Some people out there seem to be confused, but I always vote in every local and every national election for every office and every ballot initiative since I was 18 years old. Some of my greatest civil rights heroes have fought and died so that we can all vote and I honor their memory in the ballot box every single time.
To some of us, especially those of us like myself who have been scheduling secretaries for US senators, it often seems like a morally reprehensible choice between compromised corporate Democrats and fascist-minded Republicans. Where I live in California, I have the luxury of voting my conscience for president for third-party candidates that better align with my ideas of justice and equality.
But in any and every contested race, as my mom Mary Morello always said, we have to fight the fascist every which way we can, recognizing that even if there's but an inch of difference between two candidates, there are a lot of vulnerable people who could be greatly harmed in that inch. So vote your ass off, but don't just exercise your right to vote. Exercise your right to fight for, organize for, struggle for, and manifest the kind of world you'd like to really see without compromise and without apologies before, during, and after election day. And let's stop the fascists every which way we can. Power the people.
I'll probably get downvoted to hell for saying this, but whatever, it needs to be said. It's just unbearable listening to how all of you defend voting for people you hate and doing nothing about it.
Here's the truth: if you have one party that's neo-fascist, and another party that does nothing, then in reality, your country is a one-party neo-fascist state.
What you need to do about it is fixed the root cause. Throw your constitution in the trash and write a new one that guarantees proportional representation. Sure, PR isn't perfect, but it's better than a single party state.
No, voting in primaries isn't going to fix the problem. Maybe you get a small handful of 10 politicians around the country that make you feel good about yourselves, but there are still thousands more standing in their way preventing any real progress. What have Bernie Sanders or AOC really achieved? Nothing, because there's 500 other people in Congress. What has Mamdani done for more than the tiny fraction of Americans living in NYC? Nothing, because a mayor in NYC is can't do shit for the 90% of people who live in other parts of the country.
Do whatever you want, vote however you want, but real change won't come until you throw out that stinking piece of trash constitution you have and write one that makes the USA a real democracy. Shout it out as loud as you can, because until then, nothing meaningful is ever going to change.
P.S. It's not that people aren't aware of the shitty system, it's the fact that absolutely nobody is talking about the real problem, and there's no movement whatsoever to fix it. Even Canadians are pushing desperately for PR and getting nowhere, but the USA is even more silent about it, and it's fucking infuriating.