Elites Don’t Want You To Vote
The powerful have always been afraid of your ballot
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Every election cycle, men and women reemerge to tell us that our vote has no value. They insist that the public is generally misinformed about the issues and that we should instead let ourselves be led by smarter, more objective rulers who understand how the world really works.
Every time this advice is offered to me, I cannot help but think of the character Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead Wright) from Game of Thrones (2011–2019). When the medieval fantasy show ended in the summer of 2019, the answer to who would sit on the Iron Throne and rule over the fictional continent of Westeros was finally answered: Bran Stark was appointed King because he was a dispassioned ruler who would not succumb to the petty impulses of the late King Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson) or the genocidal ones of the Mad King.
All-knowing and singularly focused, Bran is cold, rational, and “perfect.” He does not get bogged down by the whims of his predecessors because he has transcended the person he used to be. He delegates most of the actual governing to the realm's technocrats, such as Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) and Samwell Tarly (John Bradley). He instead spends his supernatural abilities on larger tasks such as hunting down dragons.
I remembered being incredibly frustrated when the series finale ended, in part, because Bran didn’t seem like a good leader. He was unfeeling in his outlook, withholding his future sight to let thousands die during the battles of Winterfell and King’s Landing. Wasn’t this cold Machveiallian outlook no worse than Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) or the dozens of other ruthless leaders dotting the history of the show?
And yet, the idea of a cold, benevolent ruler has existed in the world of philosophy for generations. The shadow of this utopian figure has haunted our discussion of politics as commentators scoff at consensus-building and point to this mythical figure as the person who should lead us. We shouldn't listen to our own thoughts about justice or governance. No, we should rely on the Brans of the world.
Vote for them, or better yet, don’t vote at all.
This paternalistic outlook is as old as democracy itself. It has nothing to do with proper leadership, but rather, it is about convincing everyone else that they are better off not questioning those in power.
Democracy is a historical anomaly. While anthropological evidence suggests that some pre-agricultural societies were more egalitarian in the past, most of our recorded history has been one of tyrants, kings, emperors, high priests, and committees leading over their subjects. The idea that citizens should elect their leaders, and, in some cases, craft their own laws, has only enjoyed popularity very recently. It’s a sadly novel idea, and one that has faced immense resistance from our society’s most educated and celebrated minds.
One of the first recorded Democracies was ancient Athens during the late 6th century BCE, and it was slightly different from the representative democracies of the modern world. While citizenship was constrained only to free men (women, slaves, foreign residents, and children were not considered citizens), it was far more active than simply choosing a representative. Some political positions were chosen by lot (see the Boule), and their legislative Assembly (see the Ecclesia) was opened to all citizens who qualified.
Critics of this system emerged from men we widely celebrate today. Prolific philosopher Plato (428/427 — 348/347 BCE) wrote disdainfully of ancient democracy. He was deeply impacted by his mentor Socrates's prosecution and execution (470–399 BCE) in the Athenian justice system. Plato thought that this decision was indicative of majority rule in general. He advocated for leadership, not dictated by the majority's will, but through men skilled in governing. In book six of The Republic, he analogized a country's stewardship to the captain of a boat singularly focused on his craft — a metaphor popularly referred to as “Ship of State.”
A grim example of the Ship of State principle is the dystopian science fiction movie Snowpiercer (2013) by director Bong Joon-ho. The film takes place after geoengineering has created a new Ice Age that makes the Earth’s surface uninhabitable. The last surviving remnants of humanity live aboard a train that circles the globe indefinitely and is heavily stratified by class. This straightforward metaphor for capitalism has the poor living in the cramped tail section, while the rich live it up in first-class. The train is helmed by their leader Mr. Wilfred, and they have an almost God-like reverence for his leadership. As a teacher explains to a classroom full of children:
“If we ever go outside the train? We’d all freeze and die. If the engine stops running? We’d all die. And who takes care of the Sacred Engine? Mr. Wilford!”
The picture we have here in both Snowpiercer and Plato’s original Ship of State metaphor is of an educated man knowing what’s best — the inputs of his “lessers” be damned — which is an awfully convenient position for a powerful person to take when arguing for who should command a society. Plato’s conception of a good leader would go on to be called a “Philosopher King.”
This viewpoint would impact “Western” thought for thousands of years: Plato’s pupil Aristotle would argue that governments were best led not by the many, but by virtuous men; Nietzsche detested the “mob” of democracy in favor of a more virtuous Übermensch; John Stewart Mill suggested that extra votes should be given based on citizens’ education level; and even in the modern era, academics such as Jason Brennan argue that our government would be better off under the rule of knowledgeable technocrats and academics (known as an “epistocracy”).
Brennan labeled his ideal class of political participants “Vulcans,” after the aliens in Star Trek, for their ability to gauge facts dispassionately. As Writer Katherine Mangu-Ward wrote favorably of Brennan’s work in Reason Magazine:
“Encouraging more ignorant people to vote is not just pointless, argues Jason Brennan; it’s morally wrong. There is no duty to vote, but many people may have a duty not to vote. Boosting turnout among citizens who are young, uneducated, or otherwise less likely to be engaged — the primary targets of get-out-the-vote campaigns — is likely to have the unintended consequence of encouraging people to fail in that duty.”
Time and time again, the narrative is for common “ignorant” people to stand aside as more “sensible” minds take the helm. Yet, whether you are calling your objective, unfeeling leader a Vulcan, a Philosopher King, an Übermensch, or a Bran Stark, these figures are striking for their detachment from reality. Bran Stark could lead Westeros because he was a demi-God connected to a system of magical trees spanning the continent.
That type of person doesn’t exist in real life.
Despite this anti-Democratic critique's prolific nature, there is no concrete evidence that more “educated” people are better at making decisions. Educated people make poor decisions all the time. So much so that the question “Why are smart people so dumb?” has become a meme.
This oversight applies especially in politics, where educated people don’t seem to be more objective in their political decision-making. One widely cited study titled Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government suggests that your ability to solve math problems is impacted when said problem contradicts your political preferences. There are also historical events such as the war in Iraq, the election of Donald Trump, or the early spread of the Coronavirus, where educated people were confident about a decision that would later turn out to be calamitous. To that last point, as late as March, I, a person who researches for a living, still thought the Coronavirus was no worse than Influenza.
Smart people don’t know everything.
The idea of intelligence itself is a highly contentious and poorly understood concept that changes radically depending on your cultural context (see the racist history behind the concept of Intelligence). It’s common in the United States to associate more education with liberal thought. Still, a conflicting 2011 study by academics Rindermann, Flores-Mendoza, and Woodley found that education was linked to center-right and centrist ideology in Brazil and the United Kingdom.
Our perception of intelligence is based on subjective values that change greatly depending on where you are in the world.
Smart people are just like us in the sense that they have cognitive biases that prevent them from seeing the full picture. If we only listened to the educated unquestioningly, we would not have advanced in areas where they were wrong, and they are wrong a lot. For example, Charles Darwin, the person described by many as the Father of Modern Biology, was adamant in public that women were inferior to men and should exist within separate spheres. The fact that he was highly educated and knowledgeable about biology didn’t mean he was any better at handling the political question of female emancipation.
The idea that regular people shouldn’t participate in politics has less to do with the superiority of the knowledgeable and more about powerful people’s fear of what comes after they stop captaining the boat.
The powerful have always been terrified by the will of the majority. Plato believed that a pure democracy was one step away from tyranny. Philosopher Hobbes described in his seminal work the Leviathan that our state of nature outside of society is a “war of all against all.” There is this widespread fear amongst elites that if you remove the constraints of “civilization,” then the people will descend into an unruly mob.
In disaster studies, there is a name for the upper classes' widespread fear to assume the worst from people. It’s called “Elite Panic.” Coined by Caron Chess and Lee Clarke of Rutgers University, the term describes a phenomenon in disasters where the rich and powerful use this worldview as a justification to panic, and in some cases, preemptively punish the “mob” they fear will inevitably form in the aftermath.
A quintessential example of this is the response effort to Hurricane Katrina. The image portrayed by those in power was a dire situation of uncontrolled mayhem, depicting a scene of over ten thousand dead. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin infamously went on The Oprah Winfrey Show (1986–2011) and claimed that within the Superdome (the place refugees from the storm were being housed), evacuees were hurting each other. Mayor Nagin saying:
“They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin’ Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.”
These statements would later be deemed exaggerations, but this perception of looters would have a detrimental impact on the response effort. The private security force company Xe (now merged with Triple Canopy, and formerly Blackwater) was contracted out immediately by the federal government to “secure the city.” As if during wartime, they were armed with automatic rifles and deputized by the Governor of Louisiana to make arrests. The number of armed forces occupying the city would only increase as the National Guard and private security forces hired by the wealthy entered the fray. According to ProPublica, the police were also given orders to shoot looters on sight, and by many accounts, they did. As one community organizer told The New York Times several years later of the violence in the Algiers neighborhood:
“I done seen bodies lay in the streets for weeks. I’m not talking about the flooded Ninth Ward, I’m talking about dry Algiers. I watched them become bloated and torn apart by dogs. And they all had bullet wounds.”
This hodgepodge of local, state, federal, and private forces would be an active detriment to the relief efforts in the days and weeks to come: officers would detain and in some cases harass citizens distributing supplies; vital space on boats and helicopters was often reserved for armed escorts, and very early into the recovery the Mayor ordered the police to deemphasize search and rescue efforts to prioritize an end to the looting. The Mayor would later admit that reports of looting were exaggerated (and years later would eventually be convicted of corruption for an unrelated kickback scheme).
Not only did “the mob” in New Orleans not devolve into chaos, but it was also followed by a lot of spontaneous mutual aid and charity. In one example, a group of activists and healthcare practitioners came together to form the Common Ground Collective, which formed a makeshift medical clinic as well as distributed food and other supplies to thousands of residents. In another, a makeshift flotilla of boats dubbed “the Cajun Navy” rescued thousands of people from their stranded rooftops.
While humans are not perfect during a crisis, much like our misconceptions about the Philosopher King, they don’t always devolve into chaos either. In fact, moments of crisis are often filled with examples of strangers coming together for no other reason than that they want to help each other. In her book A Paradise Built in Hell (2010), author Rebecca Solnit highlights dozens of examples of people preserving during moments of disaster. The early days of the 1906 San Franciso Earthquake are known for makeshift community kitchens. Londoners during The Blitz are routinely cited as being more unified following the bombings.
The mob that men like Mayor Nagin fear often doesn’t come, and yet we see this fear everywhere in our culture. You cannot turn on a movie, show, or briefing without some authority figure justifying why they won’t relay information to the public. “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.” says the character Agent Kay (Tommy Lee Jones) in Men In Black (1997) as his justification for why their secretive organization doesn’t share the existence of aliens with the public. “Telling the public we might all be dead in eighteen days achieves nothing but
panic,” says the president (Stanley Anderson) in Armageddon (1998) shortly before he instructs our protagonists to board a spaceship to blow up an asteroid heading towards Earth. In both of these situations, the public might have benefitted from this information, especially in Armageddon, where bits of the asteroid break off and end up decimating cities. The fear of public unrest, however, was seen as a higher priority than harm reduction.
In a more serious, real-life example, Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo refused to take more drastic steps to curb the Coronavirus out of the same concern. He said at a press conference in February: “We have to keep this in perspective. There is no reason to panic. There is no reason to have an inordinate amount of fear about this situation.”
We see this same fear of the mob built into the very bedrock of our government. James Madison in Federalist Paper Number 10 discussed a concern about curbing the influence of an “overbearing majority.” When we look at our political institutions, such as the Senate or the Electoral College, they are built on the premise that the government must be insulated from the people's will. For example, the presidency is not decided by the popular vote alone, but by electors who are awarded to states in a way that deflates the influence of more populous ones.
Like with disasters, however, this fear has not insulated the United States from the rise of right-wing populism but exacerbated it. The anti-populist Electoral College assured President Donald Trump’s victory. Hillary Clinton famously secured the popular vote, but because of the Founding Father’s fear of the people, an obviously incompetent authoritarian was put into office.
There is an argument to be made that the over-inflation of rural interests via the Senate and House of Representatives has likewise undermined our democracy. When it comes to voting overall, Democrats routinely outperform Republicans nationally in elections. Still, the federal legislature's structure means that the Democratic Party has to win by huge majorities to take hold of either chamber. Rather than form a coalition represented by the nation's interests, this disparity has incentivized the Republican party to rely on voter suppression to win elections, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the Founder’s fear of the public.
Anti-populism has not inoculated us from demagoguery, and it, in fact, ignores successful movements in history, such as FDR’s New Deal, that have given us noteworthy reforms. There are plenty of examples throughout history of leaders who have the public’s ear and do not use it to become tyrants.
This intrinsic fear of “the people” has less to do with our state of nature and more about the elite's cruelty.
From Plato to Nietzsche, most of the philosophers and academics we have referenced today were supporters, or in many cases, members of the upper class. Plato was born into a prominent Athenian family, and John Stuart Mill’s father was a famous philosopher who rubbed elbows with the likes of Jeremy Bentham.
As our values have progressed, we have had this desire to cauterize these thinkers' outdated views from the ones we consider useful. Plato is routinely cited as an influential political thinker, even if his views on women and slavery are rightfully deemed antiquated by today’s standards. We preface our most lauded thinkers with calls to place them into their proper historical context, ignoring that maybe their cold outlook is foundational, not ancillary, to their worldviews.
For example, when it comes to Plato’s understanding of human nature, we should recognize that his idea of slavery cannot be viewed in isolation. Plato, who also owned slaves, tied his justification of slavery into his aristocratic belief that certain people are just superior, writing in the Gorgias:
“…nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways she shows, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior.”
This is the logic of a fascist who does not value human life. There’s a scene from FX’s TV show Archer (2009 — present) where the secret agent protagonist Archer (H. Jon Benjamin) is confronting a South American dictator named Caldarone, and the latter provides a very similar metaphor to Plato’s when justifying the violence of his leadership:
CALDARONE: Meat is whatever the tiger says is meat. Because God made him the boss and all the other animals his food.”
To which a sarcastic Archer replies:
“ARCHER:…thank you, George Bore-well, for that clunky analogy in defense of totalitarianism!”
I watched this episode very close to when I read Plato’s Gorgias, and it struck me because it was the same logic. Plato, like Caldarone, was a slave owner rationalizing his cruelty. He thought that slaves were just naturally meant to be slaves, and in a move very similar to chattel slavery, even advocated that the offsprings of slaves should belong to their masters. It should be noted that Plato and his student Aristotle stood against an ancient Athenian movement to abolish slavery. If they were transported to our time, then they probably would align more closely with far-right reactionaries than anyone we associate today with political freedom.
However, buried underneath this justification of a “natural order” was panic that the status quo would become disrupted. Plato was fearful of slave revolts and wrote in his work titled Laws a series of prescriptions to avoid them, including to make sure your country’s slaves do not have a shared heritage or language. He would go on in Laws to describe the various ways owners should treat their slaves to avoid insubordination.
Likewise, Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, although occasionally critical of the institution of slavery, was also fearful of the possibility of revolt. When it came to his own slaves, he would only free 10 out of the 600 enslaved people he held in bondage throughout the course of his life. Part of the reason for this hesitancy came down to fear. He once described owning a slave as holding “a wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”
These men were terrified that the people they had enslaved — the people they had denied their humanity — would rise up and kill them. It was not an irrational fear. History is filled with slave revolts and uprisings. American history has at least 250, and Jefferson was aware of them — the Haitian Uprising generated particular concern for him.
However, these moments in time were not lawless masses of people descending into mayhem the moment their bondage was lifted. They were reacting to injustice and fighting for their freedom against the people who had robbed them of their humanity. As Martin Luther King Jr. famously said: “Riots are the language of the unheard.” Slaves revolted because they were in bondage — not because of the savagery of human nature.
We saw similar sentiments from elite academics in response to the French Revolution. People such as Edmund Burke claimed that it was destroying French society. In his seminal work Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), he discussed the tyranny of the mob, writing:
“If I recollect rightly, Aristotle observes that a democracy has many striking points of resemblance with a tyranny. Of this I am certain, that in a democracy, whenever strong divisions prevail (as they often must in that kind of polity), the majority of the citizens is capable of cruelly oppressing the minority, and that this oppression will extend to far greater numbers and will be carried on with much greater fury than can almost ever be feared from a monarchy.”
This claim that the majority is to be more feared than the monarchy may be true for someone of Burke’s standing (he was a famous writer and his father was a successful solicitor). Still, the fact remains that the French peasantry was suffering due to the monarchy’s political incompetence. The price of bread, the primary food stable for the peasantry at the time, had increased significantly after two years of failed harvests up to an estimated 88% of a worker’s wages. People blamed the aristocracy for that, not simply because of politics, but because they were starving.
It’s telling that the powerful choose to see these moments in isolation from the larger, systemic problems that caused the populace to revolt in the first place. Their labeling of humanity as a mob allowed them to uncritically sidestep all accusations of cruelty and mismanagement inflicted by those in charge. When you see all humans as potential barbarians-in-the-making, it becomes really easy to justify any violence against them.
The privileged have employed this belief as a shield to preserve their own power. They were and are continuing to project their fear of losing power onto humanity as a whole, and it has tainted how we perceive society and human nature itself.
The finale episode of Game of Thrones ends with Westeros' surviving lords and ladies deciding who will lead them. The character Samwell Tarly meekly stands up and suggests that maybe the people should elect their leader, to which the nobles respond with uproarious laughter. Lord Edmure Tully sarcastically remarking: “Maybe we should give the dogs a vote as well?”
They then elect Bran Stark — the unfeeling Vulcan and Philosopher King — who seems disinterested in bettering the lives of the average Westerosian. The series ends much how it started, with nobles arguing around a table about how to lead the country, all promises of broken wheels, and reform left to the wayside.
This is a form of propaganda thousands of years in the making. The elite have held disdain for those beneath them for as long as we have debated who holds power. Every year people — who are either wealthy or uplifted by wealthy interests — tell you paradoxically that not only does your vote not matter but that it is a dangerous thing worthy of being feared.
But dangerous to whom?
If we truly valued all voices, then those uplifted by wealth might have more to worry about than “too many voting.”
Pop Culture Has Never Understood Politics And Voting
Our belief that voting is hopeless, as seen on tv
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.