So this essay has been a long time coming for me, as I try to figure out where I fit in on the Left. My heart is in the struggle for an egalitarian, enlightened, peaceful world. But I don’t consider leftism a religion, and the impulse of many to treat it as such – to codify and regulate the behavior of people according to its tenets – too often looks like a movement going through the motions instead of genuinely challenging the human condition. Indeed, my argument is that political correctness, far from being an expression of genuine compassion and anti-bigotry, has transformed into a cosmetic substitute for authentic radicalism legitimating authority and privilege while hampering our efforts to change our condition. The goal of this essay is to start a conversation within the Left about our means, not our ends.
The biggest problem with challenging the hegemony of political correctness is distinguishing the valid critiques from the abundance of bogus critiques. Among the bogus critiques I count the whining that comes from the Right whenever they say something insensitive and rude. This raises the question of what political correctness actually is, since it seems silly to conflate rudeness with institutional oppression.
I define political correctness as the societal and cultural side-effects of authoritarian institutions’ attempts to keep pace with accelerating social change through top-down policy. In my theory, it doesn’t matter whether politically incorrect behavior is being addressed for the right or wrong reasons. What matters is that it is a way to shore up privilege instead of abolishing it.
Consider the example of your typical right-wing bigoted talking head who says something they’d defend as merely “politically incorrect”. They’ve said something that some subsection of the population finds offensive – it could be a racial minority, an oppressed ethnic group, even a historic out-group such as homosexuals. What they generally mean when they label their comments “politically incorrect” – at least, my sense of their strongest argument – is that “the establishment” has set rigid and sweeping rules about what is an acceptable opinion. The implication is not that they are being “censored” so much as called out for offending a social norm they would claim is inorganic and artificial, created not by society at large but by its elite through its institutional force majeure.
My point is not that, therefore, they are somehow off the hook for their comments. Their claims could be incorrect – after all, while I’d hardly say anti-gay bigotry is wiped from our society, most of us live in social circles where anti-gay language would be considered rude and uncomfortable. It seems to me that claiming there’s a grand conspiracy to create a taboo on anti-gay language is a bit ridiculous (and certainly in the Right’s wheelhouse).
However, both explanations need not be mutually exclusive. These two propositions can be true simultaneously:
For these right-wing types, it’s the perfect cover – anytime somebody criticizes them for genuinely being offended, they can pretend that the real criticism arises from violating the establishment’s rules. And this is what is so insidious about political correctness: it dillutes the power of legitimate moral sanction in our society. People can credibly claim they are victims of the elite, instead of victims of their own bigotry.
Yes, saying racist shit sucks – it is hurtful to social conviviality as well as certain individuals, and it has the potential to perpetuate narratives and prejudices that hold us all back. But given that the channels of media are controlled by an elite few corporations, the piling on and blacklisting that follows such an utterance is out of proportion with what the organic social sanction would entail. While we may not care about the feelings of the bigot, we may not immediately see how the media’s use of these incidents serves their interests – programming, articles, interviews, and other opportunities for increased attention and advertising revenue – over our interersts, which involve genuine healing, understanding, and contrition.
There’s also a political danger when we allow institutions to be the arbiters of bigotry. If you can label people racist, or anti-gay, or sexist, or whatever, you have a mechanism by which you can enlist society in supporting your blacklisting, censorship, or other authoritarian act. This can be used as a back door to oppressing people who say other inconvenient things – such as politically subversive, seditious, or disruptive things.
While society might disapprove of the politically incorrect behavior and sanction it on their own without involving authorities, it would do so in an informal, decentralized, and more deliberative way. This is a perfectly legitimate means of social discipline; indeed, our society changes authentically through few other mechanisms. That’s not political correctness as I understand it; it’s merely social norms, which always exist (both good and bad ones). The problem with political correctness arises from a society so dominated by institutions with their own agendas that they can co-opt this social dynamic for their own ends.
This is why Keith Preston calls political correctness “totalitarian humanism”: it is cultural progressivism pressed into the service of the ruling class’s interests. It’s why the U.S. can justify imperial expeditions as humanitarian interventions and get away with it. It’s why things like greenwashing and token minorities on corporate boards are attempted and work so often. It’s why we get our asses beat on the street when we protest and the cops can claim it was for our own safety. It’s why kids are suspended from school for merely drawing a picture of a gun. Political correctness co-opts radical change to prop up and empower conservative institutions who only understand policy.
Indeed, while “political correctness” as a term is centuries old, it emerged in modern times as a way for New Leftists of the 60s counterculture to call out attempts to institute an orthodoxy in all sorts of liberatory movements. Orthodoxies and heresies are always thought-limiting constructs that should be hateful to academia and thinkers of all stripes. So it is rather ironic that much of the totalitarian humanist agenda was created on academic campuses, as an extension of the 60s movements success on campuses. Many activists became professors and sought to institute their progressive changes through the schools’ administrative policy apparatuses. These experiments set the stage for the implementation of this approach on a wider scale.
It should go without saying that this essay is hardly an attack on egalitarian and just social change. Rather, I attack political correctness because it subverts the organic change society is constantly engaged in. When the positive trends of society are co-opted for the benefit of institutions that are inherently unegalitarian, they tend to delay the emergence of a consensus in society that can heal old wounds of oppression and privilege.
Affirmative action is a great example of this. Nobody can deny that serious inequalities between racial minorities and whites existed at the time such policies were enacted. But the method in which they were enacted was not designed to address the deep seated psychology or cultural norms that made racism possible. No, being diverse was touted as the goal – instead of simply being merely one metric of racial justice among many.
Not only that, quotas and other rote legal requirements became ways that institutions seek to indemnify themselves against charges of inequality and discrimination. Taking affirmative action as an example, it didn’t matter that no minorities were in positions of power, or that a culture of harassment might have persisted, or that whites simply took their bigotry to lunch instead of openly proclaiming it. Most of all, the hierarchical nature of the institution which allowed it to dictate morals to its personnel in the first place was never questioned. What mattered was that the institution – the business, or government agency, or school administration – had taken some “affirmative action” towards correcting a 400 year old problem (at least).
Of course, these policies did effect some desirable ends. It’s not that hiring more minorities isn’t a good thing despite all that, just as criticizing the bigot in the previous example wasn’t a good thing in its own right. It’s that such policies are designed to serve the purposes of institutions primarily, not to help us overcome our social ills. If they serve the interests of justice, it is a secondary concern. The primary purpose is allowing the privileged to piggyback on a movement that should be working to depose them.
Hierarchical and authoritarian institutions like corporations, governments, and schools are inherently artificial and top-down. They do not have consciences and moral compasses in and of themselves. They exist in our society through legal fiat, and they simply cannot participate in the debate and consensus of civil society that drives social change (whether they’re legally considered “persons” or not). Because they are abstractions of human behavior patterns, they maintain their integrity through disciplining the people that comprise them. This is accomplished through prescriptive means like policies, charters, directives, rules, etc. to maintain their integrity as an organization. To the extent they allow people to act on their conscience, they cannot achieve the discipline necessary to coordinate personnel actions as a whole – meaning those at the top commanding those at the bottom.
In other words, institutions are conservative by their very nature – they cling to old norms and accept new norms only with some expenditure of effort. Those instances where society organically and spontaneously evolves new norms will surely catch the leaders of these organizations off guard. The changes are often subtle enough that they evade the notice of individuals, let alone the bureaucratic programs of the human resources staff. The ever accelerating trends of social justice and egalitarianism that have swept society for decades challenge their institutional legitimacy and destabilize their integrity. Therefore, institutions need a way to conform to these trends without disturbing their inherently authoritarian command structure.
I believe what we call “political correctness” results from the attempts of the institutions that so dominate our society to acknowledge changing social norms by implementing kneejerk, often draconian policies. These policies rarely in and of themselves solve the underlying problem. However, they do preserve the institution’s legitimacy and integrity, and this is their purpose.
In addition to propping up unegalitarian institutions, there is another, perhaps worse aspect of political correctness: it subverts the narrative of the social change in question. When the institutions of society proclaim a particular policy or law or rule as a response to this change, people tend to consider the matter settled. Changing the law, such as passing the Civil Rights Act, becomes the whole point of the struggle instead of (at best) one side-effect of the people’s rising up or (at worst) a way to pacify the people. These responses tend to bookend, rather than promote, the momentum for social change and make us more dependent on the mediation of elites rather than seeing their intrusion as part of the problem.
If this stunted view of bigotry stayed safely in these institutions – if we only had to deal with it when we were at school, or work, or reading the newspaper – then perhaps it would not be so bad. When these dynamics leak out into the consciousnesses of ordinary people, however, it becomes truly nefarious. Real damage is done when we internalize these rigid, superficial rules and reproduce them in our interactions with others. The honest dialogue necessary to address privilege through bottom-up means gets tangled up in these rules, and people become fearful to open up.
Civil society functions because it allows people to establish trust and human connections on their own terms. Mass society would be an even more horrible, alienated place without those opportunities we have to connect with individuals. We need the rich particularism and frankness of our relationships on a small scale; it’s just primate psychology. It’s the place where we can be ourselves and integrate feedback on a conscious and subliminal level.
To the extent that institutional society forces us to obey arbitrary rules and stifles our “unacceptable” thoughts, it hampers our sense of self and our ability to grow that sense. If we then take these rules and mindsets and reproduce them in our relationships, or screen new relationships through this orthodox filter of politically correct ideas, we experience a much less rich and more alienated human condition. Such a condition will not be as likely to allow the cause of anti-privilege – or any cause – to draw upon our need for freedom and dignity.
Indeed, we will be more likely to reflexively critique each other when we inevitably step outside the strict confines of political correctness. Instead of seeking to understand one another, we will identify with the rules and play up our sense of offense when the rules are broken. Instead of delving into aspects of privilege and oppression and learning to heal ourselves and each other of the wounds we inflict and sustain, we will focus on code words and symbolism as proxies for the authentic dialogue needed. Substance must be banished because it cannot conform to the narrow boundaries of political correctness.
When the parameters for dialogue are so utterly narrow, thoughtful persuasion becomes less likely to occur. If you cannot abide certain kinds of disagreement without responding with outrage, you cannot effectively argue your point of view. You’re more likely to scold than persuade. Political correctness weakens our ability to address competiting ideas. And without the practice of challenging our views, we become more dogmatic in promulgating them instead of more thoughtful.
This dynamic is especially apparent in the radical activist community, where shallow outrage has been elevated to a place of predominance. Being in our movement becomes a matter of articulating matters with the proper taste, instead of with the necessary frankness. We cannot be strategic if we have become unable to emotionally handle competing values and visions. We cannot prefigure a society without privilege if the effect of our work is merely to set arbitrary rules for conduct, since that encourages the totalitarian mindset of privilege and reproduces authoritarian organizational structures within our movement.
My point is not that it is always and ever wrong to feel outrage. It’s a human emotion that we feel when personal boundaries are overstepped, and we’re going to have some boundaries. Rather, the culture of political correctness urges conformity to a degree where, on the margins, those boundaries are more likely to be rigid and unable to tolerate heterodoxy. Instead of understanding why we maintain these boundaries, we are encouraged simply to enforce them. So our mentality becomes one of policing one another for heterodox ideas, and in such a situation we are deterred from forming more honest and intimate relations with one another.
If that ongoing dialogue is part of civil society, part of the way in which society advances morally towards more egalitarianism and less bigotry, then politically correct behaviors cripple the bottom-up society. Not only are we conforming to institutional dictates that hamper our personal growth, but that translates to less pressure on the institutions that promulgate authoritarianism and hierarchy in our society. The entire feedback mechanism becomes poisoned, and people worry more about being orthodox than being real.
This is exceedingly unfortunate, because the historic bigotries of mankind inevitable require more thought, debate, and attention, as destabilizing as this can be for the powers that be. These politically correct institutional responses are almost universally superficial, failing to address the deep-seatedness of bigotry in our psyche and culture. By stigmatizing the bigotries beyond the normal social sanction, these responses actually work against the kind of tough social intercourse that could promote progress towards a better, more balanced condition for everybody.
In an attempt to arrest people’s ability to do or say offensive things, these policies end up arresting their ability to learn from legitimate social feedback. By encouraging outrage and scolding rather than dialogue and persuasion, biases and bigotries tend to be sublimated instead of challenged. The less conscious we are of these biases and bigotries, the harder they will be to face and correct. We should expect the struggle against these dynamics in our condition to be painful, disruptive, and difficult. Privileged people must listen to the stories of marginalized people in order to understand how the systems we all exist in actually behave holistically. But if the only effect of the struggle is to flip the tables on out-groups, so that now those who disrespect the former out-group become themselves the new out-group, then genuine healing cannot occur. We simply have a superficial change in the social taboos, and those taboos still take energy to maintain – energy we could put into more thoughtful and engaging dialogue among individuals that can bring out the best in everybody. The kind of pro-forma egalitarianism engendered by replacing old stereotypes and generalizations with new ones is shallow and unsatisfying whether it occurs within institutions or in the greater civil society.
Take gender equality policies for example. The norms that promoted patriarchal, discriminatory behavior against women are not merely some matter of misunderstanding or meanness. These are biases that have existed deeply embedded in our culture for millennia. To expect us to sweep them away through some crafty rule changes is more than disingenuous; it smacks of outright bait-and-switch. We need reflection, discourse, and compassion to work through these issues – not the implementation of a new, reciprocal bias to correct the old bias. Kneejerk rejection to bigotry often leads to new political alliances and the mere shifting of institutional power structures rather than a decomposition of net power in society. It doesn’t promote the individual’s evolution of conscience to create new rules to mechanically follow.
When I say that genuine social change comes from the bottom up, that means it comes from individuals – from each person’s sincere and trying process of searching his or her heart and arriving at a different configuration of morals and ethics than the one previously held. It is an exercise in vulnerability to challenge deep-seated beliefs and identities. This intimate and delicate journey only becomes socially noticeable when it reaches a critical mass of individuals.
Institutions cannot participate in this uniquely human process. They are naturally hostile to the self-consciousness and enlightenment that it can promote. When we adhere to institutions’ prescriptive and proscriptive policies, we frustrate that personal, individual process and make the journey lonely and anti-social – if it occurs at all, because simply toeing the line is safer and less vulnerable.
It is the height of elitism and thoroughly anti-egalitarian to believe that people must be bullied into enlightenment. Institutions hold this mindset because they gain their existence from organizational discipline, but in reality society at large leads them in positive directions, not the other way around. It is crucial, therefore, that we maintain an open society where people are free to hold hateful and bigoted ideas, because to suppress this behavior through authoritarian means only ensures it will pop up again in some worse, more dangerous or perverted form. A dialogue that effectively calls out these ideas can only exist if the ideas themselves can be apprehended without self-censorship.
Privilege needs honest dialogue to identify, for it is quite deeply buried in our minds and hearts. Dictating that people shall no longer exercise their privilege simply cannot work because it does not address the root causes. Empowering institutions to execute such a strategy does more for the institutions, and the privileged people who control them, than it does for the oppressed – at least in the long run. Privilege must be addressed, not simply sublimated.
I suggest that the Left begin to orient themselves and their activism towards anti-institutional ends for this very reason. To the extent the Left has accepted institutional remedies to social ills, they have acclimated themselves to hierarchy, privilege, and elitism. This is the sliver of truth in the right wing’s denouncement of the “liberal elite”. If anti-privilege is just going to be used to justify more privilege, why would you be convinced to support it?
We need an approach to privilege and oppression that can both call its perpetuators out while providing them with alternative approaches to adopt. Hostility to bigotry is natural, but simply acting on that hostility is not judicious. Instead of making fun of, or outright attacking, people whose ideas offend us, we would do our cause better to go in a more contemplative route of sharing stories. The model of the truth and reconcillation commission is a good example of this, as well as the active listening techniques for conflict resolution. In Occupy Richmond, workshops were used to simultaneously deescalate hostilities while promoting listening, and I’ve witnessed the power of this approach firsthand. However, all of these approaches require us to discipline our emotions and avoid simply lashing out at injustice, suggesting perhaps that we have a project within ourselves to which to attend, one that can complement our project in the world at large.
To oppose political correctness means to uphold genuinely liberal principles like freedom of speech, assembly, and press – especially when they are uncomfortable. The key is not to defend KKK rallies, or bigoted jokes, or offensive behavior of any kind, but to understand that they cannot be combatted through countervailing oppression, as expedient as that may at first seem. Rather, they can only be genuinely addressed through those mechanisms readily available to us that require neither authority nor privilege. As the saying goes, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”.
However, let’s be clear: this new, new Left would have to be truly anti-authoritarian and anti-hierarchy. It is to be found most purely not in modern liberalism but in the anarchist movement. Anarchists can be some of the most politically correct because their radical sensibilities can lead to dogmatic behavior, but they also have a long and powerful tradition to draw upon that can inform their path back to consistent egalitarianism and anti-authoritarianism. Indeed, when political correctness is understood for what it is, it will finally be abandoned in favor of something more radical, more effective, and more human.
The words of my hero Robert Anton Wilson seem to capture best why the politically correct orthodoxy of insitutional society is inherently a dead end for radicals:
I see anarchism as the theoretical ideal to which we are all gradually evolving to a point where everybody can tell the truth to everybody else and nobody can get punished for it. That can only happen without hierarchy and without people having the authority to punish other people.
Let’s fight privilege, not by creating a new taboo and a reformed ruling class, but by promoting a more honest dialogue and reflective society.
]]>Understood in this narrow sense, I do not find elitism dangerous as an abstract analysis. Indeed, there are a vast variety of competencies inherent in people, whether through their choosing to develop them or whether they come “naturally” (whatever you think that means). That some should gravitate to a place where their talents are best used is not a problem; it is a core purpose around which we associate.
The problems enter in when a mere measurement of talent distribution is expanded into an individual or group identity. Without elitist pretensions, there is no need for a purposeful elevation of the more competent over the less. There is no need for institutional structures that maintain elite predominance. Why go to great lengths to stress differentiation between non-elite and elite if those differences are obvious?
In other words, it appears that elites are elite due to their ability to render some sort of service to others. But over time, elites come to be served by others. This happens because, instead of the elite status being a matter of demonstration and service, it turns into a status existing in and of itself. If the elite status cannot be commonly seen, then it must be imposed. Hence, institutional structures like royal families, aristocratic classes, and executive professional networks maintaining exclusive access to power. The elite become an identity, not a competency.
The importance of coercive structure to elevate these elites cannot be underemphasized. Societies are narrower than the humans they comprise. They select for qualities, talents, and characteristics they value based on their imperfect understandings at a given time. For societies to develop, they cannot simply perpetuate the same patterns for which they select; they must broaden their appreciation for underutilized talents, unappreciated qualities. The elite, in order to maintain their position as a matter of identity, must arrest this progress as a matter of preserving their status. Service to society is once again hampered.
I can imagine elite apologists saying that certain individuals are more valuable to society than others. For whatever reason, their talents are rarer. The loss to society of an improperly elevated talent is worth the danger of codified supremacy. The values informing this distinction between individuals are arbitrary but inherent in the social body. But this views the danger of elitism only in terms of its social consequences. It does not speak to the consequences to the so-called elite individual.
Talent within the self is not alone sufficient. It must be developed and actionable in order to useful. After all, if elites are distinguished by their usefulness to society, then their talents must be realized or the elite status is illegitimate. In a very real sense, the only legitimate use for a concept of elite is the service by the elite to the net benefit of society.
If one’s sense of identity comes from the opinion that one is elite as a matter of what one can do, and not what one does do, it can hamper this striving to develop the talent. It can invert the pattern of service and squander the talent through demanding that others serve the elite. This then becomes a mere power relationship and, as earlier mentioned, will require recognition by society through coercive means in the end.
I’d argue that egalitarianism is not the argument that everybody is equal in talents. Instead, egalitarianism is the argument that what constitutes virtue is service, not identity, and that human potential is the basis for moral equality. It is through the kinetic that the potential is demonstrated and work is performed, if accomplishing work is the point in the first place.
What counts as “talent” is after all a normative construct. It isn’t important at all, in the end, whether everybody has the same capabilities; what is important is that we understand genuine service, and that we cultivate a society that sees value in service to others so that potential is realized wherever it lay and not be squandered by mere institutional momentum.
The egalitarian approach has perhaps one construct on top of this: that perhaps potentials of import are not so easily perceived by us mortals, and therefore the safe bet is to value all instead of directly ordering the social body to select for the obviously desirable talents. Rousseau may have been correct that institutions corrupt man, but it seems more important to me that they may promote the development of individual talents based solely on their value to institutions. Obviously, human potential is broader than the society can integrate at a given moment. We can have faith in people, or we can have faith in leaders - this is the insight of the anarchist.
]]>“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal,” declared Emma Goldman in a ringing indictment of the feeble mechanism by which the state claims to be restrained and directed. Of course, in invoking this quote anarchists argue against counting upon elections to change the status quo. We aren’t going to bring about the voluntary society by listening to politicians, casting votes for them, and pressuring them to abolish their own offices. The statist means and the anarchist ends are clearly opposed.
But there’s another argument against voting: that by casting a ballot, one registers endorsement of the state and its violence. Advocates of this argument do not hold that you must have chosen the politician who wields power. They disregard personal intent, interests, and any issues at hand. The argument is quite simple: by participating in the election, one is bound to its results. Given the anarchist view of those results - violence, fraud, and lies - one can only conclude that voting makes one an accessory to the crime.
This constitutes a body blow for those who define themselves by their rejection of the authoritarianism so intrinsic in the state. It’s one thing for voting to be a silly ritual. But a decidedly different attitude must be adopted if pulling the voting lever leaves one with blood-stained hands. Faced with such an awful proposition, the task becomes one of avoiding complicity with the system. An absolute break with the state is the only path of conscience.
In theory, this break seems reasonable to achieve: one simply ceases to cooperate with its agents and directives. But the state reaches far into the world we live in. It doesn’t just direct the police, military, teachers, judges, and other bureaucrats who intervene overtly. The very civil society we seek to unleash through the spirit of voluntarism, mutual aid, freedom, and solidarity seems hopelessly bound up in the state.
##Anarchism is not absolution##
The biggest statist distortion lies in the minds of people - the very people so foundational to our dream of a voluntary society. They are conditioned to behave in ways congruent with governance, to think of themselves in terms that reinforce the primacy of governance, and therefore too often to mistake their largely voluntary lives as a gift from authority. Allegiance to the state and allegiance to one’s country, locality, and neighbors are seen as not merely connected but rather the same idea.
It is the behavior of these people that provides the underlying legitimacy to the state. After all, were it not for the people, there could be no power to rule. It is the people who elect the politicians, pay the taxes, enforce the laws, fight the wars, and more. As Étienne de la Boétie argued centuries ago in the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, inciting the masses to organized resistance is totally unnecessary. Rather, all that is required is for the people to stop obeying. So to address the problem of the state, we must address the people’s obedience. Sociologically, psychologically, spiritually - why do they obey?
This leads one to wonder whether mere withdrawal of consent is even sufficient. Symbolic micro-secession by an individual does little to address the behaviors inherent in statist society. Where does the state end and civil society begin? For that matter, what’s so fundamental about the individual that its removal from the equation affects the problem of authoritarian society? How does one isolate oneself from the crimes and violence of the state when its institutions pervade our society - especially when it is in that very society the seeds of voluntary association must be planted? A break is impossible without at least an implicit answer to these questions.
This is not to say that personal reflection and a critical review of one’s choices is not necessary. The example of one’s own life and actions is likely more effective persuasion than the most articulate thesis. What I object to is a pseudo-christian guilt that demands an absolute purge of statist sin. To focus on distinguishing oneself from statist society can only detract from the task of engaging with that statist society. We must resist adopting an anarchist identity so foolishly consistent and exacting that it destroys our connection to the people in whom we hope to realize a free society.
Our goal cannot be simply to free our persons of perceived statist taint. Anarchism is not some sort of political puritanism. We are not seeking some form of absolution for the “sin” of being born in a statist society. To view the state as this intelligent, malignant entity out there influencing people to initiate force and fraud is to invoke the Christian’s concept of perpetual spiritual struggle with a malevolent Satan. This conception of the state is also an unfounded superstition, since we understand that it is people’s actions that not only reinforce its perceived legitimacy but make it possible in the first place.
The state is an abstraction; an institution formed out of ancient patterns of behavior. But it doesn’t exist as an independent thing, so rejecting it as such can only lead to confusion. There is no state: there are only people - people enforcing laws, people obeying laws, people paying taxes, people going to schools, people believing that the guy sitting in the oval office is special. The question is surely not how to isolate oneself from these people, but how to influence them to change their mindset and thereby their behavior. The only “state” we will ever apprehend is an apparition formed from the inertia of people’s habits of thinking and acting.
From this point of view, one can hardly ascribe to voting the degree of evil anarchists often do. It’s just another abstraction. Pulling a lever, writing words on a piece of paper, or pushing buttons on a screen do not in and of themselves do anything. In fact, even if you accept the significance of an electoral outcome, it’s hard to assign responsibility when the odds of an individual affecting it are so astronomical.
##A double standard##
So what does the vote mean in real, concrete terms, divorced from the popular myths of state legitimacy? It merely influences the way other people will behave. That behavior will influence the way yet other people will behave, just as we all have an effect on everybody else in small but indeterminate ways. Some of these people will assign a title to one person instead of the other. They will treat the one person’s words as “official”, unlike the other’s. They will do what the one person says, but not the other. Who can fathom the will of government employees and other interested affiliates?
After all, it is the people materially prosecuting the agenda resulting from the election of a public figure who inflict the real damage. The President doesn’t do anything; only agents of the state arrest, tax, jail, and kill. The behavior of legions of bureaucrats define the agenda, the interests, the nature of what we lament as “the state”. We should worry less about whose orders they’re following and worry more about what they’re actually choosing to do.
If this seems like splitting hairs, consider that one of the best anarchist arguments against the state lies in the behavior of its agents. A robber is a clear menace, and yet we let these state actors confiscate our wealth with hardly a peep. Nobody would gladly accept the help of a mafia-style protection racket, and yet we allow state racketeers into our neighborhoods constantly simply because they sport a badge. We look down on those who indiscriminately kill in our society, and yet we fund state bureaucrats with rifles to go out and commit these crimes against humans - so long as they’re “our troops” and not “theirs”. Our society has internalized a blind spot far more systemic and significant than the election cycle, and the resulting behavior crucially underwrites the state agenda.
Anarchists point out the inconsistency between how we regard normal crime and state crime to illustrate a core value: what people actually do, not their institutional affiliation or authority, is what matters. Murder is murder, theft is theft, and kidnapping is kidnapping. Only a double standard prevents people from judging such actions as less objectionable merely because they are performed in an “official” capacity. The anarchist proposes a radical consistency: people are responsible for their own actions, regardless of their position in some organizational hierarchy, governmental or otherwise.
And yet, many anarchists themselves apply this maddening double standard to those who do nothing more than write words on a piece of paper. They call them enablers of the state, as if the mere act of casting a ballot makes one responsible for the crimes of the state’s actors. This ascribes to the state precisely the mythical legitimacy we claim to reject - as if there could exist a magical transfer of permission from one person to another making crime acceptable. We cannot combat the statist double standard by promulgating its myths ourselves.
##Understanding civil society##
At the same time, anarchists must acknowledge how integral the political order, including elections, are perceived to be to the majority of the social body. Because people conflate the state with civil society, they often view its institutions as portals to engagement with their neighbors. As anarchists, we can either secede from this engagement on puritan grounds, or we can risk the taint of the state by meeting them in the world we jointly occupy, warts and all.
It is a sad fact that the social deliberative functions necessary for true community occur within the trappings of government; yet to reject interaction because the state is involved divorces us from important opportunities to influence others. And it is in convincing our brothers and sisters to change their mindset and behavior - not in breathless denunciations of formless institutions - that we genuinely oppose “the state”.
Remember that voting for politicians has about the same direct physical effect as an online survey: it has no power or authority but what people attribute to it. An election may convince certain individuals to commit (or abstain from committing) violations of rights, but since we hold that those individuals are solely responsible for their own actions, and nothing can absolve them of that responsibility, are the results of that election relevant? In the end, it is the behavior, not the myths and abstractions, that matter. So if by voting, you can engage with your neighbors to influence them within this mixed society, or possibly influence state actors to behave more peaceably, why would you insist on abstaining?
None of this is to say an obligation exists to participate in every election; only that we should not blow these rituals out of proportion and turn them into boogeymen. Every situation is unique, and every election is a singular moment in the social body. Only an individual can decide the right course of action in a given scenario; indeed, it is highly authoritarian to dictate rules to the individual. The danger is not in voting or not voting, but in tilting at windmills out of ideological self-importance or moralistic high-handedness.
Blaming voters for state-sponsored crime is only meaningful in the sense that the voters stand by while the crimes are committed - not in the sense that we somehow mystically sanction it through some statist ceremony. The problem lies not in the ballot, but in our patterns of thinking and behavior that lead us to treat the vote’s outcome as anything more substantive than an internet poll. We allow state actors to engage in activities we all know are deeply wrong; it is that habit of complacency towards authority which we must address in ourselves and others.
Voting may be many things, but it is not abject complacency. In fact, most people see it as a form of civic engagement. Given that, should we not start from where they are, rather than washing our hands and demanding they make the long and difficult mental transitions we’ve already achieved? Whether or not we vote, we must engage these enabling attitudes where they are, whether in political parties, city council meetings, the lines at the polls, or at family dinner tables. To abandon this society because it doesn’t meet our standards is to surrender the anarchist project totally. Anarchism as a movement is concerned with this society, like it or not.
##Conclusion##
If we fear accusations of hypocrisy by participating in institutions tied to the state, perhaps we should take a harder look at our motivations. What are we in this struggle to accomplish? To be seen rejecting the state loudly and publicly? To have an impeccably consistent argument that no debater can assail? To shield ourselves from any chance of statist entanglement? To maintain a black and white moral superiority that makes it easy to judge the world?
Or does our project transcend the immediate political realities by posing a deeper question about human relationships and individual responsibility? Are we comfortable enough with ourselves and our principles to entertain doubt, to risk making mistakes, to remain vulnerable to misunderstanding and grey areas - all for a chance at reaching our brothers and sisters within institutional statism? Can the message of mutual liberation be heard if it is not taken into the mire of authoritarian culture in which most people find themselves, on terms they can grasp?
It has never been enough for anarchists to win debates; we must win the hearts of our fellow man, wherever they are found. We do this by engaging with them where they are, not where we’d have them be. The vote is a meaningless, superstitious ritual that masks deeper social issues and sanctions nothing. It does not bolster our argument to agree with statists that elections matter. Instead, we should treat them as what they are: the trivial rites of a false religion.
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