Noam Chomsky is 91 years old, but the legendary leftist academic still managed to make waves on social media last week simply by repeating the same thing he has said about every presidential election since (at least) JFK vs. Nixon. Once a presidential election clarifies down to a binary choice between two viable alternatives, he said yet again, we are obliged to vote for the better of those two alternatives.
Chomsky says this every four years with the same principled consistency he’s said everything else he’s had to say for the last 70 or so years. And every four years it causes a weird brief moment in which he gets praised and commended as a wise old man by the very same corporate centrist types who spend most of the other three years and 51 weeks of every quadrennial cycle dismissing him as a leftist crank, while at the same time he briefly gets anathematized as a sell-out and stooge by the very same leftier-than-thou types who spend most of the other three years and 51 weeks of said cycle hailing him as a hero and posting memes with quotes from Manufacturing Consent.
That latter group wails that Chomsky is “compromising his principles” when he offers his begrudging endorsements of Biden, Clinton, Obama, Kerry, Gore, Clinton, Dukakis, Mondale, Carter, McGovern, Humphrey, LBJ, etc., but that ain’t what’s happening. He’s not compromising his principles, he’s applying them. For Chomsky, as for everyone else in a democracy, having principles and sticking to them requires compromise not with those principles, but with other people.
Noam Chomsky is a guy who absolutely believes that American-style democracy has been corrupted by corporate interests wielding power that rightfully ought to belong to the people. Our elections, and especially our presidential elections, he has said — repeatedly — are “a corrupt system designed to limit choices to those acceptable to corporate elites.” And he has said, at great length, that there are many many ways we can and ought to be working diligently to change that. But none of those ways involves elevating one’s own personal sense of purity or of special identity by throwing away the compromised-but-still-significant act of voting to instead register one’s own indignation at the limited choices we are presented with every four years.
“Voting should not be viewed as a form of personal self-expression or moral judgement directed in retaliation towards major party candidates who fail to reflect our values,” Chomsky wrote four years ago. “Voting should not be viewed as a form of … retaliation towards … a corrupt system designed to limit choices to those acceptable to corporate elites.” Because the abdication of personal responsibility that such self-righteous protest votes entails is, itself, also one of the limited choices deemed acceptable to corporate elites.
I confess to understanding the allure of misperceiving voting as an opportunity to express my own personal moral superiority to both of the available candidates. I did this in 1996 by proudly refusing to vote for Bill Clinton after what I (correctly) perceived as the perverse immorality of his “welfare reform” scheme. I allowed myself to get worked up into thinking that my vote had something to do with my personal complicity in the cruel consequences of that policy rather than that vote being what it actually was — an opportunity to choose between Bill Clinton and his agenda and Bob Dole and his agenda, and nothing more. So I wrote in Wendell Berry as a “protest” vote.
The effect of that vote was not, as it turns out, a small ripple of a contribution to pressure the Democratic Party into offering us better future alternatives. Nor did it contribute, in any way, to a larger repudiation of Clinton’s welfare reform. In the grand scheme of things, the only effect of that vote, rather, was a slight diminishment of Bob Dole’s defeat in Pennsylvania.
But for me personally, the effect was much worse. I had approached voting as primarily a means of refusing to accept any share of personal responsibility for the outcome and thereby tricked myself into regarding my own irresponsibility as a sign of special virtue. And that is a very dangerous place to be — a bystander defiantly proud of standing by, convinced of my own goodness because my hands were as clean as Pilate’s.
I should have known better. I very specifically and emphatically should have known better because I was then, in the late 1990s, working for a nonprofit specifically dedicated to encouraging white evangelical Christians to get over themselves and to get over this very same form of self-righteously proud bystander-ism. I had written essays chastising my fellow white evangelicals for elevating some personal sense of personal purity above the concerns of their neighbors, thereby becoming like the priest and the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan. I’d preached sermons on James 1:27 — “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world” — condemning our self-righteous tendency to twist that into imagining that the best way “to keep oneself from being polluted by the world” was to avoid the distress of orphans and widows.
But I still slid into the very same trap, treating my vote as “a form of personal expression,” as though it were mainly a way of demonstrating and affirming my own personal virtue. Follow that to its logical conclusion and it quickly becomes clear that the Most Virtuous path is never to vote at all. And the Most Virtuous thing to do is nothing. Ever.
That sounds absurd when stated so plainly, the reward of greatest-possible virtue for the expense of the least possible effort. But in practice, in the moment, it’s subtly enticing, enchanting, and intoxicating. It takes so the anxiety that comes from seeing others more deeply engaged and more fully committed, tempting us to see them, instead, as merely more deeply compromised and more fully polluted. It mistranslates their worthy example into the smug reassurance that we’re better than they are because we’re not doing anything about anything.
And like any addictive drug, it requires us to continuously up the dosage, because we’ll need more and more of it to deal with the ever-more-acute anxiety caused by the ever-increasing gap between what we see others doing and what we know ourselves not to be doing — an anxiety that we’ll do our best to avoid identifying, accurately, as our conscience.
The point here is not just to argue that you shouldn’t flee from responsibility by throwing your vote away on a meaningless protest vote because you wish to preserve your own righteous purity in a world that refuses to provide you with purely virtuous and perfect choices. The point here is that presidential elections are far from the only occasion on which you will be tempted to put your own sense of personal purity and righteous virtue ahead of the actual righteous virtue that comes from taking the responsibility of choosing between whatever tainted, imperfect, fallible options are actually present, and there’s no surer way to defile yourself with the pollution of this world than by abandoning the responsibility to make such imperfect choices. That’s not the way to make yourself purer than anybody else, it’s just the way to make yourself insufferably self-righteous even as you leave widows and orphans to fend for themselves in their distress.
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