A Canadian’s Guide to Voting in the 2024 US Elections

This article is a satire. Though in points 6-8 I get a bit more serious.

Munch’s famous painting; CC0 / public domain

I am not a US citizen, and never have been, nor would I ever qualify to be one. That makes me perfectly unqualified to tell Americans how they should vote. Except for one thing: Canadians tend to read a lot more than Americans, and we also tend to define ourselves by how we are unlike Americans. If it weren’t for the US, it seems, we would have no national identity at all. We simply wouldn’t know who we are. So a surprising number of Canadians, as a result, seem to know more about what’s actually happening in the US than a surprising number of Americans.

In that spirit, and with that caveat, here is my ‘advice’ to beleaguered American voters, especially those voting for the first time:

1. It can help to realize that you actually have no free will, so how (and if) you are going to vote is already determined by your conditioning, given whatever unimaginably horrific events may transpire between now and voting day. So please don’t get stressed about voting, since you have no choice about what you’ll do anyway. And whomever you vote for, or don’t vote for — they are going to fuck things up even more than they are already, with the best of intentions (usually), so it doesn’t really matter. Don’t beat yourself up over this.
2. Canadians (like Europeans, and Americans who live in “deep blue” or “deep red” states) have a lot of experience with what is called “strategic voting”, also called “lesser of two evils” voting. Thanks to the absurd voting systems in use just about everywhere, in 90% of cases your vote simply doesn’t count, because the overwhelming majority of people in your constituency have always voted for the same party’s candidates for generations, and will do so again this year. In the other 10% of cases, you get to grit your teeth and vote for the candidate whose official platform is less obnoxious than the other’s. So you learn that voting is a negative experience, not a positive one. You get used to this.
3. Voting in the US, as in most western nations, is more like a beauty pageant, or, even more accurately, like one of those singing contests like X-Factor or EuroVision. The election campaign is a performance, complete with all the trimmings. What the candidates say in their performances means nothing — their party machine has already written or vetted their speeches, and in any case their speeches and promises, and those made in their parties’ official ‘platform’, bear absolutely no resemblance to what their party, if it wins the pageant, will do in any case. So to protect yourself from disappointment, don’t believe anything that any of them says. If you doubt this, look at what Obama, who was President for eight years, promised to do, and compare this to what his administration actually did.
4. In case it wasn’t already obvious, the decisions made by governments in ‘democratic’ western countries are not made by elected ‘representatives’. They are made by the administrations, who respond to lobbyists and other rich and powerful pressure groups. Most western nations, including the US (and Canada) are hence corpocracies — where regardless of which party is ‘elected’, the same corporate oligarchies, political lobbyists and moneyed interests will make all the decisions. In some cases these unelected groups even write the entire legislation on a particular issue (vetted by their lawyers), so the elected ‘government’ merely has to sign their ‘X’ at the bottom. In many cases, they will not have read, and will never read, most of the laws they have enacted.
5. To make the election contest/pageant more interesting, parties will have the platform speeches delivered by a variety of diverse faces, and some of those speeches will directly contradict others, especially those speeches made locally rather than broadcast nationally, where the contradictions are more obvious. “You can announce that program here, but don’t talk about it in Kansas (or in Calgary)”. The objective is to create the impression that the party in question is more ‘diverse’ and hence more ‘representative’ than the other, so that it appears to offer a ‘bigger tent’ accommodating more views, including yours. This is important only if you’re one of the 10% of voters referred to in point 2 above. The ‘tent’ is taken down immediately after each election in any case.
6. There can occasionally be interesting issues arising at the local/municipal level that can actually warrant your time and attention. Those with wealth and power are usually not terribly interested in local issues, so it can actually matter who wins these local elections. Unfortunately, most local issues, such as homelessness, public transportation, housing costs, and the public education system, are largely insoluble, as they are part of much larger, more complex systems in various stages of inevitable collapse. But decisions on public infrastructure, local environmental regulations, zoning, and local health services can make a difference, and it only takes a few minutes to assess whether or not candidates for local office are competent to make such decisions. It actually takes much more skill and experience to be a competent local administrator than to be a figurehead for a party at the state or national level. You have to know about how things actually work. Sadly, those that have these competencies tend to be rare and to burn out quickly.
7. Finally, though, while whom you vote for, or whether you vote at all, probably won’t make any difference in the real material world, how you personally feel about your participation or non-participation in the process is, IMO, what’s most important. There is no point making the ‘most informed, logical, pragmatic’ choice on voting day, if you feel bad about having made that choice. Just as an example, if I were a woman voting in the upcoming US presidential election, my ‘head’ might say ‘my’ choice doesn’t make any difference whatsoever on the issues I care about, but my ‘heart’ might say I’m going to vote for one of the two women candidates anyway. Ultimately, your instincts are somewhat attuned to your conditioning, and they kind of ‘talk to’ and inform each other. Learning to trust your instincts these days is actually hard, because everything we learn tells us not to trust them. So if your instincts tell you you’ll feel better by doing X on voting day, no matter what the result, see if you can bring yourself to trust them.
8. You may have no free will, but you can be influenced (conditioned) by others, and vice versa, especially through candid face-to-face conversations with people you trust about the agonizing process of exercising your ‘democratic’ privilege in 2024, and about how you both feel about the process. Whom you talk with, and the sincerity with which you talk about your deliberations, the process and its frustrations, one-on-one and in real time, between now and election day will probably have much more impact (and in ways you can never know) than the marks you do or do not place on the ballot yourself.

I am probably both too young and too old to be so jaded, and I know the above ‘advice’ is not very helpful, but as everything slowly falls apart, it’s the best I can offer. Good luck to you in any case. You’re going to need it.

Thanks to Siyavash Abdolrahimi for inspiring this post.

A postscript on referenda, propositions, initiatives and plebiscites: We don’t see these much in Canada, and the above ‘advice’ may not pertain so much to them. In some cases, initiatives can at least be useful in communicating citizen unhappiness to governments over the administration’s current positions. Where we’ve had them here, they have normally been either non-binding (and usually reneged on by the government even when they’ve passed) or they’ve been defeated by conservative lobby groups’ massive propaganda pushes. (The spuriously-grounded development of ‘recall’ initiatives in the US, used mainly by moneyed conservatives to oust leftists, has spread here to Alberta.) And if you’re fortunate enough to have local Citizens’ Assemblies/ Juries/ Initiative Review panels, their recommendations on (especially complex and contentious) initiatives are usually wise and worth heeding before you vote.