Withdrawal 2012
A couple of days ago, the blog Conservative Heritage Times kindly asked me for whom I was voting and requested that I justify my choice in writing. This inspired me to pen the following (which is a lightly edited version of what appeared at the CHT website.)
I won’t vote. Indeed, I can’t think of any good reason for someone to drag his bones to a polling station and participate in the democratic process.
One major reason for this is that I oppose the democratic process in general. Indeed, I can’t imagine a worse mechanism for decision-making than giving equal weight to the passing opinions of every featherless biped with a pulse, from the mentally retarded to the devotees of Jay-Z or Lady Gaga to Third World immigrants to that small fraction of the population actually worthy of being entrusted with the general welfare.
The politicians are themselves walking, talking arguments for the system’s destruction. The personality type that flourishes in democracy—the narcissist sociopath—was once cast to the margins of society; for at least the past century, we have allowed these people to govern!
Then there’s the rhetoric used by the political critters, rhetoric which seems to have genuine appeal to Americans. On the one hand, the politician must bring everything down to the lowest possible level, so as to be understood by the types of men who receive most of their sustenance from Dunkin Donuts. On the other hand, he must claim that America is the most awesome and important political entity ever—and that the American people (or whoever happens to reside in the U.S confines at the time) are uniformly wise, brave, selfless, and entrepreneurial. The civic culture is, essentially, dumbed-down delusional arrogance. And I suspect will be hearing this stuff long after it’s clear to everyone with brains that the U.S.A. is barely distinguishable from a Banana Republic.
Representative democracy has always been about population control, not self-governance. The American system has achieved population control through government-sponsored degeneration.
Of course, one could say that I’m simply being a Romantic reactionary, and that I should access voting in the terms of the real world, and not vis-a-vis some idealized one. But even if we accept America as it as, voting seems to me entirely useless.
Not much has actually changed since 2008: Obama has wound down some stupid wars, but then wound up some stupid new ones. Domestically speaking, while the Tea Party rants about “socialism,” Obama’s policies are truly mere variants on the kinds of things Republicans love and support.
From a Leninist, revolutionary perspective—”the worse, the better”—one could make equally valid arguments for each candidate. Obama, as a mulatto, looks like his policies; he gives White Americans a visual representation of their dispossession. That’s a good thing. Romney, on the other hand, gives the people a false sense of WASP continuity. He is also more likely to join Israel in attacking Iran, launching another trillion-dollar war, or even a global conflict. Thus, the governor might be better positioned to bring about the final collapse of the American empire and the global dollar system that underpins it.
But then, both Romney and Obama are “worse-is-better” in that they are but two aspects of the same system—which itself is destructive and self-destructive.
Instead of arm-chair speculation about which candidate is more likely to bring on a major crisis, we should begin finding solutions outside democracy and the two parties. The first step in this process is to actively disengage from this equally evil and stupid political system.
