Electoralism Is A Treadmill
The way we think about progress is entirely backwards; the power to produce change comes from the working-class, not by elections or politicians.
On Tuesday, Illinois held its statewide primary elections, featuring the much-anticipated 9th Congressional District race for Jan Schakowsky’s seat, which leans heavily Democratic. The electorialist left in America fell into hysteria after Kat Abughazaleh lost this race to Daniel Biss by roughly 3.5 percent. The frustration came from the so-called ‘vote-splitting’ by other ‘progressive’ candidates with platforms similar to hers. Under Illinois’s plurality voting system, 15 candidates were on the ballot, and the expectation was that candidates who polled poorly would drop out to endorse the others. But even assuming this race went the way it was supposed to, the left urgently needs to realize that ‘getting the right person in office’ to pass reforms that will convince and galvanize the working class is the reverse of how power actually functions. Hanging our hopes on the perfect politician, no matter how honest, is a doomed strategy. As we’ve seen with Zohran Mamdani’s failures, refusing to fire Jessica Tisch and then senselessly endorsing Kathy Hochul, even the most promising ‘progressives’ betray their own standards, let alone ours.
Just a week out from election day, Bushra Amiwala released a video saying “I’m not going anywhere,” citing a lack of independent polling as her reason for staying in the race. Noticing this divide, a Zionist group paid for a ‘support’ ad for Amiwala without her permission, hoping to help split the vote, prompting her to make a rather awkward response video condemning it. Despite many calls for her to drop out, she stayed in, hoping for an impossible upset. Being the closest ‘progressive’ candidate in the race, she naturally took the brunt of the blame for Abughazaleh’s loss. However, it must be noted that Amiwala only received 5.0% of the total, an amount that certainly doesn’t guarantee those votes would automatically go to Abughazaleh. In the 8th Congressional District race, a very similar vote-splitting situation occurred, though with less drama, where ‘progressive’ Junaid Ahmed lost to Melissa Bean, who was backed by millions of AIPAC and billionaire dollars.
Abughazaleh’s campaign relied on a few primary selling points. First, she is presented as a young 26-year-old ‘Gen-Z’ woman who contrasts sharply with the increasingly geriatric 57-year-old average congressperson. Second, she is half-Palestinian and refuses to take AIPAC funding, especially key to a race against Laura Fine, who received nearly $5 million in help from the largest American-Zionist lobby this cycle. A pro-Palestinian position (at least at surface level) is quickly becoming a prerequisite in a political party that has shifted 180° on its approval of Israel. Simultaneously, the association with Israel and Zionist donors is becoming increasingly toxic to voters because of the ongoing genocide. Thirdly, Abughazaleh was presented as a potential ‘squad’ member, an ally of ‘progressives’ like AOC and Bernie Sanders who support efforts like universal healthcare and the Green New Deal. Despite posturing as anti-establishment, this faction has frequently toed the party line on life-or-death issues like imperialism, backed the establishment Presidential candidate, and has rarely fought to threaten their control.
Before this run, Abughazaleh worked as a journalist for the Democrat front group Media Matters, which gave her inside connections to the liberal establishment nationwide. There, she gained prominence in the party and experience while gaining traction as an influencer on TikTok and social media. We ought to keep this in mind because many commentators, such as the Majority Report, Kyle Kulinski, Hasan Piker, Mike Figueredo, etc., kept lauding her as a ‘fighter’ and an ‘outsider’ even though she couldn’t be more tied to the establishment; she literally worked for them. Naturally, it was these same commentators, holding her up as the next generation’s progressive squad member, who refused to acknowledge her many flaws as a candidate and potential politician.
Up until a day before the election, Abughazaleh’s website featured an aggressive stance toward China in support of and entrusted the US State Department to handle Gaza’s future. It read, “There is no acceptable scenario that leaves Hamas in charge of the Gaza Strip,” implying that Gaza’s only resistance force has no right to defend Palestinians.
Users on social media, whom she seems to regard as more important than the people of her own district, pointed this out, prompting journalists to look further. Reporters at Drop Site News presented a leaked email that described her as “firmly interventionist” and outlined many of her hawkish foreign policy positions. This mini-scandal prompted her to fire her foreign policy advisor and revise the website. Though this particular discrepancy likely had a marginal impact on the race, it reveals one of two things: her lack of control over her campaign or her total ignorance of foreign policy. When ‘advisors’ are dictating your opinions, voters can see right through it; you don’t believe in anything yourself. And when you don’t believe in anything, how are you supposed to fight for something voters want? Either Abughazaleh believes in the imperialist policies she had on her website and was responding to the criticism, or she is too incompetent to be able to look over the policies on her own website.
But even in her video clarifying her statement, she says she still advocates expanding USAID, an organization that has been blatantly used for imperialism, helping carry out undemocratic coups and foreign meddling for decades. She said she supports funding Ukrainian proxy forces against Russia rather than “leading with diplomacy,” which she advocated seconds earlier. I don’t think you could come up with a more contradictory stance for an “anti-war” politician— saying the US should lead with diplomacy while continuing to feed the imperial meatgrinder that is slaughtering the working people of Ukraine and Russia over a battleline that has hardly moved in years. She goes on to state that Taiwan has a right to ‘self-determination’ and that she will uphold the ‘One China Policy,’ a softer way of saying she supports the American imperialist status quo. Rather than recognizing the PRC’s control over Taiwan to make peace, she wants to continue the ceaseless saber-rattling toward China like every other warmonger in Washington. What an amazing way to make your entire campaign fraudulent for leftists who could be advocating for you.
My advice for electoralists is to either stay out of these debates or be an uncompromising maximalist to push back against the acceptable frame of discourse. Admittedly, foreign policy will not determine the outcome of elections. However, they are a great litmus test of whether politicians think of themselves as cosmopolitan humans or as chauvinistic Americans. The entire world sees America for what it is: a self-interested bully that exploits and pillages for profit— aligning with that to seem more ‘electable’ signals that your idea of human rights is conditional. The strategy should be to reorient foreign policy back to the domestic, sort of like how Zohran Mamdani said in a debate that he wouldn’t visit any other country; he would stay in New York to run the city.
More broadly, if Abughazaleh wanted to win this race, she should’ve presented herself as the radical fighter people want to see instead of copy-pasting an Elizabeth Warren-type platform. Market solutions like a Green New Deal, single payer healthcare, and taxing the wealthy are just not practical in this bloated, greed-striken economy. This country needs to think bigger, and the way to start that conversation is with things like nationalizing the energy industry to slow climate change, abolishing all health insurance to fully socialize medicine, and expropriating wealth from the capitalists that rob the working class.
For anyone running for office, candidates need to stop trying to be celebrities and focus on local endorsements instead. Contrast this with Daniel Biss who, despite being a Zionist freak who received at least $460,357 in funding from pro-Israel lobbies, has actually made inroads with the political infrastructure of the area over his career. Abughazaleh appearing on CNN panels to argue in circles with conservative freaks like Scott Jennings clearly did not win the election; putting in the work on the ground level did. National fundraising needs to stop, too. Someone in New York or California shouldn’t be getting ads for a prospective congresswoman in Illinois.
This election feels like a repeat of Adelita Grijalva versus Dejja Foxx last year. Grijalva was a person with real connections to the district, trying to take her late father’s seat against Foxx, a 25-year-old plant who was a national activist-celebrity being pushed by David Hogg’s Leaders We Deserve PAC. The presentation of ideas matters; no one who gets help from astroturf organizations like Justice Democrats or Leaders We Deserve should expect to win when their policy platform comes straight from establishment advisors. Anyone worth their salt needs to actually win over support on the ground using their own words.
To reiterate the idea behind my previous article, this is why left electoralism looks so inauthentic: you’re trying to change a capitalist system that fundamentally is not designed to give the working class concessions through the electoral process. As a politician in Congress, especially in this archaic two-party system, you can’t make forward promises because, without a doubt, there will be right-wingers, centrists, corporate shills, and establishment cranks to block the policies you put forward. Any promise you make is purely theoretical, which is just not very convincing.
So how does political power actually work? In short, all progressive change— meaning changes that benefit the working class— comes from the people first, and it is only by force (or threat of force) that the state allows it to happen, so long as it doesn’t fundamentally threaten the rule of capitalists.
*My selective use of the quotes in ‘progressive’ distinguishes this misnomer. Politicians are only ‘progressive’ by the policies they falsely promise, whereas real progress can only come from the people. Even when reform succeeds, it rehabilitates the capitalist system, allowing it to continue. Thus, a real progressive is someone who knows that progress can only come by force, through ending the capitalist system and, with it, all its exploitation.*
Concessions only happen once there is enough working-class leverage to force them through. Why? Because even if there are dozens of ‘progressives’ in office, there will always be enough centrists paid by the health insurance industry ready to be the rotating villain and block it. With some of them, like John Fetterman, Kyrsten Sinema, and Joe Manchin, they aren’t even rotating villains; they’re just villains whose sole purpose is to block change. However, if there is a general strike shutting down the economy or a nationwide protest sending the country into a tailspin, they don’t have a choice.
Progressive policy has never been fulfilled without the working class posing a threat to the system. Generally, the major concessions to the working class in American history have occurred during periods characterized by mass movements. We especially need to pay attention to the growing strength of labor unions and the threat posed by Socialist Parties in the early 1930s. The election of FDR was a response to the devastating crisis capitalism faced at the time, but he was also elected to compromise with workers who were rapidly gaining class consciousness. The Rainbow Coalition and the Black Panthers brought us the Civil Rights Era reforms. The Anti-Vietnam War movement was a major factor in ending the war and in expanding social programs such as food stamps, Social Security, and labor protections in the 1970s. To some extent, Occupy Wall Street forced politicians to institute a national healthcare plan and to rein in the worst of the consumer exploitation in the banking industry. Black Lives Matter had the potential to be a threat to the status quo and force change, but it died out due to poor leadership and unclear goals, resulting in some local changes to use-of-force policy. The caveat is that none of these reforms achieves everything the working class needs because what we need is socialism.
Why have we developed such a backward way of viewing how power works? Electoralist ‘progressives’ in the West have been shaped by the society around them, by their education system, by their elders, and by the false proof of the democratic system’s effectiveness in producing change. In the preceding decades of ‘prosperity’ under liberal democracy, it may seem as though peace has been established by this system since political parties live in harmony and struggle for power non-violently. This contrasts with the rest of the world, which is marked by authoritarianism and militaristic power struggles, might I add, something over-amplified by our media. But that is only because in these democracies, ruled by capitalists, the political struggle has been neutered. In exchange for your political angst, you get to choose every couple of years which group of capitalists, red or blue, will manage the class relations. As long as you receive your breadcrumbs and get to watch the circus, you will not revolt against the system.
The lives of people in the West have been shaped by the false perception that democracy is the ultimate form of human freedom. However, democracy as a theory constantly comes into conflict with reality. Is it a flaw in the system that billionaires effectively get to buy politicians? Is it just a loophole that the government can be bribed into doing what multinational corporations want all the time? Is it a small bug that fascists who don’t actually respect or believe in democracy are allowed to have an equal voice in government? Or is it part of the system? But even those who are honest enough to acknowledge that societies like China are clearly doing better, they must always caveat that such a society would be better if it just had ‘democracy,’ or maybe the US can do what China is doing, but we have to do it by working within our democratic system. That’s the whole idea behind the Democratic Socialists, who think that we will be able to simply overthrow fascism and then pass these big reforms just by voting. Did they ever consider that the system is rigged to begin with? Do they expect us to waste our time and energy running on this hamster wheel?
Many of these people uphold the ‘Scandinavian countries’ as the shining example of a ‘good’ democracy, since they score highest on ‘democracy’ metrics designed by NGOs. Even if we were to live in the fantasy world that America can magically transform itself into a social democracy, what then? Are we to assume that Norway is the spearhead of socialism? No, of course not. Look at it materially. In the real world, those countries are the way they are because of a massive sovereign wealth fund built on oil revenue, not because of the political struggle for social democracy. Norway can protect capitalism by conceding some of these enormous profits, so that people have no material reason to overthrow the system. Even then, they still support American imperialist wars, are a massive contributor to the climate crisis, and benefit from the Global South being so deeply impoverished.
In discussing the state, Lenin says that, “A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell, it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it.” The purpose of democracy is not freedom but to better manage the inter and intra class struggle. The intra-class struggle is managed by mediating competing capitalists and by ensuring that no single firm or industry disrupts the capitalist system as a whole. The inter-class struggle is managed by ensuring workers have the bare minimum rights and concessions to prevent them from revolting against the capitalists. Sometimes, the state may intervene to ensure that capitalists do not overexploit workers to the point that it triggers open class struggle. This is why workers get the Affordable Care Act and not universal healthcare, a minimum wage increase but not a federal jobs guarantee, a stimulus check but no universal basic income, and the ability to unionize but not the right to unionize.
If this isn’t the case, it still begs the question. With the entire country still subscribing to this worldview that elections are the only way to change things, what have electoralists accomplished? Trump was elected with no working-class party on the horizon, and the half-decent mayor elected in the largest city just endorsed Kathy Hochul against a ‘progressive’ challenger. A genocide was carried out with US tax dollars in Gaza, and what were the consequences for politicians? Opinion on Israel moved a meager 15 points, the credibility of one PAC was killed, and we were told to fill out the uncommitted line on the ballot.
While that is reducing things a bit, what we need to take away is that elections need to be completely deprioritized in our political consciousness. That comes after we organize, show up at protests, talk to our neighbors, and learn about class struggle. We desperately need to normalize radicalism and wake up the working class because we’re running out of time.