In Absentia

Voting used to be simple, like renewing your driver's license. You heard that an election was looming, maybe you saw the candidates on TV and you got some brochures in the mail. But you registered as a Republican or a Democrat, you stand or you lean on the Right or on the Left, depending on who you are, or where you live, or how much money you make. It was your duty as a citizen, and it was no big deal.


That was then. Apathy has been a problem among American voters for generations. The feeling that so many Americans have had that voting won't change anything, that it makes no difference in their lives which party controls the branches of government, has been pervasive. Some people (like me) didn't vote for most of their lives. And they (unlike me) didn't vote in the 2016 presidential election.

Europeans have always voted in much higher numbers than Americans. They vote more because, if they don't, the outcome could change their lives. If the conservatives don't vote, the communist party might win control of the government. If the liberals don't vote, the extreme right might win. Europeans have a much broader choice in their elections, among three or four or five extremely different parties, with divergent agendas. When communist-party-led labor strikes, and student demonstrations threatened to paralyze the French economy in 1968, sitting president Charles de Gaulle went on national television and, in a magnificently calculated move, offered to resign if it was what the people of France wanted. The following day, the majority of Frenchmen who had been silent throughout the demonstrations, took to the streets of Paris in hundreds of thousands, chanting, "De Gaulle oui! Communisme non!" The strikes ended in a demoralizing defeat for the French Left.

In America, people are telling us that a record number of formerly apathetic voters will turn out in the morning and cast their votes. Since I'm currently living abroad, I submitted my Absentee vote weeks ago. I voted in 2016. Maybe, if I had been living in the States all this time, I would've continued in my apathetic ways and stayed home on election day. Maybe it's because living abroad has made me understand that my right to vote is a responsibility, and that, thousands of miles apart from the country I love so dearly and spent twelve years of my life defending, casting my vote is a way I can take part, raise my hand high - high enough for them to see it - and be counted, and remind my fellow Americans (and myself) that I'm alive and that I can be counted on to contribute.

But there is, of course, a much broader issue at work among American voters, something deeper than apathy. The events that are assailing America, and the rest of the "developed" world, are, for the average citizen, overwhelming. Faced with this, there is a tendency, especially among progressives, to become passive. Today, on the occasion of the mid-term election, what George Orwell wrote on the subject of democracy bears repeating. "There is always the temptation to say: 'One side is as bad as the other, I am neutral.' In practice, however, one cannot be neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. . . . We feel this dilemma to be a painful one, because we see the need of engaging in politics while also seeing what a dirty, degrading business it is. And most of us still have a lingering belief that every choice, even every political choice, is between good and evil, and that if a thing is necessary it is also right. We should, I think, get rid of this belief, which belongs to the nursery. In politics one can never do more than decide which of two evils is the less, and there are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic. . .  If you have to take part in such things - and I think you do have to, unless you are armoured by old age or stupidity or hypocrisy - then you also have to keep part of yourself inviolate."

Think of all the voters in 2016 who acted like devils or lunatics by voting for Trump because they could not bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton. What must they be thinking right now? American politics has for a long time been about pain. Liberals suffered under 8 years of George W. Bush, then conservatives suffered for 8 years under Obama. A friend told me once that those 8 years of Obama was "hell" and that now it was my turn to suffer. But we suffered for more than a year leading up to the election, as Trump spewed his stupidities all over us day after day. I stated on this blog when Trump was given the Republican nomination, that the party of Abraham Lincoln had just nominated a man who would bring back slavery if he could. Two years ago just prior to election day, pundits were speculating that, with Hillary assured of victory (how could she not?) it would take 50 years for the Republican Party to recover. Right after the election, they were saying the same thing about the Democrats. But I think they got it right the first time. There may be no Republican Party after 2020.

We shall see.