Is political abstinence an act of privilege?

Considering the merits and assumptions behind a common claim

If you’ve ever expressed openly the possibility that you might not vote in the next major election go-round, there's a decent chance you've been subject to a brief rebuttal, even if given in good faith.

“People fought for your right to vote,” or “You have a moral obligation to vote.” An especially popular one, not without its merits, is “The ability to forgo voting without having to worry about the consequences is the result of privilege.” The conclusion, typically, is something along the lines of one’s supposed duty to vote, or at least a duty to promote the efficacy of voices of whatever less-privileged party you find yourself a rung above on this wacky ladder. Anecdotally, the people who make these arguments typically haven’t participated in local elections where their vote would be much more substantial on a statistical level, but that’s neither here nor there.

John Locke (1632-1704) was an important milestone in the foundation of modern concepts of human rights.

This post isn’t a polemic against those who vote or otherwise participate in politics and I have no bone to pick with anyone. This is simply the summary of some reflections on my own position—if I write to criticize, I criticize myself. I have faith in your intelligence as a reader to critique your own position as you see fit.

Election season is ramping up in the US, and since I will (spoiler alert) probably continue to abstain from voting, I thought it might be wise to consider this claim: “political abstinence is an act of privilege.”

When we make claims about not voting as a result of it being a supposedly privileged act, we are drawing from all sorts of societal and cultural ideas unconsciously embedded within us and we rarely recognize it.

More specifically, it may be helpful to bring to light the many assumptions we stand on when make these claims or follow them to common moral conclusions. We can break these assumptions down into several categories.

Category one: assumed qualitative value of “privileged acts”

One kind of assumption this claim makes is that there is some sort of quality we can assign to actions that are “privileged” versus those that are not. There are actually some important things to consider about that but in the meantime we can easily observe how meaningless this is on its face with simple questions: what would be an unprivileged act? Can someone who is privileged do anything of a different sort?

I think I can point to an aspect of my own life that answers this: almost every morning, I make coffee for my wife and I and then sit and read for about an hour. I absolutely see this as something I am blessed, privileged, grateful, and <insert adjective here> that I get to do. I could go to work an hour earlier and make more money, but I don’t have to. If I were to do the math on beans and water and missed work opportunity, I’m sure that cup of coffee and reading time would cost well over $100 per week. I’m privileged, and you're probably privileged enough to do the same since you’re spending your free time reading this. But so what? What does that have to do with its ethical quality?

There’s usually a negative connotation assigned to privileged acts, but without anything substantial to back it up, it’s just a vague hand-waving in the direction of society at large. The idea that something is bad because it came from a privileged source isn’t one you want to follow to its inevitable conclusion. Voting itself is an act of privilege!

Category two: assumed utility in political participation

This is an assumption we make so often we forget it’s even an assumption. We believe so strongly in various ideas about democracy, agency, freedom, and politics, that we forget there are those that stand outside the spectrum of beliefs we’re used to. You don’t actually have to think that voting is a total waste of time to think that it’s not worth doing; you just have to think that there are more effective ways of helping your community. Voting takes, what, an hour or two max depending on where you live? Plus the hours or days spent learning about the candidates and their policies? Maybe it’s not so crazy to think that a day spent caring for even a single person is equally helpful to society.

If you think I sound crazy, consider this additional baked-in assumption made in the claim: the assumption that it’s possible to figure out who to vote for in a reasonable amount of time. Define “reasonable” any way you like—I think we're so caught up in propaganda of all sorts that we can never find our way out of the mire. What’s worse is that the more educated you are, the more susceptible you are to it. An ignorant peasant or serf knows what's good for him and his family. I’m not so sure you or I do, once we’ve factored in our petty knowledge of the world at large which the peasant knows nothing about. The best we can do is admit that we are hopelessly surrounded by propaganda and I’m not talking about left versus right. Almost every aspect of our lives is touched by it, even the parts we believe are non-political.

We could look to Jesus as an example of political action, but that usually gets tossed out the window because “things were different back then,” you know? They weren’t so progressive about rights and such, so Jesus couldn't use the political system to improve the lives of others. He had to do it the hard way. If he could vote, he definitely would have. Or something.

Somehow, I doubt that he’d be voting if he came to earth today instead of 2,000 years ago, and somehow I doubt that we've progressed very much in the ways that matter. I think Jesus would be doing exactly the same things he did the first time, exactly the same things he asked us to do in his stead: spending time and building friendships with those around him, especially the poor and needy, the minorities, the outcasts. Might sound crazy, but it’s not impossible to imitate. Is it unreasonable to think that this is a more effective method of changing the world for the better than participating within the confines of our political systems?

One of my favorite examples in fairly modern times is Leo Tolstoy, that most rational of Christians. He wasn’t really into the Bible like most of us who call ourselves Christians pretend to be, and he definitely wasn’t into the church as an institution.¹ But he thought that Jesus modeled the most effective method of improving the world, and he devoted his life to imitating it and rejecting politics altogether. We could talk for hours about what Tolstoy got wrong, but is there anything outrageous about his basic approach?

Literally all of us are victims (which does not exclude the category of propagandist!) of an inevitable propaganda machine that is designed to teach us that voting is important.² It’s necessary for our political systems to function for that idea to be instilled within us. Have we been ideologically captured into doing the machine’s bidding when we try to convince people to vote? It’s not a matter of diabolical cabals, remember. We’re several generations in, at least in the first world; our politicians and propagandists are products of this same machine.

Of course, another aspect of this category is the assumption that there's a fundamental distinction between the two main parties.³ In the words of Chomsky, “Other Western democracies are generally a few steps behind in these respects. Most have not yet achieved the U.S. system of one political party, with two factions”.⁴ If there’s a real difference, then perhaps there is value in voting. But maybe there’s room for doubt.

A final question on this point: whatever value there may be in voting, does it benefit those less privileged parties that supposedly obligate our action? It’s worth noting that the Bible does place additional emphasis on the needs of some groups over others, and the questions of privilege and oppression are directly related to it. This leads us to the next category:

Category three: the assumption that voting is a selfless act

The ability to vote, whether we call it a right or not, is always an act of privilege, and governments by definition represent their constituents. Attempts are sometimes made to cater to blocs of society without representation, or at least attempts to pander to them, but at the end of the day it is the privileged whose interests are factored into policy. By definition, I’m not sure voting can be an unselfish act!

The forgotten element of our original claim is that it assumes not voting is selfish—but, on the contrary, abstinence from voting will never increase one’s representation in policymaking. If the most privileged people stopped voting or otherwise influencing policy, their privilege would wither. Supposedly, this is the effect we want!

Now, there is a pretty big benefit to not voting. Call it a privilege if you wish. It’s not a material benefit, as we’ve already established, but rather a psychological, mental, and spiritual one. My goodness, it feels great not to care about who to vote for. If that makes me selfish, so be it.

But it’s not like I’m without ethical reasons for not voting. We’ve already considered how much time it takes to vote; if someone spends an equal amount of time doing good for their community in other ways, I fail to see how that’s worse. This is especially true when we start to look into the nature of human politics.

To vote is to use coercive force to get what you want, whether it’s for that nebulous greater good or not. All legislation is enforced by the sword. To vote for what I think is best for someone is to support holding a gun to their head while they do it. I’m not really what most people would call a pacifist, but that doesn’t sit right with me. Even people I disagree with vehemently can admit this. Here’s an example:

“The use of power and, by extension, force is the essence of politics and governing. Politics is not politics without power. This should not strike us as controversial. In any political economy the people are subject—some more willingly, some less willingly—to a higher power.”

J. Daryl Charles, Between Pacifism and Jihad: Just War and Christian Tradition⁵

I think that’s as good a place as any to stop. If you want to vote, vote. It would clearly be hypocrisy for me to tell you what to do. But maybe there are other legitimate perspectives besides “voting is an important social act.”

Category four: the assumption that the needs we know outweigh the needs we don’t

I said earlier that the less educated and more poverty-stricken are more likely to understand real needs and less likely to be captured by propaganda, and I said that there is a question mark surrounding the qualitative value of acts committed by the more privileged. But here’ a confounding factor: we only know what we know. And that is very little—nothing at all, I would say.

I think understanding local needs is incredibly important. It’s the one kind of need we can understand! And yet there’s a complication when applying this to localism and politics: is helping people here more important than people over there? If I vote for what is best for my home, I risk the opposite for everywhere else—at gunpoint, no less. I want to promote peace in my home and cease to support bloodshed afar, but in the US there are only two pro-war parties. How can I presume to vote for either?

We all claim to be against bloodshed, but take an easy-pickin’ example from either party: firearms rights and abortion rights. Whatever logic is used regarding these topics is thrown out the window when it comes to the safety and well-being of the most privileged—our political class protects themselves almost exclusively with the firearms many simultaneously claim have no defensive function, and our political class is far more interested in keeping us fighting over abortion than they are in addressing root issues in society that make it common.⁶ That’s just scratching the surface.

It may be an act of privilege to abstain from voting and not really be worried about the outcome. But that’s a meaningless observation. Whatever privilege I have in the matter, I count as forfeit. Take it if you want by voting yourself; I’ll be trying to tackle other matters.

1. I don’t really want to make this into a bigger deal than it needs to be, but I’ll briefly defend my use of the word Christian in the same sentence as Tolstoy who was not a believer in the basic tenets of Christianity (including the resurrection of Christ): to the extent that Christian is an adjective describing those who pursue Christ and the imitation of Christ, Tolstoy was Christian. To the extent that those who confess the basic tenets of Christianity share that goal, we can and should learn from even bona fide heretics like Tolstoy.

2. I’m not assigning qualitative value, good or bad, to that teaching! That would be a different argument. Propaganda is not limited to teaching falsehood or evil.

3. I’m referring to the situation in the US, but I don’t think it’s unique.

4. Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies. South End Press, 1989. Also found in pg 258 of The Essential Chomsky by Noam Chomsky, ed. by Anthony Arnove. The New Press, 2008.

5. Pg 87. InterVarsity Press, 2005. If you’re interested in my general thoughts on this book, I wrote a review here.

6. I know there are exceptions to this, and I have met honorable politicians in more local contexts. I'm not trying to say that all who participate in politics are bad people.