YOU are speaking!
Have you made any poignant commentary on the recent election in the U.S.? Do you have a good response to liberals who are upset with the results or process of the election? Have you written or seen something as a comment reply/post that you think has standalone value? Did you see a new take or analysis you hadn’t previously considered?
Whether it’s a long idea with lots of context, or a short and sweet one liner, we want those thoughts aggregated here. This post is intended to be a resource for comrades to draw from when having actual discussions outside of Hexbear both online or IRL regarding the election.
Consider this a mini-effortpost aggregator. This is not for shitposts, but humor is completely acceptable if it helps make the point.
I've been saying this for over a year, but: I will not vote for a candidate who would rather threaten me with fascism than say "okay maybe we should tone down the genocide", who is willing to risk open fascism to keep the guns flowing, who gives their finest most bloated cutting edge weapons of murder to the literal Hitler apologist neo Nazi piece of shit actively on trial for genocide he admits to like every five minutes, and old outdated crap we would otherwise be throwing away to Ukraine¹.
Like, putting aside the fact she's a legendarily transphobic cop, and nothing short of personally going down in culturally aware and exceptionally competent ways on every single trans adult in the country would make me forget that long enough to vote for her, these chucklefucks were never going to be the bulwark of democracy. They did not question the extremely suspicious election results² the open election interference or more than half assedly prosecute the violent coup. The defenders of liberal democracy would have had gallows up on January 7. Elon musk would have been hung drawn and quartered by now, and it would have been shown on cspan, mandatory viewing in every school in the nation. None of this is surprising, for those of us who remember 2000. I've been telling people the libs would roll over for belly rubs at the slightest excuse for years, that they're not worth voting for, because they will not even attempt to hold the line. They have affirmed that this was the right decision.
Bringing on the Clinton and starmer teams as advisors was just a declaration that they wanted to lose. Actual democracy can involve a vote, but it is at best a small part of it, and I don't believe its valid here. The strict adherence to voting is a failure of imagination, a failure of volition, and an abdication of ones role in society.
I dont know how many of you have long talks with random strangers outside of lefty spaces, but so many people suffer from this failure of imagination. They have died inside, their imaginations and consciousness, even their sense of themselves and connections to community stifled by lifetimes of obedience and fear, their horizons cut away in bloody strips by the knives of capital, individually packaged in neat little boxes by alienating neoliberal media. Their resurrection, and the murder of the metaphorical cops residing in their heads, is our responsibility. Even if we don't immediately love the person who climbs out of that dirt. Where we as leftists must act is not just in feeding the hungry, in practical needs or armed resistance or whatever the fuck your praxis is³, but in sparking the imagination, expanding horizons past the options explicitly presented by their masters, and connecting those expanded views and ability to act to everyday life. We can and should use this chaos to break out of the ordinary, to make the world more surreal, to blur the edges of what capitalist subjects see as possible. This is the responsibility not only of the mass chef and the soldier, though it does remain a part of theirs, but of the artist, the drug dealer, the thief, the builder, and the engineer-including and especially of software.
Get out there and do some necromancy, folks. Scream messy poetry in a coffee shop, project a movie on a blank wall, make your error messages surrealist. Intrude on peoples fucking tiny little lives. Make the world a little stranger. Bring back the dead.
¹I know, not popular here, but at least in the lib rhetoric they're fighting a defensive war against a genocidal invader. Whatever you believe, it shows what the libs really value. And more importantly, there was a god damn treaty since they gave up their nukes. Nobody's ever fucking doing that again after this example. The failure to defend them ended even the most remote dreams of nuclear disarmament without dismantling the state. There will be fallout from this, and it will be literal. Just when we were back to making fresh modern LBR steel, too. Fuck.
²I'd believe trump won the electoral college, but he absolutely did not win the popular vote. Not honestly. They cheated. We knew they were cheating. We caught them cheating. They admitted they were cheating. Nobody cared.
³its still that. I don't mean to call what youre doing unimportant. Whatever it is, we probably still need that. I'm saying its not enough. What I was doing wasn't enough either, as demonstrated by a lack of revolution. By lack of mainstream resistance. By the left still being marginal.