We May Have No Real Choice This Election, But We Have a Huge Choice to Make Afterwards

In about two months the season of national absurdity will conclude with the last episode of "End of Times Election Blues." It is rumored that a 15 second commercial spot on the show will cost more than the GDP of the poorest twenty five nations on earth. Don't trouble yourself to fact-check this—hyperbole often leads to higher truths.

The election itself will be anticlimactic—fascism has preceded its formal institution by (you choose the answer) months, years or decades. Nonetheless, people will be sweating, shaking and dying in front of their election night TVs and ambulances will be hauling away the dead. The voters have been stripped of their agency—reduced to passive spectators whose public lives effectively end at the moment they cast their ballots. Imagine fireflies or spawning salmon who die almost immediately following the conclusion of the mating/egg laying cycle. Once you check your ballot you've blown your wad—you no longer exist. In a voter's afterlife agency gives way to naked anxiety.

One might argue that people don't have to spawn and die like a row of delicatessen fish—they could rise up and throw off their proverbial chains. But that suggestion trivializes the entire narrative. We collectively leap into the abyss of fascism because our powers of comprehension have been viciously eroded—not a being among us has failed to watch a million hours of brain strangling advertisements. When the last tentacles of Alzheimer's have quietly extinguished the light switch of my memories, I will still be singing, "Winston Tastes Good Like a Cigarette Should."

We—the disassembled, the lobotomized, the blinded—have a mandate to collective rage that no other generations ever owned. We are some of the last living beings on a long and noble planet that has been blooming and renewing for a half a billion years. The question is this: how badly can we be wounded and still have the capacity to rebel? And what does rebellion mean? I believe that the cornerstone of resistance proceeds from a single question—how fucked are we if no force intercedes to prevent the current political momentum of the U.S. from continuing. Newton said it best—a body in motion remains in motion until acted upon by another force. The election cycle, I believe, should be seen as a mass blessing for Newtonian principles—we vote to ratify our place in the corporate orbit, our approval of capitalist momentum.

The question is this: how badly can we be wounded and still have the capacity to rebel?

U.S. political parties fear losing your vote—they confidently understand that you no longer figure in their plans once officials take office. They are brazenly sure that you have no power, no determination, and no capacity to organize. There will always be a zealous minority that take to the streets to oppose war and ecocide (which operate in tandem), but these forces of unified resistance have not recreated the historical levels of defiance that we experienced in the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements in the '60s and early '70s.

War and climate overheating belong to an entirely different order of moral commitment than that of the Vietnam/Civil Rights era. Bystanders in the '60s watched their fellow citizens mutilated, beaten, lynched, attacked by dogs—they endured having their own children shipped back in body bags, or staggering home with broken or missing limbs. Corporate and government malice had a visceral immediacy that we do not directly experience today.

War has morphed into a more remote and sustainable accoutrement to empire in its current iteration—proxy wars and bombing civilian populations inflict massive suffering with relatively little carnage endured by U.S. forces. The Afghan War claimed less than 3,000 American lives compared to the almost 60,000 U.S. fatalities in Vietnam. War, that once pitted half of Europe against the other half, now has been largely confined to the global south.

If far away wars no longer galvanize popular U.S. resistance, climate overheating encompasses concepts and issues that fail to move the popular imagination. While the public grasp of climate issues reflects the confusion engendered by ruling class design, the needed mitigation staggers the imagination. It is one thing to give Black citizens voting rights and to integrate a small number of schools, and yet another to completely revamp our political and economic systems. Climate has inflicted a gaping wound that threatens to bleed out in a manner of finality unprecedented in human history. There are no band aids for climate in the way that one can apply adhesive to placate those troubled by social injustice.

The plot for the final act in the history of the biosphere seems pretty obvious—either people engage in unprecedented acts of civil disobedience, or we all die.

The U.S. has never taken real steps to repair the damage from slavery and Jim Crow—the fact that median family wealth is 10 times higher for white families compared to Black families proves that social justice in America involves little more than performative slight-of-hand. We have substituted tokenism and identity politics for racial equality. Theatrical gestures may fool many members of the public, but Mother Nature doesn't give a rat's ass how many solar panels decorate your neighborhood roofs. If oil, coal, and gas go up in smoke to manufacture meaningless widgets and toys, we will die in the flames of our own capitalist fever dreams.

We have a critical election in which we will choose whether to elect a fully fascist administration to drive us into the downtown district of hell on the expressway, or we can elect a regime to buoy us up with slogans while chauffeuring us pleasantly to the exact same hell.

The choice is not who to vote for, but what do you (we) do after the votes are counted and we reelect capitalism with the 99 percent approval rating that a North Korean strongman expects. If Trump is elected we risk being shot protesting or shipped to one of the concentration camps he has vowed to build. If Harris is elected we are likely to be seduced by the mass psychotic delusion that will have us believing that the environment is in good hands while your tax dollars go steadfastly to building the "most lethal" fighting force in human history.

The plot for the final act in the history of the biosphere seems pretty obvious—either people engage in unprecedented acts of civil disobedience, or we all die. We now have an important electoral choice—we either elect a regime that will intimidate those committed to civil disobedience with threats and violence, or we elect a regime that will disarm public ire with bullshit and reassurances. The choice is a non-choice. The real choice comes after the election.