Who Do I Vote For?

by Mona Shaw

Who Should I Vote For?

That’s the wrong question. The correct question is: how to I advance justice? My view of voting has evolved since the days when I believed it was a moral obligation of those who seek justice.

The evolution began in 2003 when I left Albany, New York.  I was devastated and utterly confused by what happened there.  How could doing right thing and telling the truth go so badly? How did I go forward? How did I make sense of it?  How could those around me know I was telling the truth and just not speak out with me?

More than anything I wanted to know the truth about how justice advances. I decided to study human rights movements and their trajectories in a way, I never had before. I chose the Civil Rights Movement first.  The first thing I read was Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.”

I had read it before, but this time I really read it.  I studied every word King wrote in that letter. I saw the profound significance in the fact the letter wasn’t written to white supremacists. I was written to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, his own organization. They were threatening to fire him for telling the truth.  They accused him of being extremist, of creating horrible optics, and threatening the reputations of those in the SLCC who enjoyed high status. This rift was never completely healed, and they would have replaced him if anyone else wanted the job.

As my studies continued, I saw the same pattern repeated in every justice movement that advanced in any meaningful way. The most formidable opponents any justice advocate has are their “friends.” I saw it in the Suffrage movement, the labor movement, the anti-war movement, and certainly in the LGBT Equality movement. I also saw the same pattern in every human rights or justice endeavor I joined since 2003. 

In every effective justice movement, four things are always present.

One: The justice priority. There is always caustic tension between those who priorities justice, (i.e. those who are willing to put everything on the line for justice) and those who prioritize their status and comforts more than justice. I understand people want to believe you can have both. But you can’t. Few dedicated solely to justice died a natural death. None died rich.  At some point, you will have to choose between standing for justice or protecting your status. That choice is the determinant as to which group one belongs. Most some of both at different times in our lives.

Two: Led from the bottom.  The most successful movements are led from the bottom up. Successful movements are mobilized by the “least of these” or those most vulnerable to the oppression. When an organization seeks out bankers and CEOs, etc. for board positions, they have lost their way. They will become little more than a social club, if they survive at all.

Three: Civil disobedience. No justice movement in history that got traction has not included acts of glaring and controversial civil disobedience. If a movement doesn’t plan and advocate direct action, they will not advance.

Four: Change doesn’t happen at the ballot box.  To the extent the voting matters at all, this only happens after activists have created a political liability for the candidate to not do the right thing. In every justice movement, activists have had to plow through liberal Democrats as well as Republicans to shine a light on justice. This is slow and incremental and at first only results in empty promises. In the interim the movement will be used as a bargaining chip, blithely thrown under the bus in order for elected officials to get something they want more. Every movement has had to engage in some powerful and threatening “torch the earth” actions to knock down that block.

Voting just doesn’t matter as much as we like to think it does.  We’ve allowed ourselves to be beguiled into squandering precious moments of our lives overthinking and debating which candidate we prefer that would be better spent on organizing for justice itself.  We invest next to no time doing outreach to the people-at-large and educating them about justice. That time is never wasted. Every time we bring even one person into the justice fold out of a thousand, that convert will bring a thousand more.

There are solid arguments on both sides of whether voting for the “lesser-of-two-evils” is the better call, or if it’s more efficient to just crash the whole electoral machine to drive us into the streets.  At the end of the day, we just need to pick someone and get it over with and get back in the street. (Or not vote at all. There are solid arguments for that choice too.)

Voting does not define one’s character. Nor, should we allow it to be our moral identity. It’s not that important. In that long moral arc toward justice, that ten minutes we spend in a voting booth has too little consequence to fret about it and pummel each other over it the way we do. Nothing bad that comes from voting can’t be overturned, and anything good that comes from it will still require we remain in the street to keep it. If justice is our goal, we’re going to have to stay in the street—literally or figuratively—regardless.

What is important is that we tell the truth.  The great tragedy of our time is that we think that denying the truth will get us anywhere.  It won’t.  Dear God, we see people voting for people in the hope that they’re lying. “S/he has to say that to get elected.”  It is a travesty and an aberration of justice to scold people for not hiding or obfuscating the truth.  Truth is the GPS of justice. We can’t go to our destination if we don’t know where we are.

We shouldn’t be evaluating each other by how we vote. We should evaluate each other by what we’re doing the other 525,590 minutes of the year or the other 2,102,360 minutes if you only vote every four years.

Vote however you want, get it over with, and get back in the street.