Abstinence is having what I believe is called a moment. Everywhere a vast literature of self-denial proclaims the benefits of not drinking, not eating carbohydrates, not having sex, not watering one’s lawn. Practically the only thing from which the American people are not serially asked to refrain happens to be the one vice that I have managed to renounce, in my case with very little difficulty. I mean, of course, voting.
“Why does anyone vote?” I ask myself. The answer cannot be that we believe that by doing so, we will influence the outcome of an election. My vote, were it not withheld, would have no such effect. This is true even at the county or municipal level. The vote margins for the State of Florida in the presidential election of 2000 — the closest in modern American history — were in the hundreds, not the single digits. Voting is, strictly speaking, pointless.
Those of us who wear the temperance ribbon are accustomed to hearing the same wearyingly familiar rejoinder: If everyone felt this way, no one would vote, and then what? To which the answer, of course, is that I am not responsible for the votes of everyone. We do not live in England before the Reform Bill of 1832, when, for example, two periwigged gentlemen of Dunwich each controlled the votes of eight of the 32 total freedmen. (In the bad old days, one vote really could make a difference.) Under universal suffrage, the likelihood that everyone will follow me into recusancy is nil.
Most voters, I suspect, agree with this analysis, even if they would not put it precisely this way. Their actual reasons for voting have less to do with the practical effect of pulling the lever and more to do with the significance they ascribe to voting itself.
When I was growing up I was solemnly informed that voting was one’s civic duty. I fear that this quaint phrase does not quite catch in my throat. Civic duty is a protean concept. In the antebellum South, members of night patrols considered it their civic duty to hunt down fugitive slaves. In the course of our country’s history, the concept has also been invoked to describe obligations as various as membership in eugenics societies and the promise of Catholics to take up arms against the Holy See in the event of a papal invasion. To me, civic duty simply means paying taxes and obeying all reasonable laws (e.g., registering for the Selective Service). Your proverbial mileage may vary.
If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, civic duty is surely the first. Some version of the civic-duty line is trotted out by the sort of do-gooder who hands out voter registration forms to strangers — an activity I find as off-putting as I would an invitation to sit down and fill out a handgun permit.
Civic duty is also the implicit appeal of avowedly neutral advertising campaigns meant to induce young people and other so-called low-information or reluctant voters to cast ballots. Would it be too cynical to suggest that when MTV first encouraged viewers to “rock the vote” in the early 1990s, it did not envision a landslide re-election for George H.W. Bush? When activist stickers tell us to “just vote,” do they mean a straight Republican ticket? Surely if you thought a candidate was a harbinger of the end of democracy, you would urge anyone you thought likely to support him to “just do anything else.”
The logic of sports fandom brings us nearer the mark. When most people vote, they are expressing something like a rooting interest, not because they expect their support to carry their preferred team to victory but because cheering on one’s side is simply what one does. This is one of the many ways in which the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump were similar: To many of their most fervent supporters, what, if anything, these men would accomplish during their time in office was of far less importance than the sublime totalizing experience of voting for them.
Something similar explains why hundreds of thousands of Americans vote for third-party candidates whom they readily admit will never be elected. The act is expressive.
What about those of us who remain on the wagon? If voting is expressive, then the same is true, surely, of not voting. My indifference is, among other things, a reflection of my view that the real problems in American life are deep-seated and structural. I cannot change the fact that financialization, environmental spoliation, drug addiction, the hollowing out of the public sector and the subsuming of virtually every aspect of human existence into reality-augmenting digital media are making this country an uninhabitable wasteland — and neither can any president I expect to see elected in my lifetime.
Of all the arguments ever made to me in favor of exercising the franchise, I am fondest of the one about how people who don’t vote don’t get to complain about politicians. This is not because it makes sense to me. (Surely you are in the same position vis-à-vis a bad president whether you voted for him or not.) I like it simply because it makes me think of my great-grandmother. More than half a century ago, she would find herself saying to my great-grandfather: “Get off the davenport, buster. It’s time to go cancel each other’s votes.” (She was an aspirational Rockefeller Republican, he an unflagging United Automobile Workers Democrat.) As she saw it, voting was a kind of license that allowed you to say whatever you liked about the people in charge.
With all apologies to Great-Grandma Ruth, this seems to me not just wrong but exactly backward. Among the benefits of living in a country like this one — one of the few unambiguously good things, in fact — is that we are free to think anything or nothing about our leaders, who are in their present position not because they were crowned, anointed or even clever enough to carry off a coup d’état. They are there because of us, regardless of what millions of us did or didn’t do in November.