Op-Ed: “In 2024, Both Major Parties Have Failed America and the World,” Robin Averbeck

I mailed an early ballot last week. I voted for Jill Stein. I would have done so even if I were in a swing state; even if I were in Michigan. It took me a while to get to that place, but if you're willing, bear with me. This is why. 

I understand how arguments about voting third party get so heated. Unlike some leftists, I have little doubt that Trump would be worse for Palestine, and worse for us here at home. I do not want him to win. I want Harris to win -- if, as is clearly the case, one of the two corporate parties must. I will be extremely anxious on election night. I am afraid of what a Trump presidency might bring. I have daymares of having to leave our home, of immigrants being systematically exported or thrown into camps. As much as some region of my brain has been preparing for civil war for a decade now, I don't really want to have to fight one. So please know I am not trying to downplay the possibilities of a Trump presidency, even if his first administration did not contain enough competency or ideological consistency to produce all the horrors we feared at the time. 

But I cannot continue to vote for Democrats, because I refuse to participate in the system that has brought us to this place. And this is key: Trump and MAGA would not have been possible without this centrist, neoliberal, capitalist Democratic party. The Republicans were very smart; they played the long game, they pushed and pushed against the Overton window, and took advantage of every liberal weakness -- not the least their desire to believe that they were not always the fascists we now all know them to be, all along -- that they could find. But their message did not only fall on the ears of a population deeply steeped in racism, xenophobia, and misogyny. It fell upon the ears of that population while they struggled with stagnant wages, decided whether to sell their house or treat their cancer, scoffed at the idea of ever being able to buy a house in the first place, and watched their loved ones become lost to addictions, either to drugs or resentment at the hand the world had dealt them. So, so many of them chose to deal with all of these injustices by punching down. 

I am angry about that choice. So angry. But I long ago abandoned a politics that refused to deal with people as they are, damn the consequences. And I am not so angry that I do not believe those people deserve security, health care, a living wage. And we are never, ever going to get those things through the Democrats. They have made that clear. Obama made that abundantly clear. I do not think challenging the mainstream center in primaries will work. The structures for substantial primary voting are not there. The political consciousness among enough people is not there. And even when we get close, like we did with Bernie in 2016 and 2020, the Dem leadership will sabotage any challenge from the left that looks like it might actually win. They are fully corrupt, and fully captured. They are politicians. They will only change their ways if it means they lose power. And so committed are they to capital, that sometimes I wonder if even that will work as well as supposed. Sometimes I think they would rather lose than tack left. 

But every election cycle since I can remember, we have been told that the Republican presents an existential threat that cannot be toyed with. They said this, emphatically, about George W. Bush, if you recall. Both times. And the funny thing is that they were not really all that wrong, just like they are not all that wrong about the dangers of Trump right now either. But because the Republicans have always offered such a vile opponent, progressives have always fallen in line. The result being that there is no pressure for the Dems to change. The result being that they keep tacking to the center, reaching out, even, to people such as the Cheneys, to win. They think that's how it works. Because so many of us for so long voted in fear, voted what we thought was strategic.  But there's no way out of this nightmare by continuing to do the same. We need to build an actual left. 

It is because I have seen this dynamic in my own lifetime and in the historical past that I can now have a historical imagination, and see worse than Trump down the line. It might be hard for some to imagine, but not for me. I see someone actually ideologically committed, someone who will play the fascist move of offering some real goods to the working class in exchange for their acquiescence to violence much better than Trump and MAGA does. I see a movement right now very dependent on a very odd cult of personality, and imagine a deeper, more ideologically coherent movement of the future once he's gone. When and if that comes, a real left has to exist to fight it. Liberal centrism will not do; in fact, at that point, they very well might sigh and say that even MAGA is better than a real left. That's what happened in Germany. And what does it mean right now that Harris is on the campaign trail with Liz Cheney but not Bernie Sanders?

Refusing to vote for the Democrats is not the only way forward. Actually it's a pretty unimportant and relatively powerless one. And I'm not sure, if all of us who want better than Harris did this, how it would cut in the long term. If we would see the growth of a third party -- and corresponding movements to discard the first-past-the-post, non-representational system we have now -- or if it would finally pull the Dems left over a period of time. I'm not psychic. None of us are; let's all keep that in mind. But I know that accepting the lesser of two evils has, in the long term, resulted in more evil. I know I refuse to settle for that while actual lives now are being destroyed in Gaza or slowly choked to death at home. I won't accept these lives as necessary sacrifices because of a possible, but still theoretical, attack of the future. I will instead fight for the lives being destroyed now by refusing to ally with those inflicting this violence - and as for the future, I will do what I can, as a single individual, to build something truly capable of resistance.

Which is why even if you vote Harris (which I imagine the vast majority of you reading this will), I'm not going to assume you can't be a part of that too. Despite what our shallow, deeply conservative political culture tells us, voting is not the most powerful way we participate in our democracy. Building organizations, working on the local level, any level you can - that is. So become involved in your union. If you don't have one, start a union. Start an organization to push for rank-choice voting. Build an organization to abolish the Senate. When the keepers of the liberal rituals offer you space to perform their incantations that claim to make everything ok, refuse them. Build your own spaces. Join with others trying to organize a general strike. And yes, protest. But don't just carry a sign, although even that is better than nothing. Shut down freeways. Shut down airports. Stop the machine from working. Because -- and I can only beg that you take this seriously from someone who studied this for 20 years now -- that's the only thing that ever really works. It's a necessary ingredient. 

And meanwhile, fight the War of Position. Vote your conscience; what good is it otherwise? The far right in the 1960s were told by everyone, including other conservatives, that their positions were too extreme. That they would never make inroads, never appeal to the American public. They ignored them. They put their nose to the grindstone and found every little crevice, manipulated every opening, spoke their awful, ugly truth, for 60 years. And now they, in combination with the cowardice and complicity of their so-called opponents, have brought us here. They played the long game, pushed that Overton Window. And now we have to have at least as much courage as these cowards to do the same. 

Finally, on the genocide. I simply cannot go along with a world that is so fallen that literal genocide is not a red line for political support. If that's really the case -- if there is no hope for a society that holds the bar higher than that -- then hope really is gone. To me, to vote for Democrats while they carry out and enable a genocide would be an act of despair, in the Biblical sense. It would be to accept that there is no power whatsoever in the people, that we cannot help each other if all the abortion clinics close, if they shut down all our universities. To think that handing ourselves, and our children, into the hands of this evil is truly the only option is to give up the fight; it is the same to me as accepting everything we've lost the last 60 years, and giving up on everything we have yet to win. I won't do that. I can't do that. 

I do not know what the future holds. I do not have a magical, exact map towards the way out of this hellscape. All I can do is fight, to really fight, against all the perpetrators of injustice -- whether they are red or blue. I owe this to the past, to my ancestors; the ones I recognize as such. I owe it to John Brown, I owe it to James Connolly, I owe it to Eugene Debs and Lucy Parsons and the IWW. And I owe it to the future, to my nephews, to my friends. That is where I am at; I refuse to play the game of pretending that Dems will ever join this fight unless they are forced to. The game is rigged, and I won't participate in the farce of it anymore. Too much is at stake; not just now, not just in this election cycle, but farther down the road than our fear allows us to glimpse. The planet itself is at stake in the next century. And we have to start building something real -- something really opposed to poverty, really opposed to racism, really opposed to imperialism, really opposed to environmental destruction -- right now. So, in a sense, we have to actually believe in ourselves, in democracy. That's what I'm choosing to do. 

Robin Averbeck is Assistant Editor for North Meridian Review