Believers in the geocentric model of the solar system were not stupid. They were wrong, by all means, but they were not stupid: while it does not require much intellect to come up with the initial hypothesis that Earth is at the center of the solar system, it does in fact require plenty of intellect to be able to continually iterate on this model to rationalize the mountain of evidence against it in a coherent way.

Likewise, when Kamala Harris presents herself as the only candidate in this election to vote for to “save our democracy,” it is a mistake to assume that Americans are stupid when they apparently do not notice the paradoxes of her and her supporters’ rhetoric. In any other country in any other time, I’d think most Americans would be able to point out the irrationality just as easily as they know Lucy Van Pelt’s intents with that football. Yet many Americans, it would seem, see red whenever someone points out the absurdities of electoralism in the USA — and whenever confronted with these absurdities, simply choose to dig themselves further into a safe trench of creative sophistry, just like the geocentrists of old.

The Act of Voting

Elections are treated as a sacred thing by many, and I don’t think this treatment is incidental to the fact that elections are ritualized events generally observed on special days or seasons. Voting in Norwegian elections, ballot boxes have reminded me of the donation boxes at Shinto shrines, and voting booths have reminded me of church confessionals; but really ballots themselves bear a greater resemblance to the ema tablets of Shinto, right down to the firm request to write neatly — or in the ballot’s case, to fill in the box completely. Ema are incidentally a type of “votive offering”, funny that that’s the technical term for it.

Ballots also remind me of the idea of religious fetishes, objects which are said to inherently possess non-material values or powers. Part of this supernatural allure comes from the fact that ballots must have this particular form, and cannot be tampered with; another part is just that people generally don’t see where the ballot’s been or where it goes before and after conducting the ritual of voting.

Psychologically, events we wait in line for feel more special, if they’re things we want to do; and the act of putting something in a box can provide emotional relief on its own, this is why “worry boxes” are sometimes recommended for sufferers of guilt or anxiety. There is also something to be said about the voting age, since when I first voted in an American election in 2020, I took that experience as my equivalent to a coming-of-age ritual — it was proof that I had finally become an adult in my family, and my living situation at the time made the event feel even more special.

What I’m getting at by pointing out all of these things is that the act of voting, especially if one is voting in person at a polling station, literally uses many of the same “devices” as actual religious rites: the way elections are carried out makes them feel like very significant and serious events, regardless of how significant they are in reality, and this is reinforced by how American (and to an extent Norwegian) society at large talks about voting.

Looking at elections from this perspective of “civil religion” as it’s known in religious studies, I think helps explain why a lot of people see red when their “common wisdom” about elections is questioned: be the questioners non-voting “atheists” or third-party “pagans”, questioning the common wisdom around elections is in any case tantamount to questioning God Himself. The elections are something Americans have been psychologically primed to take very seriously, and they do not want to feel like they have been played for fools after investing so much of their mental energy into the elections.

Lady Democracy

I should think most Americans are able to provide a decent definition of “democracy” and sincerely believe on a conscious level that when they speak of “democracy” that they are using their own definition. The belief that the USA (or any other liberal “democracy”) matches that description is what is religious, and it is this religion that is the true object of Kamala Harris’ defense. She aims to defend the rituals and cultural practices of electoralism in the USA — the cultus of Democracy the patron goddess of the USA — which carries the form but decidedly not the substance of the common people’s ability to have control over their own country. Kamala Harris defends a religion so normalized that most Americans don’t realize they even believe in it, and she claims that “the other side” will disrupt this cultus of Democracy that many Americans hold so dear, just as “the other side” claims that Harris’ side will disrupt their own cultus of the Nazarene, a cultus without at least the modest decency of wearing a “secular” garb.

Religions and their gods, of course, always exist to serve some sort of purpose in society, be it a Mandate of Heaven justifying an emperor, or a Sky Father justifying a house patriarch, or simply various gods in each corner of the world personifying various natural phenomena. This considered, I think a reason why I fell out of the worship of American Democracy so early on is because I don’t live in that society, I am and always have been geographically isolated from the things that most effectively produce and reproduce American “election worship”: The Americans in the USA live in a settler-colonial society built on slavery and stolen land — that is the country’s primary contradiction, the cognitive dissonance of which has been the driving pressure of the formation and development of the original American national identity of the United States. My own national identity, on the other hand, is then a settler-colonial identity which has been taken out of its proper settler-colonial context. The original driving pressures of American identity are therefore non-factors for myself, and so I am afforded at least a somewhat easier time recognizing and questioning the aspects of American national identity based in these pressures.

When settlers slaughtered and enslaved entire nations supposedly to “bring the light of civilization and progress” from sea to shining sea, the belief that these settlers were sincere in their aims and ultimately “succeeded” is, for the settlers’ sanity, then as today, practically necessary. This is the forgone conclusion at the core of the worship of Lady Democracy, and it is then only natural that her cultus would take this specific ritualized form. Rituals, after all, create meaning and help with the regulation of one’s emotions, and as mentioned earlier, putting a physical manifestation of one’s guilt or anxiety in a box is something that is specifically recommended for sufferers of these emotions — and who could be more anxious, and more guilty, than colonizers?

Indeed, the USA is a country that will never come to terms with its own crimes, for it is a criminal country at its core — the settlers will supremely value their spiritual cleansing in the form of show-democracy, far more than they will ever value a genuine choice of leadership. Hell, what choice do the settlers really need in their leadership, anyways? Two “parties” on the ballot is enough for petty suburban drama and the superficial appearance of choice; one Party in practice is enough to maintain the status quo that the settlers benefit from. The countless millions oppressed by this paradigm can nevertheless be sold on the cult of Democracy on the promise of acceptance and an easy solution to their troubles — their worship will however always be far more unstable than the settlers’.