Okay Leftists, We Destroyed The Democrats. What Do We Do Now?
And so, the worst political hangover in history begins.
What happened this election was that at last, the maniacally greedy owners of our country had been caught acting with so much ruthlessness in another country that the majority of American citizens reluctantly understood that we had to commit the ultimate act of sociopolitical sacrifice. We didn’t try to smash the system — that’s impossible, we well knew — we simply tampered with the brakes, committing the Democrats (or at least, assuredly, the Clintonites) to the dustbin of history.
En masse, we rose. We either voted for Jill Stein (very few did, comparatively, definitely not enough ever to accuse her of being “the force that ended democracy”) or we left the presidential choice blank or we wrote in Vermin Supreme’s name or we stayed home. Along with those scenarios, it’s certain that a good number of Trump votes weren’t expressions of support for him but signatures on sociopolitical/socioeconomic suicide letters.
It was the most important vote of all: By allowing Trump’s demented Libertarian-Christian cohort to retake power we welcomed our own tragic fates. As humans, we had no choice.
From here, the popular “online left” — our “Fifth Estate” — is already positioning itself to accomplish nothing more than defacing our corporate-and-privately owned social media spaces with angry psychic graffiti, lodging complaints about Trump’s horrors and the errors of the now-defunct Democrats, that is when they’re not yelling at each other in constant, self-destructive internecine squabbles (Jimmy Dore vs TYT round 25, anyone?). Rather than stopping for a moment to celebrate the fact that we eliminated one half of the duopoly and then quickly turning to focus our energies on building solidarity and creating better, independent, more humanitarian systems on top of all this rubble, we’re just going to cyber-yell at each other. Again.
I’m feeling a bit melancholic over that. But I know the feeling won’t last. Hope and renewal eventually rise from despair and destruction. What I — what all online leftists—need to do now is concentrate all our energy and efforts on prefigurative political organizations, i.e. alternative systems large and small, in order to create a humanitarian-rooted civilization within this long-obsolete, now officially broken one. By saying no to notions like “poverty and homelessness are unfortunate realities” and saying yes to prefigurative things like mutual aid and communal living, we can leave Trump and his criminal gang to rule over an empty, unpopulated space.
I think that was what The People actually voted for this year. All I know for sure is that my personal mission to help build that new world begins today.
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My second book, My Year In The Online Left, came out on June 10. Meantime, if you want to be fully, genuinely informed about the political troll/bot invasion of Election 2016, 2020, and Elections-Yet-To-Come, buy my previous book. There’s the tiniest bit of technical stuff in there, but you’ll get it, I promise. My Twitter is @esaeger, my Mastodon is @esaeger@universeodon.com (I’m never there), my BlueSky is @esaeger.bsky.social (ditto) and my cursed Facebook is eric.saeger.9 (I do visit it daily).
