Maybe you’ve seen this stat by now: At least twice as many people early voted in 2020 than in 2016. A quarter of those early votes are from people who didn’t vote in 2016 and 10% are from first-time voters.
It’s a hopeful fact that's come up in conversations about the election recently— one that gets passed around helpfully but vaguely, like maybe it could ward off another catastrophic election result if you say it enough. Assurances like these hang in the air for a moment before the qualifying chaser of cynicism follows. By now we know that Trump’s power has defied conventional tests of success, and a single sunny data point could mean a million things or nothing at all. Skepticism is a good and healthy instinct, but the shared cynicism of this moment seems so much deeper than that. It signals, I think, an awareness of how absurd it is to feel hope right now.
I wrote recently about how 2020 has been a year of reacquaintance. I meant it on a personal level, but when I think about this election, the second wave of coronavirus surging through the nation, and the opportunity to collectively change the course of what happens next, I think it holds true on a broader level, too. Four years on from 2016, we’re confronting another presidential election of existential consequence. Once again, we’re facing a field of political possibility that has been narrowed down to two different versions of the status quo. And while the two candidates promise drastically divergent futures, both represent a lack of the vast imagination it will take to break these cycles of societal disrepair and amnesia. We are weary from a social welfare system designed to exclude the ones who need it most, from needless deaths, and from a bottomed-out economy committed to the persistent and tenacious devaluation of care.
Cynicism is an adaptive response to these conditions, which may be why it travels so easily —through social networks and media systems— and why political jokes on Twitter all sound like they’re written by the same ironic, unaffected voice. Collective cynicism is why Democrats have been whispering among themselves for months that Trump will probably win again, and why, at least in part, nearly half of eligible Americans didn’t vote in the 2016 election. It’s a rational response and a protective one. Hope is absurd given the current conditions, especially when it involves trusting an electoral system that keeps producing the same problems.
On a night where you have every reason to feel cynical, I wanted to pass along an idea that’s helped me in my most disillusioned moments. On the topic of electoral strategy, writer and activist adrienne maree brown wrote about the need to build a 'political home' outside of electoral politics, while using elections to create the conditions for a political home to exist. She writes:
“electoral politics isn’t and shouldn’t be our political home. it is a commons of service, meant to be accountable to informed people who direct the values and policies of those we elect to deliver and construct service provisions like home, health, water, education.
political home, on the other hand, is a place where we ideate, practice and build futures we believe in, finding alignment with those we are in accountable relationships with, and growing that alignment through organizing and education."
The two-party system, by design, equates supporting a candidate with participating in an election. But participating in an election can also mean pushing at the walls of its binary structure to make space for something more expansive. It’s exhausting work, but worthwhile.
Beyond the election, whatever the result, the capacity exists to build a political home of your own. Maybe it’s made of words, or music, or hours on the ground. Whatever the case, it’s a design of your making: a quiet shelter from cynicism and a safe harbor of hope.