the third rail
Fine, I'll Say It
*the below was written before Trump caught the virus; unless the extreme should happen (and even then), the main premise remains unaffected*
I don't know who I'm going to vote for. No, wait! Don't stop reading yet! This is a thought experiment! Maybe it's a confession, a little, but hear me out. I don't know who I'm going to vote for, but not because I'm conflicted about the choices. I'm conflicted, as I am every four years, about the nature of our choosing. Not just the electoral makeup distorting and sometimes nullifying the weight of each individual vote, but the two-party system that consistently and categorically denies someone like me any real voice in national politics. Our financial and moral fealty to Mammon, our instrumentation of violence such that it conforms to (and disappears within) our modern comforts; which candidate is going to offer normative, if not instantiated, change on these fronts? I once joked to a friend that I'm the actual pro-life caucus of the DSA (chaired by Liz Bruenig, obvi) except that's not true. Neither group will have me.
But let's cut off some of the usual clapbacks before they begin. I'm not suggesting everyone's favorite fallacy from 2015: this isn't false equivalence at work. I'm not suggesting both candidates will be bad in the same ways or to the same degrees, but that neither will substantively (to my mind) address the heart of the issues I not only value most, but which I believe are the mandate of the national, as opposed to the state or local, government. What's worse, part of my argument is that the president shouldn't be shifting some of these issues onto his (or, one day, her) back, but that congress should be reclaiming their more legitimate mandate to decide if we go to war, to amend the constitution, whatever. The presidential election shouldn't matter as much as it does, and while everyone keeps insisting this proves voting is more important than ever, I think the opposite is at least plausible.
In other words: Is participation in a corrupt system always better than abstention?
The starting premise needs to be explicated (if not proved), maybe, but if we can agree that "our system is corrupt" is one of my opening moves, then doesn't the ethical way forward fracture, or at the very least splinter? Is it so obvious that activity and acceptance of an actively bad situation are really better than avoidance or protest (voting)?
To be clear, I'm certain of who I will *not* be voting for. I'm sure anyone who knows me can guess, but yeah, Trump is off the list. He's a life-sized wart, a mafioso-entertainer who has more genuine hair follicles than virtues. That he might be a Trojan-horse for accelerating some conservative issues, namely pro-life court appointees, doesn't relieve conservatives of the cultural, to say nothing of the political, damage such a figurehead can, and has, wielded. Sell your identity to Christ, white evangelicals, not Trump and not even jurisprudence brinkmanship.
So: why not Biden? I mean, other than that there's barely a positive argument to make besides, "He's not Trump," which, fair! That's pretty compelling at this point! His campaign's motto is terrible, if more substantive: Build Back Better. Conservatives I follow insist he's waging the most progressive platform our country has ever seen, good ol' Joe being his own kind of Trojan horse, a wooden body in which are hidden the endless agendas of socialists and Bernie-castoffs. If only! Would that Bernie were truly a puppet-master in this whole charade. The most honest politician of our age, alas, seems unlikely to hold such influence.
Now that I've alienated everyone, and only my parents and brothers are still reading, I guess I should bring this (semi-)thought experiment onto more personal grounds: I don't *want* to vote for either major candidate. That's the core issue, one as emotional as it is rational. I played that role in 2016, when I put away my idealism and accepted our consequentialist framework for electing a Monarch. Turns out my vote wasn't even effective in securing Trump's defeat, and I felt sullied for no reason. I know! How irrational! How egotistical! But I've been reading an intellectual history of secularism lately, which has only reinforced my stuttering with profound and troubling arguments about the ways our attachment to rationalism perhaps occludes other valid means of choosing. Ethics has been commandeered by instrumentalism, and the same for our politics.
As such, I can't vote for Trump; my faith, my gut, my reasoning literally won't allow it. It's possible I can't vote for Biden, either. The electoral model protects my fellow independents and leftists and all other potential allies from this floppy mentality (something a lot of people keep *not* talking about re: electoral college, to be honest). Because I live in Colorado, my protest will be symbolic, if it happens at all.
But what I keep coming back to as I reflect on our national (and my personal) conundrum is how to navigate the damning words of Eli Wiesel: "We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim." Despite all possible urgency around equality, climate change, and worse, we are not sitting in Germany in 1933. Wiesel's claim is that to avoid Germany in 1933, or more likely in 1939, we must be active citizens, active voices, active critics. The mistake I keep hearing from almost everyone I know is that the coming presidential election is our most essential political activity. Not local organizing, not charity with Habitat for Humanity, not senate elections, not even local elections, where most of the summer's pressing issues (COVID rules, police accountability) were actually decided.
Voting for Biden is not resistance, though it may be necessary. Voting for Biden is a temporary measure, and probably all the more vital for that given our eruption of crises, but it remains a vote coerced, planned, and demanded by power. That doesn't mean I won't vote for Biden—the stakes are high, I get it—but there must be space for protest at every level, for reflection that isn't immediately canceled by a cultural and political anxiety that only deepens and exacerbates the realities it fears.
"We must take sides."
In the end, my position is probably as dull as Biden's: I'm against Trump. I think you should be, too.
Reading: I don't even know. This whole year I've continued to juggle more books than I can manage, a sort of self-induced attention deficit that means I take longer than ever to finish anything. But, at the moment: finishing Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (a magisterial book, and a masterclass in pursuing a thought to its root clarity); Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (a re-read, still genius if a bit more saccharine in the beginning than I remember); Eileen Alexander's Love in the Blitz (the cheesiest title, but imagine Jane Austen writing letters during the London blitz!!); MLK, Jr.'s Why We Can't Wait (I feel soppy listing this one, but it's great and I don't care); Turgenev's Sportsman's Notebook (just a story here and there); and a few others. Basically, though, everything is on hold this week while I finish A Secular Age. Except Love in the Blitz. I can't help how bad its title is, okay. The book is a joy!
Writing: A backdoor defense of artistic freedom that is also a definitive look into Christian audio drama. But...fun!
Please only use these opinions to cancel me once I'm back on twitter (for a short spell, starting now). I want to see it in real time.
I love you all.