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Voting is a Tactic, Your Bumper Sticker is Not

Electoral Politics and the Absurdity of the Puritanical Left

Tim Wise
8 min readMay 9, 2019
Credit: Bruce Davidson, Selma to Montgomery March, 1965

Don’t vote. It only encourages them.

The lesser of two evils is still evil.

You hear these kinds of things often when you reside on the left of the political spectrum in America, especially in the run-up to a national election. Or else you see them emblazoned on bumper stickers: slogans suggesting that truly progressive folks should never be willing to vote for, say, a clearly less-than-ideal Democrat, given how removed they often are from our own views.

According to this line of thought, we should either vote for someone whose views comport more closely with our own, like whomever the Green Party nominates this time around, or else abstain so as to send a message that we won’t be tricked into compromising our principles.

In 2020 we’ll no doubt be hearing these again, or perhaps a variation on the theme favored by at least some Bernie Sanders acolytes: namely, that it’s Bernie or Bust, and that they will not, under any circumstances, vote for anyone but Sanders for president.

Oh, and if you do, you’re a sell-out and a capitalist shill, who obviously isn’t sufficiently troubled by the milyanehhhhhhhhhs and the bilyanehhhhhhhhhs.

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Tim Wise
Tim Wise

Written by Tim Wise

Senior Fellow, African American Policy Forum, critical race theorist, and author of 9 books on racism and racial inequity in the U.S.

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