By Daviemoo
When every option presented to you is appalling, when every choice you can make is rigged to lead to the continuation of horrors at worst and the maintenance of a flawed system at best, and when you’re constantly told that this is all there is despite a whole myriad of choices behind that languid smokescreen… when does flipping the table, sending those options flying… when does that become the best option?
America
In 2020, many Americans stayed home to vote. I suspect many will stay home and let that be their vote in 2024.
Let us remember: in 2020, the pandemic was raging outside and people chose to vote in absentia for safety- at least, those who had a vision of better for America did.
The vision of better was pale, frail, emaciated- I remember people calling Joe Biden “The Caretaker President”, a man who would be elected to steady the rocking ship of America after an utterly disastrous four years of radical Trumpism. Biden offered a return to sensible politics after four years of utter madness where news corporations had daily updates on Trump’s latest gaffes or of his varying legal issues.
For those who like Trump, nothing could dissuade them. To those who hated him, that four years was mortifying. Still worse was the aftermath- Trump engaged in sedition against his own country, rallying his followers to perform a coup where they, stirred on by the idea of four years of sensibility over four years or more of increasing radicalism, broke into the capitol. Innocent people suffered for years under the atmosphere Trump normalised and that lucrative and frankly ludicrous performative outrage at the natural diversity of humans proved monetisable enough that it persists even now. People have died suffering under the rhetoric Trump normalised- mass shootings of LGBTQ events, Muslim people slaughtered for the temerity of existence. He drove a healthy post-Obama economy into ruin, all the while blaming democrats who had a minority vote.
Trump’s presidency was not about the uplifting of the working class- it was about the normalisation of divisive rhetoric- rhetoric which helped people feel superior in a world where we’re all being crushed by the same manicured foot. Trump is revered for reasons I simply cannot grasp on any level, and is a man who will drive America into obsolescence through his own self indulgent hubris. Another term of trump (I don’t write four years because I genuinely suspect he will refuse to hold elections again) will be a disaster for America, for the west- for the world.
But what have the intervening four years looked like?
Biden ran on a platform which was transparently “Make America Less Crazy Again”, promising he would deal with some of the heinous actions of Trump in power. He reversed the trans ban in the military, he signed the CHiPS act which saw domestic production of semiconductors rise, he made insulin more affordable, even tried to forgive student debt.
Unfortunately though, the republicans showed exactly how toothless Biden’s administration was, as in other parts of the US’ democratic guts, they passed hundreds of anti trans bills, they tore women’s rights asunder in a weighted Supreme Court… They have made miserable the people they threatened to make miserable if they were in power. The good guys won, and the bad guys’ loss sure looks exactly like if they’d won anyway.
Now this culminates in Biden’s months long dedication to funding Israel’s unprecedented civilian slaughter- He’s claimed to be a Zionist himself (Christian Zionists, by the way, in my opinion, are the most radical people: their belief is that Jewish people must return to their homeland to begin the apocalypse which will see them uplifted to heaven…), he’s ignored increasing cries from over 70% of Americans to bring the funding and arming of Israel to an end- and, when funding Israel, has proved exactly what he could have done to protect American rights: he overstepped congress to give Israel weaponry and money without blinking. I wonder what powers he has but refuses to wield to strike down these bills which assail the free rights of minorities, what powers he conceals which would help him tackle basic wealth and health inequalities across the nation.
At the last hour, Biden is leaking news that he’s calling Netanyahu an ‘asshole’ in private, as if that watery condemnation will save his skin. Mild discomfort at a pile of corpses 30,000 people high is hardly enough to turn the tide and garner sympathy and support. Situations like this truly make me wish religion was true, because if anyone deserves to be haunted by the spirits of those they’ve wronged it’s Biden et al in this slaughter. Biden, also, afraid of haemorrhaging votes across the varying shades of blue across the political system, is now offering republican style appeasement through immigration policy to try and scoop up voters from the side he’s supposed to stand against in this wonderfully democratic binary system where zero is borrowing policy from one, evaporating any pretence that zero is of different value than one.
Ultimately, if this farcical situation does not lay bare the lie of choice, I’m not sure what does. To peel back nuance: if your choice is a genocide funding fool who has done minimal things to protect the oppressed and the man running the oppression who will spend years causing utter chaos, eroding the tenuous threads of choice and extending his rape to the financial coffers of the country from the women’s bodies America seems to distain- what sort of choice is that? 2024; The election to save democracy by handing it to a man who has ignored 70% of American voters backing a ceasefire or giving it to a man who plans to turn America into a theocratic Authoritarian regime. Mmm… choice. Are you telling me this is the best America has, because it lends credence to the idea that America is not a serious country that a lifelong politician ignoring his voter base is “the good guy” and the bad guy looks like the Honey Monster on cocaine and acts like it in his personal life and policy.
Britain
In Britain, we’re four years behind America. Our government has spent fourteen long years utterly decimating our living standards in every single way. We’re poorer, less healthy, less safe, our economy is permanently 5% in deficit because of how Brexit was implemented- still some loyalists fervently cling to the idea that it just… hasn’t happened yet and when it does suddenly the sun will break across the uplands. We’ve had a continual assault on our basic rights- our third round of anti protest laws are now passing, it’s more difficult and comes with more paperwork to exercise your basic right to vote, the boundaries and catchments are changing to favour the tories (weird how that works huh) and our anti strike laws are now so harsh, businesses are reluctant to implement them for fear of being brought before the ECHR- a move calculated no doubt to self actualise and give the tories further rationale to rip us from the protection of a court created to protect human rights.
The tories are dreadful, and ironically the people who should be most angry are the people who stolidly back them- where the tories do meet their promises it worsens people’s outcomes at every juncture- the highest tax burden from the party of low tax, multiple instances of lawbreaking from the PM in the party of law and order, constant culture war barbs about a tiny percent of the population from the party of common sense, a conservative “at last” budget that blowtorched the gilt of the country into a watery pool of gold- and where they don’t meet their promises, it’s excuses from the party of “personal responsibility”. Not us, the people who’ve had a massive majority for years and were in charge before that, they say. No, it’s… lefty lawyers and immigrants and trans people, it’s wokeness, it’s Putin (weird that they’re more interested in Salisbury steak in the parliament restaurants than punishing Putin for the Salisbury poisonings). It’s gesture politics, or the pandemic, or brexit or any one of a hundred excuses to stop you from looking at the simple fact that they have had power for fourteen painful years.
Our choice in this upcoming election is between this, this utter madness, this farce of governance- and the more palatable option of a Biden-esque return to common sense and nothing else.
Starmer’s Grand Guignol has been to puppeteer Labour into the territory of the ’09 conservatives. It’s smart- locking the tories out of rolling back into that ground and trapping them in their radicalism. At every turn over the last few years Starmer has steadily shed any pledge with even the tenuous odour of radical change.
If all you care about is beating the tories but not dealing with the horrors their policies have inflicted, it’s great. Unfortunately some of us are more interested in being able to shout “we won” and receiving nothing for contributing to that momentous win, as we continue to face the root cause of the issues that blight our society. I swear that Starmer’s strategy is “at least we’re not the tories” and nothing else. On green policy he’s now flim slamming, saying they might ramp up to where they’ll be spending 28 billion. Weird, because I remember those exact words mid 2023. On Brexit he plans to look at legislation to lessen the impact- actual wording from an article I read recently. Not fix it, though he does talk often about making it a success. The best we can hope for is making the financial arterial gouting make a nice Jackson Pollock knockoff.
On housing, he’s watered down his pledge to deal with affordable housing, on the NHS Streeting plans to allow infiltration of private entities all whilst clinging, white knuckled, to his favourite phrase: free at the point of use. It’s not free Wes, we pay for it in our taxes. Did you know? The word watery is what I can use to describe Labour’s stances on everything from policy issues to social issues, because whenever a member of labour speaks I hear the slow drip, drip, drip of their conviction ebbing down the drain.
And what of the atrocities in Palestine? Both sides lap up the continual stream of excuses from Netanyahu, a hard right extremist authoring mass slaughter. Sunak refuses to condemn war crimes committed on camera, whereas Starmer tells us – falsely no doubt- that he’s so busy he just hasn’t had time to watch a four minute video of a group of men under a white flag getting shot at, or what must now be hours of footage of white phosphorous being dropped on Gaza, or men tied up in schools having their teeth smashed out by rifle butts, or watching Israeli soldiers in the West Bank smash up businesses. It’s hardly the extended cut of lord of the rings, Sir Kier, and I’d say it’s quite urgent we get your feedback as a human rights lawyer and future country leader- but by all means, take your time.
Neither side offers nuance, neither side offers the possibility that maybe we aren’t all supporting Palestinians because we’re naive and taken in by propaganda- in fact the tories’ new crackdown on protest is because they think we support Hamas, an organisation known to mistreat their own citizens instead of the citizens under not only Hamas but the steel beams of Israel’s regime too. Lord knows, what we really need in politics is this sort of comical lack of nuance in a situation where thousands of people a week are dying. We’re told that it’s necessary because of what Hamas did. Hamas are bad, this we know, but when the guys we’re told are good are continuing a decades long occupation and committing war crimes on camera you cant keep pointing at the other bad guy who is being bombed alongside tens of thousands of people with no stake in anything but survival, and saying “look, look but they’re doing stuff” like we’re children in an eye test.
The first big article I wrote (big, I say as if my lofty opinions matter) for the “mainstream” press was an article which exhorted people to call for aspirational politics. That’s not politics you choke on, it’s the politics of “we deserve, and can get, better than this”. The tories are ludicrously trying to convince people that the crumbling schools, patient full & doctor empty hospitals, the brown waters, the divided, poor, sick, hungry, mortgageless nation is exactly where it should be and we’re all gagging for another five years of a robotic Sunak showing what I’m increasingly convinced are veneers to the camera as he walks the line between a sympathetic smile and an executioner’s sneer.
Starmer’s labour seems focused on stopping the moaning without actually attacking the problems at the root. You know what happens when you rip out a weed from the garden and don’t deal with the root? Policy wise, it’s the equivalent of covering your eyes with your hands and pretending it’s gone. I feel like Starmer’s gearing up to punish us all for being dragged along by FPTP’s tory slant for so long. Rather than offering the type of “we can make things better” policy that gives us hope, it’s set to be a manifesto of sensible concessions which mask issues, instead of tackling them.
Constantly I find myself lambasted for voting green, but I’d rather write a list of my fetishes on the voting card and livestream it to my 74,000 followers than be complicit in either further degradation or Starmer’s wind-light adherence to policy.
It sure is better than tories though. Right..?
Let’s see how we feel after five, perhaps ten years of it- five or ten years of no real grassroots change, no brave policy to get us off our metaphorical haunches. All the tories will need is a facelift and throngs of voters will be misty eyed for more. Want the proof? Look at what America’s caretaker president has done… revealed the utter toothlessness of that sort of “at least I’m not the bad guy” politics and how it practically gilds the road for the somehow worse bad guy to come sliding in.
It’s beyond repulsive that these are the paltry options we’re presented with: on one side, sanity which plays apologist to slaughter, to putting a bandage over a seeping wound without stitches or styptic- on the other, the assailant who dealt the wounds.
I mean, really. Is my shiny new type of politics really radical, really surprising, when this is what we have? If these were dinner options I’d rather flip the table than reluctantly dig in to whichever foetid option I’m told tastes the least bad.
What else is there?
We’ve been taught conservative thinking from the knee. The pervasive obsession with “we’ve always done it that way” makes my head spin. Yes, we have always “done it” this way, and it’s led to societal division so deep that some amongst us are gearing up for quite literal bloody civil war. We’ve always done it this way, and still people suffer at the hands of a society that is punitive to addicts, where people who work 48 hours a week on the national average salary can’t afford to buy even the most ramshackle houses, where healthcare is jokingly referred to as “impossible to get” in business meetings across the country. We’ve always voted for parties more interested in the lipgloss thin culture issues and how they can weigh in for popularity than issue manifestos filled with robust plans to defeat the societal problems we’ve saddled ourselves with because ‘we’ve always done this to ourselves’; and apparently it’s “radical” to ask why? To wonder if there’s a better way- real politics, that deftly ignores surface level pettiness of culture war nonsense, that focuses on our real lives and the real issues and whether candidates out there can tear themselves away from propaganda channels like GB news or old money rags like the Telegraph to speak to the daily frustrations of normal people.
If you’re swayed in politics by the gaudy bauble of whether gays can kiss in public I fail to see why I’d be interested in your economic takes- and yet, our politics has taught us to focus on these non issues. I’m peturbed by anyone being gropey in public, but that’s for me to move on from because people can do what they want regardless of gender- but when it comes to solid economic plans, where are we with those? What plans do we have to keep property at the value people insist it must be whilst giving a leg up to the young who need to get on the property ladder? What are we doing to look at progressive worker safety laws that enshrine the right to work from home where possible provided you meet fair targets, which cuts down on travel cost so you keep more money and ensures that you’re contributing to your workplace? Why are we so insistent that green manifestos are bad when the impact on us is minimal, focusing mainly on the mass taxation of climate changers- otherwise known as the people burning the planet?
Truly the world has gone mad, lapping up populist politics that divides us with nonsense and never, ever actually gives us a path to the halo lit goodness we’re always told is just one election, one vote, one supporting statement away.
People often say they want boring politics back. I don’t: I want the type of politics that makes us all live better, happier lives. Politics that isn’t afraid to try new things to ensure we’re always doing the best we can, and even if it fails at least we know it doesn’t work. I don’t want humdrum, lesser of two evils, surface scratching changes when beneath us lurks an untapped ocean of opportunity to strive for better.Politics is designed to make minimal change because that is how it- how parties, how society- resists change. But we need change- big change, scary change, the type of change that will reverberate through generations- and calling for it, asking for it, demanding it: even getting radical about it, is not the crazy far leftie commune living nonsense you think: it’s the most common sensical thing I can think of.
Politically Enraged 