Electoral Politics are so 2020

If you’ve seen it once you’ve seen it a million times. Bernie Sanders, sitting at the inauguration, dressed in a casual parka and giant mittens. The only politician there who looked both the most comfortable and anxious to leave. No worries Bernie, bored constituents stuck at home because of the virus are ready to teleport you across movies, major pop culture events, and beyond. This, the meme that has spawned a million ice cold feminist takes, is yet another meme-fication of politicians that I desperately hoped we could leave in the year that brought us a pandemic.

But more than just memes, I would like us to abandon completely the desire to be saved by politicians, the obsession with electoral politics and representation within it.

Of all the things I love to trivialize, politicians are personally completely off my radar. This coming from an immigrant who doesn't have the right to vote, which only comes in handy when people ask me to sign a petition. But perhaps that is exactly why I find no humor in seeing the puppeteers of my social alienation turned into memes. Whether its neoliberal idealization of glamorous elected officials on magazine covers, or leftist endearment that prompted the Bernie meme Santa Claus-ifying him.

In an ideal world, discourse about politicians would be limited to how much they are contributing to the general public’s well being in this country, and how their very existence is a threat to the well being of people abroad, specifically in the global south. And of course mandatory clowning for when they do things like kneel in Kente cloth and can't get up because of their old knees.

That way, we can focus all of our general human propensity to trivialize things that are fun to talk about. Like celebrities that have all the money in the world yet still feel the need to grift us into thinking they are also interesting. Rich comedians who think that police abolition will include being able to call the cops on their white neighbors. A MILF burgeoning in our very midst, despite a rampant pandemic killing thousands every day. Taylor Swift’s pivot to ghost haunting a house next to a meadow. The fascinating yet terrifying enigma that is Florence Pugh’s instagram stories. Justin Bieber’s Instagram posts about how much he loves God. I could go on literally forever.

The masochistic instinct we have to find heroes in politicians is the very thing that sustains electoral politics. Last summer, after people spent time on the streets getting radicalized into calling for police abolition, they spent the fall walking it back to defunding the police. Just as a centrist Democratic candidate with a history of detrimental carceral policies was slated to add to his ticket the self proclaimed top cop in California. And we see the American public falling yet again for the rhetoric of reformism. Fool me once shame on you, fool me 45 times? We just need a woman president!

And the media’s obsession with rhetoric is the very tool of counterrevolutionary suppression that works itself most seamlessly into our lives. It blurs the lines between what we're told to expect of our leaders and what we actually ought to expect of them. It coaxes individualist politics out of us, when our neighbors are unhoused and without food. It turns community into a vague set of philosophical and physical identifiers. Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason supposes that it is through death that community reveals itself. As a mode of racial liberation, a community of loss is much more akin to revolutionary practices than the community of representation that neoliberalism is obsessed with. As a mode of political organizing, a community revealed through death, through who is allowed to die and who is allowed to live, is similarly akin to revolutionary traditions.

So 2020. Thank you for revealing to us that attaching ourselves to a paternalistic savior road to liberation through electoral politics is not going to be sufficient. Thank you for showing us with the organizing of Black radicals in the summer that there are real alternate avenues that yield results. But only if we abandon electoralism. Only if you stop seeing a Black woman cop and think it's somehow progressive that she gets to be a tool of oppression. Only if you stop dismissing valid criticism of politicians you find endearing. Only if you stop finding politicians endearing. You’re not the first person to ask “well what else am I supposed to do?” There are answers everywhere if you just look.