Pop Culture Has Never Understood Politics And Voting
I remember casting my ballot for the first time as a newly-minted 18-year-old growing up in Northern New Jersey. I was a senior in High School who was filled with so much enthusiasm for the process of voting. I had binged several episodes of the show The West Wing the night before, and I incessantly couldn’t stop quoting lines from the sequel to Legally Blonde — Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, & Blonde.
As Elle Woods would say, “I was there to speak up!” I had researched all the positions beforehand, and I knew exactly who and what I would vote for on the ballot. I marched into the cubicle, filled in my ballot with a blue pen I had brought with me, and dropped it into the ballot box, confident I had made the right decision. My candidate would go on to win, and for a fleeting moment, I believed in the electoral system as a magical force for good.
He would turn out to be a terrible political leader. Many of his campaign promises were lies or outward exaggerations, and I lost all faith in his administration a mere month into his leadership.
I remember not only feeling betrayed by this candidate but also feeling silly for ever believing that I could make a difference.
Years later, I became disinterested in the entire political process. I decided after watching one too many YouTube videos that voting was pointless. I was going to sit this one out. It didn’t matter who I voted for anyway, and besides, the person I wanted to win was probably going to lose to a spoiled rich person, or at least, that’s what the videos told me.
Still, I made my way to a watch party and drowned out my sorrows with a glass of wine as I watched the results on a giant projector with my friends. The results came in. The person I wanted to win did, and we all cheered.
Maybe this whole election process wasn’t so bad, after all?
For many people, their view on elections seem to vacillate between these two extremes — you are either an eternal optimist who thinks that we must trust in the process or a political nihilist scoffing as the powerful do as they please. These two viewpoints are all too common within our media. The optimist is the lawyer on the silver screen telling you to believe in the system, and the nihilist is rolling his eyes two theaters down as the latest conspiracy theory unfolds.
These dominant political viewpoints are radically different from one another, yet they are two extremes built on inaction. Whether you support the story that believes we must honor the process no matter what, or you binge the hit television show with a lead monologuing about how politics is merely a cold exercise in power, both options reduce your electoral participation to a simple true-false statement. You either vote, or you don’t — never mind the thousands of other forms of participation you can and must do in addition to voting.
These stories have been a constraint on how many of us perceive democracy — myself included — and it’s time we tore them apart.
In pop culture, these two viewpoints are built on a reductive analysis of “the system” — a wishy-washy bit of shorthand used to describe literally all power structures within which a person exists. The system includes but is not limited to:
government
capitalism
patriarchy
white supremacy
imperialism
…and so much more.
Some argue that “the system” — although it has some problems — is ultimately a force of good for humanity. One of the better examples of this in pop culture is Aaron Sorkin’s optimistic drama The West Wing (1999–2006), which involves the antics surrounding the fictional Bartlet administration. President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen) is a moderate Democrat who frequently monologues about how we must simply have faith in the process.
For example, in the pilot episode, there is a background plot about a group of Cuban refugees heading to America and whether or not the US government should assist them. The administration ends up doing nothing, and 350 Cubans go missing and are presumed dead, while 137 end up being taken into custody in Miami. President Bartlet says of this whole ordeal:
“With the clothes on their back, they came through a storm, and the ones that didn’t die, want a better life and they want it here. Talk about impressive.”
From President Bartlet’s example, we can see one of the biggest problems with process-oriented optimists' perspective: it's an extraordinarily privileged and deluded position to take. It’s easy for President Bartlet to wax poetically about the American dream because he’s in one of the world's most secure positions. There are, however, 350 Cubans in this fictional world who will never experience that reality because they are dead.
The West Wing brought up many tone-deaf examples throughout its run, and in some cases, it could get outright hostile to anyone who opposed “the system.” When character Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) has to meet a “mob” protesting the World Trade Organization in the season two episode Somebody’s Going to Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail, he is indignant about what he believes to be their erroneous stance on free trade. He bemoans to a police officer about how the protestors are nothing more than “philistines” on “activist vacation.” The two even joke about assaulting the protestors — a moment that has not aged well in an era where police officers are violently suppressing protestors across the country.
Source: episode ‘Somebody’s Going to Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail’ — character Toby Ziegler jokingly tells an officer to fire her gun at protestors.
It bears emphasizing that there was and continues to be a lot of media like this — not just the 155 episodes of The West Wing — but shows such as Madame Secretary (2014–2019), whose main character Elizabeth McCord (Téa Leoni), a former CIA agent, helped broker peace between Israel and Palestine in a single episode.
As yet another example, Kevin Costner’s Swing Vote (2008) had an entire movie that focused on how a fluke in electoral politics left the fate of an election in the hands of one apathetic man who doesn’t have a firm grasp on the issues. The movie does not end with him taking a particular stance, but with him casting his ballot — his ultimate decision left unknown. We are meant to conclude that the process working is enough.
This framing is far from simply being a fictional dilemma. It was not too long ago that Francis Fukuyama declared in his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992) that humanity had reached its final ideological evolution and that Western liberal democracy would expand indefinitely. It’s still too common to see technocratic optimists point to declines in statistics such as the world’s absolute poverty rate as a justification for why we simply have to stay on course, and everything will sort itself out. As Dylan Matthews wrote for Vox in 2018 for the article 23 charts and maps that show the world is getting much, much better:
“Under the radar, some aspects of life on Earth are getting dramatically better. Extreme poverty has fallen by half since 1990, and life expectancy is increasing in poor countries — and there are many more indices of improvement like that everywhere you turn. But many of us aren’t aware of ways the world is getting better because the press — and humans in general — have a strong negativity bias.”
Even if these numbers were correct in making this case, however (and rising ecological instability and increasing wealth inequality tell us that they are not), this perspective is still a call to not address the problems in the here and now. When your response to immediate suffering is that people in the long-run will benefit, then what you are really doing is dismissing that person’s suffering under the banner of progress — you are telling people that they don’t matter.
Again, things are not okay with our world. Only privileged people can maintain the illusion that progress is inevitable. And so process-oriented optimism tends to turn a lot of people off from politics. They stop believing that their participation matters and they become political nihilists.
On the other end of the pop culture spectrum is the belief that “the system” is bad. There is a common dogma that the corrupting influence of power taints all politicians, no matter how good and pure a person starts. The people who have the most success within it are believed to be unscrupulous sociopaths with a suit fetish. This can be best summed up in the words of Lord Acton when he wrote to Bishop Creighton in 1887 that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
The quintessential pop culture text that underscores this ideology is the Netflix show House of Cards (2013–2018). The show depicts House Majority Whip Francis Underwood (Kevin Spacey), who plots to take the presidency after being denied Secretary of State from the incoming administration. Francis or “Frank” is so unscrupulous that he kills a dog within the show’s opening scene. Throughout the series, he kills his enemies and former allies alike and destroys Democratic norms to stay in office one more day. He has a very Machiavellian conception of power. As Frank says at the beginning of season 2:
“For those of us climbing to the top of the food chain, there can be no mercy. There is but one rule: hunt or be hunted.”
Another example is Lord Petyr ‘Littlefinger’ Baelish in Game of Thrones (2011–2019), describing “chaos as a ladder” one uses to gain more power. It’s easy to see how people disillusioned with the “process is good” argument can gravitate towards this mindset because it’s everywhere. Many people either can no longer maintain the illusion of infallible progress or never had the resources to do so in the first place, and here comes this dominant culture narrative validating their fear that it doesn’t matter and that life is inherently cruel.
I don’t want to pretend like there aren’t people in the world who believe in the naked pursuit of power and power alone. Recent history has taught us that this is very much the case, but history is also filled with martyrs and communities willing to sacrifice for what and who they believe in. Chelsea Manning didn’t leak US secrets and go to jail for seven years to get a book deal (there are easier ways to do that). There are political dissidents across time and place who altruistically sacrifice their material interests to advance their conception of the greater good.
To assume that our world of politics is just about accumulating power, you would have to ignore these dynamics of faith and belief. The simplistic narrative of an all-encompassing “system” seems to be more about shielding people’s psyches than a general desire to understand politics.
Sometimes when people argue for their disinvestment in “the system,” they are doing so from a position of extreme privilege. Lonely Island’s comedy song Threw It On The Ground is probably the pinnacle of this position. A privileged Andy Samberg perceives all attempts to interact with him as indoctrination into “the system:”
You must think I’m a joke
I ain’t gonna be part of your system
Maaaaaaaaaaan!
Source: Fashion Maniac — Andy Samberg throwing an item on the ground in his hit song.
Mostly, though, I see a lot of pain and fear when people declare to the world that their participation in “the system” is pointless. There are many people rightly bitter about our society’s failure to give them a good life. While I understand this perspective, it often seems to be a defense mechanism to innoculate yourself against the worst. As Redditor Do_GeeseSeeGod remarked on the 2020 election cycle in the thread unpopularopinion:
Do you really think rich people are just going to pack it in if Bernie or Warren or whoever gets elected? “Well, fellow billionaires, we had a good 7000 year run, but it looks like the poors are going to get healthcare and living wages now. We’re going to have to settle for having a little less money.” Seems highly unlikely.
Even in your local elections, the people with money run shit. They always have and always will. They’ll placate us just enough to avoid a riot. That’s it. If your bank account is less than 8 digits, you have zero control over political policy.
We see here that this rationalization acts imperfectly as a shield. The person is trying to forecast that the rich will always maintain control over our government, but saying that the system is bad doesn’t seem to make them feel better. It is an attempt to hurt yourself before the world can do it first (if it hasn’t already), and sometimes this defensiveness can get quite dark.
Doomerism, for example, generally describes a philosophy where the fall of humanity is heralded as an inevitability either due to ecological or economic collapse. It is best known by the Doomer meme, which is a Wojak character that originated on 4chan. The meme depicts a depressed 22-year old wearing a black hoodie and beanie while smoking a cigarette.
Source: Know Your Meme — a graphic of the Doomer character with accompanying text.
I can’t say everyone who prescribes to doomerism is actively depressed, but when you look at the r/doomer subreddit, that sentiment comes up a lot. “I will kill myself tonight,” writes one user. “NEED [Playstation Network] FRIENDS STAT!!! I need someone to [game] with. In a really dark place right now and need companionship,” calls out another user.
Depression and burnout are obvious causes for a lot of people’s loss of faith in the system. “The system,” though, is not a singular force. It is a multitude of intersecting and contradictory institutions imperfectly benefiting some individuals while denying others their humanity. The truth is that some systems are terrible, odious things that do need to be torn down, but that transformation cannot happen by people sacrificing some of the little power that they possess.
We must remember that those in power would love nothing more than for you to throw all your hope away.
The fight for enfranchisement in America has been a bitter one. It’s a common talking point in political circles about how originally the only people who could vote consistently were white men with property. This is true — though that standard was a little murky, depending on your state. Yet, something that we sometimes lose sight of is that even voting secretly was a hardwon victory.
Ballots used to be public, and citizens faced severe, sometimes violent consequences if they voted for their local opposition. In the middle of the 19th century, Americans were killed going to the polls during Election Day riots. Corruption was rampant, and party bosses used the visibility of people’s ballots to pressure local elections. In the words of Harvard professor Jill Lepore:
“…if I see you at the polls and you are bringing a blue papered ballot to vote for Smith as opposed to a green one to vote for Jones, I can know that you actually voted the way I paid you to vote. Therefore, I can buy your votes, and you can sell your votes. Or I can beat you up if you don’t vote for Smith. Or, if I am your boss, I can say, ‘If you don’t vote for Smith, I can fire you.’”
Source: Wikipedia — Louisville Bloody Monday Election Riots of 1855
Reform in this area was difficult, and the concept of private voting faced heavy opposition on multiple fronts. Virginia orator John Randolph claimed that a secret ballot would “make any nation a nation of scoundrels.”
Yet, electoral progress is never linear. When the private ballot was finally widely adopted in America, it was not only because of its efficiency but because it helped some states discriminate against Black people. At a minimum, the private ballot required voters to know how to read and write, which disadvantaged the poor, the uneducated, and former slaves who were often both. States began to use the written ballot as a pretext to establish literacy tests to disenfranchise Black voters. In one Virginia District, for example, all ballots were written in Gothic Lettering to make it harder for uneducated Black men to read them. The year after Arkansas passed its private ballot law, the percentage of Black men who managed to vote dropped from 71% to 38%, and similar drops were seen all over the country.
Literacy tests would eventually be overturned by the Voting Rights Acts of 1965, but enfranchisement is still a struggle for countless people across the country. The Supreme Court struck down section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in their 2013 ruling Shelby County v. Holder. Section 5 had formerly granted the Department of Justice the ability to veto what it considered bad state voting laws, leading to greater enfranchisement. Unfortunately, the overturning of section 5 has allowed states all over the country to pass Voter ID laws, which have been likened to modern-day literacy tests because certain racial groups are statistically less likely to have such identification.
From denying former prisoners the ability to vote to the purging of voter rolls, our right to vote is in a precarious position, and sometimes we aren’t aware of how. The act of registering to vote — the legal process of declaring your eligibility to vote in a certain state— is itself a form of voter suppression. In countries such as Canada, this process happens automatically. In other countries, voter participation is mandatory. Yet in America, our system is so dysfunctional that we spend a lot of our electoral efforts convincing Americans to overcome the logistical hurdles to vote in the first place.
This is all by design, but again, the solution to overcoming these hurdles is not to make it easier for the people trying to oppress us. Voting matters a great deal. We know this because if voting were such a useless thing, then racist, rich oligarchs wouldn’t have spent so much of their time taking it away from the people they wished to dominate.
We know it matters because the wealthy still have higher voter participation than the lower classes. There is unsurprisingly emerging evidence positing that states with a wealth gap in voter participation are less likely to enact minimum wage increases and other liberal policies. The wealthy would like nothing more than for you to stop caring and let them continue to be over-represented in politics.
However, we must simultaneously remember that voting is not itself a divine good that will automatically lead to an ideal society. Process-oriented texts such as The West Wing and Swing Vote are frustrating because they gloss over the messy realities of politics. Not everyone has the luxury of waking up one day and deciding to suddenly engage in politics and then seeing that opinion being honored by larger American society. Some people have died trying to cast their ballot, and others have faced arrest because of oppressive laws — some of which are still on the books and leading to the arrest of Black people.
Source: The Guardian — Lanisha Bratcher was arrested under a Jim Crow-era law for voting while on probation.
Voting is a tool, and it is one of many that is needed to institute actual reform. Some of those tools include protests and marches. Others involve mutual aid, civil disobedience, and some sadly include mobilization of force and strategic violence.
It’s not popular to talk about now, but how many unions received policy concessions in the 1800s was through such mobilization. Much like now, capitalists used to hire guards to maintain active surveillance (and worse) over their workers to prevent them from unionizing. Workers responded with civil disobedience and marches, yes, but things could sometimes get downright violent. The 1800s are dotted with the massacres of workers at the hands of police and hired guards, and understandably in this shuffle, workers started to fire back (literally).
Political mobilization is far more complex than a yes or no choice. It’s a series of interlocking actions: sometimes they involve compliance, and other times outright resistance. Your decision to vote does not bar you from other activities, and we need people to feel this reality both on and off the silver screen.
I had to unpack many toxic narratives on my way to believing I could participate in politics. It involved unsubscribing from channels and learning to put away authors I had once loved, but it also meant realizing that politics was more complex than I once perceived it to be.
We need cultural narratives in pop culture that reflect the complexity of voting and political mobilization. I see glimpses of it starting to emerge in some titles. The video game A Night In The Woods (2017) ends with the main character’s father announcing his intentions to fight to form a union.
Likewise, the movie Suffragette (2015) chronicled women freedom fighters in the United Kingdom who employed violent action (i.e., bombing mailboxes, cutting telegraph wires, etc.) in their call for emancipation. This history, however, is removed by 100 years. It is also overwhelmed by pop culture texts that either describe politics extremely optimistically or nihilistically.
These stories are great starts, but mostly we need more of them.
There is so much more to do besides voting. You can vote for a candidate you only marginally like one day and then protest them in the streets the next. You can volunteer, and provide mutual aid, and participate in coordinated strategies online with comrades you meet on Reddit. You can donate to local candidates across the country who share your values and badger the ones who do not. You can write and share articles like this one that try to capture the truth, and you can prepare yourself and others for more direct action.
There is so much more to do than just voting, and none of it is made lesser through the act of casting your ballot.