Answering Today's Big Question

Why I Didn’t Vote, ‘08
By Jonathan Heaps

Responsible Americans everywhere are voting today. Here in Boston they have bundled without any real conviction against a mild fall morning, in order that they might stand in line for their turn to participate in our civic process. Starbucks is giving out free coffee if you come into their establishment with your “I voted!” sticker still attached to your lapel. No doubt somewhere, Puff Daddy (or “P-Diddy” or whatever that narcissistic hack is calling himself these days) is wearing a sassy t-shirt encouraging me to “rock” my vote or meet my imminent mortality. Alasdair MacIntyre, four years ago, succinctly addressed our faux-thoughtful support of voting, no matter for whom or what. He said, “For it has become an ingrained piece of received wisdom that voting is one mark of a good citizen, not voting a sign of irresponsibility.” (MacIntyre 2004)

In opposition to such a prevailing view of “the vote,” I’d like to suggest that the sheer thoughtlessness with which we encourage each other to the ballot box qualifies those exhortations as what Martin Heidegger called “idle talk.” It is the chatter of bourgeois ladies chiding the youth of today in concerned tones over tea. Or the self-righteous bombast of middle managers over lunch on the company card. “Vote” is an empty word portraying itself as wisdom, much like “Freedom” has been for the Bush administration and “Hope and Change” have been for the Obama campaign. It is the illusion of discourse. It is in this respect that voting is what is wrong with America.

MacIntyre again:
When offered a choice between two politically intolerable alternatives, it is important to choose neither. And when that choice is presented in rival arguments and debates that exclude from public consideration any other set of possibilities, it becomes a duty to withdraw from those arguments and debates, so as to resist the imposition of this false choice by those who have arrogated to themselves the power of framing the alternatives. (MacIntyre 2004)

And that is why, on this Election Day, I deliberately and thoughtfully did not vote in the presidential election.

My opposition to voting is not an absolute one, predicated on some rejection of formal civic order (anarchism, etc). No, it is contingent, based on the state of our culture of civic involvement. Three contributing factors stand out in particular. MacIntyre’s insight is the first; that we have a moral and civic duty to reject false dichotomies created by those who have unjustly (and uncritically) assumed the “power of framing alternatives.” Secondly, the infantilization of the political process through the corruption of the medium of its portrayal (namely television) inspires me to take a posture of suspicion towards the process, per se. Lastly, I hope by intentionally not voting (a provocative act for the reasons stated above) I can give myself and others occasion to rethink and re-imagine in which more important “elections” we might spend our time and energy “voting”

Exploding the False Dichotomy
The United States is a country of more than 300 million people (Central Intelligence Agency 2008) and only two powerful political parties at the national level. Canada, a country of 33 million people (Central Intelligence Agency 2008), has successfully incorporated a third party into its nationally politics since the 1930s (Wikipedia 2008). Serious third parties exist in the U.S., but are not given nearly any political coverage in the media. In the 2004 election, the Green party and Libertarian party candidates were arrested for hopping a police line at the presidential debate, seeking entrance into an informational even that, not only were they not invited to participate in, but were not in fact able to gain entrance to at all. More than just sidelined, voting for these parties (as in the case of Ralph Nader) is seen as a betrayal of one’s political allies. Among certain portions of the left, voting for Nader’s third party ticket was more than a waste; it was seen as downright bad for America.

The reduction of our political discourse into a dichromatic pugilism between “right” and “left” or republican and democrat serves to dilute our community deliberations into an easily palatable form. The possibility of intelligent solutions (and their concomitant complexity) is precluded by uncomplicated opposition: “us” versus “them.” The comprehensiveness of the false dichotomy also enables an easy-going (but wildly false) objectivity. As long as both sides are allowed the same amount of airtime to lie to the public, then all points of view have been represented and the intelligent voter can decide. Or so goes the thinking.

The problems with that sort of “Crossfire”/”Hannity & Colmes” thinking and programming are multiple. Firstly, we have the issue of how the truth can be gleaned from a field of lies. More likely than someone taking the time to parse out the bits of factuality from the mess of contradictory half-truths, most are going to become cynical about the possibility of determining the truth at all. In their justified frustration, they are likely to fall back into a kind of thoughtless conservatism, in which they will only trust the familiar. After all, if we really can’t know what the good or right ideas are, we are more likely to seek out what will least disrupt our lives. Someone who looks like me is more likely to keep things the way I find them comfortable.

And if I’m a middle aged white male with a mediocre career in my chosen field and some wild college days behind me, I vote for a George W. Bush. If I’m a middle-aged mom with troublesome kids and the difficulties of balancing career and family, I sure think Sarah Palin is swell. Or if I’m urban and educated with aspirations to a sort of NPR cultured-ness, I put an Obama pin on my sweater. Or if I’m a blue collar union member and I can toss back a beer and sometimes my big mouth gets me into trouble, I’m sure glad that colored fellow…er, I mean, African American man is running with Joe Biden.

Furthermore, in setting up the opposition as between only two, we can watch (and have watched) alternative conceptions of American order and well-being fall out of the discussion. In fact, when one places the American Presidential candidates onto a spectrum map of political positions, they land almost entirely in the same quadrant, whether republican or democrat. Further still, we can find that internal, ideological consistency becomes less and less important for members of a particular party. Instead, each defines itself in opposition to the other, such that not just the particular reason or logic of the political position is lost, but the requirement for any reason or logic is abandoned. This is the headlong dive into irrationality that lends a culture towards decline and instability.

Outgrowing Our Infantilization
Your evening news was once a function of the government’s regulative functions upon the broadcast media. Because the radio and television airwaves are public, the government required television broadcasters to perform a public service for the good of the nation. So, for an hour every night, your entertainment programming as brought to you by Winston Cigarettes would be interrupted so that information could be distributed to us via the public airwaves, in the justified belief that educated citizens have the power to effect the public good. This sort of thinking brought us the journalistic heroics of Edward R Murrow against the HUAC hearings. It was not perfect of course. It failed to avoid being an instrument of FDR’s manipulation of Pearl Harbor to get us into WWII (in which he allowed an unprovoked act of war to be carried out against the U.S. for political purposes), but the ideal remained none-the-less. The motivating principle behind journalism was the good of the community.

Commerce has replaced that motivating principle and crippled the news media’s ability to serve the public good. The advent and perfection of for-profit news reportage is perhaps the single greatest force for the corruption of the American political process and the infantilization of its participants. The motivating criteria for news media have been usurped by the standards and principles of entertainment programming. To summarize David Milch’s position, when the protocols of entertainment programming take over what is supposed to be a service for the public good, our experience of the world beyond our commute to work becomes virtualized. (Milch 2006) We encounter the real and important events of politics in the realm of what Paul Ricoeur calls “the as if.” This is a dangerous deformation of what ought to rightly be presented in the “as it happened” voice.

That this virtualization is also a passive virtualization is what elevates voting so thoughtlessly for our society. What is the bare-minimum of civic involvement becomes the pinnacle of citizenship. I sit at home and watch two liars yell at each other for a few hours a night, decide to identify with one of those liars and then every two or four years, I interrupt one afternoon and cast my cote. This is not true citizenship. People go to more trouble to be involved in the selection process of “American Idol” than that.

Furthermore, this passive virtualization infantilizes us. We become incapable of questioning its machinations or movements. Think of the 3-act structure of the last 7 years: In act 1, our programming is interrupted by 9-11 and seeing these horrible images upsets us, but we’re also captivated by them for a time. Then we get tired of them, so bring on act 2. We go after those who we believe are responsible, but the machinations of that act are frustrated. We can’t find the guy who really harmed us. So, we replace him with a different character, this Iraqi dictator. We know he’s bad and we know where to find him. Much like a comic book, one villain is as good as another. But once we’ve got him, the act is supposed to end and these kids are still dying over there. In act 3, there is a twist and we turn on the folly of the man who was our hero, George W. Bush. So let’s get those kids home and get this guy out of office. (Milch 2006)

Besides, we want to “Change” the channel now. We’ve heard about this Barack Obama program and we want to see if it is any good.

Exactly like we hope to find some kind of communion with humanity in our fictional television programs, we hope to find some communion with our nation in the programming of our political process. Except this programming doesn’t offer real communion and healing. Instead, it provides us with the insatiable habituation of an addiction. Marx was wrong; Religion isn’t the opiate of the masses. Televised politics is. Like heroin, political programming provides an isolating numbness from our anxieties and pains and an always-receding rush of satisfaction.

“Voting” in “Elections” That Matter
Don't give up on mass culture. Contribute to it. Break your heart in trying to make it better instead of standing outside it. Our species is in a fight for its life. Nobody says that the decision is going go one way or the other. So put your bodies and spirits up. It's not that we don't have a vote anymore. It's that we're voting in the wrong election. Come and vote with me. (Milch 2006)

It should be noted that I am not promoting disengagement from political concerns into a sort of stoic indifference to American politics. Like Milch says, I’m not giving up on mass culture. This is not a retreat into intellectual purity. Rather, I’m suggesting we’ve been distracted from opportunities to make a real difference by the shimmering-and-false promise of presidential elections. One day, if things improve in America, I may vote again. Until then, the energy I would put into voting (and hopefully considerably more) will be put towards “voting” in more important ways.

Part of the infantilization effected by the virtualization of our political lives is that we miss the places where our civic duty calls to us close to home. We see the suffering and needy in our hometowns and we wonder when the government will come up with a program to heal that. We see our young people losing direction and hope and we wonder when the schools will get enough funding to direct them and give them opportunities. We watch families fall apart and relationships strain and we hope that legislators will enact laws to protect them.

I don’t vote as a reminder that I have civic responsibilities that cannot be met in an elementary school on the first Tuesday of November. I don’t vote so that I can be fresh-faced and clear-minded for those people who I am in community with, whether we recognize each other or not. I don’t vote because my faith is not in the United States of America, a sprawling behemoth with little thought of conscience, but is instead in the Kingdom of God, a lean force of faithful people quietly thundering towards the eschaton with Faith, Hope and Charity.

So, I hope you’ll join me in not voting in the presidential election today. After all, you’ll only encourage them. Instead, spend some time “voting” in the “elections” that matter. I already cast my vote.

You just read it.