The Supreme Court overturned Roe and did away with the concept of ‘privacy’.
More mass shootings endanger children’s lives from Buffalo to Uvalde to Highland Park.
The former president committed textbook treason, encouraging a violent coup from his followers, but may run for president again.
A presidential front runner for 2024 is legit openly enacting fascism as governor of Florida from the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill to the ‘Survey linked to funding to make sure you have the right opinions’ of public university students and professors. “Freedom-loving” conservatives are oppressing freedoms for those who don’t agree with them from Florida to Texas to the Supreme Court. The American people are suffering, American democracy is dying, and our institutions have failed us. What can save us?
Apparently, just vote harder.
Do you have Vote Harder Syndrome?
Check with your doctor if you have early symptoms of Vote Harder Syndrome. If detected early, the virus that causes Vote Harder Syndrome can be contained to New York Times columnists and to the elite privileged few who see themselves as above the consequences of society’s actions. But let your doctor (or loved ones) know immediately if you experience these symptoms:
- Responding to a mass shooting victim with blood-stained clothes by telling her and her generation to ‘register to vote’.
- Holding the most powerful elected office in the world and responding to crisis after crisis with pleas for people to vote instead of using the power that people who did vote have bestowed on you.
- Responding to any critique of the lack of leadership in the Democratic Party by blaming Susan Sarandon.
- Caring more about electing people from your team than what that team accomplishes.
- Dismissing cries for action as ‘misguided’ or ‘naive’ because “…Manchin, Sinema, GOP, filibuster, the rules, etc, etc” as a textbook example of learned helplessness.
- Having an unshakeable devotion to the very institutions that you claim are failing us. This includes complaining about gerrymandering, the filibuster, GOP stealing Supreme Court seats, and voter suppression tactics – while not supporting drastic changes to the House, Senate, Supreme Court or other institutions like proportional representation, abolishing the Senate, abolishing the filibuster, expanding the Supreme Court, expanding federal and state courts or ending the Electoral College. You may be experiencing VHS if you tell people the game is rigged, and the solution is to play the game better. People not experiencing VHS can see this contradiction for what it is.
These are just some of the symptoms of Vote Harder Syndrome. At risk populations include people who identify more with partisanship (i.e., Democratic partisans) than with ideology (i.e., progressive, leftist) or issues (abortion rights activists, etc), so-called Karens of the country who want to see the Supreme Court’s manager, and populations that are prone to feelings of entitlement and overconfidence.
Is VHS curable?
Vote Harder Syndrome is curable, but the medication can be tough to swallow – self-reflection and the capacity to change one’s mind. There are real psychological forces at play here – from in group/out group dynamics to learned helplessness to the sunk cost fallacy.
We all want to be in good standing with our in-group. If part of our social identity is based on this in-group, it becomes all the more important to abide by the norms of this in-group. Perhaps the most basic part of the norms of any in-group is to support this group and its members over those of the out-group. Therefore, if your in-group is “Democrats” and you see leaders of your in-group like President Biden, VP Harris, Speaker Pelosi all become infected with Vote Harder Syndrome, then you too become susceptible to VHS to try to stay in good standing with the leaders of your social identity group.
If your in-group decries that you are the victim of political machinations and the way to fight back is to vote harder, you may tend to agree with them. This victimization narrative often isn’t a one-time thing, especially in politics. For conservatives, they have played the victim for years – Hollywood elites telling middle America what to do and cancel culture warriors – Jordan Peterson just said he’d rather die than call Elliot Page by his right name. If that’s not a victim complex, I’m not sure what is.
For Democrats, this victimhood has taken the form of the inability to pass their stated agenda due to GOP obstruction. This narrative has set in enough that members of Congress, the President and other leaders of the Democratic Party have learned to be helpless. What can be done about our in-group members, fellow Democrats Manchin and Sinema upholding the Senate filibuster? Nothing. There’s nothing we can do. We just need to elect 2 more Democratic Senators. That’s learned helplessness.
America’s most popular president Franklin Roosevelt ushered in the New Deal nearly 90 years ago to get the country working again after the Great Depression sent shockwaves throughout the world. The Supreme Court signaled that they may put a halt to some of critical provisions of the New Deal. Instead of begging the Court to reconsider or begging the people to vote harder, FDR threatened to expand the Court. If the current Justices were standing in the way of progress, he would simply appoint more Justices to the Supreme Court to fight for the working people. That threat itself backed the Supreme Court off of striking down the New Deal laws needed for the economic and political recovery.
If a nine-member Supreme Court rips away freedom and justice that had been precedent for decades, maybe they don’t deserve to have the power those nine members do. Maybe this version of the Supreme Court is a sunk cost. Instead of putting resources into hoping a conservative justice retires or dies, maybe we expand the court or pass term limits or impeach justices who lied to Congress. People who suffer from VHS are quick to throw good money after bad money – see a failing institution like SCOTUS, keep the institution intact and hope they can play the game better next time. That’s the sunk cost fallacy.
Vote Harder Syndrome is curable, but it often takes understanding of these fallacies – sunk cost and learned helplessness – along with a self-reflection of your own identity and the group dynamics that surround it.
What causes Vote Harder Syndrome?
Experts aren’t sure yet what exactly causes VHS. There are, however, some theories. The leading theory begins with the idea that VHS is prevalent in key demographics – white, middle class, educated, Democratic-leaning, over 35 years of age. The theory postulates that these demographics tend to care deeply about political issues but have been historically sheltered from the worst consequences of the political system. Because they haven’t been subjected to oppression from the political, legal and administrative system personally, they have faith in that system to function properly. The only problem is the people running the system. As the theory goes, get rid of them and things will be better. If you belong to that demographic, you may be more likely to tell others to vote harder.
Other theories on what causes Vote Harder Syndrome include:
- Susceptibility to elite pressure to keep the status quo.
- Repeated habit of ‘punching left’ by criticizing systemic change as ‘socialism’ or ‘not pragmatic.’
- Recency bias that successful Democratic governance from President Clinton, Obama and Biden involves incremental change (think Obamacare, Build Back Better). This is in contrast to transformational change from Democratic Presidents FDR (New Deal) and Johnson (Medicare, Medicaid).
What can we do about Vote Harder Syndrome?
Here’s 5 simple steps to fight VHS:
- Recognize the problem. Call out the syndrome whenever and wherever you see it.
- Challenge the problem. Engage not in debate, but in mutual understanding of the real problem – not Democratic voters, but our democratic institutions themselves.
- Offer a solution to the problem. The solution could be moving to proportional representation locally. It could be abolishing the Electoral College. It could be fighting disinformation on social media. It could be any kind of structural reform that would actually address our issues.
- Act on that solution together. Offer to work with the previously infected person on this issue. Join a democracy reform organization together. Co-author an op-ed to your local paper about the effects of international corporate conglomerate control over local media. Whatever it is, work on that solution together.
- Train others to recognize the problem. You can’t do this alone. We only change minds by coming together with like-minded individuals to work on a common solution. Train others to see Vote Harder Syndrome for what it is – an excuse to prop up the status quo.
Vote Harder Syndrome is curable. We can move past its siren song of stability and incremental progress to truly see it for what it is. If we can’t demand a systemic change from our elected officials, those changes will never happen. Our solution can’t be something we do once every two years. It needs to be every day. Pushing new ideas. Organizing and mobilizing ourselves to support systemic change. It starts with us. We can prevent Vote Harder Syndrome and create a better world – but first we just have to believe it’s possible.