This entry is not telling anyone NOT to vote, even if the author can no longer fight the feeling that any continued support for the Democratic Party only legitimizes and prolongs the already centuries old genocides this country was founded on. This entry is also mostly a series of block quotes briefly interrupted by venting and commentary. The brain cells responsible for stringing thoughts together in a more coherent and interconnected manner are currently on strike :raised-fist:
"I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action'; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a 'more convenient season.' Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."kayfabe
-Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail
We have F.D. Signifier* to thank for this metaphor (even though he's far from the first person to apply this metaphor to US politics). In professional wrestling and other entertainment sports, kayfabe is the committment the performing artists have to upholding the narrative and unique unreality of their profession. Two wrestlers may be best friends outside the ring, but if the story demands they have a feud, then by god are they going to try to make sure you believe it. *(Signified B Sides, "I'm probably done with political 'content'")
For an example of kayfabe in US politics we need go no further than our own governor of Michigan. This summer Gretchen Whitmer attended the groundbreaking ceremony of an AI Datacenter in Saline Township, where she talked to the CEOs of both Open AI and Oracle. Whitmer is alleged to have been caught on camera saying "We’re used to people saying fuck no and doing it anyway" to the CEO of Oracle. If the videographer's "guarantee that the clip was not manipulated, and the audio was not manipulated" can be trusted, this would be an instance of Gretchen Whitmer breaking kayfabe. Given not one but two state level offices under her authority approved permits allowing Line 5 to continue operating, it's getting really hard to believe this isn't Big Gretch showing us her real face. (For those keeping score, Line 5 also had another massive spill this summer, very close to Bad River.)
"The year when all of the white political crooks will be right back in your and my community with their false promises, building up our hopes for a letdown, with their trickery and their treachery, with their false promises which they don't intend to keep. As they nourish these dissatisfactions, it can only lead to one thing, an explosion; and now we have the type of Black man on the scene in America today -- I'm sorry, Brother Lomax -- who just doesn't intend to turn the other cheek any longer."
-Malcolm X, The Ballot or the Bullet
With one arm the Democratic Party holds a gun to our head. That gun's name is the Republican Party. With the other arm, the Democrats bump elbows with the same Republican Party and pat themselves on the back for "still being able to have bipartisanship" with this fucking death cult that they are responsible for aiding and enabling.
THESE PEOPLE SHOULD BE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE NEAREST VOLCANO"Why, the Democrats have got the government sewed up, and you're the one who sewed it up for them. And what have they given you for it? Four years in office, and just now getting around to some civil rights legislation. Just now, after everything else is gone, out of the way, they're going to sit down now and play with you all summer long -- the same old giant con game that they call filibuster. All those are in cahoots together. Don't you ever think they're not in cahoots together.. But they're playing that old con game. One of them makes believe he's for you, and he's got it fixed where the other one is so tight against you, he never has to keep his promise. You put the Democrats first and the Democrats put you last."the Democrats will betray Black and Indigenous people,
-Malcolm X, The Ballot or the Bullet (again)
"The same government that you go abroad to fight for and die for is the government that is in a conspiracy to deprive you of your voting rights, deprive you of your economic opportunities, deprive you of decent housing, deprive you of decent education. You don't need to go to the employer alone, it is the government itself, the government of America, that is responsible for the oppression and exploitation and degradation of black people in this country. And you should drop it in their lap. This government has failed the Negro. This so-called democracy has failed the Negro. And all these white liberals have definitely failed the Negro."
-Malcolm X, The Ballot or the Bullet (yeah another one, sue me)
"Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled."
-Karl Marx, 1850 address to the central committee of the Communist League
For any individual to actually represent a diverse group of people is an impossible task. Representative democracy only works at all when the representative fears the mass of people they are supposed to represent. Either to fear them in the way you fear letting down your loved ones (lmfao, in this congress?), or the far more likely scenario of fearing a mass of people will hold your ass to the fire if you don't get your shit together and deliver what they need. An elected representative without some form of fear simply does not possess the right social forces to function properly.
"At the moment, while the democratic petty bourgeois are everywhere oppressed, they preach to the proletariat general unity and reconciliation; they extend the hand of friendship, and seek to found a great opposition party which will embrace all shades of democratic opinion; that is, they seek to ensnare the workers in a party organization in which general social-democratic phrases prevail while their particular interests are kept hidden behind, and in which, for the sake of preserving the peace, the specific demands of the proletariat may not be presented. Such a unity would be to their advantage alone and to the complete disadvantage of the proletariat. The proletariat would lose all its hard-won independent position and be reduced once more to a mere appendage of official bourgeois democracy. This unity must therefore be resisted in the most decisive manner. Instead of lowering themselves to the level of an applauding chorus, the workers, and above all the League, must work for the creation of an independent organization of the workers’ party, both secret and open, and alongside the official democrats, and the League must aim to make every one of its communes a center and nucleus of workers’ associations in which the position and interests of the proletariat can be discussed free from bourgeois influence."
-Karl Marx, 1850 address to the central committee of the Communist League
"In the event of a struggle against a common enemy a special alliance is unnecessary. As soon as such an enemy has to be fought directly, the interests of both parties will coincide for the moment and an association of momentary expedience will arise spontaneously in the future, as it has in the past. It goes without saying that in the bloody conflicts to come, as in all others, it will be the workers, with their courage, resolution and self-sacrifice, who will be chiefly responsible for achieving victory. As in the past, so in the coming struggle also, the petty bourgeoisie, to a man, will hesitate as long as possible and remain fearful, irresolute and inactive; but when victory is certain it will claim it for itself and will call upon the workers to behave in an orderly fashion, to return to work and to prevent so-called excesses, and it will exclude the proletariat from the fruits of victory."
-Karl Marx, you guessed it, it's the same address again
"Alongside the new official governments they must simultaneously establish their own revolutionary workers’ governments, either in the form of local executive committees and councils or through workers’ clubs or committees, so that the bourgeois-democratic governments not only immediately lost the support of the workers but find themselves from the very beginning supervised and threatened by authorities behind which stand the whole mass of the workers. In a word, from the very moment of victory the workers’ suspicion must be directed no longer against the defeated reactionary party but against their former ally, against the party which intends to exploit the common victory for itself."
-Karl Marx, :)
There is no long term strategy for a viable planet that includes the Democratic Party. Genocide is enshrined in the Bill of Rights - the right to keep property taken through genocidal plunder. And these fucking ghouls will never challenge that. Perhaps the best thing the party could possibly do at this point is break the two-party duopoly and first-past-the-post system we have now and then die with some tiny shred of honor and decency.