Some Quick Thoughts On Electoralism
The American political system is broken.
Note: You can watch a video version of this article here.
Recently, a colleague of mine asked if I could expand on an idea I put forth in response to Nathan J. Robinson, editor of Current Affairs magazine, when he puzzled over why the Democratic Party is supporting the deeply unpopular Biden for a second term as president. I said that the Democratic Party is not a true political party, as that term is widely understood, and therefore it’s unhelpful to treat the party as such. Here’s the exchange:
My colleague wanted this idea fleshed out more and wanted to get my thoughts on the value of electoralism and what I think a left-wing position ought to be in regards to engaging with the voting process. So, here are my thoughts quickly sketched out.
In regards to the Democratic and Republican parties not being true political parties, I think about it in a few different dimensions. One, perhaps the most obvious, is where does power, and therefore accountability, reside? From the evidence, the parties do not want the levers of power to reside with the common people, and the political and economic systems are set up in such a way to ensure that power remains at, and flows from, the top. This is chiefly manifested with the outsized influence of money and social status on politics. With more money comes greater ability to control lawmakers through lobbying, campaign contributions (bribes), lavishing politicians with gifts and speaking fees, threatening to cut jobs inside a lawmaker's district, etc. There is no shortage of books and documentaries from across the ideological spectrum explaining all of the horrible ways in which multinational corporations are holding the reigns of political power and the deadly results that ensue.
This "corporate coups d'etat," in the words of John Ralston Saul, has global implications. Trade deals such as NAFTA have globalized our economy, thus pitting disempowered workers from around the world against each other in a race to the bottom, thereby ensuring immoral, detestable profits for those on top, extracted by the labor of those on the bottom. The American “Battle in Seattle” against the WTO (I recently met someone who helped coordinate those actions. It was a trip), the protests of Korean workers, demonstrations by Mexican workers, the mass suicides of farmers, none of these things stopped NAFTA from passing. People around the world were shouting loud and clear and warning about what NAFTA would do to all of us. The predictable results are what we are living with today. The political parties did not listen to their constituents, they listened to money. It was a Democratic administration that signed NAFTA into law.
Insofar as a political party is considered an organization which is run by and for the mass of its constituents, the Republicans and the Democrats do not meet that standard because they both have subverted the will of the people by listening only to those with capital, which, in our neoliberal society, is synonymous with power in all its forms (political, economic, social, etc.)
Besides money, but related to it, is the elevated social status of being an elite political insider. "It's one big club and you're not in it," said George Carlin. Lots of these insiders grew up together. They went to the same schools. They revolve through the same doors of private industry and "public" legislation and back again, with the private sector literally writing legislation pertaining to their own industries. If you're not an insider, your opinion doesn't matter to these people. You are beneath them. You have no specialized expertise. You are expected to vote every two to four years for a circumscribed set of options and beyond that you better shut up and take it. The Democratic Party made this explicit when it argued in court that the DNC was lawful in rigging the 2016 primaries against Bernie Sanders. The implicit evidence for this lack of popular accountability is demonstrated by this study which shows that what the general public wants has very little bearing on what lawmakers actually do compared to what elite interests want. If the powerful want something to change at the legislative level, it is much more likely for that thing to happen. But even if most average people want something to change, those attitudes have no bearing on what Congress gets passed. A recent example: A progressive Californian state assemblymember was set to introduce a Medicare for All bill, backed by a nurses' union, to a state legislature that is supermajority Democrat. He scrapped the bill after pressure from other Democrats because the Democrats don't actually stand for Medicare for All even though most Californians, and Americans in general, want that. The Democrats didn't want to be forced to vote on the bill because they would be exposed for what they are. They are liars. We know who they serve. Here is that California assemblymember struggling for nearly an hour trying to give excuses for his cowardice.
Now, despite all this, there is some room for leveraging people power to force lawmakers to serve the public’s interest, which is emphatically not the same thing as corporate interests. Ralph Nader, ever the dogged optimist (god bless that man), consistently hammers home the point that it takes only a minority of voters, unified across party lines, pestering their lawmakers on particular issues and threatening to withhold votes to get legislators' attention. Nader also points to using the public referendum - getting people to sign a petition to get something on a ballot or to have city council members vote on an issue - to circumvent legislatures and make things happen at the local level that lawmakers are not making happen of their own accord. Organizers in Atlanta are currently using this option to get the construction of Cop City on the ballot. (I tried to convince my local DSA chapter to organize a referendum on a $20 minimum wage for our city. They thought that would be too hard and didn't buy that our "purple" county would be into it. But I'm like, people who were born and raised here are being pushed out by tech bros paying all cash on houses well above asking price in an area that is historically rural. That affects everybody regardless of party. But I digress.)
The point is that I do think there is opportunity to leverage people-power over corporate power on the local level. A great model for this is Socialist Alternative in Seattle. They have a charismatic leader in Kshama Sawant and a purposefully engaged electorate, pretty much the polar opposite of the Democratic Party, an institution full of effete liberals who only spur engagement in their voters to steal their money and then never actually deliver any change because on the substantive, material issues, they are in lock step with the Republicans. Both parties, in large majorities even amongst “progressives,” vote to give the Pentagon hundreds of billions of dollars every year, even going beyond the military’s asking budget. No party challenges militarism. No party challenges capitalism. To quote myself (I know, I know): "The Democratic Party is a hypocritical organization, masquerading as a rival to the Republicans, that is, in fact, a full partner with the Republican Party in selling out the vulnerable to the whims of capitalism and imperialism and which clings to its rotten power, built atop the desiccated corpse of our republic, at a ghastly price that our countrymen are only faintly beginning to apprehend. The two dominant American political parties are two sides of the same capitalist’s coin. Treating them as true rivals is either disingenuous or deluded."
Which brings me to another dimension, one of ideology. The American electorate, to say nothing of nonvoters, is politically disengaged by design and assiduously propagandized to think otherwise. As professor Wendy Brown, using the framework of Max Weber, eloquently explains in this lecture, our neoliberal society - and it is fair to describe our entire society as one that is organized around neoliberal principles - chiefly inculcates mercantile values, and thus, political nihilism results. We are divorced from any real sense that change can be effectuated politically through mass movements and solidarity. Thus, all that matters anymore is individualized, commodified, nihilistic self-affirmation. Brown says that this widespread nihilism manifests, among other ways, as a "mass withdrawal into the trivial, immediate, and personal," and in "unprecedented popular indifference to consistency, accountability, even veracity in political leaders."
The quest for and deliberation of what our values are have been divorced from the realm of politics and replaced with shallow, cultural distractions. Our capitalist society is only too happy to commodify every conceivable thing, thus perverting our innate human faculties and transforming political action into a quest for little more than capital expansion. The things which ought to be deliberated and fought for in a healthy civic society using the realm of politics - civil rights, labor rights, gender equality, budgetary choices, etc. - are transmuted into little more than branding opportunities. Starbucks puts pride flags on its merchandise while illegally firing queer union organizers. Instead of occupying the halls of congress to shut the system down, people change their profile picture on a tech giant social media company to demonstrate they support the right to have an abortion. Shit like that.
The Republicans and the Democrats have stated explicitly, loud and clear, over and over again, that they are capitalists to the core. They say this while apparently being functionally illiterate as to how capitalism deforms society. They either do not understand or actively obfuscate the fact that inherent to capitalism is the accumulation and monopolization of capital and thus power. Democrats and Republicans parrot neoliberal propaganda to us at every turn, paying fealty to the veneer of "democracy" and the "rule of law," while all around us are the signs of decay, the hollowing out of the ideals our republic is founded upon, and they expect us not to believe what we see with our own eyes and feel in our own hearts every day.
Part of this has to do with the elites actually believing in their own shit. This is easier to do when you and all of your friends are at a safe remove from the rest of society. Being rich quite literally perverts your priorities and your view of the world around you. In the words of Chris Hedges: "The refinement of the rich is a veneer. They can afford good manners because they use others – including the machinery of the state – to carry out their dirty work. They often know the names of great authors and artists, but they are culturally and intellectually bankrupt. They are consumed by gossip, a pathological yearning for status and obsessed by brands and possessions – mansions, yachts, cars, gourmet food, clothes, jewelry or vacations at exclusive resorts. They epitomize the cult of the self and the unchecked hedonism that defines a consumer society."
All that both parties have left to use on us are appeals to a system, using the vocabulary of American "freedom" and "democracy," which is widely understood to be illegitimate at this point. This widespread disenchantment has profound societal effects that we see with regularity. On the positive side, labor organizing is at an all time high. Using my scientific graffiti barometer, I'm starting to see tags like "Fuck fascists," "nationalize the railroads," and "join a union," in my relatively conservative, all white, affluent county. Such tags were unheard of years ago. On the negative side, there are deep, self destructive pathologies cropping up. I got obsessed with recent cases of people setting themselves on fire over the impending climate catastrophe. I really think that self-destructive actions such as these are going to continue and spread to other causes, much as what we saw with Western immolators over the Vietnam War. When a political system does not allow for meaningful political engagement by the populace so that they may have a real say over the things which affect their lives, the populace begins to destroy things, including itself. This is always what happens when people are aggrieved with no outlet. Alexis de Toqueville wrote nearly two centuries ago: "In England, where wealth has a monopoly of amusement as well as of power, complaints are made that whenever the poor happen to enter the places reserved for the pleasures of the rich, they do wanton mischief: can this be wondered at, since care has been taken that they should have nothing to lose?"
For me, that idea is pretty central. Care has been taken, by both capitalist parties, that the people should be disempowered, without recourse, of lesser means, and thus have nothing to lose. What follows next ought to have been predicted. But the capitalist parties do not respond rationally. They respond only in ways that consolidate their power. They are obsequious to the military, putting their faith in military solutions to the inevitable unrest that results from climate change and political deadlock. They speak only of reform, not revolution. Revolution is the strict provenance of the people, not the parties. Neither party seeks to truly educate their electorate or engage them in the political process. To do so would be to undermine the parties’ basis of power, which is built on lies and concerted shuffling of the populace away from the levers of power. Revolutionary organizations such as the Black Panthers and the Communist Party spend a lot of time educating and engaging their members because they understand that the dominant society has propagandized them from birth to accept the status quo. Socialists need other socialists to fight back. Democrats just need Democrats to be quiet.
Now, in regards to the promise of electoralism, I suppose I fall somewhere between Briahna Joy Gray, Kshama Sawant, and Chris Hedges on this issue. Strategic electoralism can be useful, particularly in our depoliticized society where it is literally the only avenue that most people engage with. But, just don't have that energy come at the cost of organizing levers of power outside the system, namely organized labor power and mass civil disobedience.
I do think there are appropriate electoral projects for the left to give its energy to. I was excited by Shahid Buttar's campaigns against Nancy Pelosi in 2016 and 2020. Buttar is great at articulately clarifying the distinction between what a fighting progressive politician really looks like and what the Democratic Party is. He is well-versed and intelligent on many topics and would wipe the floor with Pelosi in a debate. Unfortunately, Buttar’s 2016 campaign suffered similar baseless accusations as what the progressive Alex Morse suffered. In the latter case, those accusations were specifically orchestrated by Democratic Party operatives. With Buttar, it was a combination of straight up lies levied by an unstable human, as well as a dysfunctional campaign staff that turned their back on him. But both cases, among others, are good demonstrations of how hostile the Democratic Party is to progressives who dare to primary corporate Democrats, another sign that the party is quite undemocratic.
Skeptical as I am of a candidate running as a Democrat, I asked Buttar why he chose that route. He told me that, given the constituency of San Francisco, he would consign his campaign to "effective irrelevance" if he ran third party. Part of this calculation was wanting to exert as much pressure on Pelosi as possible, even if he couldn't win her seat. He saw value in pushing her on issues such as congressional insider trading, of which her family is an egregious example. Without the threat of a viable challenger, there is little reason for Pelosi to change, even symbolically. I tend to buy that argument because it is a specific calculation for a specific district in the Bay Area.
I was sincerely bummed that Buttar didn't quite get 2nd place in the 2020 primary, which would have put him up against Pelosi for a second time. Having Buttar in the general election would have been enlivening. (Just by the way, I went to Burning Man for the first time last year and I saw Shahid Buttar playing a DJ set in the middle of the Nevada desert to literally no one at 2 o'clock in the morning. I went up and chatted with him for a bit. He told me that he was quite through with running as a candidate. "Let other people figure that out." That's what this system does to the best of us. It chews you up and spits you out. Virtue is not rewarded. You must find value in virtue in and of itself, or not at all. There's no other way to keep going in the face of defeat, save for religion. Briahna Joy Gray offered some encouraging words to Buttar post his political defeat. “You were our best,” she said. You can tell by Buttar’s reaction that this bolstered his soul, and it did mine too.)
The ways in which the Democrats and the Republicans are hostile to outside challengers also speaks to the notion of careerism and party loyalty. Often, no matter how good your intentions are, once you are wrapped up in the machinery of the two-party system, you are inculcated with the values of fealty to the institution, over and above being accountable to your constituents or to your own values. For those of strong will who can resist the party machine as much as possible, such as Dennis Kucinich, this means that you are destroyed and gotten rid of. For others, like AOC, you are co-opted and brought into the fold, accomplishing little in your career other than virtue signaling and apologetics for a corrupt party. These are the dangers when you enter into a powerful institution without a strong, guiding ideological framework that charts a path for your decisions. Frankly, I trust a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist like Vijay Prashad or a socialist like Kshama Sawant to stand up against the machinery of the state far and above anyone who does not have a similar guiding ideology. Being scrappy only gets you so far. How I long for someone like the Irish MEP Clare Daly to be a member of our congress. Her rhetoric just highlights how bankrupt American politics is. The Irish are on another level.
For the national-level presidential race, I absolutely think that the left should be demanding primary debates. I absolutely see value in that doddering old criminal, Biden - who voted for the illegal U.S. invasion of Iraq and who ushered in the modern era of mass incarceration - having to confront a Marianne Williamson or an RFK Jr. or any other left candidate on the debate stage. It highlights the contrasts. It's a bit closer to something like democracy. I think if the left were to come out strongly, unapologetically, against Biden and in favor of primaries, then that shows some self-respect and some fight that the right has been exerting in the political arena since the Trump era. My heart broke a tiny bit more when I saw that Bernie endorsed Biden again this round. Falling in line is not a winning strategy.
Groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America ought to be demanding that the progressive “Squad” refrain from lining up behind Biden, or else the DSA will withhold votes, refrain from endorsing them, and revoke their DSA imprimatur. That's called leverage. If the Sunrise Movement can be so quick to unendorse Alex Morse at the drop of a hat over unfounded accusations, then they also ought to be quick to refuse to endorse a president who is responsible for millions of people being imprisoned in this country and who is on the verge of a brain aneurysm (I can only hope.)
I also think that third parties should be given due consideration. Kshama Sawant is a great example of an effective third party candidate. I see much more possibility for success of third party electoralism on the local level, however. The national level, the presidency, is a harder sell for a lot of people. Not because it isn’t worth doing, but because it’s seen as Sisyphean. But even though you may lose the election, there is value in threatening the two-party machine by cultivating an independent voter base through being truly contrasting. It is a good thing that Ralph Nader ran for president in 2000. It is a good thing that the Green Party runs candidates for president. Third parties don’t steal votes from the Republicans or Democrats. The Democrats and Republicans steal votes from third parties.
I encourage everyone to vote third party if they can. People saying that it's a waste of a vote are merely supporting a self-fulfilling prophecy. For me, it's as simple as: you vote for who you want to have in power, you don't vote for who you don't want to have in power. I don't want to have Democrats in power, so I don't vote for them. Period. End of story. Thankfully, I'm lucky enough in California that there are usually a number of Green Party members and Peace & Freedom Party members on the ballot for statewide positions (the local, county level, not so much, unfortunately).
Knowing all that I know of the immense crimes, the unforgivable evils of the American empire, the worst of those crimes still well within living memory, I simply cannot vote for anyone flying under the banner of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. To do so would be to signify yet another way that I am complicit in the immiseration and murder of millions of people, a crime which I hope one day the American empire will be brought low for and to face judgement by the peoples of the earth. We cannot speak of democracy or the rule of law so long as our American war criminals are living free. Let us recall what the Allied nations did to duly convicted Nazis with the Nuremburg trials.
So, in closing, vote if you want to, but only vote for who you really believe in. Voting for the least worst ensures that we always, inexorably, get the worst. And also make sure to join a union, protest like the French do, and destroy some critical infrastructure while you’re at it. It’s a little bit of everything.