How to Break Up With Your Country Without Saying Goodbye

There is a particular modern cowardice, much beloved among those under thirty. It’s known as ghosting.

Apparently, this demographic does not end relationships; they simply do not explain themselves and do not think they have to. They stop replying, vanish from a group chat, and leave the other members to work it out over several increasingly unhinged weeks of unanswered texts.

This trait is apparently about to become the preferred way for several million disillusioned Democrats to break up with their own government, or at least with the tedious, unglamorous business of turning up to save it.

How do I know this?

Well, I read this week that a significant slice of the Democratic coalition, the very people who spent 2024 telling anyone who'd listen that democracy itself was on the ballot, was being the operative word.  

Now it appears that they are so thoroughly unmoved by their own party's leadership, so exhausted by the infighting, and so convinced that nobody in Washington has had an original thought since the Obama administration. Many of these disgruntled voters are considering not voting at all this November!

Not switching sides, mind you. That would require the emotional labour of admitting the other lot might occasionally have a point. No, the plan, if sulking counts as one, is to stay home.

To ghost the ballot box.

That’s it: to let democracy just sit there and wither on the vine, wondering where you are, and to let a privilege granted to you at birth be squandered because you’re sulking? Or is it simply because you couldn’t be arsed to get out and vote?

I find this fascinating, in the way one finds a slow-motion car crash fascinating, because it is such a spectacularly petty way to wield the one genuinely enormous power available to an ordinary citizen.

Somewhere out there is a woman who knocked on doors in a swing county, who drove her elderly neighbours to the polls, and who is now so cross about redistricting or because a congressman said something on TV she didn’t agree with. Her response is to fold her arms and say, fuck it, I can’t be bothered.

Not vote for the other lot, heaven forbid, just refuse to take part in the whole embarrassing charade, like a toddler who wants to punish his parents by refusing to eat his peas.

Surprisingly, the ‘other side’ does not care whether the peas are eaten.

Midterms, of course, are exactly the sort of unglamorous, off-year election with no presidential race to get excited about, and this strategy thrives on non-voters. Turnout drops; nobody notices until the Tuesday after, and by then the redistricting maps will already have been redrawn, so that by 2028 you will have to travel to the panhandle in Kentucky to cast your ballot. This was all done by those who very much did show up.

There is something almost impressively self-defeating about protest-by-absence. It's the democratic equivalent of storming out of an argument to stand very crossly in the next room, confident that the other person will hear the precise quality of your silence and recognise exactly which grievance it represents.

They certainly will not!

Nobody has ever won anything by walking out. If you do, the room carries on without you, redraws the district lines, confirms the judges, and decides what happens to your children’s school textbooks.

You, on the other hand, only find out what happened when you eventually wander back in, wondering why everything looks different and rather more Republican than you remember it.

If you'd like a cautionary tale, might I direct you to my birthplace, a small, damp island roughly eight thousand miles from where I'm currently sitting, sipping a Pina Colada?

In 2016, the United Kingdom held a referendum on whether to remain in the European Union, a question so tediously technical, so surely-it'll-sort-itself-out, that an enormous number of comfortable, metropolitan Remain voters- the ones who actually quite liked the EU- took one look at the polling, decided the result was a foregone conclusion, and went to brunch instead.

I mean, why queue in the rain to vote for a certainty? It was not, as it turned out, a certainty.

The Leave party won by about four points, propelled largely by people who were furious, organised, and, crucially, the ones who turned out. The Remain-supporting majorities in London and the university towns discovered, to their genuine horror, that, as in the group chat analogy, one should at least reply to messages left on the chat.

Today, nearly a decade on, Britain floats gently off the coast of the world’s largest trading bloc, still negotiating paperwork and explaining to confused relatives why data roaming charges have returned and why you now need a visa to hop across the Channel to buy that cheap French plonk you love so much.

 Those who stayed home on voting day didn’t gain a thing

They got Brexit.

I don't say any of this from a position of tribal loyalty to either rosette, frankly. Watching from a safe, bemused distance, both sides of the American political spectrum currently resemble a wedding where the open bar ran out hours ago, and everyone's still insisting they're having a wonderful time.

And I will say, without great sorrow, that if the Republican base wants to sit this one out, sulking about the price of eggs, I would be delighted.

Petulance is a bipartisan sport, and the door swings both ways.

But there is a real and important difference between being disillusioned with your options and declining to exercise the option to be disillusioned with anything at all. One is a citizen making a hard call. The other is a toddler holding his breath until the government turns blue, which, I promise you, will not happen any time soon.

So here is my modest, entirely unsolicited proposal to the aggrieved:

I aim this solely at the Democrats. Go. Go and vote. Vote badly if you want, vote spitefully, vote for the primary challenger whose only qualification seems to be that he’s got great hair, and mutter the whole time about burying the current administration, but go.

If you don’t, you could always ask a Londoner how their brunch went when they should have been voting.

Ghosting is an extremely poor way to end a relationship with someone you love, and an even poorer way to end a relationship with a country you loudly and often claim to love more than any other on earth. 

The wrapping paper on the gift given to you at birth took a couple of centuries, a revolution, a civil war and rather a lot of unpleasantness in between to arrive at your door. It seems a shame to leave it unopened because you're cross about a member in your group chat.

Paul v Walters is the author of several novels and an anthology of short stories, and he is fortunate enough to live on the island of Bali. His latest work, RITUAL, was recently launched at the Ubud International Readers and Writers Festival.