“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal,” baseball hats long lost, and the absurdity of focusing on elections while the country burns
moocowinthecity 
The United States is, in no way, a democracy. We’re barely a republic (and whether we’re even still that, or ever were, is very much up for debate). With what appears to be the imminent repeal of Roe v. Wade, those with uteruses are very much under attack. So are those in interracial marriages, gay marriages, and those (regardless of gender and orientation) who enjoy sodomy, and so many other fundamental rights to privacy we have known (or pretended to know) for the past fifty years.
When I was 13 I went to Washington, D.C. for the first time as a tourist. I was, at that time in my life, absolutely in love with the idea of the American Dream. I never actually felt American. I still don’t. Yet, here at age 13 it was hard to not be impressed by the FBI tour (I had wanted to be an agent when I was younger). I was impressed with the Smithsonian museums. I was incredibly impressed with the city, and that the cloak and dagger existed next to the pomp and circumstance; Foggy Bottom and lobbyists coexisting with public relations firms, and congress trying to navigate the in-between.
I bought a hat with an American flag on it, and I wore it – proudly (and I’m not even sure what I was proud of while wearing it) – for many years…at least until I was 16 and I came out of the closet and the world, and culture, and country that I was up against as a queer disabled Jew stared at me in the face, and I was forced to be as honest with myself about my orientation as I was about my country and the world I was about to walk out into with my whole self.
A teacher gave me a copy of Workers World newspaper and I began to read and devour all of the political discourse that was open to me; and in Leslie Feinberg I found a trans Jewish author who’s voice resonated with me. It was the first time in years that I did not feel totally isolated and alone in the hamlet I grew up in. Someone was putting words to the thoughts I had but didn’t have the political knowledge to express.
I joined the Workers World Party when I was 16 (I then had a 6 month candidacy, where I studied Marxism/Leninism and radical queer politics under the guidance of Leslie Feinberg, my hero, until I was finally past candidacy and made a Comrade at age 17). I remained a comrade until I was about 21, when I resigned my membership. I left the party, burning the bridge behind me, and wandered for awhile working out my politics and traveling, before transitioning into Anarchism: the logical extension of socialism/communism, and what – for me – is the only ethical way of approaching my fellow humans, and the only path to freedom that presently exists before us.
My baseball hat long since lost (most likely donated) along the way. I have no faith in the United States as a country, as a nation-state. My faith remains as it does with the people, with workers, with labor (including the intelligentsia). My faith does not sit with any political party, and certainly not with the electoral process…it does not sit with borders of the false divisions between peoples based on the geographical boundaries of a map.
Democrats and Republicans are (at least those in leadership) cut from two sides of the same cloth; two different poisons far more in common with one another than with any of their constituents. To be totally transparent, I play my part in the farce: I vote in the elections (local, state, national). I do like to be given a choice in the poison that is poured down my throat, and that will inevitably drown this disparate project as our empire crumbles from within. I just don’t hold any illusions about what elections are: they are the new opiate of the masses. They provide an illusion of control. They pacify and distract.
The Obama administration was just as happy to carry out drone strikes as the Trump administration. Guantanamo is still open. People are still being held and tortured in cages, sometimes for life. So by all means, claim it is privilege to recognize and call out what elections are (and what they aren’t)…the true privilege is being comfortable enough to delude oneself into believing that they mean a damn, or that your representatives in any way actually represent you and/or your interests. They don’t.
And of course, the current fight against voting rights, the current battle of disenfranchisement is certainly the criticism against Emma Goldman’s quote…Emma would smile, wryly, were she still with us today, because she would recognize that the disenfranchisement movement which causes folks to expend exorbitant efforts fighting back is a continued method of distraction from the uncomfortable truth that the only way to fix this system is to tear it down, and rebuild the entire thing from the ground up. Revolutions happen, they can be pushed back, defended against, but they are also eventually inevitable…so no voting will get us nothing but peanuts. If we want our freedom we will have to take it.
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Frederick Douglas