You Don't Get To Vote On Any Of Your Government's Most Consequential Actions

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

You’ll often hear Democrats calling people “privileged” if they talk about voting third party, or if they say it doesn’t matter whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris wins the election in November. The idea is that if you’re not doing everything you can to make sure the Democrat wins, it must be because you are white and wealthy and coddled enough to be unconcerned about Donald Trump getting in and implementing racist and discriminatory policies.

This narrative is false. Nonvoters in the United States are statistically much more likely to be poor and nonwhite, because those groups tend to see both mainstream political factions as more or less equally worthless at helping to improve the condition of their lives. Turns out you need to have a degree of stability and comfort in your life to see any significant difference between these candidates, and many lack that stability and comfort — both in the US and around the world. They aren’t privileged enough to care one way or the other.

People who aren’t privileged enough to care who wins the US election in November include:

• Palestinians, who will continue to be killed and oppressed by the state of Israel regardless of whether Trump or Harris wins.

• Ukrainians, who will continue to die in Washington’s proxy war with Russia regardless of whether Trump or Harris wins.

• Victims of US warmongering around the world, who will suffer and die from acts of mass military violence inflicted upon them regardless of whether Trump or Harris wins.

• Victims of US economic sanctions, who will continue to suffer and struggle because their government had the audacity to disobey Washington’s dictates regardless of whether Trump or Harris wins.

• Victims of US imperialist extraction, who will continue to have their labor and resources siphoned away by wildly unjust and exploitative systems regardless of whether Trump or Harris wins.

• Homeless people in the United States, who will remain homeless regardless of whether Trump or Harris wins.

• America’s working poor, who will continue to struggle to make ends meet in a constant state of toil regardless of whether Trump or Harris wins.

• Victims of the US policing and prison systems, who will remain abused and mistreated by those systems regardless of whether Trump or Harris wins.

The truth of the matter is that you simply don’t get to vote on any of the most consequential things your government does.

You don’t get to vote on whether wars, militarism and imperialism should continue.

You don’t get to vote on whether your government should engage in nuclear brinkmanship with Russia and China.

You don’t get to vote on whether your government should keep systems in place which ensure the destruction of our biosphere.

You don’t get to vote on whether your government should be continuously working to subvert and destroy any nation anywhere on earth who dares to disobey its commands.

You don’t get to vote on whether your government should continue imposing sanctions on one-third of the world, disproportionately targeting the economies of low-income countries.

You don’t get to vote on whether your government should keep systems in place which allow the wealthy to exert control over labor to extract surplus value from workers at home and abroad.

You don’t get to vote on whether your government should keep systems in place which allow people to go homeless or die of treatable illnesses because they don’t have enough money.

You don’t get to vote on whether billionaires should remain billionaires while so many ordinary people struggle to survive.

You don’t get to vote on whether you and your compatriots should be subjected every single day to mass media propaganda which serves the information interests of your government and the status quo politics it relies on.

You don’t get to vote on whether your government should keep pushing more and more authoritarian measures like Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, online censorship, surveillance, government secrecy, and the war on journalism to ensure the suppression of dissent.

You don’t get to vote on whether or not any of this murder, tyranny, oppression and exploitation should take place. All you get to vote on is what face should represent these things for the next four years, and whether that symbolic face will have a (D) or an (R) next to their name.

The functioning of a globe-spanning empire is seen as too important to be left in the hands of the voting public — so it isn’t. Nothing that is critical to the empire’s operation is ever on the ballot. They only let voters control a few superficial details about their society which make no difference to the powerful, while placing tremendous significance on elections and their outcomes so that voters really feel like they are making a difference.

Noam Chomsky was correct when he said “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” Until you really understand that quote and how far it goes, you can’t understand anything about mainstream western politics and political discourse.

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