The Impotency of Just Voting
Voting, Not Even Half the Battle
How often do you vote?
This isn’t meant to mock, deride, or make you feel bad. You took time out of your busy day to show up to a polling location, stand in line, and cast your vote. Pat yourself on the back, you participated in a representative democracy.
I hope you weren’t expecting any serious change though.
But maybe you’re a shitlib bootlicker who gets their kicks watching Russian boys get blown up by grenades and earnestly posts Dark Brandon memes. Or maybe you’re a neocon who LOVES Israel and who really, Really, REALLY wants to see Tehran razed to the dirt.
If you’re not one of those two flavors of the status quo, nothing's changing in your favor. Not now, not ever.
You cast your vote, but while you were checking boxes, a machine was chugging along. Its gears were spinning before you were born, and they will turn long after you are gone.
It’s priced in every outcome.
The most likely outcome, that an incumbent stays in office. Priced in.
A change in party. Priced in.
A pimp runs for election, dies three weeks before the election, and gets voted in any way? Believe it or not, already priced in.
Their work started long before election day, and their work will keep going long after to subvert every single fucking choice you made.
Lobbying.
When you’re working and politicians are writing legislation, lobbyists are working.
When you’re eating lunch, politicians are holding public meetings filled with lobbyists.
When you’re winding down for the afternoon, politicians and lobbyists are having drinks together and laughing back in their offices.
Again, I’m not mocking you. You have to work, you have to sleep, and you have to take time to actually enjoy life.
It is their life. Politics and lobbying are their job, their network, and their friends. It’s practically integral to the American political system. And, of course, everyone is making money off of it, disgusting amounts of money.
Your $5 campaign donation means nothing.
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That’s how the bribes work, how the money flows, and how the blood clots.
Campaign contributions.
Jimmy Williams lays it out pretty well in Vox: If you want something done, contribute to a campaign. You want a vote? Do you want to gum things up? Maybe you're trying to lube the machine before you work it really good. Contribute to a campaign.
It’s a $46 billion-dollar industry. Do you seriously think you can compete with that by voting for a different color of status quo?
The worst part? All perfectly legal under the Citizens United decision, and that’s just how the American system works. It can't really work any other way. It doesn’t know how.
“So what do I do?”
You have to do what’s difficult, be more involved. Does that mean whining on social media about how bad the orange dumbass is? Nope. That means paying attention to state and local elections and policies.
Are you a YIMBYist? A NIMBYist? Pro-gun, anti-gun, urban, rural, tough on crime, prison abolitionist, pro- or anti-choice? Unless you want Beijing-style autocracy, you can’t rely on the (two flavors of) geriatric retard in chief to get any of that done.
You have to pay attention and participate in state and local politics. Democrats have no interest in passing any sort of meaningful legislation. Republicans feign interest in actually accomplishing anything at the national level.
If you want a 15-minute city, or if you want that to never happen in your city, that’s a local decision. If you want permitless carry in your state, that goes through the state legislature. If you want LGBT rights enshrined into law, that’s best done through the state.
The presidential election is flashy, big and affects everyone in the country. Congress is big, with lots of players vying for influence and votes. Of course, it’s going to grab everyone’s attention.
You, as a human being, have to peel your attention away from the national shitshow and see what’s going on at home.
But you have to be smart about it.
I mentioned in a very old article that:
A third party can’t start by trying to run a presidential candidate. That’s unpopular and bound to fail. It would have to start at the local level. Show that it can work at a small scale before working our way up to county or the state level.
Vote Blue No Matter Who and Whatever the Opposite Is
This idea is fucking dumb.
This is how you get terrible and corrupt politicians.
This is how you get Dianne Feinstein rotting away in her office.
Love him or hate him, Freddie DeBoer laid it out pretty well in Two Brain Teasers for the Pod Save America Crowd
Instead, people like me are constantly told to vote blue no matter who, to support Democrats in any election regardless of what those individual Democrats stand for. To do otherwise, supposedly, is to support the Republicans, and because Trump is a particularly inflammatory figure, they emphasize that you’re supporting Trump specifically. (Even if the race in question is for, like, comptroller of Cleveland.) I lived a particularly aggressive version of this, as a young man, as Joe Lieberman was my senator. Liberman represented the repudiation of almost everything I believed in, but the pressure from Connecticut Dems to support him was overwhelming. But he was a neoconservative in all but name and epitomized the cautious, establishmentarian version of Democratic politics that has dominated in my lifetime. So I couldn’t vote for him. Well, they always told us to use the primary process, so we did, and we defeated Joe Lieberman! And for our trouble most of the “blue no matter who” types in Connecticut voted against the Democratic candidate and reelected Lieberman, but not before calling us traitors and anti-Semites. Womp womp!
This idea gets you politicians like Kyrsten Sinema, whom I’ve covered before. It’s got you, John McCain (may he burn in hell). It gets you RINOs and shitty Dems. Your brain-dead party loyalty is rewarded with gerontocrats who waste away in office and corrupt individuals who know they’ll get into office because of the letter next to their name.
“But Drumpf,”
“But Biden,”
Shut
The
Fuck
Up
It’s ideas and people like you who got us into this fucking mess, and it’s people like you who will keep us here.
One Last Thing
If you seriously believe in “muh Russian hacking,” “Da 2020 election was stolen,” “January 6th was an insurrection,” and you also believe that you’re going to “save democracy” by voting really, really hard.
That means you’re really fucking dumb, and I shouldn’t have to lay out why.
Before you go, there are a couple of handy tools that I love to shout out whenever I have the chance. Open Secrets tracks campaign finance. GovTrack keeps an eye on the conduct of your representatives in Congress. These are very handy tools, and I highly recommend looking up who your representatives are and what they are doing.
Until next week.