With the dust now settled on Donald Trump's victory over Kamala Harris, a cognitive dissonance has become apparent among certain segments of the online left. These are the folks who deliberately abstained from voting for Harris - some citing her positions on Gaza, others her prosecutorial record, still others a general disillusionment with the Democratic establishment.

But when confronted with the reality of Trump's return to power, the stripping of rights, the rise of blatant anti-Vaxxism and the deaths of vulnerable people whose access to USAID has been cut, many of these same voices insist that their individual non-votes bear no responsibility for the outcome. They simultaneously claim the moral authority of principled protest while disclaiming any causal relationship to its consequences.

This is a logical contradiction.

If your vote is so insignificant as to bear no responsibility for electoral outcomes, then your decision not to vote cannot constitute a meaningful political statement.

Conversely, if your decision not to vote represents a significant moral stance worthy of respect and consideration, then that same decision must carry proportional responsibility for the results it helps to produce.

There is no third option.

Every democratic election operates on the "paradox of voting" - the observation that for any individual voter, the costs of voting typically outweigh the infinitesimally small probability that their single vote will determine the outcome. In a nation of over 160 million voters, the chance that any one ballot will swing a presidential election approaches zero.

But this mathematical reality has never stopped people from voting, nor should it. The act of voting represents more than cold arithmetic - it constitutes participation in the collective enterprise of democratic governance. When we vote, we are not in the business of calculating probabilities; we are expressing our values, asserting our membership in the political community, and accepting our share of responsibility for the direction that community takes.

The non-voters of 2024 understood this symbolic dimension perfectly well when they chose to abstain. Their decision was predicated on the belief that withholding their vote would send a message - to the Democratic Party, to the political establishment, to history itself. Their non-participation was a form of resistance, a refusal to be complicit in policies they found morally objectionable. In making these claims, they implicitly acknowledged that individual political actions, even those as small as a single vote, carry meaning and consequence.

Where they faltered, where they falter now, is in the subsequent attempt to deny responsibility for the aggregate outcome of all those individual meaningful actions. Having asserted that their non-vote mattered enough to constitute protest, they insisted it didn't matter enough to constitute causation.

In Weimar Germany, the Communist Party's strategy of treating the Social Democrats as the primary enemy - famously dismissing them as "social fascists" - contributed to the fragmentation of opposition to the Nazi Party. When confronted later with the consequences of this strategy, many communists insisted that they bore no responsibility for Hitler's rise, as their individual actions were merely principled responses to social democratic betrayal. The claim was both true and false: true in that no single communist vote or abstention caused the Nazi seizure of power, false in that the collective pattern of such individual choices created the conditions that made that seizure possible.

Ralph Nader's supporters in 2000 found themselves caught in a version of this same paradox. Many who voted for Nader in Florida maintained afterward that their votes represented meaningful political expression while simultaneously arguing that they bore no responsibility for George W. Bush's victory. Again, both claims contained elements of truth - individual Green Party votes were indeed expressions of political conscience, and individual Green Party votes did not, in isolation, determine the outcome. But the aggregate effect of those individual expressions of conscience was to alter the trajectory of American politics in ways that many of those same voters later came to regret.

The 2024 non-voters find themselves in an even more precarious logical position than Nader's supporters. At least those who voted Green could claim they had supported an alternative candidate whose platform aligned with their values. The 2024 abstainers chose not to participate at all, then claimed this non-participation as both a meaningful act of resistance and a consequence-free expression of personal conscience.

The philosopher Robert Paul Wolff argued in "In Defense of Anarchism" that there is no moral obligation to obey the state unless one has personally consented to its authority. By this logic, non-voters might claim they have withdrawn their consent from the entire system and therefore bear no responsibility for its outcomes.

But this argument fails to account for the reality that political outcomes affect everyone regardless of their participation in the process; and the claim to moral superiority through non-participation contains its own form of privilege.

It assumes that the differences between the available candidates are sufficiently small that one can afford to treat the election as an abstract moral exercise rather than a concrete choice with real consequences for real people. This assumption may hold for those whose lives are relatively insulated from political outcomes, but it ignores the millions of Americans whose access to healthcare, whose immigration status, whose reproductive rights, whose citizenship, whose lives hang in the balance of electoral politics.

Political change doesn’t happen without the coordination of many individual actions toward a common goal. When progressive non-voters chose to withhold their support from Harris, they were making a collective choice - they were hoping that enough like-minded individuals would make the same choice to force a recalculation by the Democratic Party.

But collective action requires accepting collective responsibility. If the goal was to send a message through coordinated non-participation, then the success or failure of that message depends on the aggregate behavior of all the individual participants. You can’t claim credit for the expressive power of collective action while disclaiming responsibility for its material consequences.

This is particularly relevant given the actual margins of the 2024 election. In several key swing states, the number of voters who stayed home or voted third-party exceeded Trump's margin of victory. These abstainers achieved their collective goal of denying Harris their support, but they seem reluctant to acknowledge that they also achieved the collective result of enabling Trump's victory.

Much of the rhetoric surrounding the 2024 non-vote phenomenon framed the choice in terms of a binary between ideological purity and pragmatic compromise. Non-voters presented themselves as refusing to "vote for the lesser evil," maintaining that genuine political progress requires a rejection of incrementalism in favor of more fundamental change.

This framing - while emotionally satisfying and, invariably, good for a few likes - obscures the actual nature of political choice in democratic systems. Democracy is not a mechanism for implementing ideal policies; it is a mechanism for managing disagreement among people with fundamentally different values and interests. The choice in any election is not between perfect candidates and imperfect ones, but between imperfect candidates who will move policy in different directions.

The insistence on ideological purity as a political strategy ignores the temporal dimension of political change. Social movements succeed through sustained engagement over time. The civil rights movement achieved its victories by building coalitions that could maintain pressure across multiple election cycles. The labor movement gained power by engaging strategically with candidates who could advance worker interests, even incrementally.

When progressive non-voters chose to withhold their support from Harris over disagreements about specific policies, they were effectively arguing that their short-term moral clarity was more important than the long-term strategic positioning necessary for sustained political change. They prioritized the satisfaction of refusing compromise over the patient work of building the electoral coalitions necessary to advance progressive policies over time.

The desire to claim moral authority without practical responsibility is part of a broader tendency to treat politics as a form of personal expression, rather than a collective enterprise with real consequences for real people.

But politics is not therapy. It is not a Discord server. It is not a venue for working out personal moral conflicts or demonstrating ideological consistency. It is the mechanism through which societies make binding decisions about how to organize - and even protect - collective life.

The 2024 non-voters were correct that individual votes are small contributions to large outcomes. They were also correct that their non-votes represented expressions of political conscience. Where they went wrong was in imagining that they could have the satisfaction of moral expression without accepting the burden of moral responsibility.

Democracy asks us to do something that feels almost impossible: to take responsibility for outcomes we did not individually determine, based on choices we did not individually make, in pursuit of goals we may only partially support. It asks us to accept that our individual agency is both meaningful and limited, that our personal moral commitments must be weighed against collective consequences, and that the perfect is indeed the enemy of the good.

If democracy is to function, its participants must accept what philosophers call "moral luck" - the recognition that we bear responsibility not only for our intentions but for the consequences of our actions, even when those consequences extend beyond what we directly control. The alternative is a kind of moral solipsism.

The 2024 election offered a choice between imperfect alternatives, as all democratic elections do. Those who chose not to choose were making a choice nonetheless - one with consequences they seem determined not to acknowledge.

In a democracy, that is both their right and their responsibility.

They cannot have one without the other.