America, we need to talk. This just isn’t working, and something has to change. I’ll come right out and say it: This country is broken. Completely fucked. We have elections, but power belongs to the billionaires. This isn’t some big secret. Through media manipulation and consolidation, it isn’t necessary to rig elections in the traditionally understood sense of the word: The owners of this country – the oligarchs – can simply predetermine all of our choices before we’ve ever had a chance to consider the options.

Take politics. We have two political parties: The Democrats and the Republicans. There’s of course a handful of inconsequential parties that exist, but what’s important to realize is that here we have a legalized duopoly where these two parties get special treatment on just about every ballot in the country, and onerous restrictions make it next to impossible for those other candidates and third-parties to ever even make it onto a ballot.

So why is this acceptable in a nation that believes ostensibly in freedom of thought, priding itself on the god of free markets and the hallowed marketplace of ideas? Why aren’t political parties able to compete freely in this country without being locked into a limited ideological spectrum? If there’s a radical right in America, then why isn’t there a radical left? If you think the Democrats are radical, think again: Liberalism is by definition a centrist political philosophy. We only tend to think of it as the “left” because it’s more liberal only in relative comparison to the Republicans. But liberalism is not the left. In any other country, this is evidently the case, and when we look at the policies of the Democratic Party, we can see that this is so.

The Republicans would have us believe that the Democrats are raging communists, who are ready to replace their confederate statues with Chairman Mao or Stalin. And you know, in the People’s Republic of Seattle, we do actually have a Lenin statue, but guess what: We also have Amazon here. We pioneered the $15 minimum wage in this country, but to get that accomplishment it required the election of a socialist city councilwoman, which tangentially was not the city’s first brush with leftism. The right loves to talk about protecting history and heritage. Funny how they never talk about the history of labor movements, of working-class rebellion, of people rising up against the elite.

What’s being missed here is that the Republicans are just performing their role, which is to constrain the debate and to rein in the Democratic Party from becoming a truly leftist party. The Democratic mayor here only announced that minimum wage increase when it was clear that our socialist candidate was going to win. Democrats run scared shitless at any hint of a notion that they might be a scary socialist, but when there’s an actual socialist on the ballot, all of a sudden real changes start to happen that they can take credit for. Interesting. 🤔

This isn’t the first time this has happened before. FDR, notwithstanding his obvious flaws, has long been one of my personal idols because of the New Deal, but a hard truth we on the left are going to need to come to grips with was that he didn’t champion these policies purely out of altruism, he sold it to the monied interests that already controlled this country on the basis of preventing an all-out socialist revolution here. This was partially about self-preservation, although the results were undeniably transcendent in their improvement to the conditions of the average American. The 1950s middle class that we think of with such deep nostalgia was made possible by these policies: They literally made America great.

So here we are today, where just a few short years ago, in 2016, we had Bernie Sanders running for president. We know how that went. He was wildly popular and cut across political boundaries, but was thwarted despite his deep popularity. DNC official Donna Brazille admitted that they straight-up, actually-for-real, rigged that primary to prevent Bernie Sanders from becoming president.

Now does this sound like a political party that is actually fighting for you? Every time the Democrats have power, they fall all over themselves to figure out how to fuck it up. But every time the Republicans have power, they don’t waste any time dismantling core features of our political system. They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again. We must actually be insane.

Not for me. I’m done. I’m no longer a Democrat, and I’m tossing the liberal label aside. I believe in social democracy as a goal for good governance. I believe in social justice and I believe in equity for people. Furthermore, I believe that we need to start having truly honest debate about the world in which we want to create and live. Politics cannot simply be soundbytes and an ever-escalating war of gotchas. We are driving our ship of state right off of a cliff and we’re taking the entire world with us given the enormous problems of climate change.

All of this is the fault of the wealthy. The richest three people in America own half of all the wealth in this country, and since money is a direct representation of relative power, it’s clear that corporations have all of it. They bought our government long before Trump got here. They own it, they run it, and they’ve broken it. Trump is merely a counter coup. What Republican voters don’t appreciate about him is that he’s not here to fix the system; he’s here to hijack a broken system and use it to benefit himself.

In failing to meet the desperate needs of the people, the Democrats – fully enveloped by the corporations – have enabled all of this. And that’s why America is not a Democracy.

Voting harder will not solve our problems, and our representatives will not save us. Schumer’s CR vote made that abundantly clear. The courts are the very last thread that keep the Constitution barely alive, but that’s dwindling fast in light of Speaker Johnson’s threat to dissolve courts who rule against the Trump regime.

History isn’t written yet, so what will you do? If real change only happens when they fear losing control, then our job is simple: Make them afraid. The media isn’t your friend in this regard. They will bury your protests. I watched them bury Bernie by simply ignoring him. And somehow, somewhere along the way, we lost sight of the fact that protesting isn’t just about lobbying representatives or to get media attention, but it’s to lobby your neighbors and open their eyes to what’s happening. And if no one stands with you, stand anyway. Alone, you are impossible to erase.

“And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”

u up?