Instead of raging only about the larger political system, look closely at the institutions that have for so long granted access to matters like health and education and demand more from them.
Update, September 2024: Substitute “Harris” for “Biden” and it becomes obvious that very little has changed.
There are two questions I get asked a lot these days: What might be the result of the 2020 election, and is there even any point to voting?
To the first: I have no idea. The only thing I’m sure of in this election year is that there is no way to predict an outcome. A mountain’s height of Nate Silvers and all the polls in the world will tell us nothing at all: even if they turn out to be right, the predictions will only be correct by happenstance. In 2016, I really did think Trump would win, but I didn’t say that too often (except here) given that so many I trusted and who had more experience were predicting otherwise. I practically grew up in the midwest, in Lafayette-West Lafayette, Indiana, and I could tell that Trump’s base was in such places where people had seen their economies devastated over decades. Unlike the Democrats, whose candidate Hillary Clinton couldn’t even be bothered to travel to such areas, Trump’s rhetoric and politicking was aimed squarely at them.
Voters don’t respond to analysis but to events happening in their lives. At the end of the day, a liberal arts professor in the English department at, say, the University of Chicago, is still more likely to vote on how high city taxes in Chicago are going to be than on whether or not Trump has placed “babies in cages” (a phenomenon that began with Obama, actually, an ex-president who is currently part of the intense gentrification of Hyde Park, the neighbourhood that is home to an economically rapacious U of C). The Pandemic has made every institution worry about its economic security and this means that even full professors or law partners are now jittery about their economic well-being.
We don’t want to believe this, but we also didn’t want to believe that the richest country in the world would prove to be such a massive failure in keeping its people alive, let alone healthy (nearly 7 million infected, nearly 200,000 dead). I don’t think there’s any predicting which side will win, but the only thing I can be sure of is what my friend and colleague Salvador Vidal-Ortiz puts so well: “It won’t be a matter of Biden winning, it will be a matter of Trump losing.”
If you want Trump to lose, as I do, understand that your best hope is that even Republicans are moving against him: they may turn out to be our best hope. As long as they see their economic and political interests as misaligned with Trump, we’ll be fine because with or without them, Trump will do whatever he can to make it look like he won. The saddest truth about this next election is that it will once again be a case of political elites deciding who gets to stay or enter. So if you really want Trump to be set aside, understand that voicing your lack of support for him and amplifying that is one of your best chances to get him out of power.
There’s the other side of all this: that Trump might actually carry the election in the fairest way possible. The left/liberal political coverage of Trump is a lot better and much more nuanced than it was in 2016, but it’s still deeply invested in the idea that all it takes to defeat Trump is to convince people that he’s a horrible, corrupt human being (and he is all that and more) but, again, voters aren’t, in the end, actually as concerned about the horrors of Trump as we (some of us who write on the left) might like to think. Trump is insulated from the effects of his numerous personal failings being revealed because he’s a white man: white male politicians’ personal problems are shielded from scrutiny whereas women’s personal issues over-determine their political lives. Brace yourself for the unpleasant fact of an actual Trump win. Even I will admit that his increasingly desperate bids to throw complete lies into the wind to see which will stick tells me he feels he’s losing ground, but do recall that even Trump didn’t expect a Trump win in 2016.
So, should you vote? I’m with Ryan Conrad and Mariame Kaba when they talk about voting as a form of “harm reduction,” and with Nathan J. Robinson when he points out what’s at stake in this election.
I agree with all of it, and I will add what I think all three also emphasise, that we have to continue to think about what’s happening in the United States and elsewhere beyond this or any other election.
American politics is increasingly a kind of long-running soap opera, an extremely expensive production where only someone with at least a few million can even hope to run, and the sheer weirdness of the electoral system here means that we’re subjected to some form of electioneering literally all the time. This is one of the reasons why Americans are so deeply performative about the act of voting, and that performativity has been ramped up in a Pandemic year: we act like voting is some huge drama in the public eye. If you don’t vote for Biden or don’t vote at all, you are directly responsible for anything that happens, is what I and many others are forced to hear if we so much as express reservations about the call to vote, vote, vote or else.
Voting for Biden may get Trump out, but it won’t solve any of our problems and will in fact simply make it easier to live with everything that’s wrong with American culture and politics. I have friends who put it so much better than I could in a recent Facebook thread so I’ll quote them here: to the point that Biden might be pushed leftwards, Rashna Batliwalla Singh asks, What is the end that Biden will be a means to? I think he is more likely to be a detour. Liberals will take a nice long afternoon nap, as they did with Obama, and so Obama dropped 26,171 bombs on seven countries in his final year of office alone and droned with impunity, checking off his kill list every Tuesday, laying siege to Yemen and destroying Libya. Not to speak of massive numbers of deportations and letting Wall Street bankers off the hook. No push leftwards from liberals, not even a gentle nudge. Wes Low points out that, Politicians like Biden dismantled the welfare state, maintained the war on crime and poor people, distributed wealth to the very top, increased our global economic militarization, and promoted individualized risk with extreme classist derision…I think the discussion about who is worse is a red herring–we should be talking about how they are produced out of the same conditions, and if the conditions don’t change, some version of either will be in power.
That last point is worth repeating: If the conditions don’t change, some version of either will be in power.
And that is ultimately the lesson we have to learn to drive home, that if conditions don’t change, things will only get worse, mostly for Americans but also for many parts of the world (although, one positive effect of the Pandemic might be the world realising that ours is the original shithole country). Should you vote? Sure, go ahead, vote if that is what you need to do, especially when it will make a difference in your state and city. But vote without smugness, and without making others feel bad for not voting just because, like so many millions in this country who have actually lost loved ones and whose lives are in perpetual disrepair, they see no point in the system of electoral politics. Or because they genuinely don’t believe in an asinine system which makes no sense to the rest of the world (“your vote counts, except when it really, super-duper doesn’t” is the general gist of the American presidential election).
If you don’t vote, that’s fine too, really it is: we have to get beyond the idea that our lives depend so much on an apparatus that is flawed, creaky, and robs us of our political and psychic energy all the damn time. Just don’t pretend that not voting somehow makes you more authentic or more radical or more outside the machine, or however it makes you feel.
My point is simply this: Whether you vote or not, find a way to think about our collective political life that goes beyond the broken systems that validate our existence. For some of you, that might mean becoming more involved in very local elections, which is where you see yourself having the most effect. For others, not engaging with elections but instead building systems that work for people, whether aid networks or food distribution systems (without them being built on piety or as nonprofits) or, hell, coming together with people to actually discuss how truly radical ideas might be put into effect to transform our horrible conditions and our despair into something at least resembling hope. Stop dismissing the power of intellectual work, and stop dismissing it as work. Instead of raging only about the larger political system, look closely at the institutions that have for so long granted access to matters like health and education and demand more from them.
Don’t just look at the big issues, but look at who is directing policy and funds. For years, my activist friends and I have been pointing out that the immigration “rights” movement has achieved exactly zero results, but even the left has refused to ask why and how that is (DACA was always, as we warned, an utterly useless and toothless gesture from a president who had to be forced to sign even that into existence). The same is true of “community” centres, like LGBTQ organisations or abortion groups, that get massive grants for “community outreach” and yet do nothing more than, well, spend time on getting more grants (try getting queer healthcare outside of a big city or even in one, and try, just try asking for an abortion anywhere). And whether you vote or not, learn to engage with people on the other side. I’ve grown weary of every election cycle being dominated by this pointless raging between two sides: it’s time each suspended its animosity towards the other (while shutting up the truly stupid and uselessly petulant, snarky ones in its midst) and started thinking about how to bring about change outside of the extraordinarily flawed political system in this country.
Our systems are broken, we fail at healthcare, we fail even to keep our children fed, and we have vast swaths of paid public servants who have been killing Black and poor people with impunity from the time of this country’s inception. The political and cultural constructs in the continents we call Europe and Asia are scarcely much better but few among them have had access to so, so much landmass and so, many resources, all of which have been flushed down the toilet and prove utterly useless to the millions who need it.
Things are going to be really bad no matter which candidate emerges as the one chosen by the political elites to be the next president. The issue is not whether or not to vote and whether or not that makes you a better or more enlightened person. Your vote or its absence is nothing without you being active in a system that should make elections a matter of course, not the matter of life and death they’ve become in this country. In a sane society, voting would not be so fraught. Here, we’re only weeks away from November 4, and we already know that lives are literally at stake here, actual lives, many of them belonging to people we know and love.
Vote or don’t vote, but think long and hard about changing and even destroying a system where either option has literally become a matter of life and death.
See also:
“The World Will Still Need Your Attention: Beyond the 2016 Election.”
“Choose Your Elite: Edith Windsor, Hillary Clinton, or Donald Trump.”
“Rights Make Might: The Dystopian Undertow of Hillary Clinton’s Feminism.”
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. I make a point of citing people and publications all the time: it’s not that hard to mention me in your work, and to refuse to do so and simply assimilate my work is plagiarism. You don’t have to agree with me to cite me properly; be an ethical grownup, and don’t make excuses for your plagiarism. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
Image: Washington Crossing the Delaware, Emanuel Luetze, 1851.