Who are the non-voters? Vote-shaming, the Catholic Worker, and 2020
My introduction to CTA a few years ago coincided with my introduction to the Catholic Worker movement. While participating in the Re/Generation program, I lived and worked at Maryhouse, one of the Catholic Worker houses in New York City. I often think about the similarities and contradictions between these two movements. Though my dual commitment to church reform and the Catholic Worker is fairly common, each movement can learn and grow from engagement with the other. The Catholic Worker is radical in its condemnation of capitalism, racism, fascism, and imperialism; it draws directly upon the rich well of scripture. CTA’s primary source is the Second Vatican Council, which inspires us to reform the Catholic Church and center justice for people of color, women, and LGBTQ people. The radical tradition of the Catholic Worker can push us CTA members to deepen our commitments to racial and economic justice — in the context of electoral politics and beyond.
As the 2020 general election approaches, people (and corporations) would have you believe that non-voters are in league with the devil himself. “Not voting is not an option.” “If you don’t vote, you are too privileged to care what happens to other people.” “Vote blue no matter who.” Everything from Facebook to my mom’s crafting magazines is telling me to VOTE.
Online, I’ve seen much of this messaging directed toward perfectionist, hard-to-please left-liberals. It comes primarily from liberals who have little understanding of the political left. They see voting as the be-all and end-all of political engagement, and their current anger with the left can be traced to the belief that Bernie Sanders lost the 2016 national election for Hillary Clinton. Sanders supporters didn’t show up for Clinton, their accusers say, which led to Trump’s election. Left-liberal Sanders supporters who do not vote are therefore privileged, willing to watch the world burn because their man didn’t win his primary.
People who center this argument don’t acknowledge Trump’s populist appeal or why Clinton’s neoliberal agenda didn’t land. They don’t think that Biden has an obligation to win over people who lie to his left. They ignore that the Democratic Party has sidelined the left since the Clinton administration, not least through a strategy called “counter-scheduling” in which Clinton picked public fights with leftist and working class constituencies to appeal to the corporate wing of the Party, a strategy that works under the assumption that those left and working class constituencies have to stay within the Party no matter how much its leaders ridicule or alienate them because they have no viable alternative. They ignore that the party has been re-tooled in the name of the professional managerial class, leaving the poor and working classes behind.
The “privileged leftist who throws a temper tantrum and refuses to vote because Biden doesn’t pass their purity test” is a red herring. It says more about who the accuser considers worthy of their attention and who the accuser dismisses entirely.
In 2018, Pew Research Center published an extensive report about the demographics of non-voters. Glenn Greenwald digs into that Pew data in an April 9, 2020 article in The Intercept titled “Nonvoters Are Not Privileged. They Are Disproportionately Lower-Income, Nonwhite, and Dissatisfied With the Two Parties.” The piece is worth reading in its entirety. It debunks the myth of the non-voting “New York and California leftist trust-funders,” analyzing who really doesn’t vote — and why. People who reported that they did not vote specifically because of their dissatisfaction with the candidates are disproportionately poorer and non-white. Again, this is not due to voter suppression: people who don’t vote are most likely to say that they choose not to do so because they are dissatisfied with the available choices or don’t believe that voting will better their lives. 56% of all non-voters make less than $30,000 a year. Almost half of non-voters are people of color even though people of color make up about a quarter of the population.
I recently saw a viral Facebook post claiming that memes and articles accurately articulating Biden’s positions on climate change, health care, immigration, or other left issues are all half-truths, often spread by Russian trolls to sow cynicism. Let me be clear: cynicism is not a Russian plot. It is the inevitable consequence of an unjust political and economic system.
Far more sinister than Russian memes is the national media that shows overwhelming bias in favor of a neoliberal agenda. Far more sinister is the Democratic Party machine that chooses each year’s nominee through behind-the-scenes machination. Far more sinister is the decades-long bipartisan consensus on making war, enriching elites, and exploiting the global poor.
As author John Loughery argued in a March 17, 2020 interview at LitHub, Dorothy Day would not have voted in 2020. This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with her life and work. Fear-mongering would not have swayed Dorothy. She lived through a century of real, cosmic, world-threatening evil and never voted. She remained firm and consistent in her principles.
Dorothy Day was a Catholic and an anarchist. She was not naïve, contrarian, disconnected, or under the impression that a perfect candidate would someday come along and justify casting a ballot. Her politics were personalist: she believed that each of us has a moral obligation to care for the other, like the Good Samaritan. We must personally clothe the naked and shelter the homeless because we are all part of the mystical body of Christ. She believed in prophetic witness against state violence. She believed that problems should be addressed on the smallest scale possible, which Catholic social teaching calls subsidiarity. Whether or not you agree with Dorothy, you must acknowledge that her political convictions are deeply grounded in Catholic tradition, sacred scripture, proximity to the poor and suffering, and radical thought. They reflect a serious, cohesive theology.
Some Catholic Workers do vote. Though they do not hew closely to that aspect of the movement’s philosophy, they are still Catholic Workers. The movement is a big tent. It has always been so, wracked (and blessed) by ideological differences and disputes. Some Catholic Workers supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. His populist economics resonated with their commitment to the poor. Sanders’s agenda is not consistent with Dorothy’s philosophy, but politics are messy and none of us live in the abstract. Political engagement is a negotiation among competing influences. The Catholic Church, conscience, social expectations, current events, and bad faith propaganda are among the many influences on our thought and action.
It’s one thing to follow one’s own conscience and vote, and another to dismiss a philosophy without serious engagement. Catholic Workers cannot vote-shame. “Vote-shaming” is telling people who don’t vote (or vote third-party) that they are stupid, evil, or the source of all the nation’s ills. It does not engage radical political traditions that have criticized the failures of the liberal nation-state to adequately represent and serve the people. It limits one’s political imagination. How can we build a new world without turning to the movements and thinkers who have challenged us to construct a new paradigm, a paradigm bigger and more liberating than holding our nose and choosing between two corrupt politicians every four years?
More importantly, though, vote-shaming demonizes people who do not vote — the multiracial poor and working classes. It dismisses their agency and intelligence. The Catholic Worker commitment to voluntary poverty should help one understand why people do not vote. If we live in real relationship with people who disproportionately do not vote, we should know better than to condemn them for this choice. Christian anarchism takes disaffected non-voters seriously in a way that a liberal hyper-focus on electoral politics does not. It holds real despair along real hope. It imagines something new and yet remains grounded in both tradition and experience.
As we approach the 2020 presidential election, emotions run high. We should discuss (and argue about) how we vote or don’t vote. We should share our deeply held convictions. We should not condemn the people who do not vote. If we do not share the circumstances and apathy of poor and working class people who believe that voting will not help them, we should not be so quick to deny their agency. If we are truly committed to economic and racial justice, this is an obligation. We must listen to people when they tell us that the system does not work for them, even if it largely works for us. Finally, we should engage the deep, radical currents of our Catholic tradition that help explain the brokenness of that system. The Catholic Worker movement is one such current that has the potential to carry us toward something new.
