I’m going to get right to the point — watching people complain on Twitter about how their perfect candidate did not get the Democratic nomination annoys the living shit out of me. It wouldn’t be quite as frustrating in a more or less ordinary election year, but with the pandemic raging and Donald Trump trying to destroy the post office and everything else that is good, I have very little patience for any of it.
It’s not that I think the two-party system in this country is working perfectly. No. Lately, it’s been a total clusterfuck. I am critical of it, in spite of having a lot of respect for many of the hard-working individuals who are part of it.
I was an independent until Trump got elected. That’s how critical I am of our system (sidenote: all of the people smugly welcoming me to “the resistance” after I said I became a registered Democrat should get over themselves).
However, I had to recognize that I needed to set aside my personal feelings of comfort and satisfaction with being an independent and help defeat Trump next time around. That meant recognizing voting as a civic duty, as opposed to a fetishistic act of self-aggrandizement I can virtue signal about on social media.
A few years ago, the writer Peter Pomerantsev told me that voting had to stop being so personal in this country. It has become all about satisfaction — like picking out a dress, and walking out of the store when you decide you simply “don’t love it” — this process abetted greatly by social media, which drives our addiction for public validation.
As a society, we like likes. We don’t like snide comments. We don’t like being reminded of some dumb or insensitive thing our preferred candidate said or did. And we’ve become so dependent on the surge of pleasure we get from people agreeing with us, or promoting our point of view, that we can lose the plot just a little.
The psychology of voting is such that it is always uncomfortable. We feel discomfort, because — and I really hate to break it to you — no political system is perfect, and some are frankly worse than others. Ours is not, in fact, the worst, even though it sometimes feels that way, simply because Americans like to look inward much more than we like to look outward. Recognizing all of this and not giving up is a step toward a mature political sensibility.
If you’ve followed my column, you know I am not a big believer in tough love. In this case, however, I think that tough love is warranted.
You’re not voting so you can make a cute post about it later. You’re voting because you’re a goddamn citizen of the United States. Right now, our country is being run by an unstable demagogue and a group of craven enablers. Enough is enough.
This doesn’t mean that idealism is canceled and that hope doesn’t matter. These things are important, especially in a country as young as ours. The need for hope and the need for practicality are perfectly echoed in that old saying: “Pray to God, but row for shore.” You have the capacity for abstract, hopeful thinking and the chance to exercise your power for good.
Progressives like to make fun of religion, but they forget that progressivism itself can become a religion — a dark, fundamentalist one at that. Progressive fundamentalism has its own vengeful gods and its own ideological rigidity, its endless and futile quest for purity. It’s a little bit funny, but much less funny when you’re trying to defeat Donald Trump.
Doing the right thing is not that hard this year. No one’s asking you to go sit in a filthy trench and shoot at people. No one is demanding heroism. All that matters is getting out to vote, and making sure your loved ones do it too, as much as you can.
That’s it. You can yell at me about the contents of this column after Election Day.
Image credit: Bill Smith