Voting for Kindness

I just got back from casting a ballot in my local precinct election. It's probably the first time I've ever voted for a city council position in my life, but a couple days ago, I received a visit on my doorstep from my Massachusetts state rep, who was out canvassing for one of the people running, and I felt like that was the sort of hustle and personalized outreach that ought to be rewarded. 

Also among my motives, though, it must be said, was a certain desire for absolution. The candidate she favored is running on the DSA ticket, and I thought: "Here is my chance!" Not only can I fulfill my teenage dream of voting socialist (though the chance came around "rather late for me," to borrow a phrase from Philip Larkin), but also I can offer my ballot as a sort of indulgence, hedging against my otherwise guilty complicity in the problems besetting my home town. 

The place I live, after all, is gentrifying. And I, by all possible definitions, am one of the gentrifiers. Not only did I overpay for my current unit, no doubt driving up prices around me, but I also stand to benefit personally from the changes afoot in the rest of the city. An extension of public transit that's going in near me is almost certain to bring in more young professionals and commuters, driving up home values still further, and possibly contributing to the displacement of longtime residents. 

And when I think about the fact that I am implicated in these ways in the changes happening in my neighborhood, I have two thoughts that tend to follow in rapid succession: "I can't do anything about it" is the first. "Why?" I ask myself. "Because I don't really want to do anything about it," comes the second. I kind of like the thought of my home increasing in value. As the lead character in Joseph Heller's Something Happened guiltily confesses: "I find-- God help me-- that I want it."

There's a scene in the dark, funny, ultimately heartbreaking and unforgettable HBO satire The White Lotus, in which a wealthy family is sitting around a dinner table at a resort in Hawaii. The father is dressing down his leftist offspring for constantly harping on various matters of social injustice. He scoffs at the idea that any of them might actually want to give up their money or advantages. "Nobody cedes their privilege," he says, "That’s absurd. It goes against human nature."

All of which may be true, up to a point. But it only reminds me of Vachel Lindsay's injunction: "Come, let us vote against our human nature[.]" He wrote these words in a poem called, fittingly enough, "Why I Voted the Socialist Ticket"—and his point was that, even if we experience selfish motives in our lives, we can exert ourselves at the polling booth to transcend those aspects of our nature. "I am unjust," he says, "but I can strive for justice./My life’s unkind, but I can vote for kindness."

This is precisely the sort of moral acrobaticism that I aspired to in deciding to trudge over to the precinct voting booth. I may be sitting in a home that's currently gaining value and contributing to the cost-of-living issues in my fair city, I told myself; but that doesn't force me to make political decisions that will prolong that same pattern. I can in fact favor candidates who might undercut my own direct material self-interest for the sake of some public purpose I believe in. 

What that public purpose is specifically in this case is a more inclusionary zoning regime that would incentivize developers to include more affordable units. Whether this is necessarily the best policy choice to drive down housing costs can be debated, but what we really shouldn't be arguing about anymore is whether those costs need to be lowered (they clearly do, and not just in the city where I live, but around the country).

This might seem obvious and uncontroversial—as uncontroversial as saying "gee, health insurance premiums are too high." But the latter only seems like a universal opinion because many of us don't know anyone personally who works for an insurance company. Whereas many of us are, or know people who are, owners of housing stock. And from that we probably realize that not everyone stands to gain directly from lowering housing costs. 

A friend of mine recently shared with me a debate that was happening online, in which one of the parties to the controversy was arguing that adding to the housing stock was a problem because it might "drive down property values." Other people tried to disagree with him on his own terms, saying "no, no, of course it wouldn't," which struck me as ludicrous. Because of course it would drive down property values! That's the whole goal! One person's (the owner's) "property values" are simply another person's (the renter's) "housing costs."

And I am currently one of the owners, and to me higher property values are more or less a straight gain (apart from the slightly higher tax burden that comes with them), at least from a material standpoint. But Lindsay's point in his poem was that material interests need not necessarily be the be-all-and-end-all of our political life. We can, through an effort of will, transcend the considerations of mere pocketbook and personal advantage.

And so I went to my precinct election and cast my vote for the socialist candidate, just as Lindsay did. Crying to God in all the polling places/ To heal our everlasting sinfulness/ And make us sages with transfigured faces.