Voting like a radical means voting for our movements. This election and every election, #VoteLikeARadical 📣
You might be a radical. But if you’re like most of us, you never learned how to vote like a radical.
Radicals remember three things:
One: All candidates, once elected, become our opponents.
Two: We vote for the ones we’re best suited to fight.
Three: We protect movements - our real source of power.
If you went to school in the United States, you likely heard that our system was the best one. That a vote meant something special. Expressed who we are. Told the world what we stood for.
Now, some of us have always known that this system is unequal at its core. Indigenous Peoples of this land have always said it. Black folks have always said it. People from many marginalized identities in this country have long noticed this truth.
But whenever you realize it, the day you see that our system doesn’t work because it can’t work, is the day your life begins to be a radical life.
Yet it’s easy to skip a step. Every four years, we can fall into voting in a liberal way - like we’re cosigning a candidate rather than picking our opponent. But for radicals, voting isn’t personal.
Why? Because radicals know: ALL presidents, once elected, become our opponents.
In a year like this, where we’re so full of grief and rage at the genocide in Gaza, and an unjust wider war that seems like it’s just beginning, it can feel like casting a vote condones these horrific injustices.
Who can bear to reward any party that has financed and supported the destruction of the Palestinian people? Or backed the Iraq war, or made people homeless while bailing out Wall Street? Or any of the countless brutal things that U.S. leaders do?
We never vote for them. We always vote for us: so we can shape the conditions we need to fight for the liberation of all peoples.
A radical vote isn’t about who we want to represent us - because no president will do that. Even the most independent have to report to the one percent. Every president’s job is to stabilize a fundamentally flawed system. And our job, as radicals, is to replace the system itself.
Even if someone we prefer wins, it’s still not our job to support them. It’s our job to build so much popular resistance that they’re forced to defy special interests. In fact, that is the best support we can offer them.
Whether we’re fighting a president we despise, or one we’d like to see succeed, our role is still to fight.
So which of these candidates deserves our vote? None of the above. But you don’t vote for who’s deserving. You vote for the ones you’re best equipped to fight.
Only one factor matters in who gets our vote. It’s not which candidate we wish would be powerful. It’s which election result will leave ourselves most powerful.
Protecting our movements is the main question on the ballot. Especially now. Since 2016, US elections have set basic neoliberals against overt authoritarians - whose values aren’t just hateful, they are the trademarks of fascist regimes. Regimes where public silence becomes necessary for survival and social movements can no longer endure above ground.
Our peoples have lived that level of repression. We know what it’s like when governments dictate our lives without our consent. In colonization and enslavement; under policies against Indigenous people like removal, relocation, forced assimilation, boarding schools, and termination. Under policies against Black people like Jim Crow laws. Fleeing persecution, but finding that here, too, we could be threatened: with blacklisting that silenced our values and identities; the fear and violence of the War on Terror; laws that strip away people’s body autonomy; that impact who, how, and where we can love and care for one another. Many of our people are still systematically prevented from voting.
We are building on centuries of resistance. We are lifting up the voices of our people and fighting for the liberation of ALL. As radicals, we use our vote to claim space for the best possible conditions for that fight.
Your vote is not a code for “Please represent me” or “I support you.” Your vote is the act of selecting your opponent and the contract you sign to resist.
In election years, Left arguments ramp up over voting: whether it’s horror at mainstream candidates’ choices, or eagerness to help build third party capacity; the desire to teach a mainstream party a lesson, or the belief that if fascists win, the people will finally rise up. But let’s not fall into the same trap as many Americans, who think voting is their only way to have their say.
Because radicals know: that our real power lies in our movements. Our movements can grow far more powerful than they are today. But we must work to protect them.
As radicals, we don’t mistake our vote for our power. So, let’s use the one thing voting is good for - choosing our opponent - so we can build our real power and protect all life. So that instead of directing our energy against fascism, we can take leadership amid the climate crisis. We can nourish and protect life that colonialism has tried to destroy. We can build the roots of a real, multiracial democracy, from the ground up.
We’re going much farther than voting. We’re after real power to change all of our lives. So let’s go build our power, choose our opponent, and vote like the radicals we are.
Featuring Nick Tilsen, Bill Fletcher Jr., Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, Gaby Strong,
Ricardo Levins Morales, and Dakota Camacho.
plus Mik Moore, Becka Tilsen, and Janene Yazzie.
Based on the essay "How to Vote Like a Radical," by April Rosenblum.