Actor and comedian Russell Brand caused something of a online firestorm when he discussed the edition of New Statesman magazine that he guest-edited in a recent interview with BBC anchor Jeremy Paxman. Brand argued that because the corrupt establishment serves elites rather than the electorate, people should refuse to vote. Voting, Brand claims, grants tacit approval of a toxic established order. Per this argument, voting for the lesser of two evils is foolish, because the kind of change that existing political parties offer only papers over a rotten foundation. Brand’s diagnosis of the current state of affairs contains a great deal of truth. His solution of not voting and waiting for revolution, however, misses the mark.
Brand delivers an analysis of the present political economy that is far more accurate than anything aired on Meet the Press. Brand asserts: “The planet is being destroyed; we are creating an underclass; we’re exploiting poor people all over the world and the genuine legitimate problems of the people are not being addressed.”
A cursory glance at the debates we’ve had in the United States in the past year shows that all these things are true. The Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report just this week finding increased deaths, infrastructure collapses, ecosystem failures, starvation and poverty likely given the current trajectory of political action. The topic of climate change itself has been a ghost in major discussions this year in the U.S. Instead we have focused on related issues such as the Keystone pipeline and the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed regulations on existing power plants.
The underclass that Brand describes is growing and becoming more impoverished by the day. The richest 400 Americans own more wealth than the 150 million poorest and 95 percent of the post-recession income gains have gone to the wealthiest 1 percent while most Americans’ wages have been flat for a decade. Close to 20 percent of Americans live within 125 percent of the poverty line and more than 50 million people are uncertain in their ability to purchase food. Socioeconomic mobility, long the popular conception of the American Dream, is more scarce now than anytime in recent memory.
As in the United Kingdom, the American political class seems incapable or unwilling to deal with struggles of ordinary people. The great progressive triumph of 2013 has been winning the debate to keep the government’s lights on while the elite obsession with budget deficits allows the unemployment crisis to persist. Even raising the debt ceiling, viewed as a political victory for Obama, was in many respects about protecting financial elites that have a corrosive influence on both major parties.
The year’s major national security stories, the Snowden NSA revelations and the debate about predator drone strikes have revealed many of Barack Obama’s broken promises to rein in Bush policies. Americans have registered their disgust with an average 8.9 percent approval for Congress and record-low approval numbers for Obama.
So why should Americans dignify this abysmal state of affairs with a ballot? The truth is many already don’t. The United States ranks 120th out of 169 countries on voter turnout, and about 47 percent of the voting-age population did not participate in the 2012 elections. Per Brand’s theory, such low participation should send a message to elites that Americans demand real alternatives, but this has not been the case. Brand is right that the levels of apathy and indifference we see is caused by design, but it has just descended into increased consumerism, alienation and atomization. It’s true that there’s bubbling populist dissent, as in the exciting Occupy protests, but it has yet to translate into a sustainable political movement.
The solution is to neither cheerlead the Democrats nor drop out of electoral politics until some revolution arrives. Resignation is unwarranted because voting for the least bad alternative is not incompatible with otherwise voicing dissent against a Democratic Party that has embraced neoliberal economic policy, the Bush paradigm for foreign affairs and, most crucially, subservience to finance capital.
Progressives on Election Day should engage in a collective act of nose-holding, go to the ballot box, and counteract reactionary voters who will always turn out no matter what. To say there are no differences between the candidates, as Brand suggests, is disingenuous and ignores the consequences of those differences for regular people.
The fact that there are differences, however, should not be an excuse for Democrats to pat themselves on the backs for not being as awful as the Republicans. Instead, the remaining 364 days of the year should be spent building the infrastructure for an alternative means of democratic expression beyond our existing framework. This includes organizing the working class and the poor, striving to empower immigrants and working for constitutional change to move beyond some of the constraints of the document that make America perhaps the most undemocratic developed country. Bringing something like New York’s Working Families Party to other states through changes in election law would be a good first step to gradually construct a more egalitarian coalition.
In order for there to be real change, people must no longer believe that, as Margaret Thatcher notoriously put it, “There is no alternative.” Right-wing forces will otherwise fill the vacuum that Brand foresees. It is up to people who believe in an egalitarian society to prove that there is a more equitable future that can be attained through social movements. Fighting fiercely for this vision is not contradicted by submitting a vote for a relatively better candidate, rather it provides an important stopgap measure to prevent things from getting worse and to hasten the arrival of a better society.
Gray Whisnant is an Viewpoint columnist for The Cavalier Daily.
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