I rarely tell people that I don't believe in voting. Participation in the body politic is widely considered to be both a privilege and an imperative to the enlightened urban citizen. To choose otherwise is quite literally heresy – and heretics by and large have a difficult time of it in society.

The platitudes I face as a non-voter are known to everyone, precisely because they are platitudes – People have marched for miles! or Immigrants crossed oceans!The fables are beautiful and they are compelling. But that does not make them true.

I do not agree that secretly flicking a switch once a year constitutes "making your voice heard". Nor do I think that an annual trip to a voting booth is a criterion for whether one can complain or not. My right to free speech is not contingent upon anyone else, no matter how many of them there are, whether they were elected to some office or however much they stamp their feet.

Neither do I agree that the personal is the political. I fully reject the Kantian universalizability principle that underlies so much of contemporary moral discussion. What if everyone acted the way you did? is not a useful means-test for one's actions.

I am a pure liberal. I choose to live in Brooklyn and am very consciously grateful that my friends are as diverse as humanly possible. None of them think like me, none of them act like me and none of them have the background that I do. This is a source of great pleasure, and I wouldn't change it for the world. Nor could I! I'm not egotistical enough to think that "everyone will act like I do" as if those around me were my mirror images.

It is undeniably true that I don't have the practical ability to ignore the state. I have to use state roads, and if I refuse to pay taxes the consequences will be dire for me. But there is literally nowhere on Earth for me to go without some government claiming control over my person. Though democracies are increasingly common throughout the world, it is the state that is universal. These governments will continue to act regardless of any sort of popular approval – and certainly regardless of any approval of mine.

State action proceeds independently of any democratic justification. The purest example of this could be seen during the 2012 Democratic Convention. Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa sought to amend the party platform to include a reference to God and to acknowledge Jerusalem as Israel's capital. He put the edit to the convention floor, seeking to approve the change via acclamation. Having failed to receive the outcome he sought, he asked for a revote. Then he tried again. Finally, he simply pretended that those in the audience – unanimously Democrats and democrats – had agreed with him.