I realize that this isn’t a wise thing to do or admit, but most of my social media use is on Tumblr. I very rarely go beyond simply curating a feed of memes and text, only occasionally adding my own voice: it’s the safest way to avoid going viral, which isn’t the goal on tumblr, but a very unpleasant experience to me. It happened with one of my posts, and I’ve avoided it ever since.

Given the nature of the segment of the platform’s user base that I follow (unlike other social media, Tumblr makes it pretty easy to only see the people you’ve decided to follow. That and the option for a purely chronological interface are why I use it.) the overturning of Roe v. Wade was a major blow. The the revelation that the court intended to come for Griswold v. Connecticut (contraception) and Obergefell v. Hodges and (most likely) Lawrence v. Texas, both of which are essential for the freedom and legal existence of the queer community, was seen as a major threat as well.

This led to a great deal of discussion, in that uniquely useless way you find on social media, about political strategy. As usual, the discussion shrank from attacking the right to punching left – specifically, the anti-electoral left. The thought was that the right wing got here through voting, so surely the problem was that there were people on the left who thought that voting was a bad idea.

The Army of God didn’t “just vote” — they’re a right-wing terrorist organization whose ideals are embraced by the Republican Party.

This, of course, betrays almost as bad a grasp of history as the court did when they argued that abortion had no roots in the traditions of the United States (bold of them to claim we have traditions, and bold of them to claim that abortion as a practice hasn’t existed longer than the United States.) This ignores the targeted killing of abortion providers, the hundreds to thousands of instances of property crime – including arson, bomb threats (both real and purported) – as well as such events as the attempted auction of paraphernalia associated with these illegal actions.

While killing an abortion doctor and then the gun being auctioned off to pay for legal defense may not seem to be “political” in the same way that voting is, you have to understand that both of these things are political, and the space between them is also political.

This also ignores the fact that illegal actions have been taken to steal elections – I refer here not to the “big lie” of the 2020 election, but to the “Brooks Brothers Riot” of the 2000 Florida Recount, which involved three of the nine sitting Supreme Court Justices, all of whom voted to overturn Roe.

The assertion that we got here because the Republicans “just voted” is idiocy.

We got here because the Democratic Party Line is to “just vote” – ignoring a number of legal, semi-legal, and illegal tactics that the other side has been using for half a century.

Does this mean that you shouldn’t vote?

I would argue this isn’t necessarily the case. However, if your political engagement ends with voting, then you’re a rube. Doubly so if it’s just voting and posting. If that’s all that you do, then you’re just greasing up a machine that has one end in sight – things ratcheting rightward without end. You’re giving it legitimacy.

Anyone arguing for electoralism as a stance — especially electoral fundamentalism, where one *only* votes — has to respond to the anti-electoral critique.

However, I think that anti-electoralism is a valid stance to take. I even take it temporarily, at times, especially for rhetorical effect. How can I not? I would never vote for the Republicans, and what has the Democratic Party done for me lately? Please note: by lately, I mean “within the time frame of my life.” Looking at the numbers, it definitely seems that no one has my interests at heart. This does not mean that I should – or that I will – disengage. What it means is that my political involvement must necessarily take on a character beyond the “just vote” crowd’s advised position.

Instead, to have any effect, I must adopt a (metaphorically) insurgent mindset, and look for ways that I can change the rules of the game so that I and people who share my values can have an effect. Because the Democratic Party would die before taking one step leftward, “voting” is fairly far down the list, because when they say “compromise”, they mean “compromise with the people who want me immiserated and/or dead” not “adopt commonsense progressive positions like climate change mitigation or free college or free healthcare.”

Here is an incomplete list of approaches that can be taken, including both individual and collective action.

Letters to the Editor

An individual, low-effort tactic – which means also, a low-effect tactic. However, if you find yourself isolated from those who feel as you do, you must do what you can. Writing letters to the editor is, stereotypically, the province of lonely retirees, however, it is a way to get your words in front of more people. You can’t bank on virality, but you may be able to sway one or two people, and if you keep at it, you may be able to find a way to contact these people and move on to collective tactics.

Become a Nuisance

Yes, we’ve all seen resistbot, we know that there are phone numbers for state and federal elected officials, but did you know that you can just call up the zoning commission and make yourself a nuisance because they keep approving five-over-ones? Or mock them for thinking that buildings that lack overhangs are a good idea? How about showing up to a meeting of your school board and shouting down the red-pilled, arguing for more treatment of race and gender or more accurate history textbooks? Or just removing The Great Gatsby from the high school curriculum for being a subpar book?

Engage in Mutual Aid

There are many mutual aid organizations that sprang up in the wake of the pandemic, and with a bit of work you can find local collectives. They need materials and they need willing hands. By pledging time and resources to such groups, you can help to support people that are being victimized by state power. Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, providing for the destitute, and providing homes for the unhoused should be the common task of all humanity, but it is important to meet people where they are and give them agency over it. For this reason, I believe that mutual aid organizations are superior to charities. This will also allow you to link up with like-minded people for actions that require collective support.

Organize a Teach-In

Invite people to sit around a firepit in your back yard and talk. Or, failing that, and for a more formal bet, you can set something up at a sympathetic coffee shop, commandeer a room at a community center or school building (usually they have some means to do this legally) and host a meeting with members of the community and talk through a political issue, and try to build solidarity around a particular idea or cause. Share your expertise, or invite someone else to do so and talk through the issue – but I would caution you not to do so in a hierarchic fashion: expertise is valuable and real, but can crop up in places you don’t expect.

Organize a Protest

I’m not going to tell you whether or not you should do something illegal, but you shouldn’t make your tactic “break the law and then immediately turn yourself in”. Just going to say, that sounds like a bad idea.

I would argue that protests are not as common as most people think – when I was in high school, I attended protests against the Iraq War, but most of our time was spent standing by the side of the road holding up signs. This is a purely spectacular action (and I use “spectacular” here to mean “of or relating to spectacle” as opposed to making a definite change.) Most protests that take place on the weekend or in the evening are the same way. Allow me to offer a critique: the best time for a protest is 11:45 AM on a weekday, specifically, aim for financial districts and places where a lot of normal people congregate. A protest should not be a spectacle. It should be a domesticated riot. By this, I mean the goal is not to damage something, it is to indicate displeasure. The best way to do that is to raise the operating cost of the status quo. This is not violence, this is inconvenience. By raising operating costs and doing so consistently, the other side of the equation can be forced to make adjustments. If you work strategically, this can lead to changes that would take much longer through the normal process.

Organize

Forming an affinity group or union is a major task. Many people think that they can get on social media and declare a general strike. This is foolish. You need to lay groundwork for any action of this sort: you need to stockpile resources and save money to cover your basic needs, you need to work together so that if one person is harmed, all may respond. The goal of a union is similar to that of a protest, but it is persistent and it is targeted: raise the operating cost of status quo beyond what the other side can pay, open the space for them to make errors and exhaust themselves.

Theorize

This is what I’m trying to do in many of my pieces on this website, and it isn’t something that I would advise most people do (though I do encourage comments and invite feedback, allowing a sort of long-range collaboration.) The reason is that it’s honestly way less effective than the other ones and I freely admit that. The idea here is to craft the sort of ideas and cognitive tools that can be picked up in the other tactics that I mention above and acted upon. The Neoliberal orthodoxy emerged through the crisis of the 1970s because those were the ideas on hand, and the suppression of other ideas through the 2008 crisis allowed this orthodoxy to limp on to the much worse crisis of the 2020s. If we are to escape some worse fate, it is necessary to have some kind of theoretical groundwork for other ideas – but this theory must be grounded in a variety of perspectives. Because everything but the ultra-orthodox economics of the Chicago School was shunted out of the mainstream, we ended up in the world that we’re in.

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These seven options are just a small handful of the options available to us – and voting is simply an eighth option that political action can follow. I’m not convinced that it is wholly useless: if it was, then they wouldn’t prevent felons from voting or restrict the ability for minority communities to vote.

Wikipedia’s image for the Overton Window, used under a CC BY-SA 2.0 license.

However, reducing everything down to just vote is not madness, it’s idiocy. It’s demanding that you ignore all of the other options available to you and just lie back and take it. If you insist on taking other actions, you can force the hegemonic powers of society to adjust their course of action. You can shift the Overton Window and force a change in the conversation.

If this change doesn’t happen, we’re going to continue to slide to the right, and the current situation – with the rights of women and minority populations being curtailed, the essential functions of the state being bartered off for political favors, and the thermometer creeping higher and higher.

If we want this to change, we have to act.

And that means we have to do more than just vote.

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“Just Vote”: Electoral Fundamentalism as Failure Mode