Election Blues
And reds, and whites
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These days, I find myself wishing I could get my hands on some of that magic potion imbibed by Rip Van Winkle over two centuries ago. How wonderful it would be to fall into a deep slumber and awake to discover I’d missed not only the 2024 American election, but the next four rounds as well.
This fantasy is born of an entirely rational resentment. In order to stay informed about local, national and global events, I have to make a superhuman effort to bypass the endless reports of a campaign in a faraway land – one where I have no say in the outcome, even if it will affect me as a citizen of the world.
Elections are a time of surfeit prose. The coverage is often predictable, overly dramatic. The run-up to the polls in the UK earlier this month featured countless forecasts of The Total Collapse of the Tories. The results brought confident declarations of a Labour Landslide – if you can call getting less than 40% of the popular vote in one of the lowest voter turnouts of the past 100 years a “landslide”. We were barely into the morning-after dissection of the results when the British press turned their pens en masse towards France, the potential imminent win of the far right, and the ins and outs of the complicated two-phase election system there. Then came the ear of he who shall not be named. Followed swiftly by the “historic” withdrawal. The crowning of the new candidate… Local, national and global news has all but disappeared from the front pages.
Yes, elections matter. But all this fuss about leaders, this preoccupation with winners and losers, warp public discourse about what politics is, what it means to be politically active, how voting works and doesn’t work. Grassroots activists know this well.
Amidst the mayhem surrounding the UK General Elections of 4 July, this social media post from Queers for Palestine offered a refreshingly balanced perspective:
When voting today, vote for Palestine, for trans people, for migrants, for people of colour, for people with disabilities, for the working class, for the environment.
And remember, whatever the outcome today, it isn’t a step towards liberation. We’re not interested in a seat at the table. The system is not broken, it’s working exactly as it was designed. Keep showing up and organising to dismantle the table, and collectively build something that liberates everyone.
When creating a future that’s for all of us, don’t put faith in party politics, put trust and energy in community.
The post is not a call to boycott the elections. Indeed, it assumes the reader will vote. But it puts the electoral process in its place. Whereas General Elections focus on the nation-state, this post moves the international to different kinds of communities and identities to the planet we all share. Unlike politicians who make wild promises to target constituents in an attempt to grab their votes, Queers for Palestine ask people to vote for something beyond our individual self-interest, for wider collectives of which we’re members or in solidarity with. Theirs is an unabashedly utopian statement which at the same time warns the reader not to invest too much energy or emotion in elections.
Go ahead, cast your vote, it seems to say. But don’t get your hopes up. And don’t stop doing other kinds of politics.
There is much to this advice to proceed with caution at election time. To be overly confident about the kind and scope of change that voting makes might be to engage in what the late critical theorist Lauren Berlant called cruel optimism. Reflecting on electoral politics, Berlant writes:
It may be a relation of cruel optimism, when, despite an awareness that the normative political sphere appears as a shrunken, broken, or distant place of activity among elites, members of the body politic return periodically to its recommitment ceremonies and scenes.
Berlant doesn’t offer a straightforward answer to the question of why our attachments to formal politics persist, why many people continue to vote even when the results are so often disappointing. Nor do they suggest that the “solution” is to abandon formal politics altogether. But by concluding their book Cruel Optimism with examples of grassroots political art and activism, Berlant seems to suggest that the political depression that can result from the cycle of optimism and disappointment typical of electoral politics arises from the tendency to treat elections as an end in themselves.
Doing politics – including the electoral kind – is not merely a means to an end. As Berlant writes:
One “does politics” to be in the political with others, in a becoming-democratic that involves sentience, focus, and a comic sense of the pleasure of coming together once again. Achieving and succeeding are not the measures for assessing whether the desire for the political was ridiculous.
Like the Queers for Palestine post above, these words provide a much better sense of why activists – including those of us involved in political parties –“do politics” than all the nonsense published in the mainstream media at election time. Berlant draws their observations about the pleasures and meanings of grassroots activism from the work of the late anthropologist and anarchist activist David Graeber, whose delightful little book Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology seeks to “offer a glimpse at the outline of a radical theory that does not actually exist, though it might possibly exist at some point in the future”.
It may seem strange to end a post on elections with an ode to anarchism. Throughout his book Graeber reminds the reader that one thing that distinguishes anarchist from other forms of democracy is that anarchists don’t vote. Instead, they make collective decisions through the processes of mediation and consensus. Whatever you might think of elections, this is the kind of political process that everyone can learn from. Like Queers for Palestine’s call to vote in solidarity, Graeber’s reflections and “tiny manifestos” on doing politics are just the wise words we need amidst the verbosity of the election cycle.
I’m away from this newsletter next month. I’ll be back in September with some more thoughts from the work of David Graeber and other radical writers.
Pen in Fist is written by me, Carrie Lou Hamilton. You can find my other writing and projects here. If you like what you read, you can get a paid subscription or leave me a tip.
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