Here's a powerful argument from Salon that you shouldn't:
- Vote for Hillary, be a sucker: It’s OK to reject the choice of a tyrannical liberal or a right-wing tyrant
“Vote for Hillary or be responsible for Trump” is slogan of someone maintaining -- or being played -- by the system.
Nothing generates more insipid analysis than a U.S. presidential election. It’s a wonderful opportunity for two-party functionaries to distill American mythologies into the high-minded diction of corporate wonkery. I suppose it isn’t helpful to complain about election analysis by adding to the babble, but it does seem worthwhile to highlight the limitations of the genre.
I dislike voting as a model of political engagement, especially in a corrupt and constrained system that devalues grassroots organizing and tries to limit our imagination to mechanical support of stage-managed icons. Yet I accept that people find inspiration in public figures and express approval by casting votes, sometimes the only political commodity available to a disempowered public. We can critique U.S. elections without being contemptuous of their participants.
Most election skeptics actually value (and perhaps overvalue) their votes. Pundits who insist on voting as a precondition of respectability exhibit contempt for anybody who rejects the mythologies of U.S. exceptionalism. To be respectable, one mustn’t simply vote. One must vote correctly. Such entreaties preclude third-party candidates or acts of conscience deemed inadequately practical. We remain confined to a political canon that produced the greatest crisis of inequality in world history.
Americans are enamored of the vote as a symbol of collective power. The right to vote certainly shouldn’t be taken for granted, but deification of voting can prevent us from treating ourselves as something grander than a massive focus group curated by a few dozen affluent lickspittles. The mythography of voting has conditioned us to treat mediocrity as superior.
