This was originally a Facebook post, but after publishing it I realized I just wrote a novel. So I set the post to "only me" and decided that when I had the time, I'd post it here and add a few things. So here it is:
You all knew I was going to do a post-election rant. So here it is.
Four years ago, I was looking forward to not caring about politics ever again. I wasn't really sure why I was tired of caring about politics, but I knew that it was causing me to be angry all the time, and I was tired of being angry. I just wanted to enjoy life, and I couldn't do that if I continued being politically active. I had been an activist since 2004, and I was one of the top political bloggers in the state at one point. But by 2016 I was just tired of the whole thing.
I didn't have the ability to express why I was so exhausted back then, but it was because I was starting to realize that the Democratic Party had no desire to make things better for the working class. After eight years of watching Obama and the Democrats cave to the Republicans on any issue that would help us, I didn't see them as worth fighting for. I didn't know how to do politics outside of elections. So on election night in 2016, I was anticipating a Clinton win and I would just go on and live my life.
That didn't happen, of course. And I spent the next four years drifting way further to the left of the two party system. And way to the bottom of the political compass. I eventually realized that I was an anarchist.
Over the last four years I learned about the history of leftist movements in the United States. Leftist movements in our country always tended to lean more towards the anarchist side. We had some really great leftists before the Cold War made the nation suspicious of socialism. Dorothy Day. Mother Jones. Bill Haywood. Daniel DeLeon. None of them gave a shit about electoral politics. They cared about organizing the working class. During the Freedom Movement in the 1960s, we had a lot of great civil rights activists that were organizing and weren't concerned with elections either. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were the best known ones, but Fred Hampton is one of my heroes. He was barely in his twenties and he knew that racism wasn't a white vs. black issue, but a ruling class vs. working class issue. He knew that the best way to end racism in America was to end capitalism.
Some folks wonder if anarchists vote. Fuck yes, I voted. Under our current system, the working class is free for the two minutes that they spend in the voting booth. After that, we go back to being servants under the state. So yeah, I voted to get my two minutes of freedom. And then I watched as the election was much closer than any pundit predicted.
There's a lot of butthurt Trump supporters right now claiming that the election was rigged.
I think the election was rigged, but not for Biden. In 2016 Trump pulled off an upset that defied all the polls. In 2020, Trump is somehow defying the odds again and making the race way closer than anyone predicted.
One election defying the polls is an anomaly. Two elections is fuckery. There's some fuckery going on.
I told my mom a few weeks ago that the main difference between a Biden and Trump presidency for me is that, "If Biden wins, there's a chance that a right-wing militia will come after me and shoot up the house. But if Trump wins, there's a good chance that the militia will have the backing of the state when they do it." You can call that hyperbole if you want to, but I've been getting death threats for all the shitposting I do for a long time. One guy harassed me so badly I had to get lawyers involved (and I'm not allowed to discuss that matter further). One of the recent death threats I got was from a guy that lives three blocks away, in my neighborhood. My address is scrubbed from the internet so he doesn't know where I live, but I know where he lives. It's real close. And he's a three percenter.
I'm not concerned with a right-wing militia coming at me on their own. History has shown that they run when you shoot back, and I got plenty of my own guns. But a militia backed by the state? That's a different story.
So that's the only reason I have to be relieved by a Biden win. But here's the thing (and fair warning, this is going to be the part where I piss off some liberals):
I don't think the Democratic Party is going to learn a goddamn thing from the last four years.
Maybe, just maybe, they'll focus on at least making sure that elections are more secure and not subject to fuckery. But I doubt that there's going to be any serious movement to abolish the electoral college. They should focus on doing that. The fact that Biden is up three million in the popular vote but we don't have a winner picked is really fucked. (Edit: It's five million now that the election is done, but still...)
We need a party of working class heroes and the Democratic Party has not shown any desire to become one. After all, they worked their asses off to shut out the two working class heroes out of the primary, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Biden didn't even mention us in any of the policy positions on his website. We're invisible to them.
Trump did as well as he did by playing off the racial fears of the white working class. The Dems would do well if they appealed to the entire working class, but they are really loathe to do so for fear of pissing off corporate donors (ironically, "the squad", who did campaign by appealing to the working class all cruised to reelection).
Biden hasn't even promised to close the concentration camps at the border. He's just promised to make them less brutal. That's no surprise, since he was vice president when they were created.
And the one, single silver lining to a Trump presidency is that he was too easily distracted to let fascist coups win in Latin America. The US has had a long standing policy going back to the founders (look up "Monroe Doctrine") of making sure that we set up our own puppet governments in Latin America. We attempted to kill President Maduro in Venezuela. We stopped trying because Trump got bored and moved on. We pulled off a coup in Bolivia, but Trump must have gotten bored with that because the newly enacted fascist government was pressured into having another election, and the socialist party in that country ate their lunch. Chile just scrapped their Pinochet-era constitution. I worry what a Biden presidency is going to bring to that region if he decides to continue a long standing US policy there.
Fascists in America were allowed to grow under an Obama presidency. I worry that the same thing will happen under Biden. Liberals always treat fascists with kid gloves up until they start shooting. If you need any evidence of this, look at how Governor Whitmer and Attorney General Nessel treated Michigan's fascists. It wasn't until some were taking action to kidnap the governor and put her into a mock trial in Wisconsin that they took any type of action. There's been no real effort to squash the fascist movement in Michigan. If some of my liberal friends want to say that they didn't do anything because it's no illegal to be a fascist, I'll invite you to look at the past century of how our government has treated socialists. There's a major double standard there. Hell, just look at how Black Lives Matter protests get treated vs the protests against the quarantine. One of those groups got tear gassed, and we all know which one.
Fortunately most of my liberal friends on here are of the radlib variety and not the centrist kind. So you'll understand when I tell you that real change isn't going to come from Biden or Whitmer. It's going to come from us organizing. Organize your workplace. Join mutual aid groups. Buy guns and join the SRA. Agitate for change to make things better. Piss off the Democrats in power so that they can't ignore us. Make them more afraid of us than they are of anyone with money. Real, meaningful change isn't going to come from an election. It'll come from making the working class a force to be reckoned with.
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