Politics & Power Quote by Howard Zinn

It lands like a barbed compliment to democracy: sure, you can vote - but for what, exactly? Zinn’s line borrows the old fatalistic joke structure (“If God had meant X...”) and turns it into a secular indictment of American electoral theater. The punchline isn’t that voting is worthless; it’s that the menu is. “Candidates” here is doing heavy work, implying not merely human beings on a ballot, but genuine choices: people who represent the governed rather than the governing class.

Zinn’s intent is agitational in the best sense. As a historian of dissent and author of A People’s History of the United States, he treats politics less as a civics lesson than as a power system with PR. The quote smuggles in his larger argument: elections can function as a legitimacy machine, converting public frustration into ritual participation while leaving underlying arrangements intact. The “gods” are a sly stand-in for institutions that like to present outcomes as natural, inevitable, beyond human tinkering. If you’re not getting real candidates, Zinn implies, it’s not because nothing better is possible; it’s because the system is engineered to prevent it.

Subtextually, he’s needling the piety around voting as the supreme civic act. The line pushes attention away from individual responsibility (“did you vote?”) toward structural responsibility: who gets to run, who funds them, what counts as “serious,” what gets filtered out before a single ballot is cast. It’s less anti-democratic than anti-complacent: a reminder that democracy isn’t a ceremony, it’s a struggle over what choices are allowed to exist.