Category: Political Theatre Does Not Represent Us

Many of the people who are up in flames about non-voters are people whose “activism” ends at voting and getting people to vote. A lot of these people condescend non-voters and sarcastically ask leftists, “Well then, what do you want me to do?” Which begs the question… What can you do instead of voting?

“White Democrats who are pushing for Black folks to save America from itself have demonstrated our relative unimportance by refusing to help us strategize around safety during participation in electoral politics.” – Brittany Lee Frederick.

White voters, what are y’all doing to ensure the safety of Black voters and the follow-through of white politicians? What are y’all doing to ensure the safety of BIPOC period? There’s more work to be done than just voting on the ballot and never doing any other work. Still, we don’t want to encourage defeatism or inaction by overwhelming people with the amount of work that needs to be done; that’s the opposite of what any of us should focus on.

It’s when we renounce electoral politics and also refrain from doing other work that we feel most defeated and eventually, guilted into “at least” voting… and the cycle continues. That guilt and impotence that stems from inaction is diminished when we get involved in our communities and see our power first hand. We can’t invalidate the work people are doing outside of the system just because they didn’t bubble in their ballots; that’s just one action in their lives as opposed to many. Even if we all bubbled in ballots, the real change will come from doing the labor and building support networks within our own communities. So much attention is focused on voter registration and information, especially with the upcoming elections.

But how different could things be if we reallocated our resources and numbers from politics and directly into the community? The refusal to participate in this system comes after divesting from the system itself, a slow process that comes after the realization that no politicians will come to your rescue because they simply don’t care. Instead of letting that instill fear and hopelessness in you, let it radicalize and empower you. Choosing not to vote isn’t fatalistic, as some believe; in fact, there’s more hope in trusting that our communities can fend for themselves without relying on puppets. When we redirect our idealism and hope from the system and into ourselves, there is a higher likelihood that our needs and the needs of our communities will be met.

The reality for most is that we don’t have the resources to fully invest in electoral politics and also resist them. The truth is that with jobs, school, families, and downtime to account for, most can’t fully invest in phone banking for politicians and still have the time and energy to commit to organizing in their community. When we talk about dismantling and defunding and abolishing, it’s easy to get lost in the commitment to destruction and forget that we also need to build and nurture. A big part of the fight lies in how we build support networks outside of the structures we hope to destroy. There are already people and projects across the IE getting involved and helping their communities.

Do you have clothes you never got rid of during spring cleaning because we got stuck in quarantine? Consider putting together a clothing drive or clothes swap with some friends. Do you have a space in your yard and like to garden? Plant some herbs and veggies and distribute produce around your block. Do you like crafting and working with your hands? Make some face masks and hand sanitizer to give out to the houseless population. Anything from skill sharing – cooking classes, financial literacy courses, political education, translation services, and more – to providing services – child-care, ride sharing, community gardening, running errands for the elderly (especially during COVID) – is useful.

Everyone has a skill, an interest, a talent. We can all build on what we already have and share it with our community instead of waiting on politics to save us.

 

Further reading:

“Reaching Beyond ‘Black Faces in High Places’: An Interview With Joy James” from Truthout

“Socialist Faces in High Places: Elections & the Left” by Black Rose/Rosa Negra

“Voting is Not Harm Reduction” by Indigenous Action

Flint, Michigan is still without clean water. Continuous accounts of state violence are being (badly) mitigated by Democratic promises of reform that will give more funding to police. Joe Biden himself has explicitly stated that he does not – and will never – support Medicare for All. The last post included deportation statistics under Obama vs. Trump; there is a reason Obama was labeled “deporter in chief” despite being a Democratic president. These problems don’t start or end with blue vs. red, and they won’t end just by flipping the White House. Even when Obama ran under a campaign that promised “change,” the most vulnerable populations still suffered and were placated by empty promises. Now, Joe Biden himself has assured Americans that “nothing [will] fundamentally change.”

For younger, self-identifying “leftists,” Bernie Sanders’ first presidential campaign was an initial exposure to “leftism.” If his 2016 – and his most recent – defeat should have taught his supporters anything, it’s that the two-party system is designed to maintain the status quo, and that even the threat of capitalism-lite (Sanders’ Democratic Socialism) is still threatening enough for Democrats to end it themselves. The 2016 email leak revealed correspondence between DNC officials stating that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) “tried to aid [Hillary] Clinton and hamper [Bernie] Sanders,” as well as discussed ways they could sabotage Sanders’ campaign and smudge his public appearance. Not only did this demonstrate the monopoly that the two-party voting system has over the United States, it also explicitly revealed that even the “progressive party” will refuse to move further left if it threatens the hierarchy.

That all being said, it’s safe to say that most of us are not represented or protected by electoral politics and politicians, even locally. When you trust the government and its legislation instead of yourself and your community, you unintentionally reinforce the need to appeal to the moral judgement of those in power. Voting cannot be our survival strategy when so many colonized and oppressed people won’t survive, even after they vote. We don’t need to ask permission to exist safely and live dignified lives. We deserve more than the crumbs of politicians and reformist legislature.

References

Time and time again, we see and hear the argument about privilege in regard to voting: the people who do vote are privileged and selfish, and the people who don’t vote are somehow also privileged and selfish. This argument is tired and premised on shaming people into action through condescension and guilt. So, who are these people who aren’t voting, and why don’t they vote, anyway?

Despite the opinions claiming that non-voters are the “privileged few” who have no critical stake in politics:

• Voting trends in 2016 and 2018 both show that almost half of nonvoters are non-white, even though these communities compose only one-fourth of the voting population.
• 56% of nonvoters are quite poor – making less than $30,000 per year – even though that income group constitutes just over one-fourth of the voting population.

People who abstain from voting do so because they are so misrepresented or entirely ignored by electoral politics and policies to bother voting. The solution to a corrupt system can’t be to just register these people to vote and provide information on candidates or policies, because the problem isn’t whether they have the capacity to vote. They choose not to vote because electoral politics have not substantially changed their lived realities. There is a correlation between those who choose not to vote and those who belong to the most vulnerable communities – people who are indigenous, Black, undocumented, queer, poor, and so on.

One of the most common arguments for “voting blue no matter who” is the fear of mass deportations and further xenophobia from the Trump administration.

• 409,849 undocumented folks were deported under Obama in 2012.

• A little over 265,000 undocumented folks were deported under Trump in 2019.

• Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act states that law enforcement (local) can partner with ICE (federal) to deport people in a local community. This means that cities and counties can become subject to federal jurisdiction regardless of more benevolent local policies – and/or local elected representatives.

These local representatives and local elections are, on a smaller scale, comparable to “voting blue no matter who” when it comes to presidency. At the end of the day, local and federal electoral politics are just electoral politics, and this is just one snapshot demonstrating the neglect of one vulnerable group of people.

In San Bernardino, local elected officials are making six-digit salaries while the city recovers from bankruptcy for the past five years, and while most members of the community aren’t making even close to that salary range. How can it be argued that electoral politics and elected officials are designed to listen to and protect vulnerable communities, when these communities are the first to be exploited – even at the local level?

“… We must recognize how [these] systems have evolved to the point where you hardly have to keep someone from voting to keep their vote from having effect. The system evolves to protect itself, and privilege is the opposite of giving up on the belief it will self-rectify” – Hari Ziyad.

We can do more – and better – for ourselves than voting.

126 million people do not care about political theatre.

There has been a lot of discourse over the upcoming presidential election this coming November. All kinds of people have had deep arguments revolving around the following concerns: “Why should we vote?” “What are the downsides of not voting?” “Reasons why we should never vote.” “Why voting is anti-Black and colonial,” etc. In the end, debates about all of these positions around voting re-center the American political machine, whether or not people feel sympathetic or apathetic towards the political institution itself. However, there has been very little discussion that mentions the large mass of people who do not vote.

Here are a few basic statistics:

• There are about 330 million people living in the US.

• There are about 16-20 million people who cannot vote because they are undocumented, felons, or ex-convicts.

• There are about 246 million people who are eligible to vote in the US.

• There were only about 136 million people who turned out to vote for a president in 2016.

So, these numbers and some simple math show that there were about 126-130 million people in the US who did not vote in 2016.

We argue that these people will never be fully absorbed into the system and its political institutions, and we should explore the potentialities that underlie this reality. In particular, we want to ask some questions about all the debates regarding voting: Who’s having these conversations about voting in the first place? Are we speaking to educated, college degree audiences? Are all of the debates on voting – whether defenses for or rebuttals against – even relevant to the over 126 million people who do not vote? If we all know that the political system is failing and dying, how can we side step and move beyond the need to center the political institution in the first place? If there are at least 126 million people who frankly do not care about politics or the nation’s political theatre, what can this mean for autonomous movement building?

The debates around voting tend to be very saviorist, which imply a desire to “save” others from acting “improperly.” This is a form of paternalism. We hope that we can one day render all political institutions (and the police that underlie them) irrelevant to our lives, and maybe that begins with the 126 million who are apathetic about politics – as we should all be.

Autonomy will never be achieved at the voting booths.