Queers Need To Realize That Elections Won’t Save Us

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

It’s heartbreaking when a terrible man ascends to power. Every time this happens, and it’s by no means a unique experience in America, we are reminded of just how horrible our system is. And when that man is the next leader of your country — a man who campaigned trampling on your very identity — a whole lot of people crash against that realization at the same time.

Trump will be president, and he didn’t need a coup d’état to get there. He didn’t have to encourage sheriffs to deputize half of America. He merely achieved it through the normal transition of power.

That’s been happening a lot recently, hasn’t it?

Trump. W. Bush. Reagan. Our system sure is electing people every few decades who reliably upend everything for the worse, and this time will be no different. Americans will have to fight against potential rollbacks to our bodily autonomy, our healthcare, and so much more.

As us queers reckon with all the work we will have to do to preserve and expand our rights, its comes time we face the fact that the current electoral strategy has failed us and that a bottoms-up approach is needed.

Elections take too much

Every time an election goes terribly (i.e., a conservative reactionary, and in this case, a fascist gains power), I see an effort to relitigate the specifics of the campaign. What could have been done differently? What voter outreach did XYZ politician miss? What political strategy or issue did the candidate, in retrospect, need to back away from or embrace?

In essence, what and who is to blame? Is it Russia? Leftists? Young people? Those against genocide? China? What group selfishly didn’t vote, and who should we have paid more attention to?

All of these critiques focus on the substance of a particular campaign rather than on the form of how we organize — i.e., an emphasis on short-term electoral campaigns and how to run them. After every defeat, we are encouraged to reroll the dice in two and four years’ time, hoping for better results. We have to vote harder. Donate more. That’s the proposed solution repeatedly, and it’s a failure.

I think that structurally, elections can be elitist (see my reasoning here), but even if you disagree with that point, it cannot be denied how big of a drain on resources they are. Every election cycle, billions are burned in spending on staffers and ads, with this year breaking records. Billions are now spent every year, even during non-presidential cycles.

More than just money, we overtax the people who are the backbone of such campaigns. Staffers and volunteers are thrown into a chaotic environment that will burn them out within a few months, not because of the results of the race but often because the work environments of campaigns are profoundly unhealthy. As Jesse M. writes of their involvement in the 2020 election cycle:

Part of what makes our electoral system so terrible is its system of what jobs do exist. Most people who work in politics do so for very short stretches of time, like I did. If you make it through one campaign cycle and work into the next one, you’re an aged, rugged veteran. The person who hired me, two levels of experience above me, was 21 years old at the time.

So much of our time and energy is spent on these short campaigns that will not connect to anything more significant once they are over. Maybe a candidate wins (a big if), and their volunteers and staff get a win under their belts, but often, that’s all it is. Those efforts translate into the individual advancements of a politician’s career, with no guarantee that they will even stand by what they campaigned on.

In fact, it’s often accepted wisdom at this point that many such promises are lies. You spend all of this energy on something and then send your efforts into the ether, hoping “your candidate” does the work they promised now that you, as a voter, have no leverage to make that happen.

It’s a backward approach to gaining power. You are spending resources upfront in the hope of getting “amenable enough” people so you can start building what you need. The supposed aim is to elect leaders who will pass legislation permitting us to make the systems of care we need to survive. And every election cycle, we keep volunteering and donating more and more to keep this gamble going, and it isn’t working.

I propose — and I am not the first to advance this today, let alone this century — that we work on building what we need, irrespective of who is in power.

That, first and foremost, we create, invest in, expand, and care for grassroots groups, mutual aid networks, defense leagues, community newspapers, and more that will allow us to build power in a decentralized way. Groups that stick around longer than a six-month campaign and whose growth will not impair our freedom if a terrible leader ever steps in.

One of the problems with the presidency (and many current executive positions) is that so much power is centralized around them that bad leadership is catastrophic. You lose the presidency once, setting you back a decade or more.

Trump is going to roll back a lot of rules and appoint a lot of judges, and that does not even get into the laws he’ll pass. Even in an ideal case where a person of your ideological persuasion wins (unlikely in my case), the momentum of the institutions the presidency governs cannot be halted and reversed quickly. It can take years to reverse a decision made by a bad presidency — if the moment ever comes at all.

That’s a lot of eggs to put in one proverbial basket.

In decentralized groups, that domino effect doesn’t happen as much. You pour resources into many groups, and if a bad leader arises (something that is inevitable), nothing is keeping you there. The group withers. Members leave and spin their efforts into different things — something that happens all the time. From the DSA to Black Lives Matter, many progressive and leftist projects owe their existence to a split (and maybe a merge and split again) from another organization.

This process of destruction and rebirth (of reacting to change) is healthy in movement-building. Change is unavoidable. It’s not a failure for people to remain committed activists under a different organization, group, collective, coop, or whatever the hell you want to call it.

And yet we have somehow gotten it in our heads that unserious people work on building long-term groups and communities, while serious people throw all their resources into short-term efforts that will not only cease to exist several months down the line but have to be continuously restarted anew in not much time at all.

It’s a kind of madness that needs to stop.

A conclusion

Queers are on the edge of society. We are poorer, and we are one of the more recent scapegoats fascist reactionaries are using to gain power. We can’t afford to wait to reroll the dice. We need things now, which means building things in the present, not continuously pointing to the hazy future of the next election.

There are so few activists out there, and even fewer are building community or, to extend my earlier metaphor, weaving new baskets. Most of us are being directed to drop all our eggs into the single, unwieldy basket of electoralism and then get upset when it breaks.

But it’s going to break because all things do.

The goal is to build so many different baskets that it doesn’t matter if one of them tears a sunder. To build mutual aid networks, to roll out strike funds, to found worker coops, to teach queer defense classes, to host regular potluck meals so your friends can eat, to take a shift at the community kitchen or garden (or make one if it doesn’t exist), to backup banned books and films, to begin scrutinizing your local businesses and politicians, to knock on your neighbors door and say hello, and all the little things you can do to build real community.

Communities that can vote in an election and exist long after it ends.