How you can resist funding the government → other forms our opposition can take → electoral politics, legislator lobbying, playing the game

Tax day has arrived, and with it the various news fluff pieces about lines at the post office. But there are a few bits here and there about tax protests of various sorts, worth reviewing:

• George Bush is continuing the long-standing Republican theme of lowering taxes, or wanting to, anyway. More power to him. Wait — can I take that back? Chances are the Repubs will propose a bunch of tax breaks that’ll mostly benefit the people who share their income brackets, then the Demos will respond with some populist, feel-good, middle-class benefits like higher per-child deductibles and the like, then both parties will remember how much fun it is spending other people’s money and cut their proposals in half. With any luck, though, things’ll drop a bit.
• Some legislator or other had the bright idea of introducing a bill to move tax day from April 15^th to the first Monday in November so that it’d fall right before election day. Clever. Good luck to you.
• Some Libertarian Party chapters protest on tax day by handing out fake million-dollar bills at post offices, explaining that the government spends that much of our money every five seconds.
• There’ve been a few news items about the few folks like me who are purposefully reducing our incomes below the tax line, here’s one: Eleanor Bonney Simons, 83, of St. Johnsbury, hasn’t paid federal income taxes or the federal tax portion of her telephone bills in a decade, and said she always makes sure to give away enough money each year that she doesn’t have any tax liability. “I find I can live very well this way,” Simons said. “It makes me feel good to know I’m not supporting the war effort.”
• Some people are withholding something on the order of half of their income taxes, and then including a letter with their tax forms saying that they will not willingly pay the portion of their tax that goes to the military. The IRS sometimes goes ahead and pulls the remainder from their bank accounts, but these protesters are satisfied with their symbolic protest and with not paying the taxes voluntarily.
• There’s another idea in the form of a bill that gets floated from time to time in the U.S. Congress that would create a sort of “conscientious objector” tax that would be paid into a fund that is only spent on those parts of the federal budget that are non-military in nature. Yeah, right. (link: National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund.) Of course this, like the symbolic withholding above, doesn’t actually have any bottom-line effect. It’s just an accounting shuffle. In fact, I’d wager that it would have an overall negative effect, because it will encourage even more people to pay taxes by enhancing the illusion that it’s a morally neutral or morally acceptable act.
• I’ve seen many news articles about how the IRS has been doing less and less enforcement, with fewer and fewer auditors over the last several years, so that it’s much easier to get away with being a tax cheat. Even the most blatant and wacky phony tax dodges often work simply because the IRS doesn’t have the resources to go after most of ’em. (Last year, the IRS revealed that over the previous two years it had mistakenly paid out thirty million dollars to people who were claiming a “slavery tax credit”.) A lot of these articles have a “but this year things will be tougher” spin, and seem to have been prompted by a preëmptive IRS press release, but the numbers seem to support the suspicion that people who pay their lawful share are either a willingly generous group or are being played for suckers.

“I think people fear the IRS much less,” says [tax analyst Jackie] Perlman. Her suspicion is supported by data.

A 2001 government survey found that 24 percent of taxpayers think it’s OK to cheat on their taxes — up from 13 percent in 1999. And the fiscal consequences are huge: If all Americans had paid their taxes last year, according to IRS estimates, an additional $207 billion would have poured into federal coffers — enough to pay the projected federal deficit for 2003, and have $7 billion to spare…

“I think that people have come to see paying income tax as driving 55 m.p.h: Only a fool would do it,” says Deborah Schenk, a law professor at New York University. “If the attitude spreads, the whole system will collapse.”

Because of a series of recent budget cuts, the IRS’s number of full-time personnel declined by 16 percent between 1992 and 2001. The result: the average taxpayer’s chances of being audited dropped dramatically. Five years ago, the IRS audited 1 of every 78 tax filers. Last year, the fraction shrank to about 1 in 170. That steep decline in audits, experts say, has emboldened brash millions to try to pay less. “It’s not a secret that the IRS is understaffed and it can’t enforce as much as it would like,” says Perlman.

Just so nobody has any illusions, here’s today’s version of Kerry’s position on the Iraq War:

Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry said on Monday he would have voted for the congressional resolution authorizing force against Iraq even if he had known then no weapons of mass destruction would be found.

Taking up a challenge from President Bush, whom he will face in the Nov. 2 election, the Massachusetts senator said: “I’ll answer it directly. Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it is the right authority for a president to have but I would have used that authority effectively.”

And what’s his take on how the war was conducted? He told Stars and Stripes magazine:

Stars and Stripes: The charge is out there, that Republicans are much better suited to handle defense issues. How do you counter that?

Kerry: My record counters that, and my friends counter that. My message to the troops over there? Help is on the way. Help is on the way in every respect. The Guard and the Reserves have been overstretched. [The Bush team] have conducted a back-door draft by the stop-loss provisions and the lengthy deployments. People have been overextended, and stretched too thin.

They went into Iraq in a brilliant military strategy, which we all adopted and supported, but they didn’t have a plan to win the peace. They didn’t bring other [countries] to our side. They didn’t give our troops all the equipment — the body armor and the armored Humvees, and things they need and deserve. And I believe they didn’t go in with enough people to make it secure.

So I think our troops are at a greater risk than they had to be, and I think we have borne greater costs than we needed to. Furthermore, I have a plan for a Military Families Bill of Rights. My Military Family Bill of Rights will provide greater guarantees with respect to education, health care, deployment schedules, and pay.

And I think we can do a better job of helping our troops. I’ll make sure that they have state-of the-art equipment. I will make sure we can actually grow the military. I’m going to create two new active divisions in the Army. I’m going to double the number of special forces troops we have to fight terror.

So, I will do a better job protecting our troops, and a better job of making America safe than George Bush has.

There’s a great tradition of Democratic presidents who’ve led us in war. From Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, to President Kennedy — Bill Clinton who, managed to do Kosovo without any casualties at all.

So, to summarize: Kerry believes that even though there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq until the U.S. brought their own, the president should still have had a blank-check authorization to invade and occupy at his whim. Furthermore, although the brutal “shock and awe” campaign was “a brilliant military strategy, which we all adopted and supported,” he thinks that the invasion should have been conducted with more countries, more equipment, and more troops. So that he can back up this “more, more, more” talk, he plans on growing the military, in part by creating two new active divisions and doubling the number of special forces troops deployed “to fight terror.”

Oh yeah, and he believes Bill Clinton “managed to do Kosovo” — get this — “without any casualties at all.”

“In their moral justification, the argument of the lesser evil has played a prominent role. If you are confronted with two evils, the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Its weakness has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget quickly that they chose evil.” ―Hannah Arendt

Those of you who are choosing Kerry (even enthusiastically supporting him and urging others to do likewise) believe me when I say I understand you and can sympathize with your reasoning. But if Kerry wins will you forget that you chose evil and that evil was victorious? Will you celebrate victory? Will you say “good enough, then”?

I got a lot of feedback about my lesser of two evils post last week. One reader wrote:

Your quotes support something I heard Noam Chomsky say on the radio the other day. He said that Kerry would make no significant changes in foreign policy, but that he would be quite different on domestic policy… He got quite testy in response to there being no difference between Bush and Kerry. Bush is at war abroad, and at home, with people who work. Chomsky said that saying there was no difference was to say to tell working people that one did not care about them.

As to people forgetting that they have chosen a lesser evil, I doubt it.

Another reader makes the case for the importance of choosing the lesser evil (edited slightly for clarity):

Kerry commented on authorization of the force resolution, not on war. The former is (in Kerry’s framework) about forcing inspections. Kerry dodged Bush’s counterfactual question about whether he thinks Bush was right to go to war given what we know now, but he should have addressed it head on, because in the actual case, when Kerry believed Bush about WMD, he opposed Bush going to war (at the time and in the unilateral fashion he did). If Kerry had been President instead of Bush, would he have waited to put together an international coalition and then gone to war? Well, not only is there no reason to think he could have gotten international backing after extensive inspections revealed no WMD, but he wouldn’t have had Cheney, Wolfowitz and the rest of the neo-cons clamoring to implement the PNAC invasion of Iraq just hours after the towers fell, so the whole question is moot.

If you have the choice between letting 1 million people die or ½ million people die, choosing to save ½ million is not choosing evil, whereas gazing into your Nader… I mean, navel… is. The “lesser of two evils” complaint is intellectually bankrupt; one takes the most rational path one can.

Will I celebrate victory if Kerry wins? Yes, of course, as I would with saving ½ million people. Will I say “good enough, then?” No, of course not; what a silly question. One continues to take the most rational path one can. It’s such a simple matter, I have trouble fathoming what cognitive defect leads people to think that not choosing is somehow superior to choosing the best course. In the case of the upcoming election it may, for some, be a megalomaniacal belief that voting for someone is equivalent to electing them, so voting for, say, Nader, is better than voting for Kerry if they think Nader would make a better president than Kerry. But of course one isn’t choosing a president, one is choosing which box to fill in, which results in a very small relative shift among the probabilities of the various candidates winning. Given the poll margins, a vote for Kerry actually has a significant chance of affecting the outcome, whereas a vote for Nader has virtually no chance of affecting the outcome. Just as there is no principle that validates letting 1 million people die when you could have saved half because ½ million people dying is “evil,” there is no principle that validates throwing your vote away by marking the Nader box when you could have had some impact on whether there will be 2 more Scalia clones on the SCOTUS, whether the environment will be sacked, whether people will be able to find work and earn a living wage, etc., even though some elements of Kerry’s foreign policy are “evil.”

Just to be clear — Kerry’s militarism, his chauvinism, his claim of “no casualties” — these disgust me. As does the aspects of American culture that bred these views, and the massive destructive force that backs that up. But when I go into the polling booth, there is no lever I can pull that will flush these evils down the drain. They are givens that I have no control over — at least, not in the voting booth. We should all be working every day to change these things, but this is a completely separate, orthogonal matter from what lever to pull on Nov 2.

A presidential election is a mighty fulcrum. In one day of voting, the face of the executive branch of the U.S. government may change, and with it four years of presidential decrees, regulations, appointments, and saber-rattling. The presidential election of 2004 looks like it will be a close one, so it’s reasonable to feel that although the lever in a voting booth is a small one, its fulcrum is situated as well as any for a single citizen who wants to make a difference.

A little effort on your part now to encourage people to vote for Kerry — by telling them how important voting is, by playing up Kerry’s comparative positives and staying quiet about what makes him distasteful — could conceivably make a big difference in how this country gets run for the next four years.

And even if Kerry isn’t much to get excited about — a lesser of two evils at best — even such a small difference, when seen in a person occupying such a powerful office, can make a big difference indeed. We don’t know for sure what a President Kerry would be like, but even if you ignore his hopeful campaign promises and just rely on the law of averages, he’s unlikely to be any worse than what we’ve got now.

So okay, let’s hope Kerry wins in November, and let’s be glad if he does. And now let me try to convince you why you shouldn’t vote for him, support him, or encourage people to vote for him.

What does supporting Kerry’s election campaign mean? It means more than just attempting to dethrone Bush. A pretzel almost did that without any votes at all. Kerry’s campaign is a big package, being sold with a multi-million-dollar budget, and win or lose it is going to define the opposition to Bush and his war and his policies.

Kerry is defining the opposition to Bush in this way: We are passionate about war and the military, and think America’s mission in Vietnam was a heroic one — in fact if you went over to Vietnam and killed people, you’re probably a better person than someone who didn’t. We support the Iraq war, but wish it was turning out better, and think we should have gone in with more troops. We think our military is too small and doesn’t have enough equipment. We don’t want anybody to mistake us for being less hawkish than the Dubya Squad. We didn’t lose much sleep over Abu Ghraib. We think that the Patriot Act and the “burqua resolution”¹ gave awful powers to people who used them unwisely, but that doesn’t mean we’re against them.

In fact, Kerry isn’t running against the Dubya Squad so much as he’s campaigning to normalize what they stand for. Worse, he’s being so hawkish that he’s actually causing Dubya to stake out even more belligerent positions for fear of being outflanked! By supporting Kerry, by standing by him, by applauding his talking points, by cursing those who slander him, by vowing to dance on his inauguration day, you’re helping him do this. If Kerry wins, it will mean that something like half of the voters, the ones who don’t think Bush is doing just great I mean, rallied behind this “opposition” message.

And you won’t need to wonder why when you start to hear things like “hardly anybody questions that the American mission in Vietnam was essentially an honorable one” and “everybody agrees that we need a large, global military presence” the same way that this cowardly herd behavior from Democrats a couple of years ago led to things like “nobody doubts that Saddam threatens the United States with weapons of mass destruction.”

It’s easy to give yourself over to wishful thinking. A politician’s campaign speeches are as vague as they think they can get away with — promising positive-sounding things in general, and not much in specific. The intent is that the audience will think “maybe he’s talking about me and my hopes.” Some take this to ridiculous extremes and try to believe that Kerry secretly stands for what they stand for, and not for the things Kerry has been voting for, has spoken up for, and has centered his campaign around. Kerry’s the last person a “lesser of two evils” voter has to vote for, so that voter is looking at Kerry like a horny drunk boy looks at the last girl left in the bar — her bad breath and missing teeth are vanishing from attention and thoughts like “I bet she’s got a pretty voice” are starting to pop up.

Don’t fall into this wishful thinking trap. If you’re going to vote for the lesser of two evils, at least look that lesser evil in the face first. Look at what Kerry has actually done and is actually doing. Case in point: Kerry didn’t just “believe Bush” about these mythical weapons of mass destruction — he was part of the choir singing the WMD chorus. I think you’re fooling yourself if you think that Kerry “opposed Bush going to war.” Hardly. He voted to enable and authorize it, and even now insists that this was the right thing to do. Another thing a vote for Kerry will be is a vote for someone who helped lead the war parade.

His spin, now and then, is that by voting to give Dubya the power to go to war in Iraq, he wasn’t actually voting for war in Iraq but simply to give Dubya a bigger stick to wave when trying to enforce weapons inspections and such. But millions of us knew that the Dubya Squad was hungry for war and we begged Congress not to let them have it. We knew that this resolution was like the Tonkin Gulf resolution — what passes for a declaration of war in today’s Congresses. Kerry’s aw-shucks position reminds me of someone who admits that sure, he gave the loaded pistol to the chimpanzee, but he first admonished the chimp never to touch the trigger.

Now you may say that while all of what I’ve said is true, or true enough anyway, this still doesn’t change the brutal but necessary “lesser of two evils” calculus.

But you have to answer, realistically and not just hopefully, whether the likely reduction in “evil” from a Kerry victory over Bush is worth the cost of further degrading the political opposition and further legitimizing jingoistic bullshit, worth the cost of moving the country, the Democratic party, and the media more in favor of this grotesque dream of ruthless American empire. Remember that it was cynical political calculation of a very similar kind that caused so many journalists and legislators and such to get swept along by the war frenzy in the first place.

We need to start saying “no” and no more of this “well I really’d rather not but just this once more if you promise you’ll be better about it next time” whining. And there’s no reason why we shouldn’t include a big “no” to John Kerry, and a lot of reasons why we should. It might even be helpful.²

Is there a good reason to believe that Kerry couldn’t take sensible, half-way decent, good positions on the war in Iraq or the Abu Ghraib scandal and still win?³ Are we that pessimistic? Is his insistence on decking himself out in a set of New Clothes just as transparent as the Emperor’s really such a great campaign tactic? I mean, hell, even Republican congressmen from Nebraska are coming out against the war these days. Maybe it’s time to start wondering whether Kerry is doing this hawk act not from reluctant political expediency but because he’s deeply mistaken and a Dubya-like jerk.

A losing candidate who ran a campaign dedicated to making the U.S. a better, more honest, more respectable and self-respecting country, and who conducted a campaign that reflected this, would leave us in a better place than a candidate like John Kerry will leave us, even if he defeats the awful Dubya. In fact, such a person wouldn’t even have to be a candidate — such a campaign doesn’t have to wait for election season to come around.

I’m with Thoreau on voting — it’s nothing to get excited about, and nothing to be proud of:

There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing; who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of free-trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot to-day? They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret. At most, they give only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and Godspeed, to the right, as it goes by them. There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man; but it is easier to deal with the real possessor of a thing than with the temporary guardian of it.

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.

I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to any independent, intelligent, and respectable man what decision they may come to? Shall we not have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can we not count upon some independent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions? But no: I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reason to despair of him. He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought.

The “lesser of two evils” argument says that we’re at a point where we can make two choices, one will add a certain amount of evil to the world, the other will add more. We’ve got to choose one, so choosing the lesser evil is the right thing to do, even though it means choosing evil.

The answer to this argument is that in the real world we have a wide and ever-changing array of choices, each of which may move us and the world in more or less good or evil directions. If Bush or Kerry were our only choices, Kerry would be the lesser evil (by all appearances), and the right choice. In the real world though, we can do better by rejecting them both and choosing something good instead.

In The New Yorker, Louis Menand discusses how America will be choosing its next president, and leaves the impression that we might as well let 1,000 monkeys throw 1,000 handfuls of monkey feces at 1,000 touch-screen voting machines. But by far the best analysis of the American voter I’ve read so far this year is Mark Ames’s New York Press column from last June. It all comes down to spite. Yummy.

You know things have gotten desperate when Utah Phillips registers to vote. Phillips is a folk singer, an anarchist, a tax resister, and has never voted before. He explains:

This is not easy for me. I’m an anarchist and I’ve been an anarchist many, many years. The anarchy that I’ve followed and practiced all of that time came to me through Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers, through Ammon Hennacy, the great Catholic anarchist and pacifist. Ammon taught me, as he did, to treat his body like a ballot. My body is my ballot. And he said, “Cast that body ballot on behalf of the people around you every day of your life, every day. And don’t let anybody ever tell you you haven’t voted.” You just didn’t assign responsibility to other people to do things. You accept responsibility and see to it that something gets done. That’s the way he lived and that’s the way the past forty, going on fifty, years that I have lived. It’s a way to vote without caving in to the civil authority I’m committed to dissolving.

But, we are in a desperate situation here. And it’s not just us in the United States. There are people all over the world who are affected by these people who have staged a coup on our government. I can see a shopkeeper in Damascus who’s threatened by being bombed out. I can see a schoolgirl who’s collaterally killed by the action of these people. There are millions of people in the world who are affected by the actions of this government, and they can’t vote in this election. I have no use for Kerry. I have no use for Bush. I don’t like either one of them, but these folks can’t vote in this election. They have to have people vote for them. And I intend to be one of those. What’s the best chance they’ve got to keep them from being bombed and killed? I don’t know. Kerry is an unknown quantity. Bush is a known quantity. A crapshoot, isn’t it? But I’m going to stand in for one of these people. And if I’m wrong, I’m wrong by myself.…

Now, I am not putting myself forth as an example. I’m not putting myself forth as a role model. Anarchists don’t make rules for other people. You make rules for yourself and then people have got to learn how to trust you. And if you blow it you have the courage to change, and you do change and an anarchist is always something you’re becoming. I don’t need any congratulations for what I’m doing at all. I feel lousy about it. I don’t feel good about it all. I’m simply going to do it. And if there are consequences of my act, than I harvest those consequences. That too, is anarchy.

Excerpts from another interview with Phillips:

The old peace movement tactics of sit-ins, vigils, civil disobedience are ineffective and predictable, according to Phillips. Advocating new strategies of organized war tax resistance, Phillips likes the idea of tax money paid to an “alternative fund” and assigned to community organizations.

“There’s no sense for me to go out and protest this war and pay for it at the same time.”

He alludes to photographs he’s saved in a scrapbook, “one of a woman in a refugee camp with her baby in southern Lebanon and she’s got pockmarks all over her face from shrapnel and her little baby is swathed in bandages.” Another is of two little boys “in front of an orphanage in Angola, on crutches, part of their limbs missing from stepping on landmines. I look at those pictures and I say, ‘I didn’t pay for that.’ ”

Zeynep Toufe from Under the Same Sun reflects on the campaign season:

I think something is wrong if who to vote for is your biggest decision this year.… The substantive question isn’t whether or not you’re voting your conscience on Election Day; the real question is whether you have your conscience guiding you every other day. Some get out the vote campaigns have been using the slogan Vote or Die. The unfortunate truth of the matter is if all we do is vote, they will continue to die.

War tax resister John Kefalas narrowly lost in his bid for a Colorado House seat. Incumbent Bob McCluskey beat him by 474 votes.

Yesterday evening, I sent this email to a list devoted to war tax resistance:

Partners—

It’s sure been hard to drum up much interest for tax resistance over these last several months. Everybody’s been so wound up about the election and how important it is that it’s made everything else seem like a distraction.

Now that’s over, and the people who last week were telling us to please, please, please vote for the fellow who voted for the Patriot Act and the war resolution (and to please save our funny ideas for the annual April 15^th war tax resistance fifteen-minutes-of-fame show), are now shuffling around like war refugees themselves, feeling angry and repentant and wondering what to do next.

Meanwhile, the people who covered up Guernica at the U.N. Security Council are planning to paint a new one in Falluja.

We have an opportunity now to reach out and say “you tried voting for the lesser of two evils, and you put your heart into it, but there’s a stronger vote you can cast every day and we can help show you how.”

On November 2^nd, the Republicans extended their control of Congress, Dubya retained his control of the White House, and the majority of voters condoned and even vindicated the belligerence and disregard for life and liberty that has been on display for the last four years. But as awful is that millions of people who should know better woke up on November 3^rd and cast another vote — to continue sending their money to be spent by that terrible bunch.

I feel like we need to challenge these people. I’m in no mood to join another Bay Area protest march with the same old “People! United!” marching under the banner of “Our Opinions Sure Are Right!”

Next time there’s a march, I want to see us marching upstream, with signs saying “And When You’re Serious About It, Get Back To Us!”

Meanwhile, the time to turn up our volume is right now — the gut-felt anguish of these voters hasn’t gone away yet and we’ve got what they’re looking for.

I appended an excerpt from Thoreau’s Resistance to Civil Government that seemed to speak extremely well to today’s election aftermath from a perspective about a hundred and fifty years back (I’ve taken the liberty of chopping paragraphs more finely than in the original, for ease of on-line reading):

I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, co-operate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.

We are accustomed to say, that the mass of men are unprepared; but improvement is slow, because the few are not materially wiser or better than the many. It is not so important that many should be good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump.

There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing; who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of free trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot today? They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret.

At most, they give up only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and Godspeed, to the right, as it goes by them…

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency.

Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.

There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.

I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to any independent, intelligent, and respectable man what decision they may come to? Shall we not have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can we not count upon some independent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions?

But no: I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reasons to despair of him.

He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought.

O for a man who is a man, and, and my neighbor says, has a bone is his back which you cannot pass your hand through!

Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. How many men are there to a square thousand miles in the country? Hardly one.…

It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even to most enormous, wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.

If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.

See what gross inconsistency is tolerated. I have heard some of my townsmen say, “I should like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico — see if I would go”; and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute.

The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war; is applauded by those whose own act and authority he disregards and sets at naught; as if the state were penitent to that degree that it hired one to scourge it while it sinned, but not to that degree that it left off sinning for a moment.…

Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform. Some are petitioning the State to dissolve the Union, to disregard the requisitions of the President. Why do they not dissolve it themselves — the union between themselves and the State — and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury?

Some good news:

The giant spending bill that Congress passed on Saturday eliminated money for developing new nuclear weapons, including one that would be used to destroy underground bunkers. It also deeply cut the Bush administration’s request for money for a new factory to make the triggers for nuclear bombs.

One of the projects eliminated was the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, widely known as the bunker buster; the administration had wanted $27.6 million for the program.…

Another program that was cut back was the advanced concepts initiative, which was also apparently for new weapons, although details were not made public. It was also supposed to provide meaningful work for young weapons designers after years of the United States’ relying on old designs, nuclear experts said.…

Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, and a sponsor of amendments in 2002, 2003 and this year to kill the bunker buster, proclaimed the cut as “the biggest victory that arms control advocates in Congress have had since 1992,” when limits were put on nuclear testing. All of Mr. Markey’s amendments failed, but the votes were increasingly close, the last one 214 to 204.

Stopping this new nuclear weapons funding has been a big priority for the group California Peace Action, which I’m not active in myself but whose mailing list I’m on. It’s a rare and welcome example of a group like this being able to declare a clear victory in a hard-fought battle. Congratulations!

I tried so hard not to get excited about the election in Connecticut. I’ve officially given up on representative democracy, and I’m trying to keep my focus where it belongs by repeating the mantra: “The problem, and its solution, is not going to be found in the suits in Washington.”

Oh but it just felt so good to watch Lieberman get chopped down.

The problem isn’t found in the suits in Washington, but in the people who put them there and tolerate them. And the solution will come when those same people say “No!”

This wasn’t the big “No” but it was delicious nonetheless. Connecticut has taken the lead (and put the rest of us to shame — my state has a senator up for election this year who is every bit as hawkish as Lieberman, every bit as willing to play the nanny state morals enforcer, but who is running virtually unopposed this year).

It’s almost enough to make me want to go back in the booth, grab the joystick, and play the Diebold lottery again.

In The New York Times earlier this week, Robert Zaretsky drew some parallels between today’s American “TEA Party” movement and France’s Poujadism half a century ago.

Pierre Poujade

One difference Zaretsky doesn’t mention is that Pierre Poujade’s conservative, populist, pro-imperialist, anti-tax movement actually put some skin in the game, whereas thus far the “TEA Party” has been all talk.

In 1955, Poujade led his “Union for the Defense of Shopkeepers and Artisans” in a tax resistance campaign. “Tens of thousands of taxpayers, mostly in southern France, where his strength is greatest, have refused to make their first installment in payment of taxes on last year’s income.” He also occasionally called for brief strikes in which Poujadists would shutter their shops. In some areas, so it was reported, “unabashed Poujade vigilantes went right on chasing tax collectors down the roads, mobbing police and defying troops assigned to escort them.” According to another account:

The loudspeaker is [the movement’s] symbol and it all started in earnest one bright morning… when a loudspeaker mounted on a truck brought awful tidings to the pleasant little town of St. Cere near Toulouse in south-west France.

“Attention,” it blared. “Attention. The tax inspector is in town.”

There was a rumbling sound as the steel curtains with which French shops are shuttered at night were rolled down all over St. Cere. Then, amidst ominous quiet, a strange procession wound its way through the medieval streets.

At the head of it marched the tax inspector, carrying a bulging briefcase. He was followed by 80 black-uniformed members of the Republican Security Corps with gas masks dangling from their shoulders and submachine guns at the ready. After them, looking just a little scared, came the entire citizenry of the town.

The tax inspector rapped on steel curtain after steel curtain, demanding to be let in to see the books. Nowhere did he get an answer. When they found that even the bistros were locked, the hapless inspector and his guards gave up their mission and beat a humble retreat from St. Cere.

The tax-hating citizens had revolted against the Government of France, and won.

Defiance soon was carried further than that. Angry “Poujadistes” began resorting to physical violence against stubborn tax inspectors who insisted on seeing the accounts. They also took to spiking forced tax sales by refusing to bid until the auctioneer had lowered the price of whatever was up for sale to a laughably small figure. Thus a tax delinquent might buy back his own shop for, say 10 cents. At an auction the other day, a brand-new car went for one franc, or less than one-third of a cent.

The movement has got its members elected to office in almost three-fourths of France’s departmental chambers of commerce. It has secure the support of most of the provincial press, often by threatening mass cancellations of subscriptions, while its own monthly publication, L’Union, has a circulation of 450,000.

Here’s a Life magazine article about the Poujade movement, featuring pictures of some of the resisters, and the detail that “some priests ring church bells to warn of the arrival of the revenuers.” Another brief wire service note shows that the Poujade phenomenon started to cross national boundaries and develop copycat movements elsewhere, perhaps not by accident.

Like the anti-tax, anti-big-government right-wing in the United States today, the Poujadists didn’t seem to mind certain expensive big government projects:

Poujade presented a seven point program to enable France to hold Algeria, hinged on the presence of a large army, strong measures of repression of the independence movement, severe punishment for those who advocate autonomy, and unspecified “reforms” to overcome the unrest of the natives.

When hecklers yelled, “How can you reduce taxes by starting a full fledged war in North Africa?” Poujade’s men quickly silenced them.

The Poujadists briefly formed a political party, and more than fifty of its slate were elected to the Chamber of Deputies (including a young Jean-Marie Le Pen). The movement was short-lived, though. The party was organized on rigidly authoritarian lines and didn’t have much of a platform beyond its complaints.

Poujade decided to bet everything on a single, high-stakes roll of the dice: he’d call for a reenvocation of the States-General (which hadn’t convened since 1789) as a way of overriding the existing government with a populist revolt. The American parallel would be if the “TEA Party” people were to call for a Constitutional Convention to rewrite the United States Constitution more to their liking. He couldn’t pull this off, and lost credibility. A year after their surprisingly strong showing at the polls, people were already asking “what ever happened to the Poujadists?”

When Vivien Kellems resisted the federal income tax withholding system, she was subjected to an unusually intense smear campaign, which included the government intercepting her private mail and making it public, as shown in the following Associated Press account from the 31 March 1944:

Anti-tax U.S. War Plant Owner Called Sweetheart of Nazi Agent

Washington, March 31. — (AP) — Miss Vivien Kellems, Westport, Conn., war contractor who advised businessmen not to pay income taxes, was described in Congress today by Representative John Coffee (Dem., Wash.) as the sweetheart of a Nazi agent in Argentina.

Coffee read to the House of Representatives love letters he said she exchanged with a German count in Buenos Aires. He told his colleagues Miss Kellems possessed war equipment blueprints “of inestimable value to the enemy,” and demanded that the justice department “put an end to this incredible conspiracy.”

Without disclosing how he obtained it, Coffee said one letter from Miss Kellems to Count Frederick Karl von Zedliz in Buenos Aires was signed “all my love sweetheart, Vivien.”

“I say that Vivien Kellems is a menace to the American war effort,” Coffee said. “This woman, who is in constant touch with our hated Nazi enemies — this woman, the love of a Hitler fifth column spy in Argentina, admits by her own statements, that right now in Connecticut, she is engaged in work for the armed forces of a highly restricted and confidential nature.”

Miss Kellems, whose Connecticut plant makes signal corps equipment, announced in January she had skipped her December 15 income tax payment and would use the money to set up a post-war reserve for her firm. She made speeches urging other businessmen to do the same thing, bringing from Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau the remark:

“To advise citizens to refuse to pay taxes — particularly in time of war — smacks of disloyalty.”

In turn, Miss Kellems charged that the government had squandered billions on “boondoggling.”

Later she announced that she had made one payment on her taxes because she found she had some ready cash. She denied advocating anything illegal, saying the law permitted postponement of taxes when a person could not pay. To pay in full at once she insisted, would spell bankruptcy.

She also charged she was being “violently smeared” and denied a statement, which she attributed then to a radio commentator, that she was engaged to marry Count von Zedlitz.

Coffee said Von Zedlitz was on the British black list as an enemy agent, and said Miss Kellems’ speech advising business men not to pay income taxes was made after she received a communication from Von Zedlitz.

He told the House Miss Kellems wrote Von Zedlitz that an astrologist had told her she would “play a part, not only in national affairs, but also in international affairs” and concluded the letter by saying “how could that be if I am not married to you?” He said that indicated her intention of marrying “this agent of the German Reich.”

“This same Miss Vivien Kellems, who advises American business men not to pay their income tax and support the war effort, admits that she consulted with the Nazi agent in Buenos Aires on her proposed seditious speaking tour,” the representative said. “In that same month Von Zedlitz wrote to Miss Kellems … Wishing her ‘joy’ in the ‘monstrous speaking program.’

“Miss Kellems poses as a patriot; yet she has consistently played the Nazi game,” Coffee said. “Vivien Kellems is today giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Vivien Kellems is today a tool of the Goebbels propaganda machine.”

Coffee told the House Miss Kellems “is the lady who ran against our own Clare Boothe Luce in 1942.”

He said it was his contention that any American citizen who deliberately advises American business men not to pay taxes which the law imposes “is guilty of such reprehensible conduct as justifies her prosecution at the hands of the Department of Justice.”

The letters were also leaked to the press.

As far as I know, there was no real evidence that Von Zedlitz was in fact a Nazi agent or even a Nazi sympathizer. But this did sideline Kellems’s political career (she had run against Luce in the Republican primary, and had been planning another run), though she came back as an anti-Bush Republican senatorial candidate in the 1950s.

There were some half-hearted investigations into how the Office of Censorship had leaked her letters to a Democratic congressman (best guess: via Roosevelt’s State Department), but by then the damage was done. (Though there were some fascinating revelations about how the censorship department was being used for industrial espionage, ironically, to help a German film manufacturer compete against the American company Eastman Kodak.)

John Coffee lost his seat in the election of 1946, and never made a comeback.

Kellems kept up her anti-income-tax fight, saying: “Your vicious Nazi smear technique of the New Deal has been successful in silencing other American citizens who have dared to differ with the views of the present administration. But since I have nothing to conceal I am not afraid and all your fulminating and personal abuse will not swerve me from my purpose, which is to effect the repeal of the income tax and to persuade congress to pass some sensible tax laws.”

About a year before she died, in 1974, People magazine profiled Kellems as “A Determined Lady Who Won’t Pay Income Taxes”:

In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes. — Benjamin Franklin

One lady who is resisting this certainty is Vivien Kellems. At 77 years old, she is tiny and slender with carefully coiffed, silver-gray hair and a face which shows the fine wrinkles of thousands of smiles. And she is rich.

Vivien Kellems could be the classic example of a benign little old lady, were she so inclined. She isn’t. And that has complicated life for a lot of people — most of whom work for the Internal Revenue Service.

Come April 15 every year, many American citizens like to think of Vivien. For at an age when most of her contemporaries would be content to curl up with their memories of Rudolph Valentino, Ms. Kellems — businesswoman, feminist and rebel with a lot of causes — is still an enthusiastic volunteer in a very long war against the income tax. She has refused to pay any since 1968, sending in signed but otherwise blank federal returns.

Sitting amid her antique glass collection while she nibbles hors d’oeuvres served by her maid of 20 years, Ms. Kellems hardly looks like a revolutionary. But when she talks about the income tax, it’s with an activist’s outrage.

“My fight is in the best American tradition,” she says. “I want to be a test case. I get these letters from old ladies saying, ‘I couldn’t do it, but I just want you to know how I feel.’ They’ve given me the courage to go on.” And they also send contributions to the cause.

And so she fights on, part of the year from the Brentwood, Calif. mansion of her brother Jesse and the rest of the time from her pastoral 100-acre estate in quiet East Haddam, Conn.

Her current crusade is aimed at the federal income tax laws’ discrimination against unmarried people, whose tax rate can be as much as 20 percent higher than that for married people. Sheldon Cohen, former commissioner of the IRS under President Johnson and now a tax consultant, says, “I think she’s right about single people. She’s a Don Quixote in this area. Some of the windmills deserve to be tilted at. But there isn’t any complete justice. Ultimately, she’s not going to win.”

Vivien Kellems would dispute this. Now one of the best known and respected tax lobbyists in Washington, she has persuaded New York’s Representative Edward Koch to introduce a bill that would create one tax rate for everyone. And she is working to get the bill out of the House Ways and Means Committee, where it has been kept languishing for three years by Chairman Wilbur Mills, long the Horatio at the tax reform bridge. “If we can blast the bill out of committee, it’ll sail through Congress,” she says. “Wilbur Mills promised it will be out of committee this session. Mr. Mills and I are close friends, but he’s let me down four times. You don’t get a law passed in Washington because it’s just and fair but because it’s politically expedient.”

While she lobbies in Washington with one hand, Ms. Kellems is keeping the IRS at arm’s length with the other. Since she first refused to fill in her tax form, she has been barraged with claims, penalties and interest levied against her — $122,000 worth. But so far she has paid only $813.30 for a medical deduction on her 1965 return which was disallowed by wrist-slapping IRS auditors in 1969. (The IRS is planning to take her back to court in June.)

“The IRS demanded my records and subpoenaed my accountants to get them,” Ms. Kellems says. “I said that I was pleading the Fourth and Fifth amendments, that my income and my records were my property and could not be seized without a court warrant, and that I didn’t have to answer when it might tend to incriminate me. Then I got a letter from the IRS saying I had properly pleaded the Fifth and they wished to withdraw the suit. I haven’t filed now for five years. They assess interest against me, and I assess interest against them.” She reckons that by 1968 — when she stopped paying — the government owed her $72,000 in taxes collected in previous years when she was paying the single person’s rate.

Ms. Kellems in fact tried to sue the IRS for $2,939.13, which she said was the penalty she paid on her 1965 taxes for being single. Although she knew she had little chance of winning, she fought her case all the way to the Supreme Court. Last spring, that ultimate tribunal refused to consider it.

More recently, Ms. Kellems has been counterattacking the tax system on another front. The objective was a capital gains and dividends tax program instituted in 1969 and 1971 in her home state of Connecticut. Half the objective has been won already: after a drive in which she played a major role, the dividends tax was repealed in 1973. And, concedes a state tax official with a sigh, she also played a major role in getting the capital gains tax cut in half.

Vivien Kellems was born June 7, 1896, in Des Moines to parents who were both ministers of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). The family moved to Eugene, Oreg. when she was 2. Vivien grew up there as the only girl in a family of six children and was always close to her brothers.

She graduated from the University of Oregon — where she was the only coed on the debating team — and stayed on to complete a master’s degree in economics. Her elder brother Jesse (he is alive but seriously ill) insisted that Ms. Kellems continue on to her doctorate at Columbia University. But when Jesse, also a clergyman, ran out of money before Vivien completed her thesis, she went to work, booking appearances for the U.S. Marine Band. (Ms. Kellems is currently completing her doctorate in economics and win soon submit her thesis on “how individuals can act to change the law” to the University of Edinburgh, where Jesse received his Ph.D. 50 years ago.)

Then another brother, Edgar, whom Jesse had put through MIT, invented a device — the cable grip — for installing, handling and supporting electrical cables. Ms. Kellems had $1,000 saved, so she staked Edgar, and together they founded the Kellems Company in 1927, with Vivien as president. “I started with one man and vast ignorance,” she recalls. By the time the Kellems sold the company to Harvey Hubbell Inc. in 1962, it was a flourishing enterprise with 135 employees. Since the company was not public, the amount received was not disclosed.

“I loved the cable grip business,” Ms. Kellems says. “Men always try to hide the fact from women that business is so much fun. I had no intention of selling, but it became harder and harder — and the tax situation for a small business was incredible. Then Hubbell came along, and they agreed to keep the factory where it is in Stonington and to keep on all our employees.”

Mrs. Rose Gee, formerly an assistant to Ms. Kellems at the Stonington operation, says, “If you started to work for her, you would never have thought of leaving — she was that kind of person. Everybody loved her.”

Well, not quite everybody. For Ms. Kellems had already begun her long struggle with the IRS. Round one involved the withholding tax.

“When they passed the withholding tax, it was as a war measure, but they never took it off,” she says, still a little indignant about the whole thing. “I mulled that over. Then I was giving a speech at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles one night in 1948, and I heard myself saying that I would not collect any more withholding taxes from my employees. I said I wasn’t going to be an agent for the government. If they wanted me to be their agent, they’d have to pay me, and I wanted a badge.”

She didn’t get a badge, but she got a lot of flak from the IRS. Even though her employees were themselves paying their withholding taxes, the IRS hit Kellems with a $7,600 penalty. After a lengthy court battle, this argument was settled. The Kellems Company started withholding. “I had to,” she says, “or they would have bankrupted me.” During the 1950s, she took her antitaxation campaign to the public. “When I needed a platform,” she recalls, “I would run for office. I ran for governor, for senator, for Congress, and lost every time.” She had more success with another cause in Connecticut in 1964, when she sat in a voting booth for nine hours to protest the difficulty of ticket-splitting on the voting machines used in the state. After toppling over from fatigue, she was finally removed from the polling place. Subsequently, Connecticut’s voting machines were modified to allow easier vote-splitting.

Through most of her endeavors, Ms. Kellems has remained a loner, turning down chances to affiliate with such groups as CO$T (The Committee of Single Taxpayers) because, she says, “I’m not a joiner, I’m just not that kind of person; basically I’m a Victorian.”

A handsome woman who twice made the nation’s best-dressed list in the early ’40s, Ms. Kellems is not without a trace of feminine vanity. Pouting after losing the Republican nomination for Congress to Clare Boothe Luce in 1942, she said, “Everybody talks of Clare Boothe’s sex appeal. Nobody mentions mine.”

She was married at 23 to a World War Ⅰ Navy veteran but left him after two weeks and got a divorce a year later. Her only other publicly serious romance involved an engagement during World War Ⅱ to a German businessman long resident in Argentina — Count Frederic von Zedlitz. Because he was on a British-American wartime blacklist of German nationals abroad, journalists Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell accused her of fascist sympathies.

Ms. Kellems insisted that her fiancé was anti-Nazi. But she was shattered by the allegations, and the engagement dissolved. In 1952 she wistfully told a reporter, “If I had settled down to a normal life, if I had married and raised children, I’d probably never have gone barnstorming around the country on all these crusades.”

Today she is resigned to a single life, saying, “Of course I’ve had my share of romantic entanglements. At my age, who hasn’t? But I could never marry now, not with the fight for equality for singles going on.”

Always an ardent feminist, Ms. Kellems has been campaigning in support of the Equal Rights Amendment for women. (She attacked discriminatory work curfew laws in Connecticut as early as the 1940s.) But taxes are her main concern. “This tax fight is stimulating, and it’s fun,” she says. “It takes the place of business; this is a matching of wits, too.

“I’ve met absolutely lovely people in the IRS, though. They do terrible things, but my relationship with them is just fabulous. I get invited to IRS parties and they say to me, ‘Keep it up, Miss Kellems.’ I have many, many friends.” The sentiment appears to be reciprocal.

Banking tycoon J. Pierpont Morgan once said, “If the government cannot collect its taxes, a man is a fool to pay them.” If he had been a little less of a sexist, he and Vivien Kellems would probably have gotten along just fine.

Kellems used to tell her supporters to “enclose a used, dry tea-bag or coffee grounds to spill out on the desk” when writing letters of protest to Congress, as an allusion to the Boston Tea Party — a tactic that has come back in recent years. These days, though, it’s more likely to result in a HazMat team and an office building lock-down than a simple trip to the wastepaper basket (which, come to think of it, probably makes it a better tactic than ever).

So the political primaries have begun, already many months into what seems like perpetual campaign season. You’re probably being inundated with tweets and status updates and comments and op-ed pieces forwarded from family members and blog posts and video clips of indignant pundits.

Some rare, mature, and sensible ones urge you to carefully consider the important issues, resist the distortions of propaganda and the news cycle, and look at the big picture before you vote. But above all, to vote! Vote as if it were the most important decision you were going to make this year.

I hope you will indulge a different point of view. I’m going to urge you not to vote. Further, I’m going to ask you to urge your friends and family to follow your lead. Even better, I’m going to suggest that you cultivate a studied ignorance of the candidates and their positions so that even if you were forced at gunpoint into a voting booth in November you wouldn’t have any idea which lever to pull. And not only that, but I’m going to tell you how, by (not) doing all these things, you can be of greater service to your country, your community, your loved ones, and yourself.

There are two main reasons why I expect you to follow this heretical advice. One of them is utterly rational, logical, and easily-demonstrated: your vote is worthless, and whether you carefully consider your vote and cast it wisely or whether you flip a coin or whether you make other plans entirely, the effect you have on who becomes president will be the same. It doesn’t matter for whom you vote in the privacy of the booth because your vote will have no effect on the results of the election, and so there is no reason to become an informed voter, and indeed no good reason to vote at all.

The second reason requires a little more imagination but amounts to this: presidential elections are harmful, and they become more harmful the more that people care about them and the more attention they devote to them. Most anything else you can imagine doing with your time other than paying attention to politicians for the next several months would be more beneficial to you, to your loved ones, and to your community.

Then there’s the dessert — almost the best reason of all: if you decide now that you aren’t going to vote in November, you can stop paying attention. You can let all of the squabbling rattle on without you, and you can ignore the impassioned partisans and the indignant commercials and the breathless commentators. You’ll thank me.

Voting is Worthless

Your vote, should you fail to heed my advice and decide to cast one, will make no difference to the result of the presidential election. If you cast your vote for the candidate whose stated positions most closely match your views, whose image is most sympathetic to your self-image, who seems wisest and most well-advised — or if you devilishly succumb to a whim to do exactly the opposite — it doesn’t matter, because your vote will not make any difference in who becomes the president.

This is not because American elections are corrupt and error-prone, though certainly they are. True enough: because of poor interface design, the ease of malicious hacking, politically-motivated voter roll manipulation, and other such causes, there is only a dim resemblance between the vote tally and the actual intended preferences of the voters. Also true: your well-considered, researched, intelligently-selected vote may easily be swamped by the haphazard votes of dozens of morons or by flipped bits in the slapdash voting machine or by snafus at the post office. It also cannot be denied that if the vote totals are by some chance close enough to matter in any important precinct (e.g. Palm Beach in 2000), the results will quickly be taken out of the hands of the voters entirely and left to the chad-wrangling of political operatives or partisan judges.

But these are not why voting is pointless. Even if none of these things were true, the sheer size of the electorate makes any individual vote mathematically worthless. Even if every vote were counted, only once, and actually represented the real intention of the voter, and if every eligible voter were indeed permitted to vote, and even if the weird electoral college were abolished or replaced with something more sensible — even then, you would be wasting your time to vote.

Simply as a matter of scale, as the size of the electorate increases, the likelihood that any one vote will matter quickly, asymptotically approaches zero. At the current scale, at the width of the finest pen with which we can draw this asymptote, it is indeed indistinguishable from zero.

But, you may be thinking, although my vote individually may not have any effect, our votes (you and me, and our right-thinking friends) in the aggregate just might — if the aggregate is big enough. If it is true that it is completely irrational and worthless to vote, and if rational people act on this knowledge, doesn’t that mean that our elections will necessarily be decided by the opinions of people who are too irrational, mathematically illiterate, or unwise to refrain from voting? Can we risk that?

The answer to this objection is that, yes, tautologically, to the extent that our presidential elections are in fact decided by the expressed aggregate will of the voters, they are decided by the expressed aggregate will of those too unwise to know not to vote. No, we shouldn’t risk such a crazy thing, but we cannot change it by voting, because by voting you immediately become part of the problem you hope to solve.

It’s like looking at a sidewalk 3-card-monte game and saying to yourself that you’d better throw down a bet, otherwise that unscrupulous dealer will be able to successfully game all those unsophisticated people who are playing without knowing the trick. If you play, you become the sucker.

But aha! Here is a reductio that beats my argument cold: “If my vote is so darned worthless, why are so many people spending so much time and energy and money trying to obtain it?” This is indeed a nut that needs cracking, but it will have to wait until the next section.

If participating in the electoral spectacle were merely worthless, I wouldn’t be writing this screed. Lots of things that people do aren’t really good for anything, and that’s nobody’s business but their own. However…

Voting is Harmful

If you put the dread judgment of mathematics aside, elections might be worth getting excited about if they were actually what they sometimes pretend to be: our way of choosing qualified people to take necessary and important policy-making and -enacting jobs, in such a way that those people best represent the considered judgments of the citizenry.

But these parody elections like the one coming up in November are nothing of the sort.

For one thing, elections like these effectively select some of the worst people among us by perversely rewarding the sort of charming mendacity and amoral ruthlessness that characterize sociopaths. If you watch a political debate or stump speech or what-have-you, you’re watching an extended act of dishonesty. You’re watching someone whose every word is being chosen (or, more often than not, has been carefully chosen earlier) to manipulate you. Honesty — that is, the genuine motivation to inform someone accurately about what they want or need to know — never enters into it for a second.

I’ve met people like this, and you probably have too — people who seem to think that the only purpose of speech is to tell self-serving stories that trick other people into doing what they want — but when we meet them in real life we warn our friends about them and speculate as to how they became the monsters they are. But when they put on power ties and try to get us to vote for them, many of us lose all of our good sense.

“Well, that’s the way the game is played,” I sometimes hear. “If you don’t fight dirty, you aren’t going to win, so even the good ones have to fight dirty. An honest candidate couldn’t win.” But if you have accidentally (let us hope) established a political system that excels at elevating psychopaths to positions of power and authority, maybe the answer is not to hope for a flock of honorable people who can impersonate psychopaths long enough to climb into power, but to stop propping up a process that installs psychopaths as your rulers, and, once these psychopaths have been successfully identified by their success in the electoral process, to stop giving them so much power to do evil.

Sometimes people respond to criticisms like this by saying that there is no point in holding out for an ideal democracy, but that the sorts of imperfect elections designed by mortal men, of which the American presidential election is one variety, are better than none at all. Would you rather have a hereditary monarchy or a communist one-party state?

But these elections aren’t just “imperfect” incarnations of democratic decision-making — they’re not democratic at all in any relevant sense, that is in the sense of being an instance of people ruling themselves rather than being subjected to the decisions of others. It’s as if your dad promised to take you to a baseball game and instead took you to a junkyard where nine mannequins were stood up against a wall wearing baseball caps. “Well, it’s not an ideal baseball game, I’ll grant you that, but we can’t expect perfection. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Besides, you told me you hate football. Want a bag of styrofoam popcorn?”

Those who exaggerate the importance of elections also tend to exaggerate and distort the powers of office-holders and the abilities (and propensities) of the politicians that inhabit them. This has the unfortunate effect of getting people accustomed to the idea that these offices ought to have great powers concentrated in them, and ought to be looked on to solve our problems, create miracles, provide for our needs, and so forth. This in turn makes the psychopaths in power more dangerous.

These elections also abrade the honesty, decency, and community solidarity of ordinary people who are induced to participate in them — turning otherwise good people into spin doctors who see half of their fellow-citizens as enemies to be defeated and who annoy the rest of us with their email forwards and arguments at parties. These elections harm our communities, waste our resources, and embarrass us in the eyes of posterity. The best way we can confront them is to refuse to fan the flames or provide fresh fuel.

Earlier I raised the question of why so much money and effort is being spent to chase down votes that I said weren’t worth anything at all. The simple answer is that your vote is of no worth to you, but it may under some circumstances have some tiny worth to those who want to harvest it.

Your presidential vote (depending on the state-of-play of your state) may be a tiny bit important and a tiny bit valuable to vote harvesters — though only as a fraction of the aggregate votes in your state (this makes intuitive sense). But to you, your vote is not even worth that fraction (this, people have a harder time understanding).

It’s kind of the same way that Coke & Pepsi spend an enormous amount of money, creative talent, and personnel to try to influence people to choose one of two almost identical products. Imagine how eagerly they would be trying if, by convincing 50.1% of Americans to choose one or the other, they could force 100% of us to drink nothing but for the next four years. In such a case, your vote — even your wee little vote — might indeed be worth something for Coke & Pepsi to pursue in the course of pursuing a larger percentage… but how much would it be worth it to you to cast that vote? Nothing at all.

(And as with the campaigns for Coke and Pepsi, the campaigns for president have little to do with the actual merits, if you can call them that, of the products. People cast their presidential votes not for the person and policies that eventually may occupy the office of president, but in a popularity contest between carefully market-tested candidate/brands. Witness all of the people who are angry at Obama because he did not behave in office at all like the president he had successfully convinced them to hope that he would be in order to win their votes. What were they voting for? A president or a brand identification? Blaming Obama for failing to usher in Change is like blaming Coke for failing to Add Life.)

If you pay attention to this charade, you give it more media market share — more “eyeballs.” You make the aggregate a little bigger and the election that much more expensive (if you’re buying it) or profitable (if you’re selling the tools to win it) — slightly increasing the amount of money, time, and attention necessary, and thereby also the various harms, including of course the endless corrupting pursuit of campaign cash by the politicians.

Also, in order to convince yourself to vote, or more specifically to vote “correctly,” you must tell yourself a story in which your vote is actually important or influential. This reinforces the illusion that the subjects of the U.S. government have meaningful democratic influence over its policies, and therefore reduces the chances that you will look honestly at the real state of politics or will work for genuine change.

When you exaggerate the importance of voting for president — by urging people to vote one way or another or by making a big deal about anything the candidates are doing — you reinforce the illusion that voting for the right thing is anything like doing the right thing. The problems with our country aren’t caused by what people vote for on their ballots one day in November every four years, but by what they vote for with their actions on the 1,460 days in-between.

What You Can Do Instead

Well, then, what do I suggest? It is important, isn’t it, who the president is? We have to do something to make our influence felt, and, unless you’ve got the sniper chops of a Lee Harvey Oswald, election season is the time to do it, right? After all, even if the saying is true that “if voting could change anything, it would be illegal,” isn’t that also true of not voting?

Don’t slip back into superstition! Just because there isn’t an actual way for ordinary citizens to exercise reasonable democratic influence over their government doesn’t make the fake ways any less fake. Just because you can’t win the lottery by crossing your fingers doesn’t mean you should knock-on-wood twice as hard.

I’ve got a better idea: Every time you feel tempted to click on that headline about the latest debates, every time you’re tempted to unmute the campaign commercial, every time you find yourself on the verge of forwarding some news about the candidates to your friends… get up, walk calmly to the bathroom sink, and floss your teeth.

Most people don’t floss their teeth nearly often enough. I know I don’t. But flossing can prevent painful tooth decay, embarrassing and off-putting bad breath, infectious disease, and even (through mechanisms still under investigation) heart disease. By flossing, you practice inexpensive preventative medicine that will contribute to your better flourishing while at the same time it reduces the likelihood that you will need expensive medical care (and thereby drive up the cost of insurance, or of taxpayer-provided health care).

Make a disaster preparation kit. Check your smoke detector batteries. Read a good book. Bake cookies for a neighbor. Any of those things would be better for you and your community than participating in the Election 2012 foofaraw. I bet you’ve got some even better ideas.

But please don’t vote. And encourage your friends and loved ones not to vote as well. Don’t feel like you have to participate in discussing the foibles of the candidates, and don’t be afraid to be utterly ignorant of the horse race. Be proud of it! As it is, I couldn’t pick Rick Perry or Mitt Romney or Michelle Bachmann or Gary Johnson out of a photo lineup, but I’d be even happier if I didn’t know their names.

If you decide now that you aren’t going to vote and that you’re not going to encourage other people in their political baloney, you are immediately freed from any obligation to follow the campaign trivia. You’ll be happier, more productive and helpful, and less of an annoyance to your friends and family. Heave a sigh of relief. Get your “Delete”-clicking finger ready, and start daydreaming about what you’re going to do with all of your extra time, mental energy, and social capital.

When the United States entered World War Ⅰ, they decided to finance it by selling “Liberty Bonds.” Although this war tax was ostensibly voluntary, those citizens who were most envenomed with war spirit took it upon themselves to be vigilante tax collectors, and used a variety of pressure tactics — up to and including physically violent lynch mobs — to encourage others to contribute.

Some time around 1968 Henry Cooprider, a Mennonite pacifist who witnessed one of these mobs in action against his family near Inman, Kansas some fifty years before, was interviewed. I found a transcript of that interview on-line. It also includes some very interesting memories of his time in a detention camp for conscientious objector draftees. Here are some excerpts.

[D]uring the years of going to church and teaching that we got from the ministers and our parents at home and the teaching that we had against participating in war or trying to take revenge of anybody or killing — taking life — we felt like the teaching we had in those early days were entirely against any of this. I suppose that we just grew up with that kind of a teaching and of course when it came time for us to be drafted, when World War Ⅰ came long, a number of us were exempted from military service, well, because of farm furloughs, because we were farmers, we didn’t have to go to training camp, but as the war progressed, the sentiment in our own neighborhood was such that it was about necessary for all young men of draft age really had to serve some time for the government in this way and it was along about 1917 that the sentiment was so strong about the stand that Mennonites were taking and especially in our own neighborhood. Myself and my brother had been exempted because of this farm — that wouldn’t be a furlough, what would that be called?

Q: Exemption? Farm exemption?

We were exempted because of participating in farming. That was supposed to have been because of the fact that we could produce food, so our people, even that were in war-torn countries, even in our own country.

Well, the sentiment got so that in our neighborhood, that people couldn’t put up with some young men being exempted and others having to go and serve their time in military service. Many had even went and never came home because of war service. Well, it was during that time that a number of people came to my parents’ home when I was still at home and helping my father farming. One night they came to my parents’ home and wanted to demand that my father buy war bonds and when he refused to do that because he figured that buying war bonds would be helping out in the war and promoting war, so these people that night said that, “We’re going to tar and feather you,” and my father was not well at that time, and my brother George stepped out — they were in our front yard — and my brother stepped out and said that they, that he would take my father’s place. So that’s what happened that night. My brother was tarred and feathered in my father’s stead.

Q: Give your father’s name.

My father’s name was Walter.

Q: How old were you and how old was George at this time?

I was twenty-one years old at that time and my brother George was twenty-five, and that seemed to satisfy this gang of people that night, and as quick as this was done, the whole bunch [word(s) omitted] as fast as they could go.

From here, he goes on to describe what happened when he was drafted, and sent to a detention camp where they tried to break down the conscientious objectors and convince them to take up arms — haranguing them, hosing them down with cold water, threatening them with execution, submitting them to various ordeals, assigning them work that was incrementally more-militaristic in nature to see how far each man would go. (Still, he says he’s thankful he was drafted late in the war, as Mennonite objectors had been treated worse earlier on at the same camp — some beaten to a pulp.)

While he was in camp, the war ended. He tells this story about what happened next:

[B]efore the armistice was signed, we were classed as some sort of a creature, you might say, instead of a human being, and after the armistice was signed, things changed altogether. I think they thought more of us as a human being than what they had before. I might just say here that a day or two before we were discharged, one of the top sergeants who had been the roughest and meanest and the… trying to get us to change our minds the hardest of any officer in the camp, we had gotten together and bought a Bible and presented him a Bible that morning at roll call and this man broke down and wept. I thought he had such a hard heart and the way he had acted during the months before, I thought he couldn’t shed a tear, but this man broke down and wept, so it shows to me that, after all, he was simply carrying out his duties as a military officer and he really didn’t believe in the things he was doing himself.

The conversation came back around to Liberty Bonds and the pressure put on Mennonites and other pacifists to put their scruples aside and fund the war effort:

Q: You said the mob came to your house because they wanted your father to buy war bonds? Did some of the Mennonites around here buy war bonds?

Yes, they did, And that’s the thing that made it a little harder, because some did and some didn’t, and there was a kind of a divided opinion as to what those war bonds were used for.

Q: Were there other incidents of this type around here where this kind of pressure was put on?

Not in our immediate community, but there was in the Canton, Kansas, community. Same thing happened over there, to a minister there. … Dan Diener, I believe was his name. It seems like that that was after them [word(s) omitted] thing that they did, and they [word(s) omitted] that that satisfied them.

Q: Do you think that they were ashamed of what they had done?

It seemed to be that many of the people that were there that night eventually would tell part of their experience and they even named the people that were in the gang that night — mob, as it was called, and many of them were ashamed of what they did.

Q: Did the general community around here, do you think, support them, or were they more opposed to this kind of action?

I think the general community of our neighbors around here were strongly opposed to that kind of action.

He remembered this interesting detail from the conscientious objector detention camp:

I might say there was a question too that was asked so many times by the officers in the camp. That was, “Did you vote?” That was a very common sentence that was brought before these conscientious objectors. “Did you vote?” And the ones that did vote, said, “Well, it’s up to you to support your government.” Of course, that was a little bit harder to answer. Then how come you don’t support your government if you voted and helped to put in these officials? I might say that I have voted once in my life, and I’m seventy-two years old.

Q: Is that the reason, you feel you have to support their…?

I think that’s the strongest reason I can put forth.

When the conscientious objectors were released from detention, they were issued paychecks for the time they had been officially in uniform.

[I]t had been decided amongst the whole number of men that were there that the money that we had would go into relief… to a relief fund, and none of it was kept individually. We had one man, a representative of this decision, that collected checks from everyone that agreed to do this and this was taken in one… what should I say… one bunch, so we had no money whatsoever to spend from the government check.

ACOOC’s Strategy and Conference Activity

Acción Colectiva de Objetoras y Objetores de Conciencia (ACOOC), our conference host, is struggling with some of the problems Colombia is facing, particularly with batidas and with its confused conscientious objection policy (see yesterday’s Picket Line for details).

Before the conference started, I met with the remarkably energetic, enthusiastic, and personable Milena Romero of ACOOC at the group’s headquarters in Bogotá, and she filled me in on what the group is doing.

ACOOC is run out of a small set of offices that also includes a small café, a conference room for rent, a print shop, and a computer refurbishing center. These help make the organization financially self-sustaining.

When I was there, there were eight or ten other people on-site, some brainstorming a video and/or direct action project. They were all about as young as the youngest person at a typical war tax resistance gathering in the United States, but perhaps this is to be expected as there is an ongoing military draft in Colombia, and so the issue hits young men viscerally.

It is a tribute to the open-mindedness and curiosity of the group that they hosted this conference, since their own urgent focus is on protecting conscripts and conscientious objectors. Tax resistance isn’t really on the radar here yet, being mostly crowded out by these priorities. The group hoped that the conference could help them, and other activists with a similar focus, to learn about war tax resistance. They also wanted to use the opportunity to confer with other activists about the status of the struggle to legalize conscientious objection to military service, and to capitalize on the gravitas of an “international conference” to add weight to their lobbying efforts.

ACOOC’s Strategies

The group has designed and is vigorously implementing a set of strategies:

• document batidas, and be a credible source of information about them for the press and for human rights authorities
• push for legislation that would regulate in a predictable and beneficent fashion the process of applying for conscientious objector status
• help conscientious objectors who have been drafted to navigate the judicial system in the absence of such a law
• erode the military ID requirement

ACOOC is also trying to win a public relations struggle. Because of years of trouble with paramilitaries, guerrillas, and the drug war, people in Colombia tend to prioritize security and in particular security through superior force of arms. Public opinion is not very sympathetic to arguments for principled nonviolence. So ACOOC is moving slowly and trying to make conscientious objection non-threatening to a security-focused society. At the same time they’re also trying to satisfy the radical wing of conscientious objectors who are attracted to their cause and who want to make sure they won’t be left out in the cold by compromise.

Proposed Legislation Legalizing Conscientious Objection

A bill that would formally legalize the conscientious objection process is working its way through the legislature. It passed the Colombian Senate unanimously, but the military is hostile to it and it is expected to face serious opposition in the House. The Constitutional Court is also expected to weigh in at some point (apparently, unlike in the U.S., that court sometimes reviews proposed legislation for constitutionality before the legislation passes through the legislature).

Part of ACOOC’s strategy regarding this legislation has involved walking a fine line on the issue of abortion. Abortion is illegal in Colombia, but the courts have ruled that it is permissible in the case of rape, severe fetal deformity, or danger to the life of the mother. Conscientious objectors to abortion in the medical profession have sought legislative protection of their right not to participate in such abortions, and sections that permit such conscientious objection are wrapped into the conscientious objection to military service bill. ACOOC has been working with a women’s rights group to make sure the bill doesn’t go so far in this area as to lead to opposition from the abortion rights movement. This part of the bill may be key to gaining sufficient support from Catholic conservatives in the House to pass the bill over broader conservative opposition.

ACOOC has also had to strike a balance between the sort of compromise that has a chance of passing in the legislature and the concerns of some of its more radical base, many of whom are skeptical of government outreach or believe the legislation does not offer sufficient protection to conscientious objectors. Even the anarchists I spoke with, however, were willing to hold their noses and speak politely with the politicians they needed to lobby, saying they could put their politics aside temporarily in the hopes that the legislation would offer concrete help to draftees.

The law would require conscientious objectors to do 15 months of alternative service. Some of this might be in civil defense agencies also run by the ministry of defense (such as agencies roughly equivalent to FEMA in the U.S.). Some objectors balk at such service (the same was true in the U.S. where some drafted objectors felt okay about joining civilian service camps to do alternative service, and some refused).

ACOOC is not completely happy with the legislation, and has a list of changes that it hopes to implement, either by additional legislation or by means of judicial challenges, after the bill passes, but it feels that the best way forward at this point is to try to pass the legislation as written.

The military has been lobbying to change the legislation in hostile ways: for instance with provisions that would force objectors to apply for conscientious objector status before a panel made up only of people representing the defense department, or that would force objectors to pay a fine in order to get conscientious objector status.

ACOOC is lobbying to water down the first of these proposals, insisting on a civilian representative on the panel. It’s keeping more quiet about the second proposal, though, recognizing that in the court of public opinion the military has a strong argument that if a non-objector may be forced to risk his life, a conscientious objector ought to be forced to put some skin in the game. However they are aware of the case of Alfredo Díaz Bustos in Bolivia (a regional human rights body ruled that Díaz could not be forced to pay a fine there in order to get conscientious objector status) and expect that if the second provision passes they may be able to challenge it on similar grounds.

Executing an Outreach and Lobby Plan

At the conference we heard of much about the efforts to get this bill passed (and about ACOOC’s other strategies), and we also helped to implement some of it. One afternoon, conferees broke up into three groups to plan visits (two each) the following day to the following:

1. the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Colombia
2. the Defensoría Del Pueblo (ombudsman) in Bogotá
3. the Ministry of Defense’s Human Rights Office
4. the headquarters of the Polo (left-wing coalition) Democratic Party
5. the office of Green Party congressional representative Alfonso Prada Gil
6. the government’s director of human rights & the district secretary

For participants in each of these meetings, ACOOC had prepared a sheet in English and Spanish briefly describing why they considered it important to communicate with that particular office, and what specifically the offices should be asked to do about ACOOC’s concerns. Our teams met to discuss our strategies for the meetings, and the next morning went out to the previously-arranged appointments.

The following day, each team reported to the group at large about the results of the meeting, both telling us the “feeling” they had about how the meeting went, and any specific action items or promises agreed to by each side.

This I felt was very well-designed and -executed and seems likely to have practical results.

I was part of the group that met with Clara López, former mayor of Bogotá and now head of (and presidential candidate of) the Polo Democratic Party. She promised her party’s support for the upcoming conscientious objection legislation, and also told us that she’d been at Radcliffe in the U.S. during the Vietnam War and had been active with Students for a Democratic Society working to protect draft evaders and to chase ROTC out of Harvard back in the day. She told us she had been a war tax resister for a few years but relented in the face of ruinous fines. Now, as a wealthy Colombian, she pays a “patrimonio” tax that is explicitly labeled a “war tax.”

Three and a half years ago I wrote an essay about why Americans should stop participating in the presidential election — either as voters, as supporters of one candidate or another, or as participants in the endless social media and conversational back-and-forths. In short, that they should pay as little attention as possible to the election campaign and should revel in and take pride in their ignorance of the horse race and the candidates and their “positions.”

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine posted this on her Facebook wall:

I feel bad because I feel like I should listen to everything they have to say but, I just had to turn off the Republican Debate. I just couldn’t handle it. Even while looking at pictures of puppies and kittens.

So I decided I should dust this essay off and polish it up a bit in the hopes of helping her and other people who feel guilty about ignoring politicians. This election is shaping up to be the best one in my lifetime not to vote in, so I hope my essay will ease many unnecessarily troubled consciences.

It’s still 2015, isn’t it? The presidential election is fifteen months off and the party conventions are still almost a year away. These days campaign season seems to never end. You’re probably already being inundated with tweets and status updates and comments and op-ed pieces forwarded from family members and blog posts and video clips of indignant pundits — almost all designed to deride one candidate or boost another.

There are some rare, mature, and sensible ones that urge you to carefully consider the important issues, resist the distortions of propaganda and the news cycle, and look at the big picture before you vote. But above all, to vote! Vote as if it were the most important decision you were going to make next year.

I hope you will indulge a different point of view. I’m going to urge you not to vote. Further, I’m going to ask you not to encourage your friends and family to vote for anyone, or at all. Even better, I’m going to suggest that you cultivate a studied ignorance of the candidates and their positions so that even if you were forced at gunpoint into a voting booth next November you wouldn’t have any idea which lever to pull. And not only that, but I’m going to tell you how, by (not) doing all these things, you can be of greater service to your country, your community, your loved ones, and yourself.

There are two main reasons why I expect you to follow this heretical advice. One of them is utterly rational, logical, and easily-demonstrated: your vote is unimportant to the outcome of the election, and whether you carefully consider your vote and cast it wisely or whether you just flip a coin in the voting booth or whether you instead make other plans entirely, the effect you have on who becomes president will be the same. It doesn’t matter for whom you vote in the privacy of the booth, and so there is no reason to become an informed voter, and indeed no good reason to vote at all.

The second reason requires a little more imagination but amounts to this: presidential elections are harmful, and they become more harmful the more that people care about them and the more attention they devote to them. Most anything else you can imagine doing with your time other than paying attention to politicians for the next year and change would be more beneficial to you, to your loved ones, and to your community.

Then there’s the dessert — almost the best reason of all: if you decide now that you aren’t going to vote in November, you can stop paying attention. You can let all of the squabbling rattle on without you, and you can ignore the impassioned partisans and the indignant commercials and the breathless commentators and your earnest and tireless relative who forwards everything. You’ll thank me.

Voting is Pointless

Your vote, should you fail to heed my advice and decide to cast one, will make no difference in the result of the presidential election. If you cast your vote for the candidate whose stated positions most closely match your views, whose image is most sympathetic to your self-image, who seems wisest and most well-advised — or if you devilishly succumb to a whim to do exactly the opposite — it doesn’t matter, because your vote will not make any difference in who becomes the president.

This is not because American elections are corrupt and error-prone, though certainly they are. True enough: because of poor interface design, the ease of malicious hacking, politically-motivated voter roll manipulation, and other such reasons, there is only a dim resemblance between the vote tally and the actual intended preferences of the voters. Also true: your well-considered, researched, intelligently-selected vote may easily be swamped by the haphazard votes of dozens of morons or by flipped bits in the slapdash voting machine or by snafus at the post office. It also cannot be denied that if the vote totals are by some chance close enough to matter in any important precinct (e.g. Palm Beach in 2000), the results will quickly be taken out of the hands of the voters entirely and left to the chad-wrangling of political operatives or partisan judges.

But these are not the reasons why voting is pointless. Even if none of these things were true, the sheer size of the electorate makes any individual vote mathematically worthless. Even if every vote were counted, only once, and actually represented the real, informed intention of a real, live voter, and even if every eligible voter were indeed permitted to vote, and even if the weird electoral college were abolished or replaced with something more sensible — even then, you would be wasting your time to vote.

Simply as a matter of scale, as the size of the electorate increases, the likelihood that any one vote will matter quickly, asymptotically approaches zero. At the current scale, at the width of the finest pen with which we can draw this asymptote, it is indistinguishable from zero.

But, you may be thinking, although my vote individually may not have any effect, our votes (you and me, and our right-thinking friends) in the aggregate just might — if the aggregate is big enough. If it is true that it is completely irrational and worthless to vote, and if rational people act on this knowledge, doesn’t that mean that our elections will necessarily be decided by the opinions of people who are too irrational, mathematically illiterate, or unwise to refrain from voting? Can we risk that?

The answer to this objection is that, yes, tautologically, to the extent that our presidential elections are in fact decided by the expressed aggregate will of the voters, they are decided by the expressed aggregate will of those too unwise to know not to vote. No, we shouldn’t risk such a crazy thing, but we cannot change it by voting, because by voting you immediately become part of the problem you hope to solve.

It’s like looking at a sidewalk 3-card-monte game and saying to yourself that you’d better throw down a bet, because otherwise that unscrupulous dealer will be able to successfully con all those unsophisticated people who are playing without knowing the trick. If you play, you become the sucker.

But aha! Here’s a tough question: “If my vote is so darned worthless, why are so many people spending so much time and energy and money trying to obtain it?” This is indeed a nut that needs cracking, but it will have to wait until the next section.

If participating in the electoral spectacle were merely pointless, I wouldn’t be writing this screed. Lots of things that people do aren’t really good for anything, and that’s nobody’s business but their own. However…

Voting is Harmful

If you put the dread judgment of mathematics aside, elections might be worth getting excited about if they were actually what they sometimes pretend to be: our way of choosing qualified people to take necessary and important policy-making and -enacting jobs, in such a way that those people best represent the considered judgments of the citizenry.

But these parody elections like the one being inflicted on us today are nothing of the sort.

For one thing, elections like these effectively select some of the worst people among us by perversely rewarding the sort of charming mendacity and amoral ruthlessness that characterize sociopaths. If you watch a political debate or stump speech or what-have-you, you’re watching an extended act of dishonesty. You’re watching someone whose every word is being chosen (or, more often than not, has been carefully chosen earlier) to manipulate you. Honesty — that is, the genuine motivation to inform someone accurately about what they want or need to know — never enters into it for a second.

I’ve met people like this, and you probably have too — people who seem to think that the only purpose of speech is to tell self-serving stories that trick other people into doing what they want — but when we meet them in real life we warn our friends about them and speculate as to how they became the monsters they are. But when they get on stage and try to get us to vote for them, many of us lose all of our good sense.

“Well, that’s the way the game is played,” I sometimes hear. “If you don’t fight dirty, you aren’t going to win, so even the good ones have to fight dirty. An honest candidate couldn’t win.” But if you have accidentally (let us hope) established a political system that excels at elevating psychopaths to positions of power and authority, maybe the answer is not to hope for a flock of honorable people who can impersonate psychopaths long enough to climb into power, but to stop propping up a process that installs psychopaths as your rulers, and, once these psychopaths have been successfully identified by their success in the electoral process, to stop giving them so much power to do evil.

Sometimes people respond to criticisms like this by saying that there is no point in holding out for an ideal democracy, but that the sorts of imperfect elections designed by mortal men, of which the American presidential election is one variety, are better than none at all. Would I rather have a hereditary monarchy or a communist one-party state?

But these elections aren’t just “imperfect” incarnations of democratic decision-making — they’re not democratic at all in any important sense, that is in the sense of being an instance of people ruling themselves rather than being subjected to the decisions of others. It’s as if your dad promised to take you to a baseball game and instead took you to a junkyard where nine mannequins were stood up against a wall wearing baseball caps. “Well, it’s not an ideal baseball game, I’ll grant you that, but we can’t expect perfection. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Besides, you told me you hate football. Want a bag of styrofoam popcorn?”

Those who exaggerate the importance of elections (usually as part of their campaign pitch about how important it is for you to vote, and in a particular way) also tend to exaggerate the power of office-holders and the abilities (and propensities) of the politicians who hold office. This has the unfortunate effect of getting people accustomed to the idea that these offices ought to have great powers concentrated in them, and ought to be looked on to solve our problems, create miracles, provide for our needs, and so forth. This in turn makes the psychopaths in power more dangerous.

These elections also degrade the honesty, decency, and community solidarity of ordinary people who are induced to participate in them. They turn otherwise good people into spin doctors who see half of their fellow-citizens as enemies to be defeated and who annoy the rest of us with their email forwards and arguments at parties. These elections harm our communities, waste our resources, and embarrass us in the eyes of posterity. The best way we can confront them is to refuse to fan the flames or provide fresh fuel.

Earlier I raised the question of why so much money and effort is being spent to chase down votes that I claimed weren’t worth anything at all. The simple answer is that your vote is of no worth to you, but it may under some circumstances have some tiny worth to those who want to harvest it. Let me explain:

Your presidential vote (assuming your state is even “in play”) may be a tiny bit important and a tiny bit valuable to vote harvesters — though only as a fraction of the aggregate votes in your state (this makes intuitive sense). But to you, your vote is not even worth that fraction (this, people have a harder time understanding).

It’s kind of the same way that Coke & Pepsi spend an enormous amount of money, creative talent, and personnel to try to influence people to choose one of two almost identical products. Imagine how eagerly they would be trying if, by convincing 50.1% of Americans to choose one or the other, they could force 100% of us to drink nothing but for the next four years. In such a case, your vote — even your wee little vote — might indeed be worth something for Coke & Pepsi to pursue in the course of pursuing a larger percentage… but how much would it be worth it to you to cast that vote? Nothing at all.

(And as with the campaigns for Coke and Pepsi, the campaigns for president have little to do with the actual merits, if you can call them that, of the products. People cast their presidential votes not for the person and policies that eventually may occupy the office of president, but in a popularity contest between carefully market-tested candidate/brands. Witness all of the people who are angry at Obama because he did not behave in office at all like the president he had successfully convinced them to Hope for in order to win their votes. What were they voting for? A president or a brand identification? Blaming Obama for failing to usher in Change is like blaming Coke for failing to Add Life.)

If you pay attention to this charade, you give it more media market share — more “eyeballs.” You make the aggregate a little bigger and the election that much more expensive (if you’re buying it) or profitable (if you’re selling the tools to win it) — slightly increasing the amount of money, time, and attention necessary, and thereby also the various harms, including of course the endless corrupting pursuit of campaign cash by the politicians.

Also, in order to convince yourself to vote, or more specifically to vote “correctly,” you must tell yourself a story in which your vote is actually important or influential. This reinforces the illusion that the subjects of the U.S. government have meaningful democratic influence over its policies, and therefore this reduces the chances that you will look honestly at the real state of politics or will work for genuine change.

When you exaggerate the importance of voting for president — by urging people to vote one way or another or by making a big deal about anything the candidates are doing — you reinforce the illusion that voting for the right thing is anything like doing the right thing. The problems with our country won’t be solved by what people vote for on their ballots one day in November every four years, but by what they vote for with their actions on the 1,460 days in-between.

What You Can Do Instead

Well, then, what do I suggest? It is important, isn’t it, who the president is? We have to do something to make our influence felt, and, unless you’ve got the sniper chops of a Lee Harvey Oswald, election season is the time to do it, right? After all, even if the saying is true that “if voting could change anything, it would be illegal,” isn’t that also true of not voting?

Don’t slip back into superstition! Just because there isn’t an actual way for citizens to exercise reasonable democratic guidance over their government doesn’t make the fake ways any less fake. Just because you can’t win the lottery by crossing your fingers doesn’t mean you should knock-on-wood twice as hard.

I’ve got a better idea: Every time you feel tempted to click on that headline about the latest debates, every time you’re tempted to unmute the campaign commercial or click “play” on that dreadful gaffe posted to YouTube, every time you find yourself on the verge of forwarding some news about the campaign to your friends… get up, walk calmly to the bathroom sink, and floss your teeth.

Most people don’t floss their teeth nearly often enough. I know I don’t. But flossing can prevent painful tooth decay, embarrassing and off-putting bad breath, infectious disease, and apparently even (through mechanisms still under investigation) heart disease. By flossing, you practice inexpensive preventative medicine that will contribute to your better flourishing while at the same time it reduces the likelihood that you will need expensive medical care.

Make a disaster preparation kit. Check your smoke detector batteries. Read a good book. Bake cookies for a neighbor. Any of those things would be better for you and your community than participating in the Election 2016 foofaraw. I bet you’ve got some even better ideas.

But please don’t vote. And encourage your friends and loved ones not to vote as well. Don’t feel like you have to participate in discussing the foibles of the candidates or comparing their “positions,” and don’t be afraid to be utterly ignorant of the horse race. Be proud of it! As it is, I couldn’t pick Jeb Bush or Mike Huckabee or Carly Fiorina or Ben Carson out of a photo lineup, but I’d be even happier if I’d never heard their names.

If you decide now that you’re not going to vote and that you’re not going to encourage other people’s political baloney either, you are immediately freed from any obligation to follow the campaign trivia. You’ll be happier, more productive and helpful, and less of an annoyance to your friends and family. Heave a sigh of relief. Get your “Delete”-clicking finger ready, and start daydreaming about what you’re going to do with all of your extra time, mental energy, and social capital.

My call for Americans to stop participating in the presidential election process was picked up by the Center for a Stateless Society: “Please don’t Vote. It’s Worse than Worthless. There are Alternatives.”

In our chronological stroll through the newspaper coverage of the “passive resistance” campaign against the Education Act, we’re now up to June 1904, and the movement has been growing for over a year now.

The Bedfordshire Advertiser of 3 June 1904 covered a meeting of the Luton Passive Resistance League. The coverage is notable for how it describes one of the attendees carefully itemizing the school budgets and the sources of the funding devoted to the schools in order to come up with the appropriate amount of the rates to resist:

The executive recommended the members to deduct 2d. in the £ from the rateable value set out in the middle column in the demand note. The Committee further recommended them to pay their rate at the office in Church-street if the collector did not call upon them before June 29^th, so that they would be in the first police court batch. The summonses would be issued, if magistrates could be found willing to sign them (laughter) on June 29^th, and the sale would probably be held about July 14^th.

More and more I’m noticing in the rhetoric of speakers associated with the movement a hope that a change in government (from Conservative to Liberal) will solve their problem. Before this time, the Nonconformist vote had been split between the parties, but the Education Act controversy caused many Nonconformists to abandon the Conservatives. However this was a time when Labour was just beginning to cut into the Liberal vote. Also, Irish voters were not sympathetic to the anti-clericalism of the Nonconformists. The Conservative government was also trying to change the subject by introducing tariff reform and trying to lure voters back that way (that government had been elected largely on the issue of the Second Boer War, which ended in 1902). So despite the rallying of Nonconformist voters, and the championing of their cause by Liberal politicians on the rise like David Lloyd George, an electoral triumph was no sure thing.

In fact, though, the country would finally get a Liberal prime minister in late 1905, and the Liberals would hold that office until 1922. But they would find it difficult to repeal the offensive portions of the Act (if indeed they really cared to), and the passive resistance campaign would continue.

The impression I get is that the Liberals were trying to ride the wave of indignation without committing themselves to the goals of the passive resisters… much in the same way that Republicans address Tea party rallies with insincere promises to abolish the IRS, or MoveOn tries to convince progressives and liberal peaceniks that the Democrats are totally on their side.

Anyway, at the meeting, Rev. W.J. Harris tried to strike a balance between raising hopes and managing expectations:

Twenty thousand summonses had now been signed, and the opposition to the Act to-day was more dogged and resolute than ever (applause). The Government had revived and it was a question whether at the next election their own party would secure a sufficient majority to wipe out the injustice. He thought the Irish would vote against them, for they were not yet freed from the tyranny of the Romish priesthood. They must not lose heart if they did not win at once, but must be willing to go before the magistrate fifty times if necessary.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• The New England Gathering of War Tax Resisters is going to be held from October 14^th to 16^th in Hardwick, Massachusetts. Details will be posted to the NWTRCC website eventually.
• The Tax Policy Center takes a closer look at those Americans who successfully pay zero income and payroll tax (about 27% of us, they estimate).
• NWTRCC is hiring a field organizer / outreach consultant. If you think you might be interested, you can find the details here.
• Hundreds of separatists in Trieste have stopped paying taxes to the Italian government.
• Erica Weiland, at the NWTRCC blog, examines the sorry set of presidential candidates we’re being asked to choose from and wonders if there’s any reason for a war tax resister to vote.
• Germán Treuz, the curate of Alcira Gigena, Argentina, caused a ruckus when he refused to pay a road toll recently, complaining that the road had not been properly maintained for years and was in poor condition. His act “had a large impact on society because he is a very well-known person,” said the mayor, and other people have come forward saying that they, too, refuse to pay for such a shoddy road. Treuz later told a radio audience: “The tollgate can be raised easily, so I say to the people: don’t pay these thieves.”
• A college student has created a chatbot legal advisor to help people fight parking and traffic tickets in select cities. So far it has successfully overturned $4 million in parking tickets.
• The IRS continues to get spanked for its former policy of stealing money from people it alleged were “structuring” bank deposits — that is, making many deposits of small amounts over time in order to avoid the reporting requirements of large deposits. In one recent development, the agency was forced to return $29,500 from a Maryland dairy farmer. The Institute for Justice did much of the work involved in forcing the IRS to return the money in this and other cases and to change its policies.
• U.C. Irvine law professor Omri Marian expects bitcoins to be the next “super tax havens.” He says:

  From a tax-evasion point of view, they are particularly attractive. Cryptocurrencies possess the two most important characteristics of a traditional tax haven. First, because there is no jurisdiction in which they operate (they are “held” in cyberspace accounts known as online “wallets”), they are not subject to taxation at source. Second, cryptocurrency accounts are anonymous. Users can start as many online “wallets” as they want to buy or mine Bitcoins and trade them without ever providing any identifying information.

  Significantly, Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) offer one additional major advantage to tax-evaders that traditional tax havens do not: the operation of Bitcoin is not dependent on the existence of financial intermediaries such as banks. Bitcoin is exchangeable peer-to-peer by definition. Bitcoin thus seems immune to the developing international anti-evasion regime [in which] financial institutions [are] the emerging agents of tax collection… Thus, cryptocurrencies have the potential to become super tax havens.

  Bitcoin transactions are not anonymous by default. Indeed, there is a permanent record of every bitcoin transaction that is fully available to law enforcement. If you want to use bitcoin anonymously you have to take careful steps to do so.
• Here’s another example of someone paying taxes with a huge quantity of low-denomination money as a protest.
• There’s a bit of interesting background in this IRS research paper about the process the agency goes through when it detects that someone has failed to file a tax return.

Some tax resistance links that have scrolled by in recent days:

• Did you miss the national gathering of NWTRCC? Catch up by reading this blog report on the gathering, videos of panels and presentations, photos, reports from the various workshops, and coordinating committee business minutes.
• Last month I noted that a chapter of one of the largest political parties in the Democratic Republic of the Congo had called for a tax strike against the Kabila autocracy. That call has now been joined by organization Lucha, based in North Kivu, which is asking citizens to stop paying taxes, utility bills, fees, royalties, and licenses until Kabila steps down.
• Departing IRS chief John Koskinen, in his final news conference, warned that continuous budget cuts have pushed the agency to the breaking-point. A catastrophic malfunction of the agency’s decrepit information technology “is not a question of whether, simply a question of when,” he said. In addition, budget cuts and personnel losses have reduced the agency’s ability to credibly deter tax evasion. “If people think that many others are not paying their fair share or that they’re not going to get caught if they cheat… our voluntary compliance system will be put at risk,” Koskinen said. “A 1% drop in the compliance rate translates into a revenue loss of over $30 billion every year.”
• Howard Waitzkin, in Monthly Review looks at some of the prospects for would-be revolutionaries in “the Global North,” including the potential for tax resistance as a revolutionary activity. Excerpt:

  Besides direct action, revolutionaries can change what we do with our money, especially in the realms of taxes, investments, and local economic activities. Such changes can disrupt, undermine, and create space for further revolutionary actions. We in the 99 percent persist as the main funders of the capitalist state, which passes our money on to corporations that exploit workers, destroy nature, raise the earth’s temperature, and keep us in permanent war and perpetual inequality. We need to change our habits of giving up our money, and if enough of us do so, the capitalist state no longer will be able to prop up the capitalist economy for the benefit of the ultra-rich.

  Tax resistance can take several forms. For more than a century, pacifists in the United States have resisted taxes that pay for war, some eventually going to prison but the vast majority, like me, suffering no substantial harm as a result. As a card-carrying conscientious objector, I openly resisted half of my income taxes for more than a decade during and after the Vietnam War. If one honestly declares one’s income, there is nothing illegal about claiming a war deduction of 50 percent, which is the approximate percentage of the federal budget that pays for past, present, and future wars. Later, with a young daughter, I was starting to feel inconvenienced and a little bored by appeal procedures inside and outside the Internal Revenue Service because of open tax resistance. So I reluctantly made the same decision that Trump and his ilk make, to avoid taxes through loopholes rather than resistance of conscience.

  The problem with either explicit or implicit tax resistance is that we number in the thousands rather than millions. “Death and taxes,” the two inevitabilities, as we are taught, seem hard to resist, but corporations and rich individuals understand very well that at least taxes actually are not inevitable. In Latin America, tax resistance usually proceeds according to the Trump model for corporations and the rich, but ordinary people can succeed in massive tax resistance through non-reporting or under-reporting of income. During the dictatorships in the Southern Cone, the autocratic governments had trouble raising sufficient tax revenues, despite extensive attempts through bureaucratic and police surveillance, and tax resistance became one of many tactics to bring down those regimes. Ironically, a major motivation in Cuba for allowing expansion of private small businesses involves a perception that private-sector business activities were expanding anyway, along with rampant tax evasion; if permitted officially, small businesses could generate substantial taxes for social programs. Even in Cuba, tax resistance has interacted with political organizing in Poder Popular and community-based organizations to enhance popular participation. As a revolutionary strategy in the United States, tax resistance must flourish, so millions of us stop functioning as the main financiers for the capitalist state.

• John Stoner, at Mennonite World Review, invites Mennonite taxpayers to find the courage to be a conscientious objector. Excerpt: “In the United States, conscription has ended and we as persons are not conscripted for war. But war goes on unobstructed, because our money is conscripted. We could be conscientious objectors to war by being conscientious objectors to taxation for war. So, why aren’t we conscientious objectors to taxation for war?”
• Businesses in Tunisia have responded to surprise tax hikes by vowing not to pay.
• 10 million American taxpayers were hit with penalties for failing to pay their quarterly estimated taxes on time. This number has risen 40% since the beginning of the decade. The IRS seems to believe this is because of an increasing number of people working in the “gig economy” who aren’t aware that they are legally responsible for making these quarterly payments.
• Michael Goldstein brazenly commits a federal crime by urging people to refuse to pay the federal taxes that purchase our next nuclear war. It’s also a crime to incite tax resistance in Italy, apparently, but La Legge per Tutti can help you find the contours of that prohibition.
• Unicorn Riot has posted a series of articles on Alternative Economies & Community Currencies in Greece. And Commons Transition has published an in-depth study of the Catalan Integral Cooperative.
• I’m going to try to wait to comment on the tax bill oozing through Congress until something actually becomes law, but Calvin H. Johnson couldn’t wait. He says that the proposed tax cuts will push the U.S. federal debt past the point where it threatens the stability of the fisc. And not a moment too soon.

Finally, this interesting data point on American politics destroys the polis:

Using smartphone-tracking data and precinct-level voting, we show that politically divided families shortened Thanksgiving dinners by 20–30 minutes following the divisive 2016 election. This decline survives comparisons with 2015 and extensive demographic and spatial controls, and more than doubles in media markets with heavy political advertising. These effects appear asymmetric: while Democratic voters traveled less in 2016, political differences shortened Thanksgiving dinners more among Republican voters, especially where political advertising was heaviest. Partisan polarization may degrade close family ties with large aggregate implications; we estimate 27 million person-hours of cross-partisan Thanksgiving discourse were lost in 2016 to ad-fueled partisan effects.

Another reason why you should ignore the presidential elections.

In other news…

• An international conference on war tax resistance is planned for later this year in Edinburgh, Scotland. It will also be the occasion for the general assembly of Conscience & Peace Tax International.
• The war on traffic-ticket-generating radar cameras continues, with several destroyed by rebels in France using fire and spray paint, and another destroyed by an accident it contributed to in Germany.
• Facebook has decided it will ban advertising that discourages people from voting. This should go to show that censorship is of course going to be practiced on behalf of the already powerful (who have the power to censor) and against unpopular heresies. But, you know, polite liberal golf claps is about all I hear.
• A poll of expatriate U.S. citizens showed that many are contemplating renouncing their U.S. citizenship, largely because of the tax (and onerous tax reporting) burden.
• Businesses in Pakistan are on strike to protest a sales tax increase.
• An IRS building in Kansas City, Missouri was shut down by a hazmat team because of “a brown substance on a package” discovered by an employee.

I’ve developed the bad habit lately of annoying my friends. When one of them posts a get-out-the-vote election-boosting thing on the Facebook or somewhere, I’ll sometimes take a brief potshot at their sacred cow, and include a link to my anti-voting manifesto.

The disadvantage of being on the don’t-vote side of the argument is that you’re mostly alone against the orthodoxy and people start off dead-set against agreeing with you whatever your arguments are. The advantage is that your arguments are better — first because you’re right, which makes forming correct arguments easier; and second, because thanks to the intransigence of your audience you have to try that much harder.

There are some good pro-voting arguments that are nuanced and difficult to refute (though this is not necessarily enough to make them convincing), but by and large when I see people promoting voting or trying to shoot down anti-voting arguments, their reasoning is mostly lazy smoke-blowing and glittering generalities instead. This seems to be because when you already have most people on your side you don’t feel like you have to try very hard.

But recently a couple of my friends took the bait and tried to argue me out of my position. The two main forks of my argument can be summarized as: 1) voting isn’t helpful, and you do nothing to make anything better by voting; 2) participating in the election spectacle is harmful and diverts your focus from things that would be helpful. Wisely, I think, my friends focused on prong #2, which, I have to admit, I ask you to believe mostly on the strength of rhetoric and plausibility rather than math and logic, as it’s not quite as cut-and-dried that way.

They believed I was unfairly discounting some plusses of participating in the election process that don’t depend on it being directly helpful or effective. For example:

1. People who participate in elections thereby educate themselves somewhat about the structure of the government and the various issues under debate, and this might be helpful in making them more effective at making change.
2. In the course of debate about the election they may be inspired to take action on various issues they hear about in a more direct, non-electorally vicarious way.
3. Participating in the election gives people hope that they have the power to make change — it’s a beneficial way to encourage people to envision a different, better polity. In the absence of this hope, people may become discouraged and give up. When I tell people “voting won’t help” they may hear “nothing you do will help” and so they may retreat into passive helplessness.

For points #1 & #2, I’m willing to concede and throw those possible positives into my calculation of the benefits and harms of voting, though I don’t think it changes the end result much. Getting people excited about voting so that they can then become educated about the structure of government and learn about ways they might take direct action is an awfully Rube Goldbergy way to go about it. Perhaps it is effective to some extent, but it’s awfully inefficient. And voting doesn’t seem necessary to this process, merely arguably sufficient. In the absence of voting, would nothing more efficient and less harmful fill that void? I suppose that could be argued, but I’d need convincing.

Point #3 however I think is entirely backwards. I want to put in a good word for hopelessness. I want to encourage people to abandon hope in the electoral process and do something useful instead, in the same way that I want to encourage someone with a malignant tumor to stop watching faith healers on TV and make an appointment with an oncologist. The time has come, say I, for you to get seriously hopeless. Not because there is no hope, but because your hope lies elsewhere.

There’s a common alcoholic metaphor I’ve heard, about looking for the solution to your problems at the bottom of the bottle. After a while, the alcoholic’s problems largely are subsumed into their drinking problem, but they keep returning to drinking as a way of trying to solve it. Even when they eventually decide to quit, they search for some way they can drink their way out of their drinking — by drinking strategically, only at certain times or in certain amounts or of certain varieties of booze. At some point, if they really want to solve their problem, they have to give up that hope. They have to lose hope so they can find it again. They have to loosen their grip on the bottle so their hands are free to grasp a different hope that might actually deliver.

I think it’s the same story with voting. The more you imagine voting your way into a better world, the less likely you are to actually live in that world. In order to change things for the better, you really have to give up on that bad habit for good, and address your problems directly. You have to put down the pencil, turn your back on the voting booth, walk out determined never to return, and put your hope somewhere else instead.