As election day draws nearer, I am finding myself under challenge about my intentions. I will not be voting for either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. Nor will I be voting for the capitalist libertarian (Chase Oliver), the tankie (Jill Stein), or the neo-tankie (Cornel West).
I reject the institutionalized false dichotomy known as the “two party system.” It yields two candidates who both favor genocide. This is an absolute red line for me and I will not cross it. I am anti-capitalist, so it should go without saying that the capitalist libertarian is out of the question. Both Stein and West would demand that Ukraine capitulate to Russia and this, too, is unacceptable.
Some say Trump is a greater threat to “democracy,” but we do not have a democracy. We have, by design, a constitutional oligarchy (see Federalist no. 10).[1] Having lived on the underbelly of capitalism most of my life, I find this political and economic system repulsive.
Some say Trump will be worse than Harris and this is likely true. But 1) I cannot be in any way complicit with genocide by voting for either candidate, and 2) I have been listening to Democratic Party excuses for failure, even when they’ve controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, on a number of existential issues for many people, including voting rights, police white supremacist gangster reform, a minimum wage increase, universal healthcare, student loan relief, class inequality mitigation, and abortion rights since Jimmy Carter was president and I’m tired of hearing them. When folks claim that Democrats are better on issues besides genocide, this is mere lip service. I don’t want to hear empty words. I want and, having been denied gainful employment for 23 years, need to see results and I have learned, very much the hard way, that the Democrats will never supply them.
It is the institutionalized false dichotomy that leads to arguments such as “the other guy is worse.” Evil is still evil. Voting for the “lesser evil” still yields evil. That evil now yields genocide, which is the penultimate human rights violation. I cannot claim to support human rights and vote for either of these candidates. That evil may well also yield World War III[2] and with so many nuclear powers involved, it is hard to see how this war would not go nuclear.[3] But so many insist I should vote for the “lesser evil.” No, a thousand times, no.
[1] James Madison was only a bit oblique about this in “Federalist No. 10,” in Federalist Papers, ed. Garry Wills (1982; repr., New York: Bantam, 2003). But there are three critical questions to be asked about his work advocating what was adopted as the U.S. Constitution: 1) Whom does Madison trust to rule? 2) Whose minority rights does he seek to protect? 3) Whom does he seek to protect those rights from? In a critical reading, it’s clear that the minority rights he seeks to protect are not those of any subaltern group, but rather the property rights of wealthy white men, who, in that era, were generally the only people allowed to vote, and that he meant to protect them from confiscation by a popular mob—quite likely the folks Colin Woodard associated with the “Greater Appalachians” socioeconomic region, who align quite neatly with modern-day authoritarian populists, in American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (New York: Penguin, 2011). It is also clear that he trusts wealthy white men to rule.
[2] David Benfell, “World War III?” Not Housebroken, September 15, 2024, https://nothousebroken.substack.com/p/world-war-iii
[3] Thalif Deen, “Are the World’s Ongoing Conflicts in Danger of Going Nuclear?” Inter Press Service, September 17, 2024, https://www.ipsnews.net/2024/09/worlds-ongoing-conflicts-danger-going-nuclear/