#electoralism
‘White Privilege’ Defanged: From Class War Analysis to Electoral Cynicism
by Zach Schwartz-Weinstein
Throughout the current election cycle, it has been striking to note the ways that privilege discourse has been deployed to demand loyalty to particular parties and candidates. “Either vote Clinton,” one widely-circulated tweet demands, “or admit you’re a privileged asshole.” Bernie Sanders refused to concede to Hillary Clinton because of privilege. Third party voters are privileged. “Ultraleftists” are privileged. Privilege has thus become central to a heavily moralizing language of civic responsibility which demands that the US electorate maintain a neoliberal bulwark against the far right for the putative good of the less fortunate. This use of the concept marks an appropriation, one which transforms privilege discourse fundamentally, from an analysis of white supremacy’s capillary and quotidian power into an individuating and deeply ideological mechanism of state discipline.
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Abolitionist Democracy: Dispelling Fear and Loathing in the 2016 Campaign
by Joy James
The rivalries of candidates or parties define the political universe of US democracy. However, electoral democracy has always been in a heated contest to subdue or defeat its opponent— abolitionist democracy. Electoral democracy does not seek equity, i.e., the destruction of the master/mistress-slave relation; rather, it demarcates “winners” as free citizens from “losers” — those locked up or locked out of society and political power. Abolitionist democracy seeks and in its most fierce expressions recognizes that structures of confinement serve as roadmaps on a fabled quest to transform the “nonhuman” or “anti-human” into the “human” citizen. That transformation of course is not what is referenced in calls to “Make America Great Again” or “Stronger Together” or assurances by the FLOTUS and POTUS that the United States still is “the greatest nation on earth.” Democracies are populated by humans (including those not fully recognized as such), hence compassion and ethics remain during election cycles. However, electoral democracy presupposes the “human” and agency to be fixed in the voter-as-citizen. Unlike electoral democracy, abolition democracy focuses upon the struggle for personhood to signify the limits of captivity and indignity, that is, it probes the boundaries of legal violence, or illegal violence enacted with general impunity. Electoral democracy maintains that the political will of the people is expressed in its elections. Abolitionist democracy can argue that the political will of (some) of the people is also expressed in police violence. Both are election campaigns and our policing campaigns are windows into national or factional political will and intent.
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So many of the tools the media uses to channel our votes into MIC-approved candidates revolve around this-or-that politician’s cult of personality and treating the Republicans and Democrats like rival sports teams that I’m half convinced that if we slaughtered the entire political class tomorrow and agreed to do all legislation via referendum from now on, we would have a functional society inside of six months.
That or we’d go the way of ancient Athens, of course, but hell–if we can slaughter one political class, we can slaughter another one.
