In college, I had an economics professor who did not vote.
“Statistically,” he told us students, “my vote will make no difference in federal and state elections. It’s a waste of time and effort. So I don’t do it.”
This was the sort of offhand comment made during office hours—a remark to be carried away for inspection and discussion, as we undergraduates tried on different ways of inhabiting our world. The professor’s stance was unfamiliar, but who were we to reject it wholesale? He was part of a famously good economics department that produced fabulously successful graduates. In fact, that first semester of my freshman year, I’d registered for Principles of Microeconomics, believing I’d go on to major in the subject.
My only problem was that economics made no sense. I frequently attended the professor’s office hours because—as hard as I tried—economic concepts slipped from my grasp. They did not correlate to my own sense of reality; or else, they described a reality that hovered like a veil over the world I knew, sometimes transparent, mostly opaque.
I remember one office hours session in particular, when, gathered with other students around the professor’s desk, I desperately attempted to copy out a diagram the professor had drawn. Maybe it illustrated Negative Externalities with Per-Unit Excise Tax Correction. Or, simply, Inelastic Demand. What I know for sure is that another student—a braver student—challenged the professor about his stance on voting. The 2006 midterms approached; voting was on people’s minds. What about elections that are decided by a single vote? Wouldn’t that mean your vote mattered? The professor began to calmly repudiate this premise, then paused. He had noticed my notebook on his desk: one page revealing my cramped rendering of his diagram.
“Paper is cheap,” he said to me. “It’s not worth writing so small and illegibly just to save page space. If you fill up that notebook, you can just purchase a new one.”
My cheeks burned. I’d been bested by economic principles once again. The professor, after all, was an expert in costs and benefits. He’d done the math. He’d studied the models. He assigned value to time, effort, resources, and behaved accordingly. He was nothing if not a rational man with a rational set of beliefs and behaviors.
So he recommended using paper spaciously for note-taking.
He did not vote.
And while students could lob hypotheticals at him all day—such as the chance that one person’s vote might swing an election outcome one way or another—he dismissed these counterarguments as statistical anomalies. Casting the ballot that tipped an election, he reasoned, would be equivalent to winning the lottery.
Anyway, I did not go on to become an economist.
I became a writer instead.
I continued to vote.
Because, ironically, it was that economics professor who made me fully cognizant of my right to vote—who made me realize the urgency of voting—because he showed me how easy it is to decide not to.
Spending hours of one’s life researching candidates and ballot items, travelling to polling places, standing in line, all when one’s individual vote will have no tangible impact, is irrational. One could, instead, spend that time eating pancakes, or bowling with friends, or putting in paid hours at work.
And yet—
In this muddled, violent, unjust, crisis-wrought world, what do we have except the irrational belief that the world and our lives could be something else—something better?
Admittedly, I am predisposed to see value in voting.
This is, in part, because of where I’m from: a small town in New Hampshire. My hometown has two stoplights. The churches are steepled. The local grocer will carry your bags to your car. It the kind of picturesque town presidential hopefuls visit in their bids to secure their party’s nominations. New Hampshire is the first state to vote in the primaries, after Iowa’s caucuses. What the state’s voters decide can have a significant impact on how other states vote—which candidates gain momentum. Before elections, political signs overwhelm our roadsides and intersections. Candidates court us, person by person, small town by small town. They stand in our high school gymnasiums and parks and town halls to make speeches. A friend’s brother claimed to have been grabbing coffee at my hometown diner, only to turn around and find Barack Obama standing behind him.
“Is that coffee for me?” Obama said.
“No!” replied the surprised diner-patron—a response he’d tell people he later regretted. I should have given Obama my coffee. When Obama asks for your coffee, you hand your cup over.
What I mean to say is: growing up in New Hampshire meant growing up with a feeling of political significance. In our small state, our small towns, we harbor a sense that we can tell presidential candidates yes or no. Sometimes quite literally.
I’m not saying it is right.
I’m also not saying that voting in New Hampshire was when my vote felt most significant. Because it was actually when I voted elsewhere—in Houston, Texas, during the 2018 midterms—when, as a voter, I felt most empowered. Maybe you remember Beto-mania? Even Beyoncé wore the signature black and white hat to show support for Beto O’Rourke’s bid to defeat Senator Ted Cruz. It meant something to join so many others in the uphill battle of turning Texas blue, to cast my vote alongside thousands of strangers in that gerrymandered city—that Beto-enthused city—willing the unlikely to happen.
It didn’t happen, and yet to have participated in that groundswell effort meant connecting with other members of a region—a country—who wanted political change. Who believed that change was possible, despite the odds. Because instigating change will always mean reaching for what seems irrational or impossible in the moment. Because it is—until it isn’t.
Power lives in our collective potential; voting in Texas gave me a sense of connection and inclusion within a larger growing movement. My vote did not tip the scale, but that wasn’t the point. When it comes to defeating a corrupt political force, or overcoming the vast consequences of climate change, one often hears lamentations of individual powerlessness: “there’s nothing I can do.” That is true, in a sense. There is nothing you can do, personally. With respect to climate change: recycling aluminum cans, or going vegan, or installing solar panels on your house will not stop wildfires from decimating forests, or glaciers from melting, or the Iberian lynx from going extinct. An overemphasis on individual action is a recipe for despair, nihilism, and habituated inertia. There’s nothing I can do—and yet there’s also everything we can do. To connect to that we, even in the act of voting for a candidate who will go on to lose, is significant because it means we have felt and flexed our latent collective power—a power that can continue to grow.
The most impactful book I have read on propelling social change is Micah White’s The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution. White was a founding architect of Occupy Wall Street—a movement he analyzes in the book for both its unlikely rise to prominence in 2011, as well as the shortcomings that led to its demise. More importantly, White offers contemporary activists a path forward via a “unified theory of revolution.” Here is a summarizing description:
So what does this new paradigm of activism look like? It is defined by a shift away from materialist theories of social change toward a spiritual understanding of revolution. It is a turn away from voluntarism and structuralism toward subjectivism and theurgism. Activists of the future will target the mental environment to spark collective epiphanies that achieve real-world victories. Protest tactics will be chosen for their potential to trigger a species-wide metanoia—from the ancient word for “a turnaround”—capable of releasing the tremendous forces necessary for social revolution . . . The contagious collective epiphany is the one force capable of conjuring a political miracle (43).
White proposes that massive social change—the kind that might forestall climate catastrophe, among other systemic power struggles—will require more than traditional conceptions of tangible “direct action,” or even catalyzing externalities like pandemics or the Food Price Index. A people’s revolution will require a spiritual component as well—a sense of miracle that can truly inspire, and can live inside a person, a people, for long stretches of time. Social change can rapidly occur—carried on the synaptic current of social media, like in the case of Occupy—but substantive change moves slowly, nonlinearly, as well. “Future movements,” writes White, “will re-conceive activism in timescales of centuries, not seconds, by focusing their meme warfare on provoking epiphanies in people who are not yet born. From the perspective of a long-term vision, todays protests aren’t failing: our protests are setting in motion a victorious process that will take generations to unfold” (188-189).
Revolution is rangy, weird, irrational, unpredictable. Its progress is not easy to measure. It cannot be mapped succinctly into a two-dimensional diagram. It is not, and should not be, easy to quantify the value of one’s participation in any effort toward liberation, equality, and sustainability. This applies to voting as much as anything else. Voting need not only be about numbers and statistical metrics. Voting can mean believing in the collective—the miracle of we—and the meandering journey toward “a contagious collective epiphany.” What would it mean, I wonder, to approach casting a ballot with metaphysical intention: as a tribute to democracy, like a prayer in the night? If anything has been clear in recent months, it is how fragile our American democracy is, how imperfect yet precious. Our right to self-governance could disappear in an instant. To vote—regardless of the outcome—is to signal a commitment to democracy: the belief that future generations have the right to self-governance, too. To assign value to the future, as well the present, is revolutionary in and of itself. A crisis like climate change, after all, stems from who and what we value. Ourselves? Each other? Future generations? Their air and forests and oceans? Their governments?
I do not vote because I believe my vote will have a singular, specific, tangible value. I do it because I believe in the intangible, nonlinear, collective consciousness that yearns toward better circumstances. Voting is one way to connect to that undulating collective: the we that embodies historical struggle, present realities, and future possibilities.
So I’ll keep voting—irrationally, joyously, determinedly—because I believe in that future. I believe in it enough to write out this essay in cramped longhand, saving space on the page to make room for what comes next.
Reading suggestions
As mentioned in this essay, I recommend The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution by Micah White. For more on building long-term movements in difficult times: Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit. For more on climate change: Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change by George Marshall, as well as The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh. Ghosh’s book, in particular, is an incredible resource for writers looking to prioritize proactive storytelling. The stories we tell and how we tell them shape how we interact with the world. For that reason, I also want to highlight two favorite works of fiction that emphasizes a collective consciousness: The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka, and “They Told Us Not to Say This” by Jenn Alandy Trahan.