We’ve all known someone who engages in a certain kind of hand-wringing about voting, and quite likely we have done it ourselves. I don’t mean a confusion about for whom to vote, or whether voting in a given election is worth the trouble, but a potentially paralyzing fear of what I shall call the ‘statement’ of a vote. This is a plea to end such handwringing, for (in most cases) a vote is not a statement at all, at least in the way we may suppose it to be.
Voting and character
What does it mean to treat a vote as a statement? Often, people suppose that casting a vote makes a statement about the character of a candidate—either in favor of the candidate for whom one votes or against the other candidate. But a vote is not an award for good character. Its result—or rather, the result of aggregated votes—is the political empowerment of some candidate, who will pursue legislation, personnel appointments, and so forth, as the office in question allows or demands, and according to a certain agenda. Character does not directly enter into the equation, unless one considers as a point of character the fact of how well officials manage to enact the agenda they support. This is not to say that good character is not desirable in politicians, although the traits that make for successful contemporary politicians often struggle to coexist with such deferential virtues as humility and honesty. A good person may be a bad ruler, and a bad person may be a good ruler; the very best rulers surely are good people as well, but they hardly grow on trees for the picking. Good character in elected officials is often something of a luxury, and it is a mistake for voters to consider it apart from questions of how an office will be exercised on particular points.
Some people may choose, or desire, to take elected officials as role models. But this is not the purpose for which they are elected, although manifestly upstanding officials may certainly be assisted in governance by a good reputation. Most of the time, politics is transactional, especially in a deeply divided society where much government is done by bureaucratic protocol or where the rule of law is designed to withstand the whims and caprices of a ruler. A vote for president, for instance, is as much a vote for the president’s appointments and advisers and the writers of executive orders as for the president as an individual. And when these are likely to produce considerably different results depending on which of some number of viable candidates for office is elected, each vote is a choice for some likely course of action.
Voting as choice
In hand-wringing about voting, we risk ignoring or downplaying two things: that voting is a choice and what kind of choice it is. When we are reluctant to vote for a candidate who represents our preferred platform because of character deficits (which can often be found if we look for them), we forget that most political offices are about leading through decision-making—often delegated or advised—more than through example. Voting is more like talking to oneself than it is like conferring a Nobel Prize or a censure, albeit with greater potential consequences. If we vote for a third-party candidate where two parties are dominant, or if we write in an obscure name, we are wholly disconnecting voting from choice. This may be a reasonable act of frustration if the viable candidates have indistinguishable platforms, or where a vote according to one’s policy views is obviously of no weight—that of, for instance, a liberal Democrat in California in a general election for the presidency. But in other circumstances, it is a statement directed at no one, and at worst a kind of self-congratulation.
Voting is not just any choice. While it can look different in different countries, as least in my own experience in the United State, most elections for major offices present a choice between two finalists, which means it can hardly ever be a statement of ideal, if it is a statement at all. If it is a statement, it is a statement about one’s preference among live options for mode of governance. To refuse to vote for a candidate with a flawed platform, even where the rival candidate’s platform is considerably more flawed, is to forget the sense in which beggars can’t be choosers. To vote for the lesser of two evils one of which is certain to come about is not to endorse the lesser evil but to prevent the greater one, since that is the most good one can even attempt in such a case.
The limits of elections
Why is it so easy to fall into such misunderstandings of what it is to vote—to forget that voting is in itself a choice, not a statement, or to misapprehend what sort of choice it is? I believe that some such confusion is a natural risk of democracy on a scale beyond the local, or at least on a national scale in a large nation. As Shakespeare wrote, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown”: it is a terrible and frightening thing to be responsible for so many people, especially when that responsibility involves an intelligent awareness of many small and large problems and systems and how these interact. When that responsibility, conceived democratically, is reduced to a vote of delegation, this responsibility over details is reduced. But even the choice between two candidates assumes, ideally, a certain level of knowledge of issues of a vaster scope than most voters are likely to know. Yet some kind of popular election, along with the nomination of candidates, will not be disappearing any time soon, and voters must accept that, in a certain sense, they are overmatched by their task and must somehow make the most of it.
Misapprehension of the nature of a vote or its absolute significance brings another risk, which can nurture such misapprehension in turn: a too narrowly political view of politics. That is to say, politics is or should be concerned with the common good, however one understands the concept—and I realize that both the basic sense of the term and what it consists of in practice are hotly contested. Yet even where electoral and governing processes are rightly ordered toward this end (however rarely this may occur), these processes, which we usually have in mind when talking of politics, are not the sole or even the most effective means of procuring the common good. In some cases, they are surely the best possible means of doing so; but in others, they can at best foster or permit achieving some social good, or create a favorable environment for its cultivation. Whether or not culture is always upstream from politics, anyone can see that a political program in the narrower, electoral-governmental sense—without any non-governmental reinforcement—is unstable or vulnerable. And so, even where a vote is consequential, it is not a substitute for ‘indirect’ political action, whether this takes the form of persuasion and general cultural influence or of directly building up the sort of institutions and initiatives one would ideally have the government support. If we see voting as a way of supplementing such efforts or of facilitating them, even where government action or tolerance may be a prerequisite, we will be less likely to expect our votes to do more than they can, to sentimentalize them, and to be embarrassed at the shortcomings of the disjunctive options they present us.
Let us vote, then, when something is at stake in an election, even if the stakes are not those we would prefer. Let us be as clear-eyed as possible about what we are doing. For a relatively intelligent and informed voter to turn a vote into a statement is a way to cope with the sense of an impossible responsibility, but at the risk of self-deception. The moral character of one’s ruler may seem to be a greater matter than the goods that can be attained (or evils prevented) through government. Fortunately, it is these goods that voting is really about—and that is more than enough for most of us to consider.
