Vote or Don’t, but Don’t Stop There
On Dual Power and Electoral Politics as an Agent of Change
At best, American electoral politics are a circus. Most of the time, voters are tasked with choosing between somebody who will more-or-less keep things as they are, and somebody who will make things worse.
Since 1988, we’ve pretty much been in a constant war with various countries in the Middle East and southeast Asia. Multiple presidents have enacted trade policies that harm workers at home and abroad. We’ve seen the War on Drugs destroy lives and the War on Poverty all but abandoned. Global climate change is treated like a non-issue at worst, and another chance for our leaders to wine-and-dine with other world leaders at best. Financial institutions and large corporations receive bailouts, subsidies and tax breaks to help keep them afloat while individuals get foreclosed on en masse.
As they say in the business, shit is fucked up and bullshit.
Every four years we do the same dance. We find a candidate who speaks to us in ways we like to hear about the issues we most highly care about. We throw our support behind them and cast everyone else as either our ideological enemies or people who just slightly fall short of our standards. If we’re lucky and if there’s enough of us, our candidate becomes the party nominee. If we’re not as lucky, we get to support the nominee we didn’t want - because the alternative is to go back to our normal lives — over which we have little to no control.
In 2008, Democrats elected Barack Obama to the White House on a platform of holding the financial institutions that had literally just threw our economy in the gutter accountable; ending our forever war in the Middle East and closing Guantanamo Bay; combating climate change; and changing the way we dealt with issues like drugs and poverty on a systemic level. What we got instead was a president who immediately ramped up the War on Terrorism by solidifying a nascent drone program, who empowered Immigration and Customs Enforcement to carry out the largest rash of deportations in US history, whose administration fought individual states as those states began to reduce the violence around drugs via legalization and decriminalization laws. We got a president who paid lip service to climate change activists but provided no concrete plans of action until the twilight of his second term. A second term he earned, by the way, by being marginally less shitty than Mitt Romney.
Normally, American electoral politics are all about compromise — compromise of ethics, compromise of values, compromise of vision. Most of us become activists only in the tiny window provided by elections, and when those elections are over we go back to silently coping with whatever circumstances we find ourselves in while nothing of great import changes. Voting, as a result, simultaneously energizes and depletes individuals and their capacity to agitate for change. Without fail, the high that might come from seeing your candidate elected is replaced by a brutal comedown — the realization your candidate isn’t going to do shit for you.
This is a bleak view of the state of things. And it could be said to lend itself well to a solid ideology of anti-electoralism. Many anarchists hold to that view. I’m fairly neutral on the subject, myself; I don’t vote, but I don’t presume to hold the answers regarding how everyone should spend their time, either.
This election cycle, there is a sense that things are actually going to play out differently, for better or for worse. I tend to skew my thinking toward the latter. The rise of Citizen Trump as a possible president has instilled in me a nihilistic fear that no amount of liberal get-out-the-vote campaigns are going to be able to stop his rise to power, and once he’s in office, we’re all fucked.
This fear has paralyzed me from speaking at a time when I - and everyone else I know - should be speaking the loudest and following that speech up with some kind of action. But every time I psych myself up to write something like this, the fear doubles down and the questions start: “short of revolt, what could stop Donald Trump?” “what viable actions do we even have besides voting?” “are we even organized enough to take Trump on?”
The fact is, these questions are too big for one person to be able to answer. They’re overwhelming and my suspicion is that that’s on purpose. All I know is, whether you vote or whether you don’t, there has to be more that you’re doing. Even if the world doesn’t end in November - even if, in the brightest timeline, you’re able to get your favorite candidate who is not Donald Trump elected, Trump’s not going to go away and his supporters aren’t going to disappear. Regardless of who wins, the political climate we’re in will be vastly different from that of 2008. So we have to be ready. We have to carve out time and a strategy for interacting with politics outside of the ballot box. And we have to do it quickly.
Trevor Hultner has been an anarchist commentator at the Center for a Stateless Society, a podcaster and a bassist in a punk band. These days he plays video games, watches cartoons and reads comic books, and tries to stay posi amidst the darkest political timeline. Follow him on Twitter at Illicitpopsicle.
