Comic Strips

The trains were just keeping with the metaphor of the OP. (Although we do need much better trains too.)

Acting like the only thing wrong is train schedules is really reductive. People who insist on voting as THE prime form of political participation will often say that not voting for a lesser evil is a privileged position because you're not going to be impacted by the stuff the other party will do. But I'd argue there is an inherent privilege to being someone who won't be materially impacted by US imperialism.

We've all been conditioned to view the violence the government inflicts on the rest of the world as normal. Maybe you don't agree with it, but only as much as you don't agree with, say, tax policy. It's an abstract thing. We're removed from the constant horror it represents. We'd like it if it wasn't happening, but we don't have to think about it most of the time and will clearly not do anything about it any time soon if everyone left of Hitler's position is "vote for the Hitler that's only going to do the bad stuff to other people."

In general I take issue with people framing this as protecting democracy from fascism. The US is not a democracy.

• For starters, a constitutional democracy shouldn't be able to end through a simple vote that doesn't even include most of the country. If voting in fascists is an acceptable outcome of the system, it's not a good system.

• From the ground up, the US was built to be as anti-democratic as possible while still technically having voting. Obviously it started with only land owning white men being allowed to vote. It's expanded slowly over the years, but it STILL explicitly disenfranchises people such as prisoners. The electoral college, gerrymandered congressional districts, and the longer, staggered term limits in the senate, and the lifetime term limit for supreme court justices are all mechanisms which were explicitly designed to filter out the will of the masses from influencing government. To bring in a personal example: I live in NY. My vote doesn't matter. I don't say that as an excuse for not voting because I know I won't have an effect of the election. I say that because I don't even get a vote! Even if there was a candidate I cared about, just because of where I was born I can have zero influence on their election into government.

• Finally, I'd argue that an imperialist country is definitionally not a democracy. The core principle of democracy is that the government rules over only those who have consented to it. An imperialist state such as the US takes actions all around the world in other sovereign countries that have major influences on people who never consented to be subjects of US power. An Iraqi who's house got bombed didn't get a chance to vote against Bush. A person in Latin America didn't get a vote on the US invalidating the vote in their country with a coup. Cubans, Vietnamese, etc. didn't get to vote on the US making sure they couldn't trade with the rest of the world.

As a related point to the last point: This is why I think it's philosophically wrong to vote for candidates who don't represent you in the US elections. In a democracy you are still considered to have "consented" to being governed even by an opposition party you didn't vote for because you consented to the process. By voting you are saying that you agree that this is the way we will choose our government and that you will abide by the results even if you don't get the outcome you want. That's fine if the process was truly democratic and you can live with any of the outcomes even if you'd prefer something different. But if all outcomes are systematically unacceptable to you and the process itself is flawed, then still casting your vote within that framework is consent to the government and the process that produced it. When you go vote, there's no box for "I'm only voting for this person because they're technically better than the other one. I'm not actually ok with them." You simply vote for Harris and the implicit choice of "I will not try to enact change in any other way."

If you think Trump represents the rise of fascism and the end of democracy, then you shouldn't be willing to abide by the results of the election anyway. But could you imagine any of the people telling you to vote against fascism taking up arms to storm the capital to protect that democracy and it's people? Could you even imagine those people symbolically supporting leftists if they did this? I can't. Because they didn't do shit last time. Because they spent years talking about the right wing coup attempt in terms of it being treason rather than it being a problem because they're fascists. Because civility and rules are more important than anything else to these people. If Trump won, the day after the election the same people who said it'd be the end of democracy will be saying "We'll get em' in 2-4 years."