A quick note: this piece contains commentary on “the far left” and “the far right”. I recognize the pitfalls of over-generalizing any group of people or reinforcing monoliths where there is likely plenty of diversity. In fact, I think we would benefit from exposing that inevitable diversity of opinion within groups deemed to be homogenous, because we would realize there probably isn’t as much groupthink as we imagine, that certain ideological fixations are fragile when scrutinized, and that there is more that unites us than divides us. I don’t want to perpetuate “us” versus “them” thinking for all of these reasons. And yet, we need to be able to make statements on dynamics and trends that we’re observing in order to tend to where we’ve gone wayward. Let’s see if we can handle the bigness we’re trying to hold here… We do it together. We do it with thoughtful critique. I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Ok, onward.
It should make our skin tingle.
It should make our spine shudder.
When someone attempts to suppress one of our foundational inalienable rights, the one that unlocks every other, it should be met not merely with passive concern or resigned expectation. It should be seen as an explosive, blistering forest fire of a red flag raging at us with heart-quaking admonition. Pay attention.
The far right is blatant about their efforts to suppress the vote. They make it plain as day.
They enact laws that limit access to voting which include everything from restricting mail-in ballots to criminalizing anyone who provides food and water to voters standing in line at the polls.
They purge voter rolls.
They intimidate voters, and on and on.
But the far left is more insidious with its voter suppression. It looks a lot more like undermining the democratic party and the act of voting itself through:
disproportionate blame
unrealistic demands, including naively underestimating the preparedness for alternatives
false equivalence
ignoring the more clear and present dangers
decontextualizing history
erasing progress
I want to be abundantly clear that I am not challenging the right to critique systems of power or to feel the rage of a thousand suns over the fact that America strains to evolve itself into the democracy it has long promised to be and has thus caused so much global damage in its wake. If it’s not already obvious from reading this Substack, I celebrate that energy. It is precisely the kind of clear-seeing that is necessary to reach ideals and aspirations toward collective liberation, but it is incumbent upon us to recognize that any legitimate progress toward these aspirations asks us to build what we seek, asks us to shape change.
What I am challenging is the kind of quicksand of fatalism that can eat the left alive. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire describes this difference between the right and the left. The right is obsessed with the past: they want to freeze or slow down historical progress and “domesticate” time to domesticate people. The left is obsessed with the future, but only one that is pre-determined and hyper-controlled (think of the extremes – i.e. anarchist, Marxist, and/or communist thinkers develop(ed) incredibly detailed, mechanistic blueprints of how exactly an ideal society would theoretically function, crafting specific and immutable frameworks to be imprinted on society.) Both the far right and the far left devolve into rigid ideological self-righteousness, eventually becoming hypocritically dogmatic, pretentiously moralizing, and riddled with impractical intellectualism that, when practiced, lead to an erosion of freedom. One major pitfall for the far left in this regard is that it loses recognition of the importance of harm reduction in the short term and strategic evolution in the long term.
Ok, back to voter suppression.
With inflammatory shortsightedness and impracticality, voter suppression on the far left traces a direct line between the compounding cruelties of systemic oppression to the Democratic party, and now to Kamala Harris, with excessive blame and impossible demands. They want immediate and comprehensive structural transformation of every arena of suffering both within this country and caused by it abroad… or they want complete devotion to their insulated presumptions about what “justice” or “resolution” looks like for their single-issue fixation. In an ecosystem of impracticality, we are thrust into brain-meltingly frustrating fracturing across the sprawling left. And this fracturing comes with enormous risk when it’s weaponized divisiveness versus heterogeneity that can support growth and maturation.
Voter suppression on the far left is reinforced by rampant disinformation that suggests complete futility in electing a Democrat.
“Silence on Gaza Genocide” at the DNC is false. This gives: “tell me you didn’t watch even a minute of the DNC without openly admitting it.” This was the first DNC in American history to feature a panel on Palestinian rights, the first DNC in American history to repeatedly feature prolific recognition of abhorrent Palestinian suffering and demands for a ceasefire + hostage release, the first DNC in American history with a candidate who centered her commitment to ensuring the right for Palestinians to self-determination and sovereignty.
“Silence on Gaza Genocide” is a fierce misrepresentation of what actually occurred. If you haven’t seen Raphael Warnock’s speech, I can’t recommend it enough. Here’s a powerful clip (click to see it, I don’t think you need an IG account).
Voter suppression by the far left is also committed by delegitimizing appropriate democratic processes with untenable accusations, like cruelly and pervertedly conflating the DNC with a “Reich convention” . This is a completely inane analysis that none of us should have to waste our time on. One of Juan’s main arguments in the linked clip, aside from grotesque Holocaust inversion, is that the DNC was choreographed and thus illegitimate.
Babe, tell me what isn’t choreographed – from waiting for a train to boarding a plane, from high school Friday night football to the Super Bowl, from a wedding to a funeral, from an operating theater surgery to a courthouse trial. And what about brushing our teeth in the morning? Choreography is a basic component of any gathering, any event, any function, literally any endeavor… especially one with tens of thousands of people, dozens of speakers, all requiring bulletproof security in this trigger-happy world.
The far left further suppresses the vote by avoiding the unquestionably obvious thing: proclaiming emphatic rejection of the far right and Donald Trump. There is a near-total refusal to place appropriate blame on the RNC, Republicans, the far right, Trump, etc at least in equal measure from the far left. It echoes the total abdication of Hamas’s responsibility in the tragedies in Gaza and Israel. Why? Why is it that the far left refuses to acknowledge that there is more to the story than a one-sided assault by Israel? That Hamas continuously rejects ceasefire deals? Why is it that the far left refuses to admit Trump’s policies on Gaza would be far more devastating to the people they aim to defend, with his unwavering reinforcement of Netanyahu, his beliefs about Palestinians — the man who invented the Muslim Ban?
The left becomes as insistent on purity as the right does, it just manifests differently. Is anyone ever good enough? What human could possibly be infallible in their eyes, especially burdened by thousands upon thousands of years of an entrenched dominant geopolitical reality built upon barbaric technologies of slavery, persecution, hierarchy, objectification, destruction of the earth, etc.
Another way the left suppresses the vote? Demanding the two-party system be dismantled tomorrow, as though this is a fictional reality in which it’s “the people” versus “the neoliberal war-mongering white-supremacist colonial empire/corporate enterprise that the Democrats built”. It’s not.
It’s Donald Trump versus Kamala Harris.
That’s it. Until and unless a legitimate counterforce to the two-party system is cultivated with steady devotion over years, maybe decades, to elevate legitimately electable third-party candidates that represent progressive ideals with even greater integrity than the democratic candidate. Voting is framed as anti-woke. Voting is uncool. Voting is anti-radical. Voting is endorsing a genocide in Gaza. Voting is copping for the colonizer and succumbing to the system instead of taking the more hardcore approach of abstinence. You get the idea. And that idea is woefully concerning with 71 days to go until the election.
Critique is essential to political progress, but when the clock is ticking between that exact progress and a 100-year setback, it’s time to get to work ensuring a dictator does not get enshrined by a mere 7,000 votes in Michigan or some equally horrific hair thin margin (re: Hilary 2016).
In this moment, I love thinking about how the most radical entity in American history to date, the Black Panther Party, voted. They ran voter registration drives that put several hundred thousand new voters on the books, they successfully elected aligned candidates up and down the ballot, they operated as a democracy internally. Indeed, it was the decision to veer away from electoral politics and coalition politics that led the Party into disarray, eventually imploding and disintegrating1.
“The unevenness of the American journey has made some skeptical. But I’m not asking you to give up your skepticism. I just want that skepticism to be your companion and not your captor and I’m asking that you join us in the work. Because making America great does not mean telling people ‘you’re not wanted’ and loving your country does not mean lying about its history. Making America great means saying the ambitions of this country would be incomplete without your help.” - Maryland Gov. Wes Moore
What the far left is ignoring is the imperative to push the party, to push the dismantling of the two party system, to push on all worthy and admirable fronts toward change, but what we don’t do is set us back 100 years by undermining voting for the only viable candidate in this election, the candidate that would not institute a Muslim ban, the candidate that explicitly stated her support for sovereignty and self-determination of Palestinians in the middle of one of her most important speeches on the world’s stage, the candidate that will reinstate abortion rights, the candidate that has a plan to build 3 million housing units, the candidate that plans to raise the minimum wage, the candidate that will continue to cancel student debt, the candidate that will not pursue a dictatorship or implement the horrors of Project 2025.
The political process is incompatible with instant gratification, dopamine addicted culture. It is steady, strategic commitment that is premised upon 7-generation thinking, even if we’re not openly framing it that way.
That voting and political process requires such a profound investment of all of us collaborating, debating, challenging, pressuring, advancing causes, showing up consistently… that in itself is revolutionary.
On January 30, 1933, a Nazi decree revoked the right to vote from my great grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and the entire Jewish population of Germany. My grandmother was young then, but in an interview she gave in 1993 she still remembered seeing her father with tears in his eyes because he could not cast his vote. He knew. With terror and devastation in his heart, he knew what this meant.
The 1933 election that eliminated the Jewish vote and installed Hitler’s regime were the last multi-party elections in a united Germany until 1990. 60 years. In 1935, waves of antisemitic legislation were passed by the only people who could vote in Germany, with harrowing consequenes that started with being excluded from any and all citizenship rights – becoming “staatsangehörige” or state subjects. Almost overnight, Jewish people became incarcerated within their own country with no way out. As you all know, incarceration would only compound into smaller and smaller confinement – from ghettos to concentration camps to gas chambers. My grandmother fled to the US alone at age 17, then worked desperately to save her father, her mother, and her little sister. She never saw her father, my great grandfather, again.
Please don’t tell me this cannot happen again. It is not hyperbole to admit: we are 71 days from a bone-chillingly terrifying potential. A man who says openly, we would never need to vote again.
Pay attention.
I will vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz with joy in my heart on behalf of every ancestor that burned in Hitler’s Germany denied theirs.
The absolute privilege to abstain from voting when you still have the right is obliterated by the not-so-distant epigenetic imprint of my great grandfather’s tears that watered the seeds of my becoming.
I have never believed voting could solve everything. But I know in my blood and my bones that *not* voting – whether by force or by choice – could mean losing everything.
Those who seek to suppress your right to vote, no matter who they are or what agenda they claim to represent are dangerously misguided. May we all endeavor to restore and affirm the sanctity of this sacred right.
Here are a few posts from the archives that are meditations on this theme –
Feeling Our Way in the Dark: on the integrity-supporting importance of uncertainty
The Smallest Decisions: on ideological laziness, inauthentic intellectualism, and the moral urgency of our time
A Divine Appointment: a palette cleanser
Thread the Needle: the third installment of a series on Gaza/Palestine/Israel
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Whoa. A very powerful and very clear piece, and simultaneously, nuanced piece Rachel. Thank you! What a joy to read.
Hear, hear. It is so stressful that this perfectionism is keeping people from engaging in the democratic process, especially when there is one clear choice for our country’s future. I hope people will get out of the social media echo chambers and at least cast a vote, bc the far right sure will.