FEAR NOT THE ACT OF VOTING (FEAR ITS BEING WILLFULLY DIMINISHED)
1 November 2004

51.3% of the voting age population of the United States took part in the 2000 presidential vote. That was 3.8% less than in 1992, and 11.8% lower than in the 1960 presidential election. But in between, there has been a consistent pattern of turnout under 60%, a disturbing if enigmatic aspect of American political life. Some have said it means the US is a democracy without the people. And polls show that a significant majority of American citizens believe the government does not represent their interests.

As such, there is an urgent need to understand the psychological motivations for resisting the right to choose one's government. Could it be that some people hold on to a childhood fantasy that they will live a life so free it need not recognize the authority of any political body? Perhaps. Could it be that there is a purism inherent in the American ideal of democracy that inspires some to see the most honest vote as the abstaining vote? Perhaps.

While for many people who consider themselves "mainstream" Americans, the mode of thought known as existential philosophy remains impenetrably alien and hauntingly devoid of traditional references for moral rectitude, it has a fundamental principle which speaks of the moral obligation to participate in a democracy: radical freedom.

Radical freedom is a radical idea, but it does not mean absolute, or even partial relativism: instead, it is an attempt to overthrow the corrupting influence of traditional moral determinism, the idea that certain thoughts or actions are inherently moral or immoral, without regard to individual choice or to consequence. Within the scope of radical freedom, the individual is required to choose at every moment, to decide with every breath whether life should continue, whether one identity or another is preferable, whether peace or conflict should prevail.

Every moment is replete with choices, and so the individual is responsible for the shape and the nature of the life that is lived, or achieved, or dreamed. It is important to know this in order to contemplate the meaning of so many citizens' flight from the urgency of suffrage.

The democratic principle specifies that the government labors at the suffrage of the electorate: this means that elected officials are subjects of the populace, servants whose "authority" is really a form of subservience rendered as authority for the good of the people, and in order to maintain and protect the system by which the people stand at the top of the societal structure.

This means the work of the government is the responsibility of the voter; there is a profound responsibility implied, and the complexity of the field of influences and interests is such that individuals who find themselves held up as candidates to high office, often have created many enemies and committed unfortunate blunders or even abuses along the way. Combine these two factors, and an honest person may say they cannot make a choice that feels comfortable.

The question is, however, more psychological than moral: the individual person, within the picture of a private, emotional existence, feels the world as a terrain across which a series of images, ideas and preferences wield either more or less influence. There is a basic impulse to defend what one perceives as one's own terrain, the territory where the self is safe to exist and to be free from the arbitrary interference of beings or forces perceived as impertinent.

Abstaining from the vote may appear to demonstrate some level of principle or of independence of mind... as if it were a way of securing the landscape of the independently developed self, the preferred inner life of a given human being... but one of the major candidates will still take office and will implement many or most of the strategies put forth during the campaign. The society will be governed, and people will rise or fall in wellbeing, will gain or lose liberty, according to that governance.

As such, to withhold one's vote is to cast a vote, to alter the mathematical playing field and "lower the bar" for victory. This lowering of the bar means that the abstaining vote has precisely the opposite effect of what its only principled argument could be: instead of acting against insufficiency of candidates, it aids the rise of less worthy figures to high office.

When the winning candidate can be elected with a plurality (or even coming in second in a plurality) of only 51% of the electorate, we are faced with a situation where less than 1/4 of the population is choosing the nation's most powerful figure. This is not a healthy manifestation of democratic principle, because it enables the structure meant to serve the liberty and resilience of the individual self to diminish the dignity and meaning of that self, and to redirect the energies of that overall structure toward other ends, other interests altogether.

So to all those blessed with the opportunity to make a concrete choice to either elevate or lower the bar for discourse, governance and the granting of popular authority: fear not the act of voting... fear not the possibility of choosing poorly... fear the diminishing of the vote itself, the diminishing of your entire sphere of meaning and influence by the degrading of the mathematics of democracy.