To the liberals who say that refusing to vote blue is a betrayal of trans folks and other marginalized groups, we radicals can reply: if enabling the Democratic Party is essential for protecting these groups, why are the Democrats leading an effort to nurture fascism? The Biden administration’s backing of Ukraine’s fascist regime and its partnered Nazi militias—which isn’t even a new practice for the Democrats, since Obama installed that regime in 2014–shows the strategic calculus behind the “you must vote blue to protect the most vulnerable” argument is not a sound one. It was never a sound one; the difference is that with the desperate reaction of the liberals to U.S. supremacy’s decline, we’ve now gotten to a point where the Democratic Party’s fascism-compatible nature is more visible than ever.
The backing of Ukraine’s Banderite fascists proves that every time you see a Democratic politician claim to be in solidarity with trans folks, it’s a completely hollow statement. The same goes for their supposed commitment to aiding the Black community; or the other parts of the LGBT community; or the cause to combat the Republican Party’s fascistic recent book banning campaign. The Democrats support a government within Ukraine that’s advancing a project by modern Hitler followers to fight a race war; that’s cultivated an environment where the Nazi militias can commit violence against LGBT people with impunity; and that’s been banning books in an even more reactionary way than the Republicans are, with Kiev’s central aim behind the censorship being to suppress knowledge about Bandera’s Nazi collaboration.
A party that’s assisting in a policy of institutionalized Holocaust denial is not a party we should vote for if we care about fighting hate and systemic injustice; voting for it will have the effect of worsening these evils. One’s attempts at trans advocacy become undermined when they act complicit in the whitewashing of a historical crime of which trans people were among the victims.
Should the Democratic Party’s apologists within the “left” or “Marxist” spaces even admit that these heinous actions of the Ukrainian state are real, they’ll essentially argue that it’s still possible to separate the foreign policy of the Democrats from their domestic policy. That whatever evils the party is advancing abroad, they represent the only political force that can stop the Republicans from doing even worse harm towards trans folks than they already have. We Marxists must shatter the thinking behind this “harm reduction” rationale by objecting: no, you can’t act like the global is separable from the domestic. To do so is to abdicate your responsibility as a citizen of the imperial center to assist in the effort to end your government’s global crimes, as if the world is only as big as the United States and the United States isn’t perpetrating gargantuan injustices against most of the rest of the world.
You can’t pretend the things the Democrats are doing worldwide are irrelevant to the question of whether we should continue enabling them with our votes. I phrase it like this because voting blue, inescapably, is an act of enablement; a decision that reinforces the dominance of the Democratic Party over our discourse, and over our organizing spaces. To do so is not only a disservice towards the peoples around the globe who are being blown apart, subjected to starvation sanctions, and placed under fascist rule due to Democrat foreign policy; it’s also against the interests of our revolutionary struggle in the center of imperialism.
Voting blue strengthens the structures of imperialism, which are what’s fundamentally to blame for the violence that trans people are subjected to. A carceral state that puts trans people at the greatest risk of being sexually assaulted; a socioeconomic order that disproportionately impoverishes LGBT people; a privatized healthcare system that by default limits access to trans-affirming care, regardless of whether the discrimination is codified. If liberals want to use trans rights to justify their pro-imperialist decisions, by the standard of their own argument their stance is still indefensible. The anti-imperialist (i.e. anti-Democrat) stance is correct regardless, as it’s the stance that advances historical progress; these ways in which it aligns with the interests of trans liberation only strengthen the argument behind it.
Whatever justifications liberals use, the effect of their actions is to fortify a system that both subjugates all working class people, and concentrates its structural violence upon the same disadvantaged groups the liberals claim to care about so much. Voting blue also means supporting this violence; it’s only a kind of violence whose arbiters aren’t forthright about their role in. Should we be grateful to these hypocrites for deciding only to perpetuate the benign types of harm?
The essence of the lesser-evil argument, the argument the liberals use to try to negate all of these points, is the notion that there’s no viable alternative; that enabling the Democratic Party at least produces the best net outcome, since there’s supposedly no other option that can bring a better one. Such a superior option exists; it exists in the form of committing oneself to revolutionary politics, which is what can bring down the system behind all of this institutionalized violence. The Democrats are portraying this situation as one where we have no choice but to help them with their crimes against the targets of the American imperial hegemon, or else we’ll end up helping in the targeting of trans folks here. They’re lying; we do have another choice.
We can build a movement to overthrow our capitalist dictatorship, and replace it with workers democracy. Which requires sufficiently combating U.S. hegemony, a task that entails forming a united front against NATO; fighting the information war against imperialism’s psyops; and breaking from the control of the Democratic Party. Achieving trans liberation, like achieving victory in the broader class struggle, requires upending our social order. It requires making extinct this system that depends on exploitation and subjugation, and therefore will continue to delay the coming of social equality for as long as it exists.
The liberals want us to compartmentalize the Democratic Party’s backing of fascism and broader efforts to maintain the imperial order; to only focus on the ways the Republicans are worse than the Democrats in a domestic sense. This is a denialistic way of thinking; a mindset where we tell ourselves that the evil of this party shouldn’t stop us from enabling it, no matter how overwhelming this evil is, because of the “good” that exists in one area. The implications of our votes go beyond the borders of the United States; they extend to all the places where imperialist violence, which the Democrats are at present the foremost purveyors of, is being committed. And to act complicit in this global violence is to strengthen the structures of capital that hold back social progress.
From both a moral and a strategic perspective, voting blue is the wrong choice if your goal is to advance the revolutionary cause. We need to keep repeating this throughout the rest of the presidential race, as the liberals try to place intensifying pressure upon us to comply with their wishes.
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