By Alex Raycroft, Cassius Hou, Peter S. Baron, and Jack Benkelman
Our next president might be a top-cop, fracking-loving, international weapons dealer who wants to close the border. And everyone keeps telling me to vote for her.
Believe me, I am familiar with the horrors of her alternative. If she loses, the situation is dire. But the situation is already dire: what could it mean to throw my vote behind a person who has financially and materially supported what international courts and anyone with an instagram account and two eyeballs will tell you is a genocide?
At the same time, how could I look at my trans friends, queer friends, Latino friends, Black friends in the face if I could have participated in a collective action to stop a second Trump presidency but didn’t?
I don’t at all know what to do.
First a silver lining, and then a cloud: 1) I have smart friends who know what they’re doing and have good reasons for it; 2) they disagree with each other.
But philosophy is the art of “thinking in slow motion.” So we argued about it, thought about it, wrote it down, and talked it out. We can’t tell you what to do, but we can crack open the door to our conversation and invite you to think slowly about it, too.
Jack Benkelman on “Voting for Imperial Subjects”
American voters live in the belly of a global imperial beast. The United States is a bourgeois settler-colonial empire. Internationally, we wield the world’s most powerful military in support of Western capitalist interests. Elections, then, are mere choices between which subsection of the bourgeoisie get to manage the Empire for a time. In our first-past-the-post electoral system, races tend to filter down to the likely top two candidates.
Therefore, the various bourgeois subgroups vying for control have organized themselves into two broad coalitions, creating a two-party system that is near impossible to shake under the current rules. If we are being honest with ourselves, it will take years of non-electoral organizing and pressure in order to change this system for the better. This must be an active effort, not merely passive “protest” non-voting.
So in the meantime, if we are stuck with the two parties, we might as well consider making a choice on Election Day. One important difference that could ground this choice are the party’s differences in imperial justification narratives—what I find to be the parties’ “ideologies”. At the highest levels of global empire, perhaps these justificatory differences matter little; for example, both parties unabashedly support Israel’s destruction of Gaza. However, the different justifications do correlate to real domestic differences in particular policies, family structures, the welfare state, and so on.
Let us start with the Democrats. The Democrats’ ideology is a contemporary liberalism that justifies the United States imperial project through a narrative of self-improvement. The narrative goes something like this: our nation began as a settler colony where substantial political rights were afforded to only land-owning White men. They were the strict patriarchs of their heteronormative households and could serve as the enforcers of the racial-ethnic order when the local militia called upon them to counter slave revolts, exterminate Indigenous people, or join a lynch mob. There was little federal intervention interfering with their right to oppress or regulating their capitalist ventures.
Through a series of reforms ranging from the Reconstruction amendments, the Nineteenth Amendment, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Acts, and many Supreme Court decisions and beyond, political rights have expanded. These reforms are taken up as evidence that American liberal democracy can be used for self-improvement within the framework of the system. The deep inequities these reforms have yet to (and likely cannot) address become cans to kick down the road. This narrative of American liberal democracy also becomes the justification for imperial interventions around the globe, under the guise of “spreading democracy.”
Some moderated, conservative version of this justificatory narrative was once shared by the Republican Party establishment as well. But under the control of the MAGA coalition, the Republican Party has unilaterally moved back towards the original justification of the American settler colonial project.
In the earliest days of European New World colonialism, the conquering of Indigenous land and the importation of African slaves was justified by Christianity: Indigenous Americans and Africans deserved their subordination because they were pagans. Overtime, however, the justification shifted towards the concept of race and white supremacy. Nevertheless, as we can see with Manifest Destiny or the Klu Klux Klan, this supremacy justification has remained both simultaneously White and Christian. As we noted in our description of the White settler household, this justification is also inseparably patriarchal and heteronormative.
Through the Klan, the Reagan revolution, the militia movement, the online “alt-right,” and now MAGA, this maximally-reactionary settler ideology has lived on. Today, it manifests itself as White Christian Nationalism. This is an American ethnoreligious nationalism similar to right-wing Israeli Zionism.
Due to the purifying effect of Donald Trump’s demands for loyalty in the wake of January 6th, Republicans have been morphing into a vanguard party for White Christian Nationalism. This has had a clear effect on their policy plans: the Trump campaign and their allies have drawn up second-term plans to use mass firings to destroy the federal administrative state, thereby destroying the material, institutional embodiment of liberal reformism.
The destruction of administrative agencies returns us to unregulated, pre-New Deal capitalism. The destruction of civil rights agencies opens the door for the return of Jim Crow. Their plans to weaponize both the security state and the military to quash protests, “clean up” crime in Democratic cities, and engage in mass deportations could quickly devolve into a fascist nightmare. Imagine if the militias and Klansmen of old were replaced by a unified force of federal agents, police, and soldiers.
I am not sure what benefits, if any, we gain from letting our reformed liberal empire convert to a revamped recreation of its original, hyper-reactionary form—so much progress could be lost, possibly taking decades to recover. Both ideological variants of Empire must be resisted outside the ballot box, but within the ballot box, the “lesser-evil” argument is to do what we can to avoid unnecessary—and potentially catastrophic—loss.
peter s. baron on “The State and Capital: Two Sides of the Same Coin”
The state and the capitalist economy are two sides of the same coin—each creates and sustains the other. The state lays the groundwork, building the legal framework that capitalists need to operate: property rights, the freedom to contract, laws upholding rights to exclusive ownership, and the sanctioned use of violence to enforce those laws. It channels public funds into subsidizing infrastructure—such as roads, ports, utilities, and digital networks—crafted to streamline capital accumulation and boost profits for the corporate entities awarded the contracts.
The state-capital relationship is inseparable. The state doesn't just allow capitalism to influence certain aspects of life—it creates a framework where life itself is produced, reproduced, and organized through the capitalist system. The very necessities we need to survive—food, housing, healthcare—are provided by capitalists who are chasing profit by producing suffering. Workers are hired to produce these goods and services, but then are paid less than the value they create, with capitalists expropriating the surplus value in the process. Then, in a twisted cycle, those same workers must buy back the products they themselves helped create, often struggling just to afford the basics.
The state and capital are incapable of disentanglement, with the state enforcing property laws, protecting private interests, and using police or military force to maintain the conditions necessary for capital accumulation. In turn, capitalists shape the state by wielding economic clout to push for laws and policies that secure their wealth and ensure the system remains geared toward their continued profit and dominance.
The mutually reinforcing relationship between the state and capital has deep roots in the very foundations of governance. In the vision of the Founding Fathers, the role of the politician was never simply to represent the will of their constituents or to serve as a direct link between the people and the government. Rather, politicians were expected to refine and temper popular demands, shaping them to protect and advance the interests of the wealthy by strengthening the legal framework that drives capital accumulation. Their role was not to serve the people, but to ensure that their state became ever more efficient and prolific in facilitating the growth and concentration of wealth for their elite competing in the global pursuit for profit. In other words, the true function of politicians was to ensure the state became an increasingly efficient tool for concentrating wealth and securing the dominance of the elite on the global stage.
In a representative democracy, politicians do not primarily serve as conduits for the interests of the general populace but instead act as brokers for competing elite factions. These factions—comprising corporate interests, financial institutions, and industry groups—vie for influence within the political sphere, and politicians function as their strategists and negotiators. Far from being a neutral arena of public debate, governance revolves around managing conflicts between these elite factions to maintain stability within the capitalist framework.
Politicians operate like referees in a game of elite competition, ensuring that no single faction accumulates too much power, which could unsettle the equilibrium required for the system’s survival. For example, regulatory compromises are often not designed to curb corporate power itself but to mediate competition between dominant industries—such as oil, technology, and finance—while ensuring that no single faction becomes too powerful and disrupts the larger capitalist balance. Rather than eliminating exploitation, these compromises stabilize relationships between sectors with conflicting interests. For instance, financial regulations might be framed as consumer protections, but in practice, they aim to prevent monopolization by large tech companies encroaching on finance’s market dominance. Similarly, environmental regulations may set limits on oil extraction, not to dismantle the fossil fuel industry but to appease emerging renewable energy interests while ensuring both sectors remain profitable. These measures reflect a deliberate balancing act—keeping corporate actors in competition with each other but under state management, ensuring that the overall structure of capital accumulation remains intact without tilting in favor of any one faction.
By insulating government institutions from disruptive grassroots democratic movements, politicians ensure that mass discontent does not destabilize the system. During moments of public crisis, such as widespread protests or labor strikes, political leaders work to co-opt, neutralize, or redirect popular demands through reforms that offer minimal concessions. This strategy helps prevent any challenge from gaining enough traction to threaten the system’s structure. In essence, the government serves not as a representative of the people but as an apparatus for elite power management—resolving disputes among capitalists while suppressing the potential for democratic forces to upend the existing order. This framework allows capitalism to persist, with politicians functioning as the stewards of its continuity and defenders of the status quo.
Politicians in a capitalist society, including Harris and Trump, are not and cannot be representatives of the people. They serve as the buffer between the irreconcilable antagonisms of class divisions, finding new ways to pressurize the masses into playing their assigned roles as pawns in a brutal game of competitive capital accumulation taking place in corporate board rooms. Though strategies differ, politicians of both major parties vie to represent the same players in this game, which must progress by breeding unimaginable human suffering, ecological devastation, and the relentless erosion of what it means to truly live—turning existence itself into a hollow, degraded shell of what it should be.
Electoral politics will never bring about the change needed to dismantle this violent structure. Politicians never have and never will bite the hand that feeds them. The true path forward lies in movements that operate outside of this system—movements grounded in mutual aid, prefigurative politics, and a commitment to promoting individual and collective flourishing.
The politicians who beg for our votes are not saviors—they are the very architects of our pain. Our ballots simply ratify which strategies will be employed to ransack the earth and siphon value from human labor and life. The choices we’re given are nothing more than variations on how best to exploit what remains. We must tear away from this illusion, resist through solidarity, and reclaim our future from those who feed on our struggles, before they consume everything we hold dear.
cassius hou on “Moral Purity and the Dilemma of Voting”
In our everyday lives, we face the exhausting yet inescapable challenge of navigating the moral complexities of modern life, and nowhere is this more apparent than deciding whom to vote for in the upcoming presidential elections. Kamala Harris is an unappealing candidate for a plethora of reasons, while the alternative has proven disastrous. Those of us who find both candidates deplorable face a dilemma as November approaches. If voting for a politician morally links us to their past and future actions, voting for either candidate seems to doom us to being a morally bad person. There is also the pragmatic worry of what the candidate we elect will do once they are in office. Furthermore, if voting further entrenches us in a stagnant political landscape, then voting itself might be a harm, and we ought to abstain from voting altogether. However, abstaining risks allowing greater injustices to persist, especially in a system where disengagement can leave the most vulnerable populations without protection. As these moral dilemmas accumulate, they threaten to overwhelm us, leaving us grappling with the weight of our choices and the implications of our engagement—or lack thereof—in the political process.
The moral crisis that we feel in these moments is real. Our current political situation and the cosmopolitan nature of our world set us up for moral failure in every decision we make. We are condemnable in a thousand ways: not just for who we vote or whether we vote, but for using phones powered by cobalt derived by modern-day slavery, for traveling via airplane or car, for consuming content produced by problematic creators. In such a world, I urge us to abandon any ambitions of keeping our hands clean by withdrawing from morally problematic activities like voting.
The temptation to withdraw is understandable. It is also impossible. Putting aside plans of absconding to some remote part of the Alaskan wilderness to live fully off-the-grid (and even that may not save you from complicity), it is infeasible to escape being implicated in the crimes of the United States government (and I take it we are worried about being guilty-by-association). Voting for Kamala Harris might be a vote for genocide, but our tax dollars also play a role in sustaining that war. Embracing a philosophy of withdrawal would mean refusing to pay taxes. For those of us who are too afraid of the legal repercussions to bite that bullet, the moral purity we seek through disengagement becomes a fantasy. We remain entangled in the system, whether through labor, consumption, or simply by existing within its borders.
Moreover, if one of our concerns is committing a morally objectionable act, it is highly debatable that abstaining from voting is not 1) a morally objectionable act in itself and 2) will not "stain" our hands with the consequences of inaction. Withdrawing from a situation where our participation could have made a difference not only overlooks the potential harms that may arise from such disengagement but also neglects our responsibilities to stay in community and solidarity with those who do not have the privilege to opt out. The ability to withdraw from political struggles by not voting is not shared by all. Marginalized communities often cannot afford to disengage as the stakes for them can be a matter of survival. To disengage in such a context would be to ignore our responsibility to take part in collective efforts to minimize harm.
It is true that we face unavoidable moral failure in the upcoming elections. Yet it is also true that we exist at a time of constant, unavoidable moral failure and do not let this truth paralyze us in other matters. We reduce our meat intake even though our vegetables might rely on underpaid immigrant labor. We use metal straws even though America's car-centric roads make it so that we must drive to work and thus create gas emissions that contribute to global warming. We jump into the pond to save the drowning child even though there is the possibility that the child will grow up to be a war criminal.
In the unjust meantime, I recommend against any attempts at keeping our hands clean. Rather than seeking to absolve ourselves through withdrawal, we must find ways to engage meaningfully in the political process, even if that looks like dismantling the current process entirely and building a new one. Simply abstaining from voting without taking additional action is both untenable and ineffective. In a world where we are doomed to moral failure at every turn, we must accept that our involvement, however imperfect, is essential.
conclusion
If you read this hoping to find an answer to your own voting quandaries, we hope that there was something illuminating in these texts. But here’s the kicker: how you alone decide to vote probably won’t count for all that much. You or me voting alone, in the end, doesn’t really count for a thing.
What does count is how we think about this together, and how we act together. Whether you vote or not, don’t do it alone. If you vote, talk with friends and neighbors and relatives about why. Help them register and get to their polling places.
If you don’t vote, that should be the least important action you are taking to dismantle this system. Plug into local organizing communities. Donate. Show up to the protests. Be a part of building a better world.
Whatever you do, think slowly about it.
about the authors:
Jack Benkelman is a PhD student at Georgetown University. He researches philosophy of race, political theory, and philosophy of mind.
Peter S. Baron (http://www.petersbaron.com) is the author of “If Only We Knew: How Ignorance Creates and Amplifies the Greatest Risks Facing Society”.
Cassius Hou is a Ph.D. student at Georgetown University. Their research focuses on feminist philosophy, social ontology, and moral psychology.
Alex Raycroft is a PhD student at Georgetown University studying social epistemology, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of place.
