As someone who was born in and lived under an authoritarian regime, and also as someone who left that authoritarian regime and researched it after it fell, I want to offer some perspective on this week’s election.
I was born in the Soviet Union, specifically Latvia, which is a smaller country on the Baltic Sea. There are a lot of lovely things about this country, but we left when I was 4 years old, in 1990, and eventually moved to the United States. My parents and I left as soon as our family could – when they opened up the travel restrictions that had been in place since 1921 – because, after living under an authoritarian regime for 70 years, especially as Jewish people, we no longer felt that living there was tenable for us.
I am grateful to be here in the U.S, despite the fact that on Tuesday this country elected a person who has expressed a lot of admiration for authoritarian leaders like the ones my family was lucky enough to escape. Now, after becoming a graduate student and then later a professor and researcher, one of the topics I keep coming back to is how people live in and survive authoritarian regimes. One of the more chilling things I learned from research on post-Soviet youth is that the vast majority of young people in the Russian Federation feel not only apathetic, but truly voiceless and hopeless in terms of participating in governmental and policy change. This is not true of your generation here in the U.S., and while there is a lot of discourse about American Gen Z being apathetic, the data tells a different story. As data from a Tufts university study shows, the percentage of people in your generation who have voted in the last three elections keeps increasing. This makes me hopeful, regardless of whom you may have cast your vote for.
If you are able to vote in the United States, you are in a position of privilege, from a global perspective. I know it may not seem like it to you, especially if you are in a marginalized position or you do not have faith in our democratic process or are just apathetic in general. But living here does in fact bring comparative privilege for the moment. So, if you didn’t vote on Tuesday, but wanted to – no matter who you wanted to vote for – I hope you do end up voting the next time you are able. I’ll tell you why.
Presidential elections are not the only vote that matters. You can advocate for and fight for communities you care about in more ways than just filling in a bubble for a person on a ballot. Local elections matter. State elections matter. And they happen every two years. So if you believe in the First Amendment, then you will also fight for an equitable and stable voting process not just for your candidate but for everyone’s candidates. On Tuesday, for example, the state of Ohio voted to keep partisan politicians as those who decide how to draw voting district boundaries, which is an example of gerrymandering – meaning “the political manipulation of electoral district boundaries to advantage a party, group, or socioeconomic class within the constituency.” Perhaps if there was a greater voter turnout, that could have been prevented.
I’ll give you another example: if you believe in “home of the free because of the brave,” then you can enact that belief in how you vote for access to mental and physical healthcare for veterans. A version of this question was on the ballot in multiple states. Unfortunately, veterans rights get voted down, especially in red states and districts. So, regardless of the president you want, you can still hold your party accountable for the rights you think it should represent. Your voice in our current version of democracy still, miraculously, has an impact.
Jenny Krichevsky is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature, Writing and Journalism at Springfield College.
Photo courtesy of Jenny Krichevsky