I Hate Election Years

or: the shepard tone of politics

The release of The Sapling Cage is only a couple weeks away, and my tour schedule is starting to come together! There will be more events announced soon, but for now I’ve got some northeast, midwest, and great-west dates lined up!

In the meantime, you can still preorder the print book or the audiobook!

I Hate Election Years

or: the shepard tone of politics

I made my dog watch the debate with me last night, and he wasn’t happy about it. He wanted to go outside and run around, but I wanted to watch the cop and the Nazi chew each other out. I got what I wanted, but I suspect I might be happier this morning if I’d let him win the argument.

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I hate election years and so does more or less every organizer I know. You can’t get anything done during an election year. Every four years in the US, everyone collectively abandons their dreams of a better world to get lost in the same cycle.

Every four years we hear the same thing: “it’s different this year. This is the most important election of our lifetimes.”

The reason this statement is so effective is that, somehow, impossibly, it’s generally true, or it feels true. The 2016 election mattered—the fate of the world hung in the balance. The 2020 election mattered—the fate of the world hung in the balance. The 2024 election matters—the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Democracy itself is on the ballot, they say, and in their way, they’re not wrong: the election this year is between a candidate who believes in representative democracy as an ideal and one who does not.

Can it be that the stakes are indeed higher, every four years? Probably. We have more and more on the line with each passing day, as climate change gets worse and the world order stumbles drunkenly towards collapse, world war, or both.

Or it’s a shepard tone. There’s this auditory illusion called the shepard tone, maybe you’ve heard it. It’s a sound that appears to be constantly rising (or falling) in pitch, no matter how long you listen to it. It’s uncanny, unnerving. I just played it while writing this piece and my dog looked over at the computer, curious and a bit unsettled. 

It’s probable that “this election is the most important election of our lifetime” is somehow both true and also an illusion.

See, the way you build a shepard tone is that you layer multiple tones, all of which are rising over time until they reach a peak and start over, but you put the volume emphasis on the ones that are rising rather than the ones that have peaked. So the mind always notices the parts that are rising.

We do that when we look at the world around us. This isn’t just true of the political spectacle. We as a society put emphasis on problems that are getting worse, and there are always things getting worse. This is rational of us, a survival instinct: the current problem needs solving, always. If you are starving and freezing, and you find food but not warmth, your need for shelter is going to only become more dire and the intensity of your situation will only continue to rise despite the fact that your food need has been met.

Acknowledging this pattern shouldn’t mollify us and and it shouldn’t pacify us. Our situation, as individuals, communities, and members of a global population, can and does get both better and worse, and I suspect that the life of the average person on this planet is going to be getting worse due to both climate change and authoritarianism.

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I hate election years not because the elections don’t matter, but because everything else seems to go on hold and all of our dreams are forgotten. The mainstream perspective on the two party system is that there are two parties that are opposed to one another, causing an ebb and a flow between two poles. This is of course, observably false.

Imagine us all in a bus. One driver, the republican, wants to drive us, pedal to the floor, towards a cliff (the cliff in this case is fascism, or the climate apocalypse, take your pick). There’s another driver though, the democrat. You would think, you would hope, that this other driver would turn the bus around. The democrats will not. Barring that, maybe they’ll pull over to the side of the road and flag down someone to help. The democrats will not. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll at least slam on the brakes? The democrats will not.

In this analogy, what democrats will do is that they’ll take their foot off the gas, maybe all the way, maybe partway. We will slow down, but we won’t change course. We’ll still be moving towards the cliff, mostly from the inertia of the driver with his foot on the pedal.

Everyone in the bus breathes a collective sigh of relief that the lead-foot driver is no longer behind the wheel and gets back to singing “the wheels on the bus go round and round” or whatever it is people do on busses.

Now, if I’m in a bus that is driving towards a cliff, I am absolutely and acutely aware of the difference between these two drivers. I would rather the driver who is moving slowly towards the cliff than the driver who is barreling towards it at full speed.

But, and this part is important… neither driver is my friend. They are my (and in this metaphor, our) captors. Soon, they will be our executioners.

The only advantage of having the democrat at the wheel is to have more breathing room, more time to formulate our plan to overpower the drivers and turn the bus around—or at the very least get the lock off the emergency door and hit the ground rolling, trusting that road rash and some broken bones are less dangerous to our health than driving off a cliff.

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I hate election years because everyone takes their eyes off the prize, and every progressive social movement starts investing all its energy in electoral politics. But I also hate election years because even those who don’t believe in electoral politics seem to lose the plot. The liberal left spends all its time arguing that everyone needs to vote for a candidate they admit is evil, the progressive left spends all its time arguing whether or not it’s best to vote for the evil candidate or to somehow suddenly pretend third party politics are viable within the American system without first doing the work of shifting to ranked-choice voting, and the anti-electoral left spends all its time arguing whether or not voting is worth doing at all.

About half of everyone doing all that arguing even have some decent points to make, but it sure feels like a giant distraction to make us forget we’re in a bus barreling towards a cliff and that none of our choices include “turn the bus around.”

We also stop listening to each other. We hear what we assume the other means, instead. Anyone who advocates for lesser-evil voting supports the genocide in Gaza. Anyone who advocates for voter abstention wants to let Christian Nationalism control the country. When I call the debate the “cop vs. Nazi debate” everyone assumes I therefore am incapable of understanding nuance. Everyone has picked a team—including the “refuse to vote” team—and thinks everyone else is immoral, illogical, and/or unintelligent.

I’m not here to tell you whether or not to vote. That’s not what I care about. I care about what else you do with your time. I care about how you spend your time actually working to make the world a better place. I care about how you treat your neighbors. I think how you talk to and how well you tip your servers at restaurants is a far better litmus test for morality than ballots are.

I even care about how the election turns out, if I’m being honest. I hope the driver who wants to drive us off a cliff fast doesn’t win and the driver who wants to drive us off a cliff slow is our captor instead.

I just won’t forget that she’s not there to do us any favors, and that she brags about the military might of the US and she brags about imprisoning people and she brags about expanding fossil fuel infrastructure and she reiterates, over and over again, her willingness and desire to supply weapons to Israel.

I won’t forget that making things better is something that we actually have to do, not something we can elect someone to do for us. It takes all of us, working together.

And maybe we’ll be able to keep doing some of that work during an election year, but it sure never feels like it.

God I hate election years.

My dog doesn’t know it’s an election year, and I’m jealous.