America is an imperial slaughterhouse and every four years that bloody kill room floor hosts a jingle-brained three-ring-circus that the men with hammers call a presidential election season. A ghastly, multibillion dollar display of buggery, cuckery, pomp and circumstance in which spineless sociopaths without a gag reflex are pitted against each other in a shit eating contest while we the people are all shamed into picking sides by pitiless wonks who won't stop shouting that this glorified reality television abortion is the most important democratic happening in recorded history and that we won't have the right to complain about getting raped for the next four years unless we choose our rapist.
Fuck you, I ain't voting. After Satan knows how many cycles of this shit, I'm through. I won't do it anymore and you can all go ahead and burn me at the stake so long as you use ballot boxes for kindling and put the latest debate on mute while my eyeballs melt. Anything is better than spending ten months straight pretending that choosing my least least-favorite millionaire to be the Pentagon's mouthpiece for the next four years is a fucking democracy because it's not.
This doesn't fucking matter, and we all know it. Even if a few good radicals managed to find a way to shut down the corporate tractor beam of the two-party system long enough to get a half-decent son of a bitch into the White House he would still just be little more than the nicest guy at the concentration camp. America is a plutocratic dictatorship, and these elections are little more than pet fashion shows for their poodles.
I used to vote. I used to be pretty goddamn passionate about it too and not because I bought into that holier-than-thou lesser-of-two-evils bullshit either. I was a diehard protest voter who realized that this thing was a show but tried to hijack it anyway in hopes of using the platform it provided to further a populist movement against empire.
My strategy was pretty simple, I would pick whichever candidate was the most aggressively antiwar and do everything I could to keep the censors from yanking them off the stage for as long as humanly possible in the hopes of waking just a few zombies from their military-industrial slumber. During my first election I campaigned like a motherfucker on fire for Dennis Kucinich and then voted for Ralph Nader when they tried to package a sweet-talking bologna salesman named Barack Obama as a pacifist based largely on the color of his skin.
In 2012, I put my proletarian pride aside to support Ron Paul when I was still a Guevara-quoting communist because I saw the way that this plainspoken free-market peacenik galvanized an antiwar movement in freefall after the Bush Junta finally fucked off. I voted for Jill Stein twice before supporting Jo Jorgensen in 2020. I switched parties from Green to Independent to Libertarian as I abandoned Marxism for a more free-market oriented hybrid of post-left anarchism and Queer libertine socialism, all while maintaining the same goal of smashing the war machine by any means necessary and those means included manipulating the empire's own circus as a zoonotic tool for agitprop.
So, what happened? 2020 happened and then a savage midterm followed like Rosemary's afterbirth. In an age of Trump and anti-Trump hysteria, the election cycle itself became an increasingly violent tool for division and its effects on the people around me became increasingly horrifying. As a muckraking anarcho-populist, bottom unity is my bread and butter, the basic notion that left and right and conservative and liberal are totally irrelevant labels in the face of the fact that everyone outside of the country club is getting fucked by the same greedy elites in both major parties.
I had worked my ass off for years reaching out to antiwar conservatives and convincing them that Queer people like me were not the enemy and in a single election season I saw all of this hard work washed away when the Christian Right turned my gender identity into their latest electoral boogeyman and other trans people responded by seeking shelter behind the strong arms of progressive warmongers while MAGA "isolationists" decided to put America first by going after our kids.
It got worse. It spread. People stopped having positions anymore, they just had enemies. Even sensible radicals like Noam Chomsky had to vote for a white power warmonger like Joe Biden in order to stop a white power warmonger like Donald Trump from doing all the horrible shit that Joe had already spent the eighties and nineties doing. The MeToo Movement devoured itself when they refused to stand with one of that jackal's victims and Black Lives Matter followed suit. Then January 6 came, and pissed-off people finally rose up in anger against power, but only in defense of more power, wasting legitimate revolutionary momentum on throwing a hissy fit for the other rapist on the ticket.
The elections themselves have become a device for lower class division in ways never seen before. This is no longer simply a tool to distract a nation from the monster behind the curtain. As the American Empire begins to collapse beneath the rust of its sins and rapidly disintegrates into just another failed state it is turning the two-party system into camps of rival apocalyptic suicide cults who have been convinced that the fate of humanity rests on the whims of a single reality television rodeo clown named Donald J. Trump.
If he gets elected democracy is over or if he doesn't get elected democracy is over. And even third parties have been infected by this partisan contagion, with my own adopted Libertarian Party collapsing into a petty bitch fight between antiwar voters who hate Trump and antiwar voters who hate trans kids enough to let him speak at our convention.
You stupid motherfuckers don't seem to realize that democracy is already over in this country and Donald Trump is nothing but a symptom of the final stages of this electoral cancer. When Donald Trump was president, the same bullshit wars rolled on towards oblivion. All of his Putin ass kissing didn't stop him from eviscerating nearly every Cold War treaty we had left with the Kremlin. And since Trump has been chucked from the White House, the same bubbling cauldron of chaos continues to permeate throughout Babylon while the same concentration camps remain packed to the gills on our prolapsed border.
The system has already collapsed. Only the illusions remain but the illusions have become existential, something falsely tribal for people to cling to for warmth while the mandarins prepare for a final kamikaze assault on the inevitable Eurasian Century in Ukraine and Taiwan.
Well, I'll say it again, just one more time, I'm done. American "democracy" has somehow become even worse than an illusion. It has become a full-blown mental illness, and I have enough of those already. There is nothing remotely revolutionary to be done with this circus ride anymore if there ever was to begin with. I will no longer validate a flunked empire with my vote.
But that doesn't mean that I'm finished waging war against war. I have simply altered my tactics to something more realistic than hijacking the Hindenburg and I seriously suggest that anyone serious about opposing empire do the same. We must do the polar opposite of engaging this systemic sickness. We must actively disengage. We must drop out.
With the empire twisting and flailing in the wind like a scarecrow, now is the time to build something new to survive the collapse of the old. We can do this by using the new tools of distraction like social media to create a thriving counter-economy in which all goods and services can be exchanged free from taxation or corporate interference on the dark web, or you can kick it old school and just start a farm. Either way, the idea of this tactic, known in left libertarian circles as agorism, is to starve the powerful of the resources of our labor while fostering self-sufficient voluntary societies that don't require a managerial class to function.
From there we secede from the state and create a vast panarchy of many stateless societies. Every self-sufficient voluntary community divorces itself from an increasingly illegitimate union and declares themselves to be a sovereign nation existing totally free from borders wherever its citizen's roam. Each of these polities would come with its own government, its own schools, its own militias, its own medical services, but all of which would be completely voluntary and completely un-dependent on physical territory.
My Queer Hillbilly Autonomous Zone could exist in the same goddamn apartment complex as the Rastafarian Republic and the Mormon Fundamentalist Dutchie of Deseret. We could borrow sugar and make peace deals over Friday night poker. America could become a bit more like it was before the white man and his electoral circus fucked it up, a disorganized tribal hodgepodge of competing governments without a monopoly on the use of force. It wasn't perfect but nobody got nuked because there was nothing big enough to be worth destroying the world to evaporate.
Maybe it'll fail. Maybe humans really are fucked. But if that's the case, I would much rather go down building something than standing in line to vote for some asshole who represents a system defined by tearing people down. You can do whatever the fuck you want this November. I'm through telling other people how to live. Just don't expect me to feel guilty for not indulging your electoral fetish because I've got better shit to do with my time.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs influenced by this post
* Behind the Wheel by Depeche Mode
* Driver by Soccer Mommy
* Shine On Sweet Jesus by the Flaming Lips
* Big Empty by Stone Temple Pilots
* The Concept by Teenage Fanclub
* Quarry by Wednesday
* Buildings by Regina Spektor
* Lessons Learned by Matt & Kim
* Some Candy Talking by the Jesus & Mary Chain
* Seattle by Public Image Ltd.
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