The United States just had an election and for me that means my liberal friends will annoy me about who won instead of annoying me about who they think I should vote for. This makes voting topical; so, what are my views on voting?

The practice of voting in any given context itself doesn’t bother me. I think it’s fine to use voting processes for all sorts of things because I’m comfortable with the ambiguity of life and consequently, the lack of consensus that a given group of people will share on a particular issue. However, I am also a student of social psychology and I take the implications of things like Henri Tajfel’s Minimal Group Paradigm experiments very seriously. Simply put, even arbitrarily dividing people creates strong in-group/out-group behaviors. This is something that anarchists should be trying to avoid, given the value of equality. The way to avoid that is to reinforce a sense of group identity that can overcome such divisions.

Now, when it comes to the type of voting that we’re talking about during the United States Presidential Elections, we’re talking about voting for specific people who are members of specific political parties and who will obtain specific rights to carry out specific duties in the interests of a specific nation. That is a context that changes a lot of things about what it means to vote. But the meaning of voting for a presidential candidate and the objective consequences of voting for a presidential candidate are two different things. Objectively, there is a small range of impact that one individual’s vote can have and that range depends on, among other things, where they are registered. It also depends on whether or not someone is going to vote for one of the two candidates who can reasonably be expected to win. And even more important is the fact that there is always a fairly consistent number of people who will vote and who will vote in fairly consistent ways. So objectively, it almost doesn’t matter at all if an individual votes or who they vote for. The consequences for the individual will be mostly subjective, unless their voting record has some sort of impact on their career.

While it is tempting to say the case is closed because objectively, voting doesn’t really matter, the subjective aspects are pretty significant. We live in a society that has historically spent a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on ensuring that people who should be considered responsible are able to vote for their representatives. Everyone knows this history and for the most part, everyone is subjected to the moral weight of voting that such a history has lead to. Whether or not someone actually votes, they’re going to be familiar with these social pressures to some extent. As a result, voting takes on an inflated sense of importance for those who do vote as well as for those who do not vote. And this is something that is even true for anarchists who may be highly aware of how little their vote would matter objectively, but who nevertheless inflate the importance of their abstinence from voting.

Personally, I find this inflation of the importance of abstinence to be repulsive. It’s actually one of the things I hate most about contemporary anarchism. I would rather anarchists voted and shrugged their shoulders about it, demonstrating an awareness of the objective insignificance of the act. To me, making a big deal out of voting or not voting is still playing the game. It is still accepting the social significance imposed upon us of voting. It is an affirmation of the status of voting that has been constructed for us. And even beyond that, it’s transparent to people that this is some sort of contrarian tendency dressed up as a principled act. From the perspective of the sincere voter, this just comes off as mockery for the sake of gratifying ones own ego. Anarchism in general then acquires such a characterization and yes, that is something I do care about.

When I think of anarchists, I think of people who are more involved with politics than the average American. Not only more involved, but also more ideological. In my view, anarchists are thus far more active political agents. So it isn’t appropriate to compare anarchists with the average voter, who is by and large only involved with politics in the role of a passive consumer. Anarchists would be politicians of some sort if they were liberals. They would be the people out on the street making sure people are registered to vote. They would be at the phone banks making calls for their party. They would be analysts and strategists for various campaigns. They would be writing policies and arguing for them. I say this because these are the analogous activities to what anarchists spend their time doing outside of and beyond the reach of liberal institutions. Anarchists try to live their politics as agents with full possession of what it means to be an anarchist, each anarchist in a sense is a party of one.

One argument that anarchists like to make about voting is that the act itself legitimizes the State. I get the argument, but I also think it’s totally stupid. For most people in the United States, the State is not legitimized by how many voters turn out to cast their ballot. The State is legitimized because of its domestic and foreign activities: its administrative, military, welfare, civil rights, and various other practices. It is also legitimized because it gives its citizens the right to vote. If there is low voter turn-out, no one thinks that the State is less legitimate because of it. Instead, what they think is that the eligible voting population has been especially irresponsible this time around. The assumption is that most everyone who should have the right to vote does, so the use of that right itself isn’t anywhere near as important as its potential for it to be used. The potential exists regardless and as long as that potential exists, the State is legitimate… society has only more or less failed to live up to its civic potential.

So should anarchists vote? Well, objectively it doesn’t matter. Subjectively, it could matter a lot and this means that anarchists should make this decision based on subjective factors. If they feel better voting or abstaining, who cares. What really matters is that anarchists continue to energetically build their own social institutions that can increase anarchist autonomy and capacity for self-determination. We have nowhere near the numbers to effect elections. At most, we can perhaps campaign for policies and candidates that may advance our projects and even if we don’t advocate for anyone to vote for those policies or candidates, we should put forward our analyses of how such policies and candidates would impact us as anarchists. That is how we could serve our own interests through an engagement with liberal politics.