There’s two things I know to be true: the majority of America’s eligible voters skip the ballot box and those of us who do vote spend our time between the ballot in misery and buck passing until the next election season.
This particular season has been especially miserable. We are mired in debt and surround daily by death. The incompetence of this administration is self-evident, I don’t gotta review it for you. But to its credit, it has successfully sown generational discord among its citizens.
When we’re all in ruin we have nothing left but the blame game to pursue. I watch the conversations across social media where the Left blames the Liberal Centrist who blames both the Leftist and the Far Right as one and the same.
We all want tidy source to villainize for our collective suffering. I decided early on not to make third party voters my villains of choice.
Because I do fervently believe that Moral protest without material strategy becomes a luxury purchased with other people’s vulnerability. But ultimately I think it’s time we acknowledge that third party voting is not the only or even chief form of moral protest—abstaining the ballot is the most harmful form!
I am less interested now in relitigating who caused what than in asking what our political ethics revealed once the outcome became material. Because a vote is not merely a personal confession. It is not a private altar call. It is a public act inside a world where other people’s bodies absorb the consequences of our choices.
Every voter carries an ethic to the ballot box. Some carry theology. Some carry fear. Some carry rage. Some carry strategy. Some carry grievance dressed as principle. Some carry moral absolutism so brittle it cannot survive the weight of consequence.
The Voting Ethics We Carry
The Religious Obedience Ethic
There’s no more consequential single issue voter than the one who carries an ethic of Religious Obedience. I’m speaking of the saints who couldn’t vote for Kamala Harris because their theology insists that a penis is a prerequisite for leadership. Yet when asked what of this leadership has been God centered, God fearing, or Christ-led, the answers are bumbling nonsense. The question is not merely “sexism.” It’s whether their political theology recognizes Christ or only patriarchy with a Bible verse taped to it. Still even this is not our primary villain. The influence of the Religious Obedience Ethic is only outsized because we live in a nation of deep voter apathy as a whole
The Protest Purity Ethic
I don’t deny moral concern, I’m only wondering whether symbolic purity was fatally mistaken for strategy. The ballot is the most important site of political protest. And I also believe the conversation in the wake of election consequence has been dominated by people who used moral language to avoid reckoning with consequences. Yes, there were righteous grievances on the ballot, but a vote is not a private sacrament of self-expression; it is a public tool with consequences.
The Cheap Talk Ethic
One thing that life and history have taught me is that liberation requires infrastructure. The Underground Railroad din’t simply spring intro being from the altruism of dominating power. And Harriet ran first alone before endangering another soul to be free. So to talk about liberation and not build political alternatives, organize locally, support infrastructure, or vote consistently. And one egregious product of our modernity is an ethic that often performs political certainty in monetized spaces because problem statements are profitable and solutions are slow.
The Fearful Harm-Reduction Ethic
This is the ethic that is often framed as either ignorant or devoted to maintenance of harmful systems. But fear is not always cowardice. Sometimes fear is communal risk assessment.
The truth is not everyone who voted pragmatically was enthusiastic. Some people saw the system’s amorality and still could not responsibly gamble with disabled people, poor people, immigrants, queer and trans people, Black people, Palestinians, and other vulnerable communities when no survival infrastructure had been built to absorb the impact. Because as I often say, theories don’t bleed but bodies do. And it’s hard to hold all the material truths of the bodies that are left to absorb impact when we lack the systems designed to absorb it instead.
The White Supremacist Economic Ethic
And no matter what we pretend to believe alternatively, this ethic is and always has been the core driver of our collective misery. Sure, many voters did vote in their economic interest, but in America, whiteness has always been treated as an economic asset. Anti-Blackness is not a distraction from economic politics. It is one of the currencies through which American economic life has been organized.
Some of Us Wanna Get Even, But Some of Us Wanna Be Free
We can keep pretending the ballot is a purity test, a confession booth, or a stage for moral performance, but it has never been that innocent. The ballot is one imperfect instrument inside a larger struggle for survival, and our ethics are only as righteous as the bodies they are willing to protect.
Everybody talkin’ ’bout votin’ ain’t seekin’ justice.
Some are seeking innocence.
Some are seeking absolution.
Some are seeking power without responsibility.
Some are seeking collapse and calling it liberation.
I am not asking anyone to worship the vote. I am asking us to stop lying about what happens when we abandon it without building anything strong enough to catch the people who fall. But justice requires more than performance. It requires consequence, strategy, infrastructure, and care for the bodies left bleeding when our theories fail.
And until our politics can carry that much truth, the vote will remain what it has always been: not salvation, not allegiance, not revolution — but one tool in the hands of people still trying to survive the empire long enough to build something better.
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