Thoughts on Non-Voting

Written in the lead-up to the 2020 Presidential Election

I will meet most leftist, Bernie supporting, or third-party touting non-voters on many if not most of their qualms. For, like these peers, I take issue with much of America’s historical foreign policy, its corporate state superstructure, and the failings of its democracy for nearly all except the wealthy, and particularly for workers, women, minorities, and the poor. I, like them, share in the view that substantial, systemic change is needed, that both the Republican and the establishment wing of the Democratic party could be called factions of the same party (the business party), and that there is cause for disillusionment. This is especially salient for young people who are just beginning to taste the thrills of freedom, the intoxicating new philosophical and political milieus of university life, and, simultaneously, the pangs of economic hardship and fresh responsibility.

Frustrated and impatient as young college kids often are — and not wrongly, for impatience can be a political virtue — they may take the view that voting for a centrist, establishment Democrat won’t do anything to change the system that seems not to accommodate their needs and beliefs. That if one votes as such, no progress is made in pushing forth leftist, progressive politics, and nothing is done to break apart the two party — or one party, however one sees it — stronghold.

Again, I sympathize for the most part with all of these sentiments. I thus might seem to come off as conservative or moderate in saying the following, but this is the inevitable consequence of being forced to criticize my peers ‘on the left’ who seem to have lost their sense of morality ahead of November’s incomparably, unmistakably critical election.

Of course, I am neither conservative nor moderate. I align most with the left wing of the Democratic party and favor many social-democratic policies, having voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary. Regardless, even if one adopts the view that Democrats and Republicans are factions of the same party, one cannot deny the fact that the difference between them is real and significant. A Joe Biden administration will take climate change, systemic racism, nuclear disarmament, gender inequality, immigrant rights, criminal justice reform, childcare reform, health care reform, voter suppression, and most other vital issues (not to mention economic justice and student loans) much more seriously than have Donald Trump and his Republican Senate. With Joe Biden leading us, science will be trusted and not vilified, the plights of workers, the middle class, Black Americans, women, LGBTQ folks, and people with disabilities will at least be taken seriously and addressed, and a sense of decency will replace the ever-pervasive, fetid stench of overt corruption, smarmy Wall Street ethics, and unabashed xenophobia that currently swirls around our capital.

Progress made under a Biden administration likely won’t fully satisfy someone of my political temperament. But the choice is utterly simple. One may choose to support a decent, respectable man who will at the least push our country forward, or one may sit on the sidelines, content with their feeble, pseudo-resistance that contributes to nothing but four more years — or worse — of a presidency that will only push our country backwards. America, and humanity itself, simply cannot go another day in which climate change is ignored and the disgraceful treatment of Black people, the embodiment of the original sin of this nation, goes dismissed. To assert or imply, through nonvoting, a moral equivalence between Joe Biden and the man with an apparently willful propensity towards endangering human life and who is largely responsible for the deaths of 200,000 Americans in the past six months is facile and asinine. And to choose to resign America to four more years of it is highly irresponsible.

For those unsatisfied with our two choices and who have encountered political disillusionment in general, I think that the right course of action should be clear. It is articulated by Noam Chomsky, perhaps the leading figure on the left since the Vietnam War and a man whose direction anyone who opts to call themself a radical should value. To Chomsky, the position of the left is always to vote against, not to ‘vote for’. Voting is a fifteen-minute task that takes one away from all of the other activism in which one is engaged for the rest of the four years and is of course not enough to affect change on its own. But it is an indispensable, necessary tool by which we in America can, to some extent, influence the outcome of our leadership. No matter how great one’s disillusionment with American politics — and I share in the view that wealthy elites in combination with powerful politicians comprise an obscured but very real corporate state that dominates our society — one must acknowledge the fact that we live with a Constitution that affords us rights unknown to many around the world, and that our elections carry much more weight than the shams conducted in places like Belarus. The power of the people to vote can and must be instrumentalized to elect Joe Biden this November.

I truly hope that anyone considering non-voting will heed the advice of Chomsky, who says one should “vote for Biden and then haunt his dreams”. The elimination of the existential threat posed in a quite literal sense to our society by Donald Trump is the highest priority any of us should carry into this election season, and those who fail to see the critical margin by which Biden is superior to Trump will only exacerbate that threat. For those who care about the climate crisis, the systemic racism faced by Black Americans and others every day, and a host of other issues, nonvoting is passive. It is cliché and conveniently fashionable for a young, disillusioned college student to take this route, and its only accomplishment is to abet a Trump win. The active choice is to vote for Biden, to send him in on a wave of newly elected progressive Congresspeople, and then to pressure him every day into addressing systematic defects. This fight is much better than any involving Trump, will be more productive for society, and, with Biden having shown himself to be somewhat amenable to Sanders’ and Elizabeth Warren’s ideas, much more conducive to policies supported by democratic socialists.

I have resorted to some cliches to make my point, but on occasion these become so applicable that they can’t but be employed. I hope that my fellow college students and young people will consider the nuances of these arguments — and that they will shoulder their duty as leftists, if they style themselves as such — to vote Donald Trump out of office. And I hope that the instances in which my own pretentiousness and naïveté has slipped through will only serve to reveal to some the uglier side of theirs.