I found myself getting super annoyed this cycle with people thinking parties and voting were the answer to our problems. I too put too much stock in the outcome of this election, but I also have come to feel that voting is a mere maintenance project to try to survive the evils of electoral politics until an actually effective system of self-governance can be implemented. I do have high hopes for that effective and representative system of self-governance--- even if just in the immediate solution it poses to the worst excesses and dangers of electoral politics. If I were starting a career in academics I might want to study Self-Governance and the Art of Politics – namely how does a fluid self-governing body navigate the challenges of this world imposed by the remnants of electoral politics, oligarchy, careerism, authoritarianism, elite ownership and capture, surveillance, the deep state and the military industrial complex, among other things. (How does it do international affairs with non-self-governing bodies- etc.) Getting ahead of myself, but anyway, I don’t feel like wasting my time with politics anymore (unless something appealing pops up—because I think political groundswells are still more likely than the world suddenly coming to its senses about how fucked things are by politics and how much better they’d be if we just governed ourselves which is what we all proceeded to do.
I don’t think the American people know what they want. On purpose I’m sure. They don’t even have to wait for Jake Tapper to say How are we going to pay for it? It’s already formed in their heads. They had change dangled in front of them in the form of Kamala Harris—an actually young attractive person and they went with the guy they figured they knew, mostly because he was a Dad. That’s the change people want. They want their Dad to love them.
It’s not their fault, I hasten to add. Their isolation from each other, their alienation from what’s going on, and from a sense that they can do anything about it has been inculcated in them. They may wish things were different, but they are only too happy to pretend that things can at least get back to that last time they thought everything was going fine. Maybe Dad can get us back there. That’s what his hat says.
I am getting irritated by the non-sense and bullshit being shat out about what this election means. I’ll tell you what it means, it means we are a very confused and fucked up and complicitly powerless people. Election Day is not an opportunity for change (unless it is—but that takes some serious planning.) What Election Day is in my opinion is an obligation to make the best that you can of a terrible choice. I honestly think for a complete unknown with dark skin and a vagina Kamala Harris did a creditable job given the short time span she was given and these unprecedented circumstances. I’m not saying she was faultless. But I think it’s ridiculous to assert as though it’s the truth that if she had pandered to my tastes instead of Liz Cheney’s she would have won. We have no fucking idea. Likewise, I think it’s absurd to say that people actually meant to make this incredibly poorest of 2 possible choices on purpose. People are doing their best in the voting booth. Fractions of people on both sides are true believers in what they’re voting for. The rest are just doing the best they can and hoping for the best. Not enough people understand the con job that Trump and the oligarchs are pulling. It looks like Dad level stuff. Dad makes me vomit (not my Dad necessarily but the concept of Dad) but a lot of Americans feel safer with Dad than with some dark skinned person with a vagina. (apologies to KH for harping on her genitals. Anyhoooo!11) This is a classic example of what’s wrong with electoral politics – it is not intentional. We’re not choosing healthcare and income equality and peace. We’re choosing a celebrity and hoping for the best.
People who think this was like 2016 or even 2020 are dead wrong. We’ve never had an election like this before where a known entity, a former president who lost his re-election, a charismatic asshole tv celebrity with a well-established propensity to get away with anything was up against a virtual unknown with an apparently unpronounceable name who 3 months before got called on by unseen hands to substitute for the current (Carter-like) president in his bid for re-election due to the public catastrophe of the president’s spectacular decline on full display to all. The task of this substitute was really Herculean. I thought she might actually do it which is what makes it extra disappointing—devastating—to me. I was placing my dreams on that blank canvas of my imagination of what her administration could be capable of. Foolish of me. And foolish as well to bear a grudge against anyone who didn't adopt my fantastical hope in the unknown one. But in truth, I am always hoping for change. I am always voting for Revolution. I just know that that kind of voting if it has any effect at all has it in the primaries. Until the operatives get their hands on it. But in this case, I was hopeful that there wasn’t enough time for the operatives to get their hands all over it. I also believed (maybe too credulously) that she was being advised to not reinforce stereotypes about her demographics, which was why she was over-compensating with the republican bullshit, which made sense since her campaign was being run out of Delaware with Biden’s people. I hated that she missed the dumb easy opportunities to reassure the left wing of the base, but I had been convinced that there was method to her madness, and I’m not convinced there wasn’t something to the strategy. There just wasn’t enough time (or Bernie people behind the scenes.)
One reason people don’t like liberals is that they are huge fuckin’ unself-aware hypocrites. They are clueless about themselves: they're just as cretinous and mean as everyone else but they think they intend better. I don’t like the US being like Hungary. I don’t like having to live with the Hungarian dilemma. How do you keep being a Hungarian when the uber Hungarian has made that awful. What good is being cynical (which you can’t help being) when people are being deported and Israel is being encouraged to turn Gaza into beachfront real estate for Israelis and other investors. How evil is it that the coolest way to be dissident is to be ironically complicit in fascism in the name of accelerationism? I do believe the US has to fall but that ain’t happening. It’s just turning into Hungary. So giving you the benefit of the doubt, what you might have intended originally with your oh so clever cynicism was to be accelerationist, bur what you are in point of fact is merely complicit in fascism. What I don't think is forgivable is that through your eagerness you've made every one else by virtue of their own ineffectualness necessarily complicit as well.
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