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Emma Goldman was pretty much on the money with her observation. Was that 100 years ago? Why write about voting just over one year from the time of Joe Biden’s infamous disastrous debate? Other presidents have been incapacitated in office and have continued on. Woodrow Wilson comes to mind. There’s a president who was at least as bad as Donald Trump about the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech. Readers may already see the connections in the duopoly with the suppression of rights, whether it was attacks against calls for peace during World War I, or vicious attacks against support for diversity. Today the white supremacists are on the rise. The penalties for speaking truth to power in one case landed some in jail such as Eugene Debs, or got protesters to Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza whacked on the head and perhaps jailed and deported. Goldman was deported herself, so the threat in the land of the free and the home of the brave can easily be seen. Is it brave to drop huge bunker-buster bombs on a nation with whom we are not at war and poses no strategic threat to the US?
I come from a family of voting activists, or at least my mother’s activism in that area, so I’ve long held the erroneous prejudice that voting made or makes a difference. With an authoritarian dictator in power now, I need to jettison that long-held foolishness about voting. In both 2016, and again in 2024, I was able to vote for a third-party candidate, so my vote may have been symbolic, but it meant nothing. I predicted Trump’s victory in both of those elections, one on a road driving east leaving Ithaca, New York, and in early September 2016, and the other watching the debacle of Harris’ non-campaign observing the debacle from my study chair in late August 2024.
My mother was the co-chair for the McCarthy campaign for president in 1968, and the McGovern campaign in 1972. She was quite good as an organizer, even though both liberal campaigns crashed and burned. She had the same penchant as I do in holding onto the erroneous belief that Goldman properly debunked. Her impetus was the belief, coming from FDR’s New Deal, that voting could change the status quo and help some ordinary people, and that was true in the 1930s and 1940s. Lyndon Johnson pissed away his Great Society in Southeast Asia, and it’s been nothing but the duopoly, war, money, greed, and power that have ruled since.
My prejudices in favor of voting and taking part in the duopoly’s machinations extended to the town where I live in western Massachusetts. I took Bernie Sanders’ advice or admonition to get involved in politics and vied for an empty school committee seat in 2016. The town where I live is supremely authoritarian with a provincial hold on power. Despite many liberals, and many of those people coming originally from the greater New York metropolitan area, the right-wing bent continues locally. As one selectboard (similar to a town council) member said, and I paraphrase, in connection to a local person’s view of school systems coming together to provide more efficient schooling in this rural area where school costs are expensive: “That’s not the way things are done here.” That was in relation to speaking out publicly about that issue. Thugs and bullies are allowed to roam the countryside freely.
https://thelastnewleftist.com/if-voting-changed-anything-theys-make-it-illegal/
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