Election 2014: Don’t believe the hype

Right on cue, Americans are starting to take responsibility for the future of our country. We’re obsessing over cable news and fuming over the latest outrageous thing some demagogue or radical politician said. We’re volunteering for political campaigns, donating to candidates, working phone banks, knocking on doors, and handing out pamphlets. We’re paying attention to polls.

These would be welcome developments if they marked the beginning of some long-term trend of civic engagement – but we all know how this works. It’s election time, and that means that we’re in for a frenzy of passion and activism for the next few weeks…followed by nearly two years of instant and absolute apathy starting on November 5th.

“Essentially, the election is a method of marginalizing the population,” philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky writes. “A huge propaganda campaign is mounted to get people to focus on these personalized quadrennial extravaganzas and to think, ‘That’s politics’. But it isn’t. It’s only a small part of politics.”

The election’s already decided

Around this time last during the last election, I infuriated an endless parade of Republican dead-enders by pointing out that Barack Obama had already won.

This time – and for the exact same reasons – I’m making a different prediction: the GOP is quite obviously going to take back the Senate, probably with a 52 seat majority.

I don’t expect the same kind of backlash from Democrats, since we still live in the reality-based community and tend not to base our predictions entirely on wishful thinking. We’ve all known about the fundamentals for months, and the left has long been resigned to the structural inevitabilities of American elections.

That’s the point that deserves further attention, because all of our political leaders going to spend the next several weeks denying it. The myth is that your personal investment  – your time, your energy, your enthusiasm to win, your outrage at the opposition, your attention to the issues, your willingness to “take a stand,” your participation on Twitter, your word count as a blogger, your persuasiveness with your friends, your engagement with skeptics, and even your financial donations – the myth is that all of these things that you can personally do will have some kind of appreciable impact on what happens.

Give up

That myth obviously isn’t even remotely true.

Let’s put it this way. As a matter of basic math, if you want to influence the outcome of an election, your best bet is to buy a lottery ticket, hit the jackpot, and donate it to the campaign of your choice. That is astronomically more likely to work than spending that same amount of time casting a vote, or knocking on doors, or making phone calls.

Any amount of effort you can put into a campaign can be instantly neutralized by a paid canvasser or a surge of direct mail flyers, and those can be bought for a pittance from the accounts of people who are much, much wealthier than you. The failure to grasp this is a failure to appreciate just how obscenely rich your plutocrat overlords actually are. Think you can overcome that with persuasive advocacy based on facts and logic? Good luck getting your message heard when all the Koch brothers need to do is turn up the volume.

A challenge

The good news is that change in the United States has rarely come through the ballot box. The history of progress in our country is a history of strikes, community organizing, civil disobedience – and uncivil disobedience.

But to succeed, we have to stop depending on elections to solve everything. And to do that, we need to disengage from electoral politics, and from the endless hype machine that tries to channel all of our political energy into caring about candidates.

That’s why I’m going to issue this challenge.

• If your candidate is polling within the margin of error in your district, spend as much time campaigning as you like.

• Otherwise: it should really take just about 15 minutes of reading to figure out who you want to support. And 15 more minutes of entering your credit card information, if you want to make a donation. And an hour and a half to vote – max – based on average wait times.

So unless your election is within that +/- 3% zone, you shouldn’t spend more than two hours on it. No watching debates, no kitchen-table conversations with your friends or family, no scowling at yard signs. Don’t let gross rich people and powerful politicians spend the next month monopolizing your time and energy.

This isn’t an invitation to political apathy. If you get the impulse to get involved in elections, just ask yourself: “What could I do that would really, actually make a difference?” And do that instead.