What is to be done?
We are on the edge now, as the Trump Paradigm, which is as of now is the Republican Party as an institution, is now the Trump Personality Death Cult. The bozos nominated for Federal judgeships refuse to say in Congressional hearings that the Constitution prohibits a third term for the Orange Fart Cloud.
The gangster mentality of Trump and his appointees will quite likely try to keep the elections of 2026 and 2028 free of "fake" voters.
We are reduced to hoping for Father Time to end the nightmare. Ok, but what next? Once Trump kicks the bucket, his MAGA cult will still be in place and there are a host of billionaires anxious to keep the scam fest going under Vance or whoever.
Personally, I don't vote because some of the Dems are already whining about how Trump is chasing the wrong windmill when he should be helping Ukraine.
Nevertheless, Trump's literal insanity poses a unique problem. He could respect an electoral defeat as he grudgingly did in 2020, after spewing tons of bullshit about it. But the New Improved Senile Trump, if he survives until 1-20-29, is just loopy enough to start a literal civil war over the fake election that he "really" wins.
The time for action is upon us.
Caveat -- personally, again, although I expect to be in opposition to whichever Blue Pimp succeeds Trump, I don't want civilization to disappear in nuclear war.
Meanwhile, the real problem for us citizens is the government has merged with money. We need to form a movement to end government for sale to the highest bidder.
As of May 2026, there is no unified organizational push for ending government for sale to the highest bidder. That leaves roughly six months to organize a counter to thuggery at the polls. I suggest starting with the central labor councils of every county in the country to form Poll Watcher teams to witness and document with video any ICE style crap. The goal is to get 6 volunteers committing to four hour shifts, with two on duty all day at every polling station in the country. During my union rep career, I found that the local labor feds are the last vestige of New Deal Era Unionism.
But the Dump Trump Poll watchers will be the perfect starting point for coast to coast organizing. However election day goes, we have an organizational structure that is not owned by any individual.
Final note -- in my personal opinion, nothing is more tedious that self-qualification on the internet. I know it is not persuasive to claim you know what you are talking about. But I have run national campaigns before.
Time to get our shit together.
Comments
I'll be serving
as an election judge for the general election, should it actually resemble an election. I don't know what role I will have yet, but I will be there, if it is an election.
It remains to see whether I'll bother voting. However, if Trump guts all of the election-operation powers that rightfully belong to the states, I might simply ignore the whole thing. Certainly if he guts local oversight of the election, there'll be no reason to participate- since only one outcome will then be possible.
And even if an election that actually looks like an election somehow actually happens, there's also this minor issue. This is a great, beautifully cynical, and entirely accurate image of what the blue-team stalwarts believe that they will be voting for if e.g. AOC is the shiny-object, empty-suit blue-team candidate, versus what they would actually get:
It is a quandary, innit?
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
I won't vote
My thread is intended as a way to bridge the gap between earnest yet naive Democrats and us cynical folks who realize that the Dem politicians are not worth voting for.
Without unity we lose. Period. Unity within the Newsome/Harris shit show is worse than chaos.
How to get out of this double bind is the task at hand.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
And the new way atempts at
a 3rd party are unimpressive progressives or some oppressive right wingers. Attempts at merging consensus between the two result in what we already have.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
I am not advocating that anybody vote in 2026. I won't.
This thread is not a pitch for electoral ambition. I am advocating a mechanism for organizing resistance, presuming that the election will be another farce. I want to capitalize on the resentment that will surely follow whatever Trump and Company do. We need direct mass action. As of now we cannot form a mass.
Organizing is how we get there.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
Good coverage of
Colorado Gov. Polis’s political suicide here, with his abrupt commutation of the MAGA ex-county-clerk Tina Peters’ sentence for her election fraud convictions (plural). He needs to slink off into a very deep, very dark, very one-way hole, and soonest. If he somehow gets appointed to Bennet’s Senate seat, things around here will get very ugly indeed.
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/05/election-denier-tina-pet...
“Polis claims not that he was strong-armed [by Trump] but that he reached the decision of his own avail, which might be even worse. He suggested that Peters was being penalized for casting doubt on the election. “It’s not a crime in our country to believe the earth is flat,” Polis told The New York Times. “It’s not a crime to believe voting machines are flawed.” Just so—but acting on those beliefs can be a crime. Peters didn’t just tell people the election was rigged; she took actions that violated the law based on that mistaken idea.”
Excerpt From
“An Outrageous Commutation for an Election Denier”
David A. Graham
The Atlantic
Gonna give her her old job back so that she can do it again, Gov. Asshole? That would be on-brand. And that, in a word, is why so many of us are done with the blue team.
The above excerpt is an example of fair-use quoting for editorial purposes, btw.
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
A Conundrum
Doesn't look as if we can vote our way out of this mess.
That is my point!
We cannot vote our way out of this mess. We need a mass movement of people demanding that our government stop being a whorehouse, backing the demand up with non-violent civil disobedience. The hard part is getting started on the project of building unity around a common sensibility. No starting wars. No big money in elections. Evolving away from predatory economics.
We don't even need political parties.
We need to connect with the tens of millions of people who still vote democratic -- we can agree about fair elections AND the need for Trump and his blunders to be tossed into the dustbin of history even as we disagree about Party Membership.
Unity of purpose!
Organizing is a skill.
I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.
I hear you,
but can't see it. Organizing is a tactic. That comes after some agreed upon principle by some number of people that then need to have the wherewithal not to be co-opeted or defeated in some way. In the US there's a hundred and one ways to defeat a mass movement. China is a current winner for its people but to get here took a revolution and a lot of additional pain for over fifty years. Americans have never had the degree of cohesion to accomplish anything like that. TheRe Great Depression -- hunger, poverty, men forced to abandon their families -- led to a few good steps, but holding on to those has been difficult. Reaganites, Clintonistas, teabaggers, Magasters and John Roberts have been assaulting what few are left.
You need an institutional imaginary of some sort.
The result of "get(ting) our sh#t together" is always going to be that we produce, and maintain, an institution which represents the sh#t that we got together.
Here the Cornelius Castoriadis notion of (collective) responsibilty is helpful. We need to take collective responsibility. If we have collective power within it, and if we take responsibility for our institution, then we have our sh#t together.
"The domination of society by the managerial apparatus can only be surpassed, argued Castoriadis, when workers take responsibility for organizing themselves."
https://iep.utm.edu/cornelius-castoriadis/
The Democratic and Republican parties represent the opposite, which is what Castoriadis called heteronomy. Heteronomy is by definition the absence of responsibility. The Democrats blame the Republicans ("Don't blame me -- I voted for Harris") while themselves being creatures of money, and the Republicans blame money itself -- you know, their money-making duties as representatives of "business." (You'll note who Trump dragged along when he visited China last week.) Nobody of either party will say "hey I messed up, I'll do better next time." And the country goes to pot.
This is why I support non-duopoly parties. The parties could just reproduce the existing system -- or they could be an opening for collective responsibility. But at least they're not part of the duopoly.
"You're just gonna have to start building alternative sources of power both inside and outside the state” -- Greg Stoker
I learned a lot from this thread
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I cried when I wrote this song. Sue me if I play too long.