I’m going to do something I don’t normally do, two things actually. The first is that for a second post in a row I am going to post an article written by another person. The reason for this is straightforward: This article makes the point that voting is a meaningless action that is completely ineffective when it comes to bringing about not only real world change but even the goals people have when they vote and the article makes the argument more succinctly and with more wit than I myself am capable of. While I may be erudite, I am neither witty nor concise. The second thing I don’t normally do is save my commentary entirely for the postscript Addendum. Other than the introduction I have just given you about what the article is about I will not try and expand upon it any further here. I’ll save it all for afterwards, when I can build on what the article says.
The original article is by Michael Malice and is titled Why I Won’t Vote This Year – Or Any Year. It begins below. All pictures are either original or added by myself to illustrate people, places, or ideas that Malice is discussing.
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I rarely tell people that I don’t believe in voting. Participation in the body politic is widely considered to be both a privilege and an imperative to the enlightened urban citizen. To choose otherwise is quite literally heresy – and heretics by and large have a difficult time of it in society.
The platitudes I face as a non-voter are known to everyone, precisely because they are platitudes – People have marched for miles! or Immigrants crossed oceans! The fables are beautiful and they are compelling. But that does not make them true.
I do not agree that secretly flicking a switch once a year constitutes “making your voice heard”. Nor do I think that an annual trip to a voting booth is a criterion for whether one can complain or not. My right to free speech is not contingent upon anyone else, no matter how many of them there are, whether they were elected to some office or however much they stamp their feet.
Neither do I agree that the personal is the political. I fully reject the Kantian universalizability principle that underlies so much of contemporary moral discussion. What if everyone acted the way you did? is not a useful means-test for one’s actions.
I am a pure liberal. I choose to live in Brooklyn, and am very consciously grateful that my friends are as diverse as humanly possible. None of them think like me, none of them act like me and none of them have the background that I do. This is a source of great pleasure, and I wouldn’t change it for the world. Nor could I! I’m not egotistical enough to think that “everyone will act like I do”, as if those around me were my mirror images.
It is undeniably true that I don’t have the practical ability to ignore the state. I have to use state roads, and if I refuse to pay taxes the consequences will be dire for me. But there is literally nowhere on Earth for me to go without some government claiming control over my person. Though democracies are increasingly common throughout the world, it is the state that is universal. These governments will continue to act regardless of any sort of popular approval – and certainly regardless of any approval of mine.
State action proceeds independently of any democratic justification. The purest example of this could be seen during the 2012 Democratic Convention. Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa sought to amend the party platform to include a reference to God and to acknowledge Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. He put the edit to the convention floor, seeking to approve the change via acclamation. Having failed to receive the outcome he sought, he asked for a revote. Then he tried again. Finally, he simply pretended that those in the audience – unanimously Democrats and democrats – had agreed with him.
George W Bush did the same thing when he sought United Nations authority to invade Iraq in 2003. Having seen that the votes were not there, he simply grounded his invasion in earlier resolutions.
A party platform is a minor matter. War – solely government’s purview – is far more serious. Yet in both cases the vote was a formality; an ex-post-facto justification for an organization to do whatever it intended to do anyway.
I am not someone who thinks that he is “making a difference” by voting once a year. I was born in the Soviet Union and my personal history led me to devote the last two years of my life educating the public about the horrors of North Korea. I constantly give talks about the situation in that least-free nation …where everyone votes. I’m actually doing the work, rather than choosing a (public) servant to do it for me.
Understanding the Soviet Union and North Korea gives a bit of insight into human social psychology. No matter how absurd the state line, a huge majority of the populace can be found to promulgate it. People will say with a straight face that having one choice for dear leader is tyranny – but having two is freedom. Is that second choice on the ballot really the qualitative difference?
Most progressives understand that human nature is basically the same anywhere on the planet. Yet they think those who rehash propaganda only exist in other, bad countries. Barring that, they believe those types are all to be found on the other side of the political spectrum. After all, the other side is where the evil, crazy people reside – those who want what’s worst for everyone.
The educated aren’t immune from such traps; they are merely more articulate about them. Frankly I am baffled that those of us who were nerds in high school now defer to the winners of popularity contests. There surely is a bit of the guard-dog psychology about the whole thing, barking loudly to defend the system in order to get the masters’ respect and approval.
If pressed, the simplest explanation I have for refusing to vote is this: I don’t vote for the same exact reasons that I don’t take communion. No matter how admirable he is or how much I agree with him, the pope isn’t the steward over my soul. Nor is any president the leader of my life. This does not make me ignorant or evil any more than not being a Christian makes me ignorant or evil. If I need representation, I will hire the most qualified person to do so. Otherwise, I will smile and nod as my friends go to their places of worship, wishing them well while I simply pray to be left alone.
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Addendum
I love that Malice just smashes all the basic justifications for voting in such a short article.
Dr. Thomas Woods jokingly refers to what he calls the “Woods Law,” which states : “No matter who you vote for you always end up with John McCain.” Have you ever noticed how no matter what candidates say, no matter how many awards they’re given, no matter what their supposed principles and posturing, and regardless of their party membership that they all seem to always turn out to be corrupt, warmongering mass murderers? Just look at the last two decades of American Presidents and the War on Terror, though it stretches much farther back than that and holds true in every nation under the Sun. Dr. Michael J. Glennon wrote an excellent book explaining why this is the case in the USA called National Security and Double Government, which I have wrote about in detail here. But the short version is this:
It doesn’t matter who is elected because the system exists to perpetuate the same policies through the permanent bureaucracies that dominate the way the system functions. It doesn’t matter who you vote for. Those who hold the real power are the unelected bureaucrats who run the government agencies and have their hands on the real levers of power who will always ensure you end up with the President and the Congress they need. Your choice in the mass popularity contest doesn’t matter. They’ll do what they want anyway. Watery tarts throwing swords might actually be a better system.
Nor would it be just if it did matter. Because the system itself is evil and the only ethical response is to refuse to take part in it.
We are told voting is about protecting our liberty. Nonsense. It doesn’t matter how many people you have on the ticket, whether it is one or one million. If the end result of the process is the investment of a person into a position of power and authority where he or she, either acting singularly or as part of the whole, can violate the life, liberty, and property of individuals and the masses with near or complete impunity then all you’ve done is inaugurate tyranny. That you voted for your new autocrat is irrelevant. To quote the inestimable Lysander Spooner:
Neither is it any answer to this view of the case to say that the men holding this absolute, irresponsible power, must be chosen by the people (or portions of them) to hold it. A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. Neither are a people any the less slaves because permitted periodically to choose new masters. What makes them slaves is the fact that they now are, and are always hereafter to be, in the hands of men whose power over them is, and always is to be, absolute and Irresponsible.
No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority, pg. 24
Voting does nothing but artificially divide society, both nationally and locally, and produce hatred and discord where otherwise peace and cooperation would function. Just like all cults, the separate political denominations of the the Cult of the State, normally referred to as political parties, teach people to see the world in a simplified “Us vs. Them,” black and white, way that defines “my side” as the righteous and noble and all others as evil and dangerous threats to existence. Therefore they have to be crushed, eliminated, and extinguished. Family who disagrees with you must be humiliated, disavowed, and finally excommunicated. You should only listen to the cult approved speakers, teachers, and media talking heads. Avoid heresy, hate the infidel, and seek to use the violence of the law to enforce the grand political vision on all the world. Voting actually gets in the way of us doing something meaningful that would make society better. To continue in this system, to continue to justify the rule of such groups, to continue to allow them to manufacture our consent and justify their positions through the ritual of voting, makes no rational, emotional, or logical sense.