Voting won’t end fascism or somehow change the fact that America is the outcome of a history of genocidal white supremacy.

Voting can slow the circulation of the ideologies that maintain and enable the actions that follow from the above. (1/n)

And this is one of King and X’s realizations: they didn’t encourage the vote to end racism and imperialism. They did so to slow their naturalization into the vital activity of the community through policy. (2/n)

King is pretty clear about voting and laws not changing hearts, as is X, but King is more specific about the use of legislation and electoral politics to restrain the activity of white supremacy and empire so that other methods can do affective work. (3/n)

X, on the other hand, viewed the vote as a weapon in the sense that the vote was a tool to put in place individuals, policies, that could destabilize the American empire at home and abroad. Voting was, like a bomb or a bullet, a weapon to be used by the revolutionary. (4/n)

Both, however, were not sanguine about the limits of voting: King is explicit that merely voting Black (or voting liberal/progressive) doesn’t guarantee progressive policy, nor does progressive policy or politics benefit everyone equally. (5/n)

Which is why voting, in the words of X, was a MEANS not an end. It was a method to accomplish something and not a thing to be accomplished. Moreover, as stated above, voting was one means among many and might not be suitable to resolve all problems. (6/n)

And this is the point: too many on the left, even the radical left and the popular radical left, mistake the method of voting for the objective that voting aims to accomplish. You mistake the election of a progressive candidate for the ends that election aims to accomplish. (7/n)

Which gets me back to Dewey: there’s agreement on the end of democracy, broadly, but not the means. If voting is a means, candidates are a means, the president is a means, the tragedy of our democracy is disagreement over means AND mistaking means for ends. (8/n)

Sanders, Warren, AOC, Biden, Harris, are all means. Their election is a means. Down ballot voting is a means. Protests are a means. Riots are a means. The end is a democratic society, and it’s not an end that can be accomplished by these means alone. (9/n)

Which gets me back to the beginning of this thread: voting is a means to slow the institutionalization of white supremacy, fascism, and oppression while other means are applied. Voting is not a fucking end. Candidates aren’t ends. (10/n)

Even democracy isn’t an end for Dewey, X, or King: democracy is a method of identifying and resolving the problems facing a community, it is a mode of understanding what our shared interests are through the robust sharing of experience among members of a community. (12/n)

Now, on this view the vote is necessary as a means to ensure that the experience of the marginalized was shared in the activity of organizing our society. It is a means to create the conditions for more robust inquiry to the interests of the people. (13/n)

And, insofar as these conditions have been organized by white supremacy, voting becomes a means to decenter to fundamentally change the terms on which we have the inquiry. It is to provide a way to change the rules that condition our lives. (14/n)

But even here, voting is a means, not an end. Voting is NEVER an end, nor are candidates or the presidency. These are means to do something, which, as I said, is something that lefitsts broadly have forgotten. But a means to what? (15/n)

At this point? Survival. Survival should be the ends to which the inquiry that democracy enables should be directed. Dewey might disagree as his understanding of democracy is robust, a way of life grounded in a faith that we can all contribute to inquiry. (16/n)

But I’d say that we need to orient our democracy as inquiry towards the end of survival, and doing so doesn’t mean that we need to give up democracy as a Deweyan way of life: we need to conceive of survival as an end through incorporating a variety of experiences. (16/n)

All of this is to say, survival is an end. Survival is THE end towards which our democracy should be oriented. Now, more than ever, we need to think of politics and politician as nothing more than a means to an end. (17/n)

In short:

(I’m getting a LOT of use out of that image.)