Confessions of an American anarchist: why I'm not voting in the US presidential election

If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal. –Emma Goldman

I had the t-shirts, the posters, the buttons. I chanted “Yes, We Can” and watched the videos. I believed in his hope. As a brand new Bachelor of History and Political Science, I wanted things to change and believed they were changing. I cast my absentee ballot, and I was there in Grant Park the night he was elected.

But the minute the crowd started chanting, “Yes, we did!” I was uneasy. What did we do? Contribute to his campaign (over $650 million)? Put signs in our front yards or slap stickers on our cars? Check a square, connect an arrow, punch a hole, press a button? Attend a rally? “Yes, we can” was supposed to be the rally cry for all Americans to work together—both parties—after the election on the incredibly difficult issues we faced as a nation. The message “yes, we did” implied that our work was done. Go to it, Mr. President. Fix it for us.

I wasn’t just disheartened by the crowd and the din. Almost a year after the election, I read an in-depth article about predator drones in Pakistan. His administration turned to impersonal, anonymous tactics that killed innocent people. The war wasn’t ending. He was bailing out corporate executives who lined their pockets with Americans’ money at Christmas time.

It started to seep in that this guy couldn’t do it. He could give inspiring speeches about hope and change, but he couldn’t end wars. He couldn’t fix the economy. If it seems like I’m heaping unfair blame upon his head, I’m not. The Republican candidate couldn’t do it either. Third party candidates couldn’t do it.  No man or woman could.

I haven’t voted since 2008, not even in two pretty huge elections in Wisconsin. It’s not political apathy; it’s the opposite. I care too much about the world to leave it in the hands of two squabbling political parties who waste more money and breath on bickering and stalemating and generally ignoring the welfare of all citizens.

But I still believe in “Yes, we can.” In fact, I believe it now more than ever, which is why I’m not voting.

My big breakthrough came with the spring. In 2010 I lived in Chicago. I often angrily stewed that the city neglected my neighborhood because it didn’t contain the right demographic or the larger-than-life attractions that allure downtown visitors. When I walked down my boulevard and spied trash accumulating beneath trees and in gutters, I muttered curses under my breath about the Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation.

But one day, it dawned on me. Why am I depending on the city to clean up my neighborhood? My neighborhood. What kind of effort would it really take for me to get up some Saturday morning to stuff a plastic bag with the abandoned rubbish? What would it take to invite a neighbor or two to do it with me? I had given up my power and responsibility for my neighborhood to a corrupt city government.

The biggest, most positive changes we’ve seen in this world result when people organize, mobilize, and work for and demand change. Not politicians, not world leaders, not businessmen/women, not the GOP or Dems. People—of all faiths and creeds and nationalities and genders and races and walks of life. The Labor Movement. The Civil Rights Movement. India’s fight for independence. The end of Apartheid.

Governments in almost every case have been the cause of pain and strife. They have organized hate and crime through wars, promoted racism and prejudice through unjust laws and courts, abused power to reward special interests, institutionalized poverty and created dependency on corporations.

Four years ago I elected someone I thought might stop the cycle. I learned that “electoral success… pacifies.” Suffrage has merely been granted to our forebears to pacify them continuously. Many men who fought in the Revolutionary War were ineligible to vote in the new Republic’s first elections (only property owners had the right). Black men and women built this country for 246 years without ever getting to choose who wrote the laws that enslaved them. Women of all races worked side-by-side with their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons to build this country and then gave them up to war when asked to do so, but they waited 143 years for the right to choose policy makers. Even after winning suffrage, many black Americans faced prejudice at the polls that prevented their rightful vote. So while I appreciate the people in the past who fought for my suffrage, I also acknowledge how ridiculous it is that anyone ever had to fight for suffrage, to beg for the government to throw them a bone.

Yes, I appreciate the men and women who fought for my right to vote. They fought for a right to choose who ruled because they believed their vote could make a difference. I've learned enough to know that my vote won’t make any difference. My vote instead endorses a system that has allowed obstructions to liberty; a system that gives me only two choices and two parties, neither of which I agree with, neither of which is actually doing anything to promote the well-being of the average American; a government that constantly violates the human rights it helped to craft, around the world and within its own borders; a government that will only continue to covet power, whether run by the left or the right, at mine and my neighbors’ expenses; a government that will continue to wage wars in the name of lofty ideological goals that it constantly contradicts; a government that will always only pay lip service (if any service at all) to correcting and acknowledging the historical evils it has inflicted for the past 236 years.

No, I won’t be voting in 2012, nor will I likely vote in 2014, 2016, 2018…. My time, energy, and money could be spent in such better ways, working for and enacting change that I actually CAN believe in, change that will have a far greater impact than hours spent lined up at the polls. I still believe we can “heal this nation” and “repair this world.” I just know there are better ways to do it than casting a ballot for a politician who will always disappoint. My time spent on November 6 is better spent in my neighborhood, in my community, working with my neighbors to love one another. 

How I will be voting in the 2010 UK General Election

This run-up to the general elections has made me feel reasonably reminiscent, though not necessarily in the fondest of ways. I am reminded in particular of last summer's European elections, which as everyone knows by now were conducted by proportional representation, ie, smaller parties actually had a real chance of gaining seats to represent Britain in the European Parliament. If the emphasis on getting out to “use your vote” was always high in different elections, it seemed especially so in 2009 when it seemed that the neo-fascist British National Party, who had up to this point only really been a minor threat on the fringes of the political radar, were now likely to gain hideous prominence.

And yes, worst fears did come to pass as the BNP gained their two seats, one of them being in my own region of the North-West. For well over a month up to that point, I had personally been agonising over whether I was going to vote or not. If someone had asked me not even three months earlier, I would have been firm in my resolve: I do not vote, because my primary allegiance as a Christian is to the Kingdom of God, and not to any of the kingdoms of this world. At the time, however, as public concern began rising so did mine rise along with it, particularly as I was working alongside asylum seekers and refugees, and therefore alongside persons who stood to lose the most if the BNP ever had a significant say in the running of the nation. It seemed like there were few options left but to fight fire with fire: I went to the ballot and voted for the Green Party, not because I believed in them or felt allegiance to them, but because I felt they were the most effective option to keep the BNP from gaining seats. My gesture was one of protest rather than pledge, of mere damage control and nothing more.

After the results, as I listened to the woes of others who saw the low-voter turnout as the principal cause, I couldn't help but think about the ways in which the mainstream political parties have failed the people living under them. To paraphrase a good friend of mine, the BNP is effectively a monster of the government's creation, albeit an inadvertent one. It was, after all, the Labour government who took this country to war in Iraq and who have since contributed to the militarisation of that nation as well as the bombing of its citizens. Similarly, it is the Labour government whose policies on immigration are abhorrent to the extent that people seeking asylum are subjected to an oppressive legislative system, in some cases even being locked up in detention centres without word of warning or reason. While all this happens, this government has for the last 13 years consistently failed and abandoned the poorer communities of the UK; housing deprivation and unemployment soar, and within the recession the hot topic of immigration is utilised as a political scapegoat. “British jobs for British workers,” an explicitly racist phrase now appropriated by the BNP, originated as a Labour Party slogan.

It might sound like I am going off on an overly-cynical rant. Others might tell me to be more optimistic and own a political voice which addresses these issues. It's not just that, however, it comes down to this: I simply do not believe in centralised power of any form. I have good friends who are intending to vote Labour in this election to try and keep the Conservative Party out. I understand this position, I even respect it. To my mind, however, they are but two sides of one coin. For the reasons I have outlined above and more aside, I simply could not in good conscience vote Labour, and I consider that to be deeply personal, due to how much that government has hurt those who were (and still are) very important to me.

To extend this further to take into account other political options; well, on a purely pragmatic level, this first-past-the-post system of ours tends to void the significance of other votes cast for smaller parties, which is a sad sign of the broken electoral system in the first place. On an ideological level, however, none of these parties represent me, and it really is as simple as that. I say this not with a heavy heart, but as someone who did take their fight to the ballot box and was afterward able to fully appreciate it for what it is: a concession to the powerlessness of the general public. Moreover, no elected government could stand for the values I personally hold as a follower of Christ: of nonviolence and the perfect justice of people brought together into fair and equal relationships with one another. No government could legislate that because it would fail at the very moment of trying. Political seats, militarism, policing, and arms trading are all signs of uneven, oppressive, and subjugating power.

I do not consider voting, in and of itself, to be an effective drive for social change. To me, this comes from other areas which are far more prominent and powerful: from social movements, campaigning and lobbying networks, trade unions, cooperatives, community organisations, churches, direct action, civil disobedience, and more aside. The potential for powerful social change comes from people, not from government, and I believe that is a principle which has manifested very clearly and consistently throughout history. Voting can sometimes be a means to an end, but it is not nearly any substitute for revolutionary tactics.

So after all of this rambling, the question is, am I going to vote in the 2010 UK General Election? Well, yes, I am. With a spoiled ballot, expressing very clearly and literally that I am voting for none of them at all.

Don't Vote