matters are the other 364 days.

And I more than admit that the U.S. is system is beyond dumb. If you live in Wyoming or Washington D.C. I don’t care if you vote for the presidency or not. You’re right. You’re vote in that race mostly doesn’t matter. But, and I know this isn't a novel insight, there’s a lot more on the ballot than the presidency. Local races at the city, county, school board, sheriff, judge (can you fucking believe judges are an elected position??) make a massive difference in people’s daily lives. I promise that if you don’t think so you aren’t paying enough attention. Will electing the right people usher in the revolution? Of course not. Neither will not buying stuff from Amazon, using Signal, or running the local Food Not Bombs. But all of those can make the world a little bit better so we do them anyway.

bonus tangent: There is a tension in anarchism between wanting to build alternative institutions and community in parallel to the current world and wanting to challenge the current world. Both streams are living and valid parts of contemporary anarchism. We often try to paper over that difference with talk of “direct action” but I am not convinced that that’s as theoretically robust as we would always like it to be. And my tangent to this tangent is that historically anarchism was all about “propaganda by the deed” and somewhere (if some historian of anarchism could help me pinpoint when I would be deeply grateful!) that fell away. At the very least the idea that anarchists have never wanted to engage with the current system is ahistorical.