This Candidate Is Different!

The illusion of voting for change under late stage capitalism

The eternal human fascination with hero worship never ceases to baffle me. Having once been the candidate I’ve been on the receiving end and it’s… weird. I did accomplish my personal goal which was to get into nationally televised debates to say some things that needed to be said about U.S. foreign policy. And I learned some things along the way.

Under late stage capitalism and end stage U.S. imperialism, people are desperate. They’re afraid for the future and they want to believe that meaningful change can come about by cleaving to structures like elections and heroes like candidates. They want a savior and they’re willing to believe just about anybody who makes the right sounds come out of his or her mouth.

Dems Kamala Harris, who lost in 2024 for supporting the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Palestine, and Barack Obama who deported 3 million immigrants during two terms in the White House.

Even if the evidence of their eyes and ears contradicts the sweet sounds.

I’m in a discussion group that reads the literature of resistance from various times in modern history and from diverse cultures. This week we took up Mao’s “On Contradiction” which I had last read as an idealistic youth without much life experience. Written in 1937 when Imperial Japan still held colonies in China, the essay examines why it is necessary to find the primary contradiction in any given situation in order to make real change. In Mao’s day a distracting contradiction was communists vs. nationalists. In our day a distracting contradiction is corporate party A vs. corporate party B.

But don’t get distracted by secondary issues: the primary contradiction today is imperialism vs. the people.

Sometimes this issue is framed as reformers vs. revolutionaries. Some cling to the status quo in the hope that a) it can be reformed and b) they don’t have to lose their considerable privilege under the current system. Almost any social movement that I’ve studied has exhibited a split along these lines: the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, environmental justice movements, etc. Women’s suffrage split between those who thought leaving Black women behind expeditious and those who thought it a betrayal of everything they were fighting for.

Black liberation movements often split between the appeasers trying for a place in established power structures (e.g. NAACP) and revolutionaries trying to replace rotten structures with those that serve all the people (e.g. Black Panthers). Assata Shakur’s autobiography, which my group previously read, had much to say about that one.

As human beings race toward climate collapse and a nuclear WW3, we sense that we may be on the verge of extinction, i.e. conditions conducive to revolution.

One of the particular challenges of our time is the enormously successful cooptation of any progressive movement by the corporate party of the Democrats. Time and again I’ve seen grassroots efforts be subsumed by the immense spending power and clever strategizing to bring change agents under control. Just yesterday I was made aware that the white person’s group Showing Up For Racial Justice (SURJ) had come under fire for endorsing a candidate in the U.S. Senate Democratic Party primary in Maine. Seduced by attractive words, SURJ decided that former mercenary and Marine with a Nazi tattoo Graham Platner is their guy.

Part of their rationale might be characterized as anti-purity politics:

To bring large numbers of white people into positive movements, we need a culture that actually allows people to change, have transformative experiences. To be able to acknowledge past mistakes, while still making profoundly meaningful and important contributions to justice efforts right now.

But this avoids the fundamental question of why an anti-racist organization is endorsing candidates at all. I stopped organizing with SURJ a couple of years ago when they began doing this, after reaching out a couple of time to argue my point. Because the extent to which any organization makes common cause with the party of war and genocide is the extent to which I understand that I have no place in their ranks. (Eventually I heard back from one SURJ organizer in my state who said they agreed with me but that they were outnumbered in the group.)

There’s not much time left for those of us paying attention to understand what’s at stake and to act accordingly. Believing in electoral politics is something mass media insists we do every two or four years. But in your heart of hearts do you really believe we are going to be able to vote our way out of the mess we’re in?