Voting Will Not Help
I just want a salad
To the best of my knowledge, no nation has ever voted themselves out of authoritarianism. Those nations that once had elections often still had elections—even Russia runs elections, and Putin always gets over 90% of the vote. By the same token, no nation has ever voted themselves out of the conditions that made authoritarian rule possible.
We need to concern ourselves with how the document that was designed to protect the Bourgeois from being overcome by Tyranny has failed them.
As neither corporate party offered an alternative to four decades of Neoliberalist policies, and those policies had forced a declining quality of life among working people, by 2016 both parties were struck by the dysfunction of attempting to win a popularity contests while having little appeal.
Would you prefer cat shit or dog shit in your shit sandwich?
But I just want a salad.
Sorry, only predigested options are on the menu.
In 2016 Trump had more appeal to the 40% of remaining voters that Republicans relied upon to have a shot at winning elections than any of the established party members.
We should recall that Trump was once treated as a pariah, and that only after winning multiple primaries did we see Republicans start to warm to him as their candidate. Still, he drove off former party leaders, after winning the Presidency. He served his term and as with everything else he has branded, what ended up being delivered was far short of what was promised.
Trump was trounced by Joe Biden, who had to come out of retirement (people forget this—he stepped aside when it was His Turn) and required the collaboration of Pete (“What line do I get on my resume for this?”) Buttigieg and Amy (“It’s okay I am already a Senator”) Klobuchar—at the direction of Barack Obama—to stave off Bernie Sanders and his grassroots threat to the Democratic Party the second time around.
Bernie Sanders would have beaten Donald Trump in 2016 (12% of Sanders’ primary voters went for Trump; they wanted change), and in 2020 (because whoever was on the Democratic ticket was going to win).
They call themselves “Democratic” yet expend great efforts to thwart popular candidates; maybe they are going about it the wrong way. The 2025 NYC Mayoral race confirms the Democratic Party loves to play spoiler to Progressives, no matter who may win in their place.
No one really wanted Joe Biden to be President in 2020—they really did not want Trump and had no other choice. Some naively thought the Biden Administration would effectively prosecute Trump for his crimes. After all, Joe Biden was dedicated to America, more than anything; when he took the oath of office he meant it. Biden picked his Attorney General and then, just as the Constitution says (it doesn’t), he kept a firewall between himself and the Justice Department, not wanting to do anything that might compromise the prosecution that was sure to come some day.
In a Republic worth its Banana, justice would have been swift and irreversible, like it is practiced in every other nation that has had unsuccessful coup attempts. Prosecution starts with the field generals—don’t waste time (as Garland did) prosecuting the patsies first—and very quickly moves up the line.
At the same time that it was clear there would never be a prosecution on federal charges before the election, the Supreme Court served up the solution, and Biden was too deep into the old narrative to see the gift he was offered. He was never going to create the test case we need with regard to “Presidential Immunity;” a legal fiction that spits in the face of “high crimes and misdemeanors” as the sole reasons for Presidential impeachment.
Joe was afraid, perhaps, that by executing this new immunity that he would send America down the path to exactly where we are now.
By the time the Supreme Court ruled on Citizens United we already saw elected offices being sold to high bidders (not necessarily the highest, sometimes the loser outspends the winner by a few million bucks). By the time the Supreme Court ruled on Trump v. United States we already had a Court that would surrender its check on the Executive.
We are not going to fix what went wrong using the parameters of the constitution that failed to prevent what happened. We are never going to be able to vote our way out of this, and that is because we were never going to be able to vote our way out of what made this possible.
Examine how the constitution ensconces the rule of the Bourgeois, directly and implicitly. That document was to ensure the rule of land-owning men. The state is structured such that the lesser People, if they are to have a vote, would only have it for their one Representative. There are safeguards in place against popular uprisings.
The Framers did not foresee this new ruling class to work against their own interests, though. The presumption of democracy is that people understand the qualities of the option they choose and that they will choose the option that is most in their favor. Elections are fixed to limit choices in general, and outside positions in particular.
While candidate A might have more appealing stances than candidate B and thus more voters chose A than B, we would be foolish to think that candidates A and B together offer the full array of possibilities—though they are offering what has been made into the full array of possibilities. Dog shit or cat shit. You eat shit, one way or another. Stop looking at the guy offering salads—he’s a fucking socialist; that will never work.
The Framers failed to account for a revolutionary segment of the Bourgeoisie that would be willing to toss away democracy and capitalism for a shot at global domination. By virtue of the document, they have shown the ability to do it, and that is where we are. They call themselves “Accelerationists.”
They know we cannot move into a globalized social order while nation-states still control economies. Nation-states must be broken, and it must happen in the most advanced capitalist nations, first (Marx said this is how the Dictatorship of the Proletariat starts, but it is also how any global dictatorship would start). By stripping the nation-state of its role supporting the People, all that will be left is record-keeping and discipline.
“Discipline ‘makes’ individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise. It is not a triumphant power…it is a modest, suspicious power which functions as a calculated, but permanent economy.” — Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
Another brilliant scribe. However, we should still vote for every progressive running in any local races. Not voting is literally how Republicans win, and whether anyone likes it or not, it is worse when Republicans are in office. 90 million Americans skipped their opportunity to cast a vote in the last national election.