For the first time in my adult life, I will not be voting come Election Day.
This is the type of statement that tends to cause gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands. “How can you not vote?” some might ask. “It’s your civic duty.” “If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain.” I have heard all of these arguments, and I don’t buy them anymore. Voting may be a civic duty, but it is also a choice. When casting a ballot, we are choosing who we believe is best equipped to serve us in the public sphere. But what if one does not accept any of the candidates as suitable? This is where I, after a quarter century as a voting citizen, have landed.
For my entire life as a voter, my vote has always been reduced to a vote against something. Against the Iraq War. Against the Tea Party. Against Donald Trump. Against authoritarianism. I cannot recall a single time I have ever voted in favor of a candidate or issue I supported. Partly, this is because in my lifetime I have watched the Republican Party, a once honorable and decent American party, degraded and driven into the gutter by degenerate white nationalists and religious extremists, while the Democratic Party has reacted to this with an ineptitude that would be embarrassing if it were not so pathetic.
A historical view helps here. For those who think the Supreme Court’s naked partisanship is something new, they should know that it most certainly is not. It was a partisan court that installed George W. Bush as president in 2000; in response, Democrats did nothing. In fact, losing Democratic candidate Al Gore presided over the certification of the vote that installed Bush in office. It was Democrats who reacted tepidly to the criminal act that was the Iraq War, in which hundreds of thousands died, with no consequences for those who orchestrated it. The architects of that war, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, died peacefully at their homes. They should have died in prison.
It was the Democratic administration of Barack Obama that failed to act against those who crashed the global economy in 2008. It was the Democratic administration of Joe Biden that dragged its feet after the Trump-incited insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, and allowed those responsible to evade justice. It was a Democrat, Joseph Lieberman, who killed the possibility of a public option when the Affordable Care Act was being debated. It was a Democrat, John Dingell, who regularly sided with the NRA to prevent proper gun control legislation, long after the scourge of gun violence was obviously a national issue that needed serious attention. It was a Democrat, Mario Cuomo, who helped Rupert Murdoch cut the red tape at the Federal Communications Commission, which allowed Murdoch to re-purchase the New York Post and later establish the Fox News Channel.
It was the votes of Democrats that confirmed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court.
Furthermore, it was a Supreme Court justice nominated by a Democratic president, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose stubborn refusal to retire despite recurring health problems paved the way for the erosion of rights that we have seen in recent years.
This is not leadership. And I, as a voter, am under no obligation to support it. The idea of “vote blue, no matter who” is just as mindless as voting only for the candidate with an R next to their name. It is the responsibility of candidates for office to demonstrate why they are deserving of my vote. This is not a radical notion; in his landmark speech “The Ballot or the Bullet,” Malcolm X correctly noted how “any time you throw your weight behind a political party, and that party can’t keep the promise that it made to you during election time, and you’re dumb enough to walk around continuing to identify yourself with that party … you’re a chump.”
The leadership of the Democratic Party is feckless and incompetent, and it has spawned a party that has lost touch with the people and is incapable of meeting this moment of urgency as democracy slowly crumbles. While it is true that one can point to Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as among those who have consistently sounded the alarm, they are hamstrung by the impotent leadership of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, whose general approach seems to be “we’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas.”
It is little wonder that the public has mostly lost confidence in the Democrats; you can only take the people for suckers so many times. Forget the Republicans; they have shown us their true colors. The only question now is how to confront this moment. Despite a decade of the body politic being infected with the cancer that is Trump, the Democrats have not provided an answer.
I am tired of voting for candidates who promise to lead, and then do not. Should a candidate who speaks to my concerns emerge, I will consider voting for them. But I am through casting a ballot for the sake of it. Again, the words of Malcolm X ring true here: “A ballot is like a bullet. You don’t throw your ballots until you see a target, and if that target is not within your reach, keep your ballot in your pocket.”
What each individual chooses to do come Election Day is up to them. As for me, I’m keeping my ballot in my pocket.
W. Richard Benash is a motion picture historian, writer and an information access assistant at Baker-Berry Library. Guest columns represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
