What they said was true. I understand that people who are committed to voting in this next election are getting abuse from people who are committed to not voting, who seem to either be under the influence of bad actors or are bad actors themselves. If you’ve received this kind of treatment then I can understand why you might be sensitive to those arguments, to the extent that certain arguments are almost always followed up by an appeal as to why voting is pointless. So arguments that claim that both political parties are the same, so don’t vote for either, is an example of this kind of hopelessness, often dressed up like something revolutionary.

Those types of arguments are successful because they sort people into opposing camps, who can only see their enemy at the expense of seeing the truth. Unified in their commitment to dehumanize and mischaracterize the other, and protect the political legitimacy of their camp. This leads to a tendency to delegitimize not only the arguments of the other, but any supporting arguments that they might use. The problem with this is that even if the other camp is full of bad actors who cynically lie to, for example, alter the outcome of an election, the best way to make their lies convincing is to use supporting arguments that are true, or partially true, or based in some truth. While making their lies sound convincing, it has the added benefit (for them) of making their opponents reject these apparent truths; which skews the effectiveness of their opponents own arguments while also making them appear to be liars or delusional themselves, which bad actors will use to illustrate why their own camp is the better one. And this goes back and forth, both sides using the same strategies to the same effect: a tenuous if not completely divorced relationship to truth and the experience of regular uncommitted parties who, upon witnessing this, is further alienated from the discourse, as the discourse has moved away from their own experiences of the real world. In this case, it likely has the effect of disenfranchising voters which is the aim of those bad actors in the first place. While a small group of passionate defenders of voting become more entrenched in their campist positions, they end up participating in and reproducing the conditions of disenfranchisement that our enemies want. We have to fight like hell not to get caught in this trap.

The two major political parties represent the monied interests of the very rich, which has differing ideas about how best to run the country. These groups can be largely defined as the conservative nationalist industrial class and the liberal international financial class. while their interests differ from each other, they represent one class of owner capitalists that rules over the workers, the marginally employed, the poor, and the destitute (which together makes up the working class). At any time, while they squabble with each other, historically they are united in their opposition to giving or sharing wealth or power to the working working class. This doesn’t mean “don’t vote.” It means vote for the one that allows us to continue to organize ourselves against the ruling classes by forming unions to protect the value of our work, and participating in local politics, community work, and political struggle and educate ourselves and each other as a protective measure against the propagandistic media which is owned by members of the above ruling classes. I will vote and I will advocate that others should as well, but I’ll also advocate turning off cable news, silencing notifications on our phones and getting involved in community work and political organizing. Both can be true, that we live in a class society and that the political outcomes from elections can have drastic or disastrous consequences.