I’ve been thinking, lately, about elections.
This is probably not a shock – I live in Ontario, Canada, and there is a provincial election in Ontario happening in late February, and there will probably be a federal election not too long after that.
I don’t particularly want to talk about the specifics of those elections, or at least not this week. Instead, I want to talk briefly about my general approach to elections, as someone with movement-focused politics. And I want to stress that while I think these things are worth talking about, I also think they’re often debated in really divisive ways that I just don’t think are warranted…I am actively disinterested in arguing about this stuff.
Anyway.
One: I think you should vote. The differences between political parties do actually make a difference to people’s lives, sometimes a big one. And there’s no need to exaggerate the impacts of one individual’s vote the way that some people do, but voting is a very easy thing to do, so why not do it — the same way we should do lots of other small, low-investment things that can contribute in small, low-impact ways to shaping the world.
Two: From the perspective of justice and liberation, all voting is strategic voting, all voting is at best harm reduction, and most of the time voting is a matter of helping to choose who our opponents will be. Don’t look for your vote to be some transcendent expression of purity or of your political identity…it’s just one small, tactical act in the broad spectrum of life. And be sure to criticize the hypocrisies and failures of the party that you vote for just as vigorously as those of parties you oppose.
Three: Despite what I just said, that doesn’t have to mean that you have to understand “strategic” in a way that simplistically follows the logic of the system. There’s lots of room to debate what’s actually strategic. And even then, sometimes standing on principle has to outweigh everything else – it’s not necessarily clear or easy. And I think because voting is just one small thing in a much broader and richer spectrum of political action, we need, when possible, to be generous with each other when we have different ways of relating to it, and not get caught up in overblown conflict about it.
Which brings me to four: I think we all need to deliberately work to push back against all of the ways in which mainstream media, party loyalists, and the material circumstances of our lives work to limit the horizons of our political imaginations to the spectrum defined by political parties. We need to see the harms of our current world and the possibilities for a better one not through the limiting lens of cheerleading for political brands, but in a way that emerges from our lives, the lives of our neighbours, and the lives of people around the world, and in a way that refuses Margaret Thatcher’s deadening slogan that “there is no alternative.” Think and talk and read and dream and act in ways that refuse how a singular focus on the electoral constrains our political imaginations. We’re allowed to want a world that is far better than any party can deliver, and we’re allowed to try to build it. And to do that, we need to experiment with ways to combine expansive vision with practical action that goes far beyond casting a ballot.