On the “Conscience Vote” and the Role of Electoral Politics for the Revolutionary-Minded
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It’s long been a truism among many on the left that electoral politics is essentially a bankrupt avenue for seeking meaningful social change, much less for achieving a just and equitable society.
And often this rejection of electoral politics encompasses as well the belief that there is little to no consequential difference between the Democratic and Republican parties in terms of the outcomes of their policies for the majority of Americans. Each party, the standard belief goes, sits in the pocket of corporate America and does the bidding of the elite, offering no meaningful benefit or change for the average American and doing nothing to tip the balance of power in U.S. society.
I’ve heard left progressives voice this position this election season, so it’s alive and well, meaning the choice remaining for these folks is either to opt out of voting or, as we also often hear, to vote one’s conscience by supporting a third party candidate.
To the first option of simply sitting out the election, let me offer this food for thought. Why would one give up an opportunity to make a choice? Making this choice and taking what we can get at the moment in terms of improving people’s lives doesn’t prevent me from continuing to work for great social change.
Simply because one makes the choice before one in the moment doesn’t mean one has sacrificed one’s revolutionary ideals or given up on a longer term agenda for greater social transformation.
Yes, Kamala Harris has expressed her support for capitalism, so both candidates endorse capitalist class society.
So, yes, there will be no revolution, no overthrow of class society.
But what about making the choice one has, say, to protect women’s health and bodily autonomy? To protect what access to healthcare folks already have? To reject mass deportation? And so on.
It would be foolish, really, to say there are no material differences between these parties, so why not make the choice before one?
I’ll talk more about a typical left position on this question below in discussing the much more interesting issue of voting one’s conscience, but let’s turn to this matter of political conscience now.
First, let’s clarify what exactly it means, from both a purist and pragmatic perspective, to vote one’s conscience. The act of declaring one is voting one’s conscience as opposed to voting for the “lesser evil” has become, perhaps, a kind of default rhetorical flourish for asserting a principled ideological stand against compromising one’s values in casting one’s vote.
Maybe it is, but I think we need to explore exactly how this faculty we call the political conscience operates, and how its function positions us as individuals in the larger set of social relationships our political actions hope to influence, even transform?
What I want to suggest is that voting one’s conscience as I’ve defined it thus far is not really a radical act or position but rather indicates a radical lack of empathy.
Let’s resist this lesser evil narrative that is so deeply and uncritically entrenched in the political consciousness of many progressives, including my own, and reflect on what it means to vote one’s conscience and also what it means to vote for the greater good.
Exploring this issue, let me fuel up with some plutonium the flux capacitor in my political time machine confessional. Back in 2000, following my conscience, in one sense of that phrase, I cast my vote for Ralph Nader. When I say I voted my conscience, I mean I voted for the candidate who most closely aligned with my ideological orientation regardless of whether or not the candidate was considered to have a chance at winning the election. I believe this is generally what people mean when they talk about voting their conscience—that they voted according to a sense of commitment to the rightness of their political beliefs and values.
When I look back, however, granted that hindsight is 20/20, I see what I take to be a more layered and complex way of thinking about what it means to vote one’s conscience. Knowing what I know now, that Bush and Cheney pushed us into a war devastating to the nation and the globe, I certainly would not have been voting against my conscience to cast a vote for Gore to stop Bush and Cheney. In this case, voting for the candidate who most closely aligned with my political beliefs even if it meant potentially aiding the election of two people who would unleash untold destruction and harm on the people of our nation and the globe would not have been voting my conscience. Voting my conscience would have meant stopping the monsters of Bush and Cheney.
While perhaps I couldn’t have known then the full monstrosity and inhumanity that the Bush/Cheney administration would become, this election cycle seems to reveal pretty clearly the monstrousness of Trump and the potential damage he could unleash on people’s lives at home and abroad. Voting my conscience in this scenario is more complex than simply an ideological purity test, determining which candidate espouses a politics most closely aligned with my own.
My point is not to tell people how to vote or what their conscience dictates, but to raise questions about what it means to vote one’s conscience and to interrogate the ideological purity or alignment test as overly simplistic.
Voting one’s conscience, in a more expansive sense, can mean voting according to a rationale that exceeds my own sense of the rightness of my political ethos and takes into consideration what my vote would mean for many other sectors of our population living and suffering outside of my particular experiential orbit. In short, it requires that act of empathy some of our politicians have called for in addressing the problem of racism, which means moving beyond our limited realm and taking into account the needs and experiences of others. In today’s context that means thinking about women’s and immigrant’s rights and more.
The type of voting behavior I describe here entails giving urgent consideration to how one’s vote will impact others’ lives, not just how well it aligns with our personal sense of what is right. A version of conscience that asks us to follow our own beliefs narrowly, potentially discourages us from listening to the external voices around us to make a decision grounded in an awareness of collective need.
I’m not sure the concept of “conscience” is even a proper term here. We may need a new lexicon, given the term’s use and development in our cultural tradition. Perhaps the chief theorist to elevate individual conscience as a political faculty was Henry David Thoreau in his classic essay “Resistance to Civil Government.” He states in this essay, reflecting on his political and social responsibility as an individual, “The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think is right.” This he concludes in response to his question, “Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator?”
Thoreau’s thinking here is firmly rooted in and shaped by the romantic individualist tradition, which brings me to wonder about the way this concept of conscience, when exercised in a political function, tends to be rooted in an individualist ethos divorced from genuine collective concern. The conscience, as Thoreau conceives it, can easily disregard the needs of the collective. Indeed, for Thoreau in this famous essay, collective struggle and organization are beyond the pale of his political imagination, as his thinking is premised, unwittingly I believe, in a concept of the individual as already alienated from others. Thus, he can assert quite confidently and blithely, “I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of an engineer.” In other words, if society collapses and devolves into chaos, it’s not his problem—but, of course, he has a piece of land and a cabin on Walden pond and access to resources should social structures crumble.
Thinking about Thoreau’s essay reminds me of a Democracy Now! Episode from 2016 featuring a debate between Chris Hedges and Robert Reich about which candidate Bernie Sanders voters should support, after Sanders had exited the Democratic primary. For his part, Hedges made it clear that while he endorsed Jill Stein and the Green Party, his larger target is voting against and stopping what he calls “neoliberal poison,” which is larger than any individual political personality. For Hedges, achieving substantial change means thinking beyond an election cycle. Hedges declared that “reducing the election to personalities is kind of infantile at this point.” We have to vote for and against systems, not personalities. In elaborating this view, he points out, “We have to remember that 10 years ago, Syriza [a radical party], which controls the Greek government, was polling at exactly the same spot that the Green Party is polling now—about 4 percent. We’ve got to break out of this idea that we can create systematic change within a particular election cycle. We’ve got to be willing to step out into the political wilderness, perhaps, for a decade.” In response, for his part, Reich argued at the time that while he agrees with Hedges’ critique of neoliberalism, risking a Trump presidency “will not be just political wilderness, that will actually change and worsen the structure of this country.”
In thinking about this debate, while it might not be immediately apparent, I suggest we see Hedges’ willingness to risk embarking on the rough odyssey into the chaos of a political wilderness as a Thoreauvian act of conscience, meaning a an act rooted in individual ego and indulgence rather than a care and awareness of what the masses need most immediately and which can be addressed short-term in an election, if only partially, while we continue to organize collectively for change in the long-term.
More to the point, this romantic sense of conscience, a residue of bourgeois thought that continues to infect and stifle efforts like Hedges’ at formulating a progressive political narrative of change, seems to be a luxury premised on class privilege; that is, perhaps it is those socio-economically positioned to survive a chaotic upheaval, in a way the most vulnerable and precariously in need may not be able to, who can afford to listen to their individualist conscience and recommend the descent into wilderness, to endure a Trump presidency, regardless of how it impacts the rest of those with whom we are socially related. While revolution must disrupt the world as it is, it also requires organization. Hedges’ thrill for an errand into the wilderness seems more rooted in a romantic individualist stance against a system, his conscience, than a concern for the welfare of others that, in my view, necessarily emerge from a strong sense of existing in social relationship with others and from considering their lives and needs.
Perhaps the conscience of the protected if visionary intellectual is downplaying the immediate needs of our most vulnerable fellow citizens, insisting on an ideological narrative of change that will entail suffering for those most in need of aid, which he himself will not have to endure
Perhaps the choices of those like Reich to work within existing structures and attempt to invest those forms with a new radical content can be understood as a rejection of this highly individualist and purity-insistent conscience, unwilling to abandon the most needy to a desolate wilderness. Sanders back in 2016 easily could have chosen to run as an independent, in which case he might have by now drifted off into the margins, reduced to a figure of little consequence or influence. As it is, at least as evidenced by elements of the Democratic Party’s platform since 2016, he seems to have succeeded in bringing his ideas from the margins to the center.
Of course, when it comes to voting one’s conscience, we also need to remember that Thoreau put little stock in voting, dismissing it as “a sort of gaming, like chequers or backgammon.” He asserts, “Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail.” In short, for Thoreau voting one’s conscience is of little consequence. Finally what matters is one’s political activism and collective action (though Thoreau wouldn’t say that) that pushes politicians to respond to people’s needs and desires in the platforms and policies they craft.
A third party, or any genuine political alternative to the current duopoly, likely won’t be forged through an election. I agree with Hedges about that. That said, why let one’s vote potentially do harm by linking it to a narrow sense of conscience, lest we find ourselves in some other version of the Iraq war?
I am not suggesting we not act with conscience per se, but I am suggesting that the call on conscience tends to root us in an individualist stance that removes us from our relationship with the many others in our world and prevents us from seriously imagining the impact of our voting behavior on their lives. We might just need a different term, maybe something like “social justice” or the “public good” which takes us out of our individual sense of rightness to think in broader terms. Indeed, the very problem with neo-liberalism is its evacuation of the concept of a public good, its denial of its very validity, as it insists we are motivated only by private interests. Re-vitalizing the concept of the public good and centering it instead of the concept of conscience, could go a long way toward pushing us to develop a political imagination that recognizes our radical interdependence.
What does seem to matter, I would suggest, in the way we exercise our “conscience” in both voting and action is our ability to think through the effect of our choices not just on ourselves but on the many others with whom we are related in radically interdependent ways.