Don’t Let the Electoral Circus and Its Side Shows Weaken Your Political Will

In the United States, presidential elections can be mesmerizing. Even people whose political work does not center electoral politics often become spectators at the electoral circus. Keeping up with the news about a presidential race can quickly morph into a hyper-focus on every meme, sound byte, and mud-slinging “debate” that the electoral circus has to offer. We live in an era of reality TV politics filled with DIY controversies. Any of us can generate a social media debacle that observers will waste hours on — how democratic! The press, politicians, and our education system all reinforce the idea that our electoral choices are the sum total of our political lives. This misperception leads people to feel righteous in their electoral obsessions and has convinced many that sharing memes and yelling at each other about elections not only amounts to political action but also constitutes a meaningful political life. However, politics dictate the conditions that inform our lives each and every day, so our engagement with politics — the work of shaping those conditions — must be ongoing. We must not allow the electoral circus we’re experiencing to reshape our ideas about what is possible. We should be reshaping the standards of candidates rather than the reverse. For example, we have not been in the streets for the past ten months demanding a more “empathetic tone” towards Palestine. We have been demanding an end to the genocide, an end to apartheid, freedom of movement for Palestinians, and an arms embargo. Those demands must continue to echo across our politics. When it comes to abortion, the codification of Roe was never enough, and it’s still not enough. The list goes on.

Resisting the erosion of our politics also means resisting the normalization of troubling rhetoric. That means rejecting the “she’s a prosecutor and he’s a felon” nonsense. People who argue that being a “prosecutor” positions someone as a savior in an era when carceral systems mark people for mass disposal amid the ongoing normalization of mass death and mass murder are not well-positioned to save themselves or each other as our situation declines. People who believe the label of “felon” should disqualify someone from political life do not understand the nature of the power struggle we’re experiencing. It is Trump’s life as a member of the ruling class, who are typically exempt from criminalization, that has positioned him to do great harm. This is always the case. Think about the oil executives who knew decades ago that they were driving us toward a mass extinction event. These men are responsible for mass death on an incalculable scale. People are dying from heat stroke, fleeing from wildfires, and being drowned by floods as I type because of the conditions that these executives knowingly cultivated. They are mass murderers, but they are not “felons” because the system exists to facilitate their harms in order to generate profit. That same system disposes of people who have no functional role in sustaining the wealth of the ruling class. It does this through the violence of poverty and criminalization. Prosecutors and police feed human beings to a torturous disposal system that robs its victims of both their present and their future.

In addition to being vapid and out of touch with what it means to be a prosecutor in the United States, or a felon, for that matter, this language also irks me on a personal level. I spent last Wednesday at Stateville Correctional Center talking to some imprisoned University Without Walls students about politics. Throughout my visit, I was thinking about how much I valued their analysis. We talked about a variety of topics, from books they’ve read recently to Palestine and discourses around violence and nonviolence. I had the privilege of congratulating a number of them because they have recently completed their review board processes and will be graduating soon. Their academic advisors have had to hurry up the process of organizing those review boards because Stateville is slated for closure this year, and we have no idea where the UWW students will be transferred when that happens. They could be scattered across the state, disrupting our ability to work with students and alumni, and breaking up the beautiful community of thought and scholarship that these men have built. As we talked about politics, books, their studies, and the future, we were all physically uncomfortable, as there was a heat wave bearing down on the area, and there was, of course, no air conditioning.

One of the men mentioned to me that a member of his review board brought up that he had characterized himself as having been transformed while in prison but also stated that prisons should not exist. The man questioning him positioned this as a contradiction. The student told me, “I couldn’t tell if he was serious or if he was setting me up for a layup.” Either way, the student handled the question capably, explaining that prison had not transformed him, but rather, he and others had created spaces where transformation was possible in spite of the crushing realities of their imprisonment. He further explained that if a program like the University Without Walls were available in communities like his, many of the men locked up in Stateville wouldn’t be there in the first place. Manufactured social conditions drive people into situations that result in criminalization. Those people are then shuffled into prisons, where they experience conditions that manufacture premature death.

While some people may identify with Harris, who is currently being praised for her role as an incarcerator, we all have more in common with my friends in Stateville than we ever will with Harris (or Trump, obviously). We are all more likely to experience social disposal through criminalization than we are to become members of the ruling class, and most of us, through any honest appraisal, could be deemed criminals. I am a criminal, as I have committed many crimes in my life (sometimes for righteous reasons and sometimes for other reasons), as have many of you. Like some of you, I could have been branded a felon if I had been ensnared by the system at the right time, and like most of you, I am only a few bad breaks away from the cycle of criminalization and incarceration that often awaits the unhoused.

You might be thinking, “This just isn’t important right now. The stakes are so high. I can’t afford to care about this rhetoric.” I understand this sentiment and the fear that motivates it. I understand imperfect choices. After all, I regularly participate in systems that are oppressing me and killing the planet (which means that they’re also killing me). I pay rent for housing that should be free. I pay for health insurance and a bevy of copays and uncovered expenses, even though healthcare should be free. I make payments on student loans that should be canceled. I pay taxes to a government I abhor, and in a similarly aggravated fashion, I vote. I do all of these things to avoid the consequences of not doing them — some of which could prove catastrophic for me. I would prefer to upend the systems that necessitate these choices, but given that we have not yet amassed the power to do so, I engage with them. Not everything we do to keep ourselves and others alive will be revolutionary or even forward-thinking. I get that. I do, however, believe that there is a difference between engaging with our imperfect electoral choices and becoming performers in the electoral circus, or even fixated spectators for that matter.

In the coming months, we must remain focused on the conditions that shape our lives and on how we can alter those conditions. That means continuing to make demands that are true to our politics. It also means rejecting harmful rhetoric, even when it serves the less awful candidate. We must resist the idea that criminalization is disqualifying and the notion that the work of locking people up should be valorized.

I feel compelled to remind people, at this moment, that fascism is not a single-party issue, however more pronounced and rabid it may be among the Republicans. What Ruth Wilson Gilmore has referred to as the “domestication” of fascism by Democrats is also a threat to our lives and freedom. We can see that domestication in the criminalization of homelessness, the enhanced criminalization of dissidents, and the further militarization of police in Democratic cities. The path to corporate fascism is bipartisan. The road is simply longer on the Democratic side. I would prefer a longer road, just as I would prefer an adversary who would swing his fists at me to one who would simply shoot me in the head, but I wouldn’t mistake either opponent for an ally. I am in a life-and-death struggle either way.

We must remember that fascism is already here, in the very fabric of our political lives. While Trump is promising relocation camps for unhoused people and migrants, we must recognize that the machinery of social disposal already exists in this country and that we are already trained to ignore its work. Premature death is manufactured daily in prisons, detention centers, and sacrifice zones, and people in the US barely discuss it. COVID deaths have been normalized, and I am hearing little conversation about people perishing as a result of extreme heat — a problem that will grow exponentially in the coming years. This does not mean that the expansion of systems of social disposal is not a threat. It means that people who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge, understand, or fight what already exists are not well-positioned to fight that expansion.

I am not asking you to pick a fight with every liberal who praises Harris as Trump’s prosecutor. I am asking you to undermine the basic assumptions that prop up that thinking. Our collective understanding of the crises we face is much more important than this shoddy rhetoric, which is merely a morbid symptom. Our work is to cultivate thoughtful, active communities that are determined to change the conditions that shape our lives. Do not allow the spectacle of the presidential race and its many sideshows to devour your energy or weaken your political will. We must not be transformed by the electoral circus, but rather, we must create space for transformation in spite of it.