The year 2000 was the year my grandmother and I moved to the United States. It was also the year I started school. I didn’t know much about America before that. I just knew that I was born there, that my mother lived there, and that we would now be living there too. We rented an apartment in the District of Columbia, where my mother worked, and for a while, living in D.C. wasn’t all too different from living in Russia.
The year 2000 also happened to be the year of a particularly notable U.S. presidential election. As it turns out, I was living in the perfect place to witness everyone’s responses. I didn’t know anything about politics; after all, I was six years old. Still, every adult I knew was constantly on about the same thing. Even my grandmother was glued to the news. One day I’d had enough, and I asked my grandmother what on earth was putting everyone in such a heated frenzy.
“The United States is too divided”, she told me. She’s since made that same observation hundreds and hundreds of times.
The United States was too divided when she picked me up early from school on 9/11, and I couldn’t understand what was happening. When we went to war with Iraq. When I came home one afternoon in 2004 and told her that everyone in my fourth-grade class would be leaving America if George Bush was elected for another term. During the banking collapse in 2008, then again when Obama took office. After the Sandy Hook shooting. When we declared military intervention in Syria.
The United States was too divided on immigration.
On abortion.
On gun control.
On taxes.
The United States was too divided just last week, when she called to see how I was doing and asked if I’d been following the election. I told her I had. She asked who I was voting for.
If anything had made it so apparent to me, showed the extent of just how divided the United States really was, it was the broken strands that twisted into mangled possibilities of answers to that very simple question. I searched for a simple reply. It wasn’t as easy. Each reply came with a hefty set of implications, fears, and consequences I didn’t want to sort through.
I’m a first-time voter, and through the chaos of the upcoming general election, I’ve been piecing together my political priorities and taking them apart again. I’m not sure how to build them so they fit neatly in a candidate. I’m not sure I can.
The United States seems too divided. I’m awkwardly jammed in a space on the left, and it’s hard to see the other side. The two party system creates a divide that forces voters to accept one rigid set of ideas fully, thus compromising an array of beliefs under an exclusive label of Democrat or Republican, an awkward space to the left or right. Voters fall under one set of values, in one of those spaces, to support the candidate that sports the label of their default side. This idea isn’t particular to this year’s election. Every four years, voters sway to one side because the opposing one is so fully demonized that there doesn’t seem to be another choice.
But in this election, it never felt like there was any choice at all.
When my grandmother asked me who I was voting for, I was still stumbling between voting third party and voting for Clinton. I wanted to vote third party because I hoped that Trump and Clinton were unpopular enough that, with enough campaigning, a third party victory could conceivably happen. I wanted to feel better represented. I wanted to be part of an effort to push more political parties to the forefront of the public eye. I wanted to assemble all the pieces of my political priorities and fit them neatly into a third party. As much as I wanted to cast my vote for a third party candidate, my reasoning and justification for doing so were deeply misguided.
This election looks like a new peak in America’s division; a reaction to the buildup of debt, xenophobia, and fear of government corruption. The United States is brimming with problems, and Americans are looking to pin them on something other than ourselves. This national environment, along with America’s rigidly bipartisan system, has produced an election so intensely polarized that many voters will cast their votes in desperation, shoved towards a candidate they oppose out of fear of the other. Specifically, shoved towards Hillary Clinton out of fear of Donald Trump. At least in my case.
A choice between a President Trump and a President Clinton feels like choice between getting run over by a train and getting hit by a motorbike. I’d want either one as our president about as much as I’d want to spend three months in a full body cast — not especially, and with the current costs of health care, I’d almost rather just be dead. Still, I would prefer take my chances with the motorbike (at least Clinton vows to make the medical bills more affordable). Trump will do no such thing, and taking a chance against thousands of pounds of angry steel-and-hate-fueled machinery has a pretty predictable outcome.
American democracy feels incredibly undemocratic; voting for a candidate you strongly oppose just so another won’t win isn’t democracy. Voting for a candidate you strongly oppose doesn’t ensure an adequate representation of your voice in government. The collective mosaic of American values and opinions cannot be confined to a laundry list with a red or blue label. I strongly believe this, and I strongly believe that in order to be a democracy, the United States must shift to a multiple party political system. The rigidly bipartisan system does not adequately represent the views of the American people. That much is clear. But again, it is too late now to start trying to put a third party candidate in the 2016 presidential seat. The priority now is to ensure that Trump does not win the presidency, that Trump does not melt down the progress we’ve made as a country by fueling red-hot flames of hate and violence.
If you’re like me, and you’re looking toward third party candidates because you are disappointed with the nominees, you’re starting your search too late. If you wanted to vote third party in this election, you are now too late. The current structure of the U.S. political system makes it essentially impossible for a third party candidate to win the 2016 presidency. If you wanted to vote third party, you should have voted third party for congress, for local government. You should have started building up the legitimacy of the third party you want to represent you long before the final stage of this general election.
You could go ahead and blame the system, most people certainly do. But the truth is that we are the system, and we have the power to change. Neglecting your opportunities to vote and ignoring your power to make change right up until you have to choose your next president is what makes you resent the lack of democracy in a system you haven’t done anything for. American democracy can feel undemocratic, especially when you’re a first time voter, but there are more productive ways to channel your disenchantment with the system than seething over news reports. Instead, let this election serve as a warning for the future and a call to start paying closer attention to whom we elect to office. With this in mind, we can start building up a system that will better represent us as voters. (Step 1 is avoiding a four-year-long wildfire of orange hate we would refer to as President Trump.)
