The last time i voted in a u.s. presidential general election, it was 2008. I saw past Barack Obama's obvious intelligence and through his vague rhetorical promises. I prided myself in seeing who Obama was talking to ("the middle class") and how friendly he was to the same Wall Street interests who had just turned the economy into their own ATM. I noted his preference for Mitt Romney's Massachusetts health care plan over the single-payer health care policies that I knew would save my Mom and Dad, both of whom would die within the next five years. Instead, I voted for a candidate who excited me -- whose very memory from the 2000 election year still causes many liberals to shudder with revulsion -- one who had begun his political labors decades before as a fresh-out-of-law-school outsider, going head-to-head with the corporate manufacturers of automotive death traps, organizing groups nationwide that were aimed toward holding power accountable, and who at least spoke about poverty, corporate oligarchs, and single-payer health care. I knew my preferred candidate would not win the general election, but I lived in the solidly blue state of California that the Repugnacan presidential candidate wouldn't even come close to winning, and i hoped to boost a third party to the level of support needed to obtain matching federal funds. Rather than simply adding my vote to a guaranteed blowout that would not have earned the blue candidate any more electoral college votes, I believed that voting for a third party would create an opening for genuine debate about things that matter.
By 2012, I had seen Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant. Those young brothers' murders had opened my eyes. And I had come to see electoral politics as a trap. I had seen that the Obama campaign and then administration had co-opted people and energies away from the radical movements I had come to see as the only hope for Black people's survival. I had seen motherfuckers like George Zimmerman just walking around freely after having gotten his ass whooped by a child he was stalking and murdering that child, and motherfuckers like Johannes Mehserle getting off for having shot an unarmed young Black father in the back on the floor of a public transit platform. Covering the Democratic National Convention for The Feminist Wire that year, I wrote
We Black people must come to see that when one of us has a post with the most powerful job description in the world and still is not free to protect something as basic as our biological existence, then we are not free either. Not just Obama’s hands, but all of our hands are tied. And if electoral democracy holds out no better promise than this, then there are few options that remain aside from those that Assata Shakur and George Jackson recommended.
By 2016, I argued that this same suspicion of electoral politics should be extended into a conclusive reason to reject electoral politics as a terrain of struggle altogether. Still in California, I knew that Clinton would safely win my state's electoral college votes. Angered not only by Hillary Clinton's support for "superpredator" crime and prison policies against Black people but also by her role in the assassinations of Berta Cáceres of Honduras and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, I felt free to not vote at all, even in down-ballot races. By that time, I had become involved in radical movements protesting the unpunished police murders of Black people. I was helping in small ways to organize Black spaces and Black networks of knowledge production and distribution outside of the academy. Those activities, and surviving gentrification while helping my partner and her children, left me no time to be involved in electoral politics, and that was fine by me. I thought that building capacity in myself and my community was more essential to our struggle than voting ever could be.
But in my total rejection of voting, I can now see, I helped encourage other Black folks around me to reject it. We encouraged each other in something that made us less prepared for the present moment. The radical analysis of the racist, capitalist paradigm we live in was correct; my strategic application of it was not. And now, knowing what we have learned over the last four years, I do not believe we, as politically engaged Black people on the left, can totally abandon the electoral theater of struggle. If we do, as we are seeing, that will be precisely the "path of least resistance" through which the enemies of Black freedom drive their tanks like so many Nazi panzer divisions. Decades of "lesser-evil" electoral strategy left Black people almost as vulnerable to white supremacist fascist violence as we were after union troops abandoned us at the end of Reconstruction in 1877. Hence, we, as radical folks who help shape the thinking and actions of our families and communities, have to at least pay attention to what is at stake, even if we choose to sit out voting, and even if we are also preparing to defend ourselves in other ways.
Even if we know the electoral arena has been bought off by the corporate oligarchs that are killing us, neglecting that terrain of struggle is inviting our enemies to attack us on that terrain. And we have too much riding on our movements to let them be smashed by fascists who just stroll right in without so much as camouflage. This doesn't mean we go volunteer for Demo-rat campaigns or whatever, because the risk of electoral politics is always that it saps our movement energies without giving us anything but empty promises. It is essential that we keep building our own movements outside that arena. That is the best place to put our energies. But while we're doing that, we must also keep an eye on the many ways the antiblack structure tries to shut down our movements. And electoral politics is one of those ways.
Different Times, Different Tactics
In struggle, many things are important; few things are essential. There are no essential differences between Biden's neoliberalism and Trump's right-wing fascism. Both are genocidal bourgeois settler-slaveholder ideologies, and, in fact, the fascism of Trump couldn't have emerged without the neoliberalism of both Demo-rats and the Repugnacans who have held office in recent decades and created the conditions that make amerikkka's settler-colonizers fertile for fascism. Trump and Biden are both essentially hetero-patriarchal imperialist neoliberal fascists. But the important distinction is between how they're going to kill Black, Indigenous, brown, and poor people:
1) Biden was never elected by having active klan-nazi elements as his base. Someone said, "I don't know if Trump is a white supremacist but i know the white supremacists think he's a white supremacist." Trump openly sends love messages to the right-wing white supremacist militias, including his recent "Proud Boys, stand back and stand by!" Biden, for all his buddying up with segregationists in congress, still has had to work closely with Black, Indigenous, brown, LGBTQ+ people, and immigrants, just by virtue of being a Demo-rat from the northeast of the u.s. imperial homeland. Trump feels no need to even pretend NOT to be a white supremacist, and even actively brings klan-nazi elements into policy-crafting governmental roles (like Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, to name a few) and amplifies their messages within his base. Trump empowers, emboldens, and inspires the same motherfuckers i might have to fight LITERALLY TOMORROW to defend myself and my loved ones.
2) Additionally, while Biden advocated for more policing of Black communities and the 1994 crime bill that has incarcerated many Black men (including my loved ones), Trump not only supported so-called "tough-on-crime" policies from the sidelines -- but he also took out several full-page ads calling for the death penalty against the Exonerated Five from the 1989 Central Park incident. He has never apologized to these Black men for that and even doubled down on it after their innocence had been proven. And they could easily have been me and my loved ones.
4) Some major laws and legal rulings make up the modern u.s. administrative state and are now under threat from the new Trumpist right-wing court, including Roe v. Wade, Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, Griswold v. Connecticut (right to privacy), the National Labor Relations Act (legalized the formation of labor unions), Grutter/Gratz v. Bollinger (affirmative action), and countless environmental, food/drug safety, labor, and health laws and regulatory agencies. There is never a way to know for sure, but Biden appointees would be highly unlikely to dismantle this whole network of laws, at least in the short term.
This is not even an exhaustive list. But if these differences are important to you -- and in this moment they're definitely important to me -- then take a moment and at least try to vote. No telling if they'll count the vote, but if it costs little to do it, it's a good idea to shape the field on which we must struggle.
The performative aspects of the presidency -- like the dignity of the office or the "notches on the belt" of legislative initiative -- are less of my concern because i don't think that the u.s.a. has an ethical right to exist in the first place. This is to say that the u.s.a. is unique as a hub of global empire -- the anchor tenant of an unethical world system that consists of capitalism and antiblackness. It is unethical from its inception. There's no "dignified" way to force Indigenous people off their land, poison Black-majority cities, and dispatch police death squads. And "legislative achievements" like tax cuts and welfare reform don't count as achievements to me because all i can think of is the schools and children those tax cuts and "reforms" starve. So Biden might very well, like Obama, steer the slave ship more ably than trump, enabling a few more of us to die just a little more slowly. But that will never mean that the ship is heading in an ethical direction. It's still taking us to the slave market, to the slaughter. Obama took us to the slaughter, and Biden will do the same if he wins.
However, be all that as it may, Trump is tossing us overboard right now. And let's not delude ourselves: That's a more immediate threat, even if both Biden and trump are long-term threats to our existence. Yes, fascism emerges from neoliberalism, but that doesn't make them the same or both equally threatening to Black, brown, Indigenous, and poor folks in this moment. Trump's fascism is a vanguard movement of white supremacists, paving the way for future white supremacist fascists who will make trump look tame and "establishment" by comparison.
"Ruthless Killers"
Look, let me be honest: As of today, on the eve of election day, i don't even believe Biden will be president. Sure, Biden will likely win the nationwide popular vote. (Every poll i see summarized in the news predicts that.) But that would only matter if the u.s.a. were a democratic republic. (The u.s.a. is fundamentally a genocide, and that's what it returns to in moments when actual democratic processes threaten to interrupt or undermine that genocide.) Because of the electoral college, the popular vote is not what decides u.s. presidential elections, and Trump has been showing the world that he is going to take advantage of that fact by any means he can, both legal and illegal.
Months ago, he had his fundraiser-turned-postmaster Louis DeJoy disrupting the u.s. postal service mail processing capabilities, indicating impressive levels of foresight (not to mention the years-long efforts to force Ukraine to attack Biden's presidential prospects, the basis of trump's impeachment). More than a week before the death of u.s. supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, trump was already floating names of people he might appoint to his third supreme court slot, the crowning achievement of his first-term judicial appointments, of which there have been hundreds, thanks to the Repugnacan senate. He has been regularly feeding racist red meat to his base and encouraging anti-masking protests in the middle of the COVID pandemic. And, of course, his let-em-die COVID response disproportionately victimizes those of us, including Black folks, who have traditionally voted against Repugnacans, something that, along with drastically reduced numbers of polling locations, seems calculated to further depress the turnout of voters who must stand in hours-long lines at the polls.
Even if we suppose that voters get past all the long lines and voter IDs and other voter suppression laws and methods right-wingers have weaponized against us for at least the last decade, and even if the armies of lawyers trump is dispatching to those jurisdictions fail to convince the disproportionately conservative federal courts, including the u.s. supreme court on which conservative appointees now hold a super-majority -- there are definitely more than 20 groups who are energized to ram Biden campaign vehicles when Don Trump, Jr, says things like "have some fun." So, for people as morally vacuous as these motherfuckers, sending out 20 groups with guns to key polling locations in 20 swing states? -- shit, that's a juicy opportunity when another four years is on the line. And, of course, when there are police who are willing to do things like pepper-spray elders in wheelchairs on a nonviolent march to the polls to vote, police who are caught preparing to do even worse by training each other in military doctrines ("be a ruthless killer") that quote Robert E. Lee and Adolf Hitler -- we are going to have to struggle on our own, because the Repugnacans and Demo-rats will condemn our defense of our right to vote, just like Biden and trump condemned our responses to police violence against us, including the recent Philadelphia police murder of Walter Wallace.
In Defense of Our Movements
I'm prepared to be very wrong about my election prediction, but I don't think that matters anymore. My point is, vote, if you're going to, but please don't think that will be enough. Trump forces our hands. Sooner rather than later, we have to act.
First, if we are voting, we have to check a box on a ballot that might help us defend ourselves against the existential threat Trump poses to us. (If you're lucky enough to live in a state trump can't possibly win, there are several left third parties that can use your support.)
Next, and most essentially, we have to use whatever means are necessary to defend ourselves against whatever shit goes down after that. Be prepared for something to go down. There are many signs that it will. These motherfuckers are coming for us.
Finally, please, let us organize our freedom movements for long-term struggle with renewed purpose. I can't offer suggestions on groups, but if you attend a local protest against police terrorism, you might find that a good place to meet like-minded folks you can build with. We need to work with the many groups on the left that are organizing grassroots independent (i.e., NOT corporate-funded) parties that empower Black, brown, Indigenous, and poor people in the long term. Remember, not all parties are bound to electoral political parties, and ours cannot afford to have their energies sapped by electoralism. The fact that we must sometimes rely on a candidate like Biden in the short term to fend off the threat of trump is not an invitation to adopt a "lesser-evil" politics strategy. It's an indication that trump is so bad that even non-voting folks like me are saying, "We gotta get this motherfucker outta here before he kills us!" We must survive pending revolution.
But creating the kinds of politics that will address our unmet needs cannot start in the electoral arena, which repeatedly shows us that it is too compromised with corporate capitalism and antiblackness to ever be about our freedom. We gotta start our own groups at the local level. And, as political prisoner Russell Maroon Shoatz advised in his seminal essay "Black Fighting Formations," it is essential that, from the beginning, we give serious consideration to what aspects of our movements must be underground and what aspects need to be aboveground.
We are still trapped behind the barbed wire, and "lesser-evil" electoral politics helped get us here. Please don't just vote; organize to defend our communities against the genocidal right-wing fusion of police and paramilitary. Organize to build the community networks of care and education and resources that our movements need. Nothing besides us will save us. While we mark the ballot with one hand we can grip the pistol with the other. If nazis are rolling through our hoods, only one of those tools might save us.
