Not all votes are the same. Obviously this is true in the sense that votes in swing states matter more, but that’s not what I mean. I mean that in the same town, in the same ballot box, for the same candidate- two votes can lead to very different worlds.
This essay explores four different scales of political thought, political consciousness. Understanding these scales of thought is deeply valuable regardless of what your politics are, because political leanings are different than the scale at which someone is thinking, so right-wing and left-wing politics all exist at every scale. While I am both sharply critical and celebratory of both left- and right-wing politics throughout this piece, I make no pretense of Superior Neutrality. Personally, I’d much rather listen to someone who I disagree with who is honest about their politics than someone pretending to be above it, so my politics are obvious in this. I’m not above all this- I’m in it, like all of us are, whether we acknowledge it or not. If you disagree with my politics, then I invite you to think of my transparency as me being honest about my biases. To any conservatives reading this, I’ll add that while there are sharp critiques of the right-wing in here, the conclusion gets into the deep strengths of conservatives, how desperately those strengths are needed, and what liberals and leftists have to learn from the right. So while I don’t pretend neutrality, I also don’t think I’m one-sided here.
First Scale: Selfishness
Starting from the smallest scale of political thought, there’s pure selfishness, which is to say- voting for one’s own benefit at the expense of everyone and everything else. Most people think that this is how everyone opposite of their political views is voting, so democrats think that conservatives are voting for their own personal benefit at the expense of community health and wellness, and conservatives think that democrats are voting for their own benefit for the same reason. In my experience, both are completely wrong, and projecting this onto our neighbors is deeply harmful and divisive. I grew up and live in an overwhelmingly conservative community, and I don’t know a single conservative who actually thinks this way- On-the-ground conservative ethics are neither greedy nor self-serving the way non-conservatives seem to think they are. Right or wrong, conservatives believe that lower taxes and less government will benefit everyone, and they believe that conservative politicians will deliver those things. Conversely, despite all the Fox-news rhetoric about how LGBTQ, People of Color, Women, poor people- basically everyone except rich white straight men- are somehow “special interest groups” who are voting purely in their own interests at the expense of everyone else- I don’t know a single democrat or leftist who thinks this way, either. On the ground, liberals and leftists believe that restricting pollution and giving people more personal freedoms will benefit their communities. So from both sides, that rhetoric is complete BS. It’s divisive hate-mongering propaganda that far too many of us, all across the political spectrum, fall prey to- and it’s not for any of our benefit.
Speaking of, there is one group of people who do act entirely from this first, purely selfish scale of political thought, though, and they’re noteworthy- it’s corporations, who are legally people in this country, and the rich. There’s very good research suggesting that multi-millionaires and up are all diagnosable as narcissistic psychopaths- whether that’s cause or effect I couldn’t say, but as a group, they certainly act that way. They will and do joyfully crush workers, ecosystems, and futures for the sake of lining their own pockets as much as possible, and never bat an eye. They’re noteworthy because speaking of research, there is very good research that shows that the will of the ultra-rich is what shapes US legislation. There has been an ever-widening gap between public opinion and legislation in the US for many decades, while the gap between what the billionaires want and legislation has shrunk to essentially zero. So we live in a world where the will of the only demographic of truly selfish people determines the shape of our political reality.
Second Scale: Local/Communal
This leads me to the second scale of political thought, which is by far the most common, and it’s the scale of one’s own community and lifetime. Most people tend to vote from this scale, which is entirely understandable, because as a species we evolved in small, close communities. So as a species, we tend to vote for what we think will make our communities the healthiest and best within our own lifetime. For example, if someone thinks that there should be regulations on how much industries can pollute our local aquifer, that people should be allowed to marry whatever consenting adult they please, that teachers are valuable and should be paid a living salary, and that women have the right to do whatever they want with their own bodies- and that person still thinks that democrats are able, or more likely, to deliver those things- then they’re likely to vote democrat. Conversely, if someone thinks that their community is better off with as little government as possible, that taxes should be as low as possible, that the second amendment is the most important personal freedom upon which the rest are founded, and that one set of religious beliefs should be imposed by force and law on the entire population at the expense of women’s bodily autonomy and people’s right to marry – and they still believe the republicans are able, or more likely, to deliver those things- they’re likely to vote republican.
There is some empathy in the second scale, but it is highly selective, and almost always regional. The second scale is the heart of centrism, people’s primary concern here is with the tiny subset of their community with which they identify. As such, this is where you find white liberals who think that BLM is going too far, because their empathy doesn’t extend to Black people. If their children were being hunted for sport by unaccountable, trigger-happy police, then they would support and engage in the exact types of protests that BLM practices- but because their children are not, then they view those actions as “too much” or “extreme.” This is where you find conservatives who think that refugees and immigrants are the problem, without ever considering what they would do to try and create a better life for their families under the circumstances that many refugees and immigrants are fleeing. This is also where we find most fascist thought. Fascists think that their lives will be better under fascism, and they do not care that by definition, it will cause millions of “Other” people to suffer or expire. So whether it’s liberal or conservative, the second scale of thought prioritizes people in my community who look and think like me, at the expense of everything and everyone else. It tries to buy stability at the cost of other’s suffering. People at this scale are either incapable or unwilling to actually put themselves in anyone else’s shoes.
Third Scale: Liberalism
These first two scales of political thought are pretty easy to describe. The third is a lot more nebulous, but it’s important that we understand it, because it’s on the rise today. To be clear, I think that’s a good thing, because I think we should be considering the impacts of our actions as broadly as possible, but it is currently muddy. This scale thinks a little longer term, and a little broader. It’s informed by global politics and impacts beyond our lifetime, but it’s still kind of tied to the second scale, in that it tries to incorporate those things while still holding onto the greatest net gains for our communities and our own lifetimes. Part of this is that most people would rather choose the devil they know than a rolling dice, which leads even people who are displeased with the current system and state of affairs to have a strong preference towards reform. So the third scale of political thought tends to support incremental change, better support for global human rights, minimization of war, minimization of environmental damage. It’s trying to create a better world for the future, while preserving the stability that it’s proponents either know and love, or know and hate, but either way, while it’s almost never said outright, stability is a core value of this third scale. Stability is prioritized over meaningful change. Whether conservative or liberal, this third scale of political thought can pretty accurately be called Liberalism. The US has been an inherently liberal society for most of it’s existence, there has been slow but steady progress on most domestic human rights violations, and it prides it’s self on being a free society, in that you can say whatever you want, travel freely, etc. This is noteworthy, in contrast with countries like Qatar, where you can be imprisoned for writing the wrong kind of poem, or Guatemala, where if you publish the wrong thing your offices will be burned down. So it’s very noteworthy that I can safely publish this video, including where it’s going to go. People operating in the third scale of political thought are aware of the failures of the system, but still believe that the system it’s self is the best avenue to create change, and that we need to get more involved in the system we have in order to make it meet our needs and goals. There’s a lot of performative, self-excusing hand-wringing and complaining at the third scale. In reality, people at this scale of political thought won’t change their behavior due to things like wars that don’t affect them, human rights violations to people outside their community, climate change, or anything else outside their immediate sphere, but they do feel a lot of emotions about those things. There’s a lot of guilt and shame and often donations to political candidates or non-profits, but nothing like actual organizing, unionization, boycotts- nothing that would endanger their stability, because that remains the core value of this scale.
People at the third scale are also often aware of the risks of other realities, such as fascism. So when Trump, as sitting president, gave orders for the US military to deploy against US citizens, and the only reason that didn’t happen was that the Pentagon refused to follow his direct orders, when Trump brags about how he’s gonna make huge camps, and threatens to put political opponents in them, when he talks about wanting to be a dictator, when he shapes the Supreme Court for his own unqualified immunity- all those things concern people at the third scale, and motivates them to vote for Kamala Harris, whether or not they like her very much, in order to avoid the outright fascism that Trump is promising. And make no mistake- Trump is a fascist, and if elected will do everything in his power to make the US a fascist country, which would be very, very hard to recover from, and might well precipitate the end of a habitable world, through unmitigated climate change, global war, or more likely some combination of those two. So while the conservatives operating at the second scale of political thought, the community/our lifetime scale, think that Trump will benefit them and their communities, no one I know operating at the third scale, of global/longer timelines, supports Trump. This means that all the conservatives I know who think at this scale are, generally very quietly, voting for Kamala Harris- and I know many conservatives who are doing exactly that, because their eyes are open and they’re not fascists.
But in reality, there’s not a lot of conservatism at the third scale. Conservatism tends to have it’s base in the second scale, and it’s leadership in the fourth scale- but there’s not much conservatism in the third scale.
It is at this third scale of political thought that all the arguments like: “We just need to defeat Trump, and then we can reconsider other tactics,” “If Trump wins, everyone will suffer and there will be no hope of any meaningful change” “Kamala sucks in these ways, but we need to vote for her to preserve any chance of democracy or a livable world” come from. For anyone in the third scale who believes in a livable world or human rights, the only possible ethical vote is for Kamala Harris.
Notably, it is also in this third scale of political thought that you hear people talk about voting as harm reduction. From the third scale, the phrase “harm reduction” is often a way to pre-empt, de-value, or deflect the possibility of actions that might cost liberals anything, require them to risk anything. The concept of harm reduction is much broader than this, but from the third scale this is how it’s most often used. So in the general dialogue, “harm reduction” rhymes with “Sit down, shut up, and vote for the lesser of two evils again.”
Fourth Scale: Global/Multi-Generational
The fourth scale of political though, though, is where it gets really interesting. However they get there, people at this scale of though are considering the holistic impacts of the system we exist within both globally and far beyond our lifetimes. People thinking here make decisions based on the impacts many generations out, and look at history in a way that none of the other scales do. For example, it takes into account the accelerating right-ward drift of US politics. In most ways that matter, such as foreign policy and corporate regulation, Kamala Harris is further to the right than George W Bush was, and Trump is an outright fascist, the extreme of the right-wing. Any conservative politician fifty years ago would have rightfully condemned Trump as an outright fascist, and he would not have been allowed within ten miles of the RNC. While people at the third scale might tip their hat to this fact, they don’t actually face it, or let it inform their decisions. So when people say that we just need to focus on this election, the thing they’re missing, which this fourth scale of thought takes into account, is that we’ve already had this election. We’ve actually been through this exact election like ten times, now. Kamala Harris is politically identical to Hillary Clinton. She’s politically identical to Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and John Kerry. All of these candidates were corporate-owned liberals with a few breadcrumbs of social justice mixed in. So we know exactly how this plays out- if the corporate liberal candidate wins, we’ll see the exact same massive cash giveaways to corporations, the same unspeakable crimes against humanity, the same stagnating wages, and the same performative hand-wringing impotence as they pretend to be incapable of doing anything other than exactly what their corporate owners tell and pay them to do. Maybe, along the way, they’ll throw us the bone of not actively funding the harassment and dehumanization of LGBTQ folks as they normally do, and we’ll all celebrate that as a win. If Trump wins, then it’s an all-out race to corporate fascism, he’ll do exactly what he did last time, which is put a bunch of corporate scum bags in as his cabinet so that they can shovel taxpayer money to their bosses as quickly as possible while allowing the most horrifying forms of environmental destruction possible. Remember when his first week in office, the cover image on the EPA website was an open-pit coal mine? That’s Trump. But at this scale of political thought, we remember that the corporate liberal candidates do the exact same thing, they just don’t change the EPA cover photo, and pretend to be working against it. We remember that Obama sicced dogs on Indigenous people defending their water for the sake of massive corrupt oil pipelines, that Biden broke the railway strike and forced rail workers to use unsafe practices which immediately led to the worst rail environmental accident of the last century, impacting the entire Mississippi watershed- that’s Biden’s environmental legacy. Put simply, the fourth scale of political thought faces the fact that this entire system is geared towards exploitation of people and destruction of land, and that the system it’s self must be torn down in order for there to be any possible hope of a livable world. It takes the step of being willing to sacrifice personal and community stability for the sake of a better world. So that definitive, but often unstated characteristic of prioritizing stability that defines liberalism, and really the first three scales of political thought? The fourth scale exists beyond that. This is where we find the people capable of self-sacrifice. It’s also where we find the quality of solidarity. While liberalism prioritizes stability while working and hoping for change that can never come while the system lasts, the fourth scale of political thought prioritizes global harm reduction over time. This is where we find people who are truly working for a better world, no matter the cost. If you want true heroism, this is where you’ll find it.
Right-wing thinkers at the fourth scale of political thought believe that there will always be winners and losers, and they work to make sure their people are the winners. So there are fascists who think at this scale, and it’s not that they don’t think about the suffering fascism causes- they’re just so deeply traumatized that they believe it’s inevitable somewhere. They cannot conceive of a world that isn’t built on suffering, so they view the human and ecological costs of capitalism/fascism as collateral damage in making sure they don’t suffer. They’re not trying to make a better world, they’re trying to make sure that they’re on top in the terrible world.
Leftists at this fourth scale of political thought recognize that capitalism, as a whole, is a race-to-the-bottom in terms of pay scales, services, human rights, and ecological stability. By this, I mean that the less a company can pay it’s employees, the more money they make. The fewer services an insurance provider pays for, the more money they make. The more damage a company does to the environment, the more money they make. So the more harm a given company can cause to people and the environment, the more profit they make. Capitalism incentivises harm. In the face of the global monopolies that these massive multi-national corporations hold, the conservative arguments that people can just work for another company that pays better, or buy products from companies that cause less harm, that the free market can ever be anything other than a mad race-to-the-worst-possible-world, sound like a child insisting that if the flap hard enough they can fly.
Obviously, because of the sea of propaganda that we all live in, the people coming to this fourth scale of political thought from the right wouldn’t say any of that about capitalism. Many from the right with structural critiques still hail capitalism, and blame the government alone for all the system’s woes, exactly as the corporations teach us all to. So there are political differences in the fourth scale just like every other, but the tone of the conversations is very, very different, and typically much less antagonistic.
There’s another thing you’ll find in the fourth scale of political thought, which we’re all terribly familiar with now, and it’s the experience of having everyone in the first three scales of political though, especially the liberals, act in wildly patronizing ways to us all the time. For example, people at the third scale love to point out how Kamala said what she had to say in support of the fossil fuel industry in order to win swing voters, and therefore give herself better odds of winning the election, as though that’s a new thought for those of us critiquing her, like we’d never thought that she might be acting tactically. At the fourth scale, we are fully aware of that tactic, we’re just also looking at how that exact tactic has driven the right-ward drift of the Democratic party, to the point where Kamala is further right than Bush. The fourth scale sees the broader strategy that those tactics are a part of, which the third scale ignores. So the third scale can’t see that the fact that she has to pander to oil and gas in order to win the election is a damnation of the entire system it’s self, and treat those of us who point that out like morons. Their argument might have merit- if we hadn’t been through it every election cycle for the last three decades. Everyone in the third scale “hoping that Kamala does better once she’s in office” is blindly ignoring the fact that every other corporate liberal we’ve been through this with, who were further left than Kamala, has immediately sold out to their corporate handlers. The rhetoric around Bush was identical, he was the existential threat that we simply could not allow, so we had to vote for Clinton and then think about our options. They were right about Bush, and wrong about Clinton. How many times do we have to see this exact conversation and result play out before we learn? That’s a question that is only asked in this fourth scale of political awareness, the third scale can’t even allow it to be asked, let alone consider any meaningful answer.
When I was younger, I found this particular flavor of patronizing, New York Times and CNN-informed liberal condescension blindingly infuriating. I was like: “I’ve actually read everyone from Friedman to Chomky, Rand to Marx, and what I’m saying has foundations in both theory and practice that liberalism 100% does not. Liberalism is a failed and failing strategy which is making the world unlivable, so how close to uninhabitable do you think your liberalism should let the corporations bring the world before we consider shifting gears? I think maybe we should do that while we can still breathe outside, what do you think?” Now I understand that people in that scale of thought aren’t ready for that question either, they’ve been terrified into thinking that anyone asking those kinds of questions is working against the Only Hope. People simply cannot think beyond the scale of political awareness that they’re at, so they are only capable of interpreting other people’s words in the way that it would be meant at their scale of awareness. This is why there will be people in the comments of this exact video saying: “So you support Trump, then?” Those comments are the epitome of the third scale. Now I mostly find it heartbreaking, and on my bitter days, funny. It’s a sign of a bad day when I think: “Oh, please, tell me more about how she’s just saying what she has to in order to win.” This seems like a fitting place to mention that the third scale of political thought, as well as the overarching model of propaganda behind it, is always appropriating ideas and language as fast as it can from the fourth scale of political thought. As soon as some idea emerges, out beyond the status quo, liberalism in particular is drawn to it’s sparkle like a moth to a flame, and they take it and reduce it down to something that still perpetuates the status quo. What’s happening right now to the concept of harm reduction is a great example of this; the idea comes from addiction treatment, and it’s super radical. Safe use sites are an incredible, radical idea- so watching liberals use the idea to silence radical thought, to sever the concept from it’s roots and implications and reduce it down to some little pet sound byte that makes it a liberal argument instead of a radical one, is painful to watch. The same liberals who are telling us to just vote for Kamala as Harm Reduction would absolutely hate the idea of a supervised injection site in their town, and that’s some high-test white liberal hypocrisy and appropriation, right there.
Anyway, the world gets much wider in the fourth scale of political thought, because people from all over the political spectrum are realizing that this entire system is geared against us, is destroying the world we live in, and is entirely unsustainable. It’s out here where we find out that the political fractures and divides which look so unbridgeable and vast in the first three scales of political thought are actually nowhere near as large as they look. It’s out here where conversations become fruitful, because I’ve never met a single person in my community who I don’t share big-picture goals and intentions with, like I also want the smallest government possible. Once we agree about that, then we can talk about how well, the fire department is pretty solid, works well, so that’s something we can all support together. In my experience, conservatives hate corporate control of the government, which I also hate. Conservatives hate how liberals talk to them like they’re slow 5 year olds, which is something I also hate. So once we’re in this territory, I’m on the same team as my neighbors. Much as people in the third scale will think this is terrifying, it’s out here where I find solid agreement with many people who supported the actions of January 6th. (That’s another statement that people stuck in the third scale will be terrified at- they’ll think I’m a closet right-winger or something, because from their framework, that’s the only way to interpret that sentence, even though it’s the opposite of the truth.) The propaganda model of capitalism works very hard to funnel everyone willing to risk their lives and stability into the right wing, where their radical zeal will serve the corporations rather than threaten them. But my neighbors who are willing to risk their lives to change the world are not my enemies, and I will never treat them as such, unless they are actively acting against the wellness of my community the way that not-see was in my town last year. But conservatives talking about how much they hate the government and how they’re willing to throw down for change? They’re much closer to me politically than liberals are, and they’re often very willing to hear what I have to say about how corporations are the problem. Our interests are so clearly aligned, we’re so tangibly allies and on the same team, that they can hear me. I’m genuinely not a democrat liberal who just hates trump on principle- I hate the same corporations and systems they hate.
Fourth Scale Voting Tactics
Once we’re all together there, then we can have a conversation about tactics, and this is actually the heart of this video. I want you to imagine that you’re part of a small band of rebels going up against a massive empire. Let’s say you have 10,000 troops, and the empire has 100 million. There’s a vocal minority that’s saying: “The Empire is Evil and must be overthrown, so we need to get all our troops together and charge straight at them, and we can defeat them with force!” What would you say to that group of people? I might ask something like: “What will that gain us? We can see that we won’t win through that approach, so what does that massive sacrifice buy us?” If they don’t have a meaningful answer as to how giving all our lives in a performative sacrifice with no possibility of victory, then I would decline to endorse that action, or undertake it. My goal in that situation would be strategic victories, not performative failure. The work of opposing that empire would be lifelong. Odds of us achieving it in our lifetime would be low, and even if we did, the work of undoing the harm of that empire would take many, many more lifetimes, so this would be our lives, as rebels.
Now imagine that the Empire, as part of their marketing campaign, gave everyone the chance to vote for it’s leader every few years. As a rebel who understands that the entire system is completely unsalvageable and must be destroyed for the good of all life everywhere, should I refuse to vote? Would that have any effect, whatsoever, on the Empire? Of course not. Refusing to vote as a way to “protest the system” is about as effective as stabbing yourself in the foot to protest the fossil fuel industry. They do. Not. Care, and it only benefits the system you’re protesting.
So who should a rebel vote for? This question is way more complicated than most people think it is. Months ago, I posted a video titled “A suggestion for the 2024 Election” which was a plan to create grass-roots ranked choice voting nationally, which would have created pathways to victory for third-party candidates. If any plan like that had manifested, if there was any actual pathway to victory for a third party candidate, I would be screaming it from the rooftops. But from the example of being unwilling to sacrifice our small force in a performative way with no hope of victory, you can see that voting for a candidate without any pathway to victory would violate my ethics. As people who can see how categorically evil the empire is, and how much harm it’s causing to us and everyone we love, and how much more grievous harm it’s causing to other people- this stings. It means that we’re going to be voting for someone committed to harm that we categorically oppose. Some people will be unable to stomach this, which I totally understand. If, in our small band of rebels, some felt that they had to charge the empire’s army directly, I would understand that, too. But performative failure is not strategic, so I wouldn’t use my vote or my life that way, and I wouldn’t suggest it, because we need every single one of you. But I would understand people who needed some short-term action, gratification so desperately, that they threw their bodies in front of the empire’s weapons- even though I’d still think it was a bad strategy. So the question isn’t complicated in terms of voting third-party- from a rebel’s perspective that’s clearly a bad choice.
Let me tell you a story that will seem unrelated at first- I promise it’s not. Since 1948, the Blue and White has been illegally stealing land and committing unspeakable crimes against humanity. But it was only last october when they began escalating and “accelerating” their unspeakable acts that the world, as a whole, began to notice or pay attention. There were fringe groups opposing them before then, now the overwhelming majority, even in the US, categorically opposes their actions, and movement is building to stop them. It took things getting really, really horrible for people to notice, let alone demand change.
When I talk to many of my conservative neighbors who think, as I do, that the whole system is corrupt and geared against them, about trump- this is what they say: “Yeah, I know he’s an evil scum bag who I wouldn’t trust alone with anyone I love- I just want him to burn it all down.” This is a vernacular expression of a political ideology called Accellerationism. Accellerationism is the belief that capitalism will continue it’s slow-burn of the entire globe until it destroys the world and makes the planet uninhabitable. Unless. Accellerationists believe that the only chance of interrupting this pattern is to actively make it so bad that people are shaken awake, look up, and see how terrible it is and always has been. So they intentionally try to enable the very worst parts of capitalism to reach people directly, to precipitate a global revolution. The argument here is that people don’t notice harm until it’s harming them, that people won’t take action until their lives are being impacted, so the quicker everyone’s lives are overtly impacted, the quicker enough of us can get to this fourth scale of political awareness to collectively shake this entire corrupt system down, compost it, and grow something healthier.
So a leftist who is a true accelerationist would vote for Trump, because Trump will make things so much worse. The argument is harm reduction over time. If we let capitalism continue this path towards destruction slowly, then over the next ten generations a lot more people will be harmed than if we just intentionally reveal it’s true face now so that people can’t ignore it and have to act. It’s the logic of someone who has a small house fire that they can’t get anyone to help with and can’t put out deciding to intentionally make it bigger to get some kind of attention before the whole building slowly burns. It’s a terrifying position, largely because the people most impacted are always guaranteed to be those most historically marginalized. Put simply, Accellerationism sacrifices the most oppressed people in a population for the possibility of a broader awakening.
This makes the bravery of the large number of intersectionality oppressed people who advocate for accellerationism all the more inspiring to me. Marginalized people who are openly advocating and working for the collapse of this system are consciously showing the same bravery that Union members show when they face the clubs of the Pinkertons on Pickett lines. They know the club is much worse for them in the short term, and they’re working for a better world.
One reason it is important to understand accellerationism is because there there is a huge bloc of corporate interests and billionaires who fear it. They fear accellerationsim for the same reason many leftists support it- they think that if they take too much too fast, it will give away the game, and the population their wealth is stolen from will take real action to change the system. So these people, who are committed to harming the environment and exploiting people for as long as possible, do actively oppose Trump and the fascist movement in the US- but it’s not for our benefit. They think Trump’s fascists are risking the whole scam, and they’d rather play the longer game. This is why there are so many Republican leaders voting for Kamala. They and the fascists have the same goal- as much wealth and power as they can extract at the expense of most of the population and the future of the planet- they just think that keeping that concealed is a more effective strategy, while the fascists think that barrels in our faces and boots on our necks are the way to go.
Despite appearances, I’m not actually trying to tell anyone how to vote. Especially for people in the third scale of political thought who are seeing for the first time the global scale of evil that this system is built on and exists by perpetrating, the idea of voting for Harris given what she’s doing in the middle east is gut-wrenching. Many of those people can’t stomach the idea of checking a box next to that war criminal’s name. I understand, and I’d never shame someone for voting third party- I just want to share this language about what that is, because in reality, voting third party today is an accellerationist perspective. Since no third party candidates have anything like a pathway to victory, then in reality a vote third party makes it more likely that Trump will take the White House and make this into a fascist country. I understand why my neighbors are voting for trump to, as they say, burn it all down. While I won’t tell anyone how to vote, I will ask you to be honest with yourself. If you’re actually an accelerationist who’s willing to trade the lives of the most marginalized people in the world for the chance that the horrors they suffer will awaken the masses and lead to a large enough movement to create real change- own that. It’s a valid perspective, held by many people, and it deserves honest dialogue and engagement on it’s own terms, but couched behind anything else. I just ask that you notice that from an accellerationist perspective, as an honest political stance, then voting third party still doesn’t make any sense. If you truly believe in accellerationism, then have the courage to name that, and vote for Trump. But for an accellerationsit to vote third party, knowing that in the system that we’re in it absolutely does makes a trump victory more likely, looks like an act of willful ignorance to me.
I’m not an accelerationist. I can’t get there. Part of the reason is that trading the lives of the most oppressed people for a dice roll is just not a tactic that I can get behind. I don’t believe we can buy a better world with the increased suffering of the most oppressed. Another factor is that accellerationism typically has no strategy beyond overthrowing the government. Like- imagine my neighbors got what they want- Trump wins, he’s such a selfish inept mess that the entire government collapses. Have they considered what happens next, from a population as propagandized and traumatized as ours, with the vast majority of the world’s wealth in the hands of the ultra-rich? It would immediately be a corporate-controlled hellscape. The government, horrible and evil as it is, is literally the only check against corporate pollution and exploitation. Trump burns it down, and we don’t have established community systems and practices in place to meet our needs and mitigate corporate exploitation- things are guaranteed to be much, much worse.
But the larger part of the reason I’m not an accellerationist is that my political elders, the people far, far wiser than I am, think it’s a bad and dangerous strategy. As someone trained in the sciences, I’m intimately familiar with The Dunning Kruger Effect, or Mt. Stupid, where people who know a little about something act with incredible, unwarranted, misplaced confidence. I watch Matt Walsh and other scientifically illiterate people do this all the time with my field of study, biology, and it drives me nuts. I’m not a political scientist. I’m a feral redneck biology teacher who reads a lot. For me to think I know political strategy better than Stacy Abrams, adrienne maree brown, Noam Chomsky, or a million other actually qualified people would be absurd past my tolerances. So I follow their lead, and Chomsky doesn’t mince words about this. He says that in serious leftist spaces, which are leftists operating in the fourth scale of political thought, voting is seen as a little break from the actual work. If there’s someone notably worth voting against, you take the time to go vote against them, and then get back to the actual work.
If you dig into the industry behind literally any single thing in the world produced under capitalism, you will find a series of environmental and human rights violations that will make any healthy person physically ill. The phone you’re watching this on cost children their hands, and locked them into lives of slavery and torture. Almost every calorie we eat comes from GMO corn which is weaponized to destroy heirloom, ecologically stable corn and destroy healthy villages. Every time we get in our car or ride the bus, we are complicit in the largest ecological damage to this planet ever caused by a single species, and contributing to every horror that climate change is giving rise to. That’s not our fault- the very concept of a carbon footprint was invented by Exxon Mobile as propaganda to try and make climate change an individual issue. The problem is systemic, and it is that entire system that must be overthrown- my point is that we’re all already part of that system. So as a radical who sees that this entire system as wholly irredeemable and incompatible with human rights or a livable world- voting for a war criminal is just another tuesday. Choosing to performatively fail in a third party vote while continuing to engage in the million other ways that enable the system more doesn’t look like solidarity to me. It looks like purity politics and a way to excuse one’s self from the responsibility of action that we all have, regardless of who we vote for. It looks like a hyperfixation on one tiny way that we are all both victims of and complicit in the system that needs to be destroyed at the ignorance of all the rest, and like very bad tactics. It’s not actually an act of bravery to do something you know will fail and make the world worse when there are other options available. Pretending that third-party candidates do have a path to victory when they absolutely don’t isn’t a radical act- it’s just self-delusion. If you’re an accellerationist- own it, but don’t dress a poorly-thought-out kind of nihilistic accellerationism in the language of hope.
On this note, I want to point out that someone simply living in the Empire and criticizing it while continuing to tacitly support it is not working for a better world, and they’re not any kind of rebel. They’re just complicit. In fact, by dedicating all their energy to getting the empire to put up a pride flag a month a year instead of structurally opposing it, they’re actually supporting the empire. They’re making it more palatable, which draws energy and people away from the necessary work of toppling it. One way to think of liberalism is as successful conditioning of standards far lower than anyone should accept. So if someone thinks of gay marriage being legalized as a big win and evidence that the system can meaningfully change, they’re likely a liberal. If someone views gay marriage being legalized as the system being dragged kicking and screaming against it’s will towards the bare minimum of respecting individual sovereignty, and the fact that it took as long as it did as evidence of how incompatible the system is with human health and wellness- that person’s probably a radical. This isn’t to say that engaging within the system is necessarily bad- it’s just got to be viewed the same way we view voting. Is our engagement with the system intentionally working towards it’s destruction, and guiding it’s collapse in ways that cause the least harm possible, or is our engagement masking it’s true nature and giving it more power and authority?
Within this fourth scale of political thought, there’s room for a lot of powerful tactics, including third-party candidates. By running, they shape the narrative and can minimize harm by influencing the platform of the empire, and by loudly insisting that we’re all going to vote for them, we can drag the platform of the empire towards humanity. Both those things have great value, and they’re super effective and worthwhile. They’re also not at all the same thing as voting tactics. We can loudly insist that we won’t vote for a war criminal and support third-party candidates, and then tactically vote against the greater evil for the candidate who has a pathway to victory.
I live and vote in Maine. Because of hard work, we have Ranked Choice Voting, so I can vote my conscience and preference, which is Claudia De la Cruz, Cornell West, Jill Stein, and then Kamala Harris. I could mark Trump last or not at all, it amounts to the same thing. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats support Ranked Choice, because they know that with Ranked choice, especially the republicans would never win another election again, they’re only in the race because of wild gerrymandering. My point is that the work of getting ranked choice was all on-the-ground people, tirelessly working for years to give Maine this systemic change. Politicians of any color will never do it.
The word “Radical” just means: “Of or having to do with the Roots.” So a radical is just someone who addresses problems at their roots. By this definition, I am a radical. Note that this doesn’t mean I’m right, I hope we all notice that these scales are not the same as a linear spectrum of rationality, coherence, or accuracy. People can and do engage in wild logical fallacies and mistakes at every scale- they’re just about how holistic our thinking is. That said, patterns become a lot more apparent at the fourth scale, and I can see that colonization, capitalism, fascism, racism, and patriarchy are all the same thing, they are one system, and it’s a system which is leading to the end of our species. So as a man working on being healthier, I must also act in solidarity with decolonization, with anti-fascism, with anti-racism, with anti-capitalism. I understand that many, perhaps most, people don’t see those five things as the same- we’re taught to see them as separate, so most of us do. But when you track the roots, they’re the same plant. It’s a plant of dehumanization and exploitation, and while the fruits it bears may look superficially different, they’re all strange.
It is very difficult to see this before the fourth scale. It’s really only once we’re at this fourth scale of political thought and dialogue that we can discuss reality. Once we’ve set down our internalized prioritization of stability, only then can we see how terrifyingly unstable the system we currently have is. How rather than being a slow force of good in the world, liberalism is a set of blinders put on the beneficiaries of colonization to prevent us from ever facing the actual costs of our privilege. We can see that right-wing nationalism is the same thing. Neither my liberal nor my conservative neighbor’s worldviews would survive the combination of knowing the history of the US’s crimes in Latin America with their own daughter needing to hike the Darian Gap. Those two things alone would force their eyes open to the point where they could never support Kamala Harris or Donald Trump. So we can see the At the fourth scale, we can look at the propaganda that we have been fed clearly, and track what systems it comes from. We can look at history and see that not only is fascism terrible for everyone outside of it’s nation, it’s actually terrible for the people of that nation as well, not to mention being the nail in the coffin of a livable world. We can look at systems beyond our own experiences, like the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which covered much of the US and Canada and held two millennia of ecologically stable, egalitarian, multinational peace. We can see that everything appealing about the US constitution was lifted directly from the Haudenosaunee confederacy. That’s not just proximity- the Founding Fathers literally spent months talking to the Haudenosaunee and saying that they wanted to make a contract just like the Haudenosaunee had. So the Haudenosaunee helped them- but then the founding fathers took out all the parts that made it democratic and matriarchal. That group of twenty-year-old slave owners didn’t just make up the constitution- they plagiarized an indigenous document and twisted it to their capitalist benefit. But that conversation, and the possibility of very different worlds than we live in now, are impossible to have until we’re out in this fourth scale. Once we’re out here, though, they become the only meaningful conversations, and the emergent strategy towards them becomes the only conceivable action.
From this fourth scale of political thought, I understand that Kamala Harris is my enemy, that she is working for the destruction of everything I love and for a world which I would not wish on my worst enemies. So my vote for Kamala would be a little break, doing exactly what Chomsky said and showing up to vote against the person who would cause an even greater level of harm. I won’t pretend that De la Cruz or Jill Stein are going to win- even De la Cruz doesn’t pretend she’s going to win, because she has more than enough political consciousness to exist in this fourth scale, and navigate it with integrity and skill. But for someone in the third scale of political consciousness to vote for Kamala is a hope, it’s an affirmation of the system that’s destroying the world. It excuses them from meaningful action, from risking their tightly-clutched stability for the sake of any real change. It excuses both the republicans, by implying that this is just what they are, and it excuses the democrats, by pretending that this is the best we can do. It pretends that all this is normal, when it is very much not. A liberal vote for Harris is, in my opinion, an act of great cowardice and willful ignorance.
A fourth-scale, radical vote for Kamala is a promise that we make to ourselves. It’s us saying, I will vote for this despicable war criminal because I am committing my life to tearing down the entire system which empowered her and which she is perpetrating. This woman, as a representative of this anti-life system which is destroying everything I love and hold holy, is receiving my vote as a promise. I don’t even have to hold my nose to vote for her, because my consistent, committed, lifelong, holistic work for a healthier world scrubs my conscience clean- I sleep like a baby after voting for my enemy, because my heart is clear with how this is an act of strategy against her and everything she represents. So part of the point of this video is that my vote for Kamala is qualitatively different than a liberal vote for Kamala.
To me, it looks like the people who feel torn about this are often in the transition from the second or third scale into the fourth, and it’s the blurriness of their tactics and ethics that make this question feel existentially challenging. They understand how a liberal vote for Kamala is active ignorance and complicity, and a deeply unethical act- but no one has explained how from the fourth scale, from a truly radical perspective, a vote for Kamala is profoundly ethical. To me, it seems like a lot of people who are voting third party aren’t doing it because they believe it will have any actual benefit, or as part of any actual strategy- it looks like the act of someone who doesn’t believe that meaningful change is possible. To me, it looks like the desperate act of someone who has no plan at all, so they’re just trying to do as little harm as they can, but they can’t see that, as Zinn put it, you can’t be neutral on a moving train. And not voting, or voting third party with zero chance of victory, looks like someone giving up because they can’t imagine another world. From the fourth scale, to vote for our enemy is an act of great responsibility. It holds the possibility of a better world, not because Kamala Harris will help get us there, but because we know that she won’t, and we believe that we can.
If I lived somewhere without ranked choice, I would vote for Kamala, knowing that I would wake up the next day and get back to the real work of creating healthier systems that can draw energy away from the horrors of capitalism as it eats it’s self, creating alternative systems that supplant and overgrow the exploitative systems that Kamala represents, creating alternative systems that help accelerate and guide the crumbling of capitalism, through a diversity of tactics.
But this isn’t binary, and every election cycle, a bunch of people use these ethics to vote for the lesser evil, and then drift away in the wind. I did this, when I voted for Obama. In my opinion, that’s an even greater act of cowardice and self-excusal than just being an honest liberal. To flirt with radical politics, to use them to deny our own complicity, and then not to engage with the actual work of changing the world? That’s the act of a cowardly traitor, and I have no respect for it. So if the arguments I laid out here resonate for you, I ask you- what will you do, on november 5th? What will you do with the rest of your life? Who are you?
I ask this because for a radical, the answer should be the same regardless of who wins. On foreign policy, corporate regulation, economic regulation, and most everything else- Trump and Harris are identical, and the work necessary to change the world is identical. Who you are will be determined by your actions over time, not who you vote for. But you’re also responsible for your vote, and it has real impacts. In terms of the impacts on marganlized communities, the context in which our work must take place, and the threats that our families face as we undertake the work of creating a healthier world, Kamala and Trump are very, very different candidates.
It’s also important to recognize that while people do tend to live their lives on one scale at a time, it’s not wholly linear. When people feel threatened, we tend to revert, sometimes all the way down to the first scale. This is why corporate interests spend so much time trying to get people to feel threatened- it benefits them when we don’t act in our collective interests.
Fourth Scale Educational Tactics
This framework has a lot of value in understanding who we’re talking to. As a teacher, I find this to be super helpful, and I think anyone working on creating change would benefit from understanding these scales in real time. For example, fascist leadership comes from the fourth scale. These are people committed to a world of brutal violence and oppression. They don’t see that it is their beliefs and actions which are creating the exact circumstances that they seek to stay above. We’re talking about people like William F Buckley, Henry Kissinger, and Dick Cheney. These three men have caused incalculable harm in the world, and done so consciously and willingly. Unlike my neighbors, these people understand perfectly that undocumented immigrant labor provides the backbone of most of the US economy, and contribute far more in taxes and profits to their bosses than they could ever receive- they know all that and intentionally spread the lie that immigrants are a drain on our economy in order to maintain a class system that puts them on top. They understand that the US is a predatory bully that feeds on exploited countries and work forces around the globe, and they intentionally shape military and economic policies in order to create and maintain that imbalance. That is such a different scale of thought than my conservative neighbors who, through no fault of their own, have been entirely raised in the second scale of thought, and are likely to honestly believe that immigrants are a drain on the economy. My neighbors are likely to parrot talking points from fascist leadership these days, but if I respond to them as though they’re Henry Kissinger, I’m actively causing harm and contributing to political fissions. They’re not Kissinger- they’re just people who can see that the system is not working for them and want a better world, quoting the only people they’ve ever heard speak to their concerns. So my work is helping them look up a little, into the next scale. I’m likely to do that in terms that resonate with them, validating their very real concerns that I share. And in my experience, more conservatives at the second scale are ready to jump to the fourth than liberals at the third scale. Third-scale liberals tend to be entrenched and wholly committed to the beliefs that excuse their complicity and validate their stability. Conservatives at the second scale today tend to be already thinking into the fourth scale, and very open to much broader conversations.
I experience many Trump-loving conservatives today as very open to hearing about the crimes of the US. The fact that their current lens puts that entirely on the government rather than corporations and billionaires is less entrenched than one might think- they’re mad at corporations as well, and when you talk about the revolving door between corporations and the government, they’re just as mad about it as I am, and not in the self-excusing, hand-wringing way that liberals tend to be. They want change and action now, as do I- and they’re not actually fascists, even if their words have some of those dog whistles in it these days, even if they’ve taken a step or two down that ideological path.
I share this because the future of the world is spinning on the edge of a knife right now. Things are in motion, things are up in a way that they haven’t been in a long time. People’s minds are spinning with it, my neighbors and mine included. None of us are immune to propaganda, and unless we speak together and intentionally shift all our consciousness into this fourth scale of thought, and then support one another in ethical action from that place, than the future looks very grim. Canceling my neighbors because they say some racist dog whistle that their entire world screams at them all day long would be just as effective as voting third party.
Once we understand this, then we can much more accurately break down the education work that needs to be done. Third-scale liberals need help getting to the fourth scale. Their information and ethics are often pretty good, they’re just not able or willing to see in a way that’s wide enough to show them realities that would ask anything real of them, beyond pearl-clutching and guilt. And in the fourth scale, where a bunch of conservatives already are, or are one quick conversation away from being, then there’s a need for helping them see the humanity of people they’ve been aggressively conditioned not to see as human at all. If that sounds hard, remember this: while liberals tend to be far, far better at collective empathy, such as empathizing with immigrants, as a theoretical demographic, and voting based on that empathy- conservatives tend to be far, far better at individual empathy. Conservatives tend to be far better at individual forgiveness, and are often deeply generous people- to other specific people. They’re just terrible at collective empathy, in the same way that liberals- and leftists- tend to be terrible at individual empathy. Conservatives might empty a mag into a case of bud light in hilarious ways, but it is leftists and liberals who will straight-up crucify our own friends, family, and community members, and think we’re being allies while we do it. This is a huge factor in why conservative spaces tend to be far more ideologically diverse than liberal or leftist spaces, and a major reason that conservatives, while only being like a third of the population, out-organize everyone else, all the time. They organically function in a coalition model in a way that the left really, really struggles with. One of the heads of the Proud Boys is a Latino guy, which is just wild, but my point is that the right is already practiced and familiar with welcoming people they’ve been taught to dehumanize- if they perceive those people as being their allies. So expanding their sense of who their allies are, helping them see that fascism isn’t actually going to help them and that we all need to oppose corporate rule, and then helping them humanize people they’ve been taught to hate- that’s all sitting right there. I don’t mean we should start with the freaking proud boys, we should start with our neighbors and families. And- there are people doing this exact work within the most extreme right wing groups, and having serious success with it. Daryl Davis, the Black dude who spent decades intentionally befriending pointy white hats, has had a massive impact on the country’s politics- and that’s just him, alone. He has impact because he’s willing to act, and he’s willing to strategically risk himself. These are necessary qualities, that liberals lack, and conservatives tend to have in spades. Every time some new horror comes out, like the governor of missouri taking the life of a man known to be innocent, the liberal response is hand-wringing and guilt, while the conservative response – not from the pundits, from my neighbors and the conservatives in my comments sections- is lets fking go. They have courage and will that is necessary medicine today, and right now the only people speaking to their concerns are Trump and the Proud Boys, who are appropriating their healthy courage and will back into service of the exact systems that they oppose. It’s hard to watch, but can you see how precarious it is? How as soon as my neighbors understand who their actual enemies are, a very different world is possible? I know that I’m not perfect, I don’t think I have all the answers- but I also know that if people like me stay silent, we’re effectively abandoning our neighbors, communities, and futures to the system we all suffer under, including their pundits, both right and left wing.
This is why I say that the world is balanced on a knife’s edge right now, and it’s far more precarious than we think, in both directions. Purity leftists drive me nuts, because they pretend that they’ve always operated with all the information and perspective that they have now. I was a conservative, I hand-painted a sign for Bush, and wanted to join the Marine Corps. Then Bush was a moron, and watching him say things like: “they just hate our freedom” was so absurd that I became a liberal, and proudly cast a liberal vote for Obama. Then Obama began extrajudicial unaliving of US citizens with flying robots, and I was like: “Oh. This dude’s not on my side either.” It was through those experiences that I began to realize that the entire system was geared against human rights or a livable world. It wasn’t one watershed moment- it was a series of things. And the fact that a series of events can radicalize someone is the largest reason I’m not an accellerationist. I know that people are capable of seeing patterns without being personally hit in the head. This is the tactic that I think has power with getting third scale liberals to the fourth scale. I think we’re seeing it right now, with what the governor just did to Marcellus Williams. That’s shaking a lot of liberals worlds. It will shake some of their eyes open. Others will return to the third scale, but it will be less stable, and the next time the state does something terrible, or the next time they learn about something the state already did, like Salvador Allende or MK Ultra, maybe that will shake them up to seeing more of reality. I think this is why they’re crushing TikTok- the nature of that app exposes liberals to so much that doesn’t fit a liberal worldview that it’s inherently radacilizing. Regardless of that app’s future- I think that continuing to show liberals the parts of reality that they don’t want to face is good pedagogy. Madeline Pendelton is a great resource for this, in my opinion. Her presentation style is much more accessible than mine, and she’s much funnier, which makes her able to cut through liberal defenses that my doom-and-gloom baritone could never touch.
There will be people who reduce this entire perspective down to just: “Jack says to vote for Kamala, Jack sold out, Jack endorsed Kamala” Count on it. If you understand what I said in this video, you understand why that reduction of this video is a lie. This is the exact opposite of an endorsement, it is an utter and complete condemnation of Kamala Harris and the entire system she represents. When I imagine people voting for Kamala as liberals, there’s a huge part of me that would rather us both vote for Trump, as accellerationists, because we simply do not have time for liberal self-excusal. If your vote for Kamala makes you think you can catch your breath, or leads you to engage less at all, the way I voted for Obama- than it’s actively harmful, to the entire world you think you’re voting for. We need you to show up. Show up to yourself, to your union, to your community, to your planet- we need to actively build systems of community support and mutual aid which supplant and overgrow the systems of capitalism.
There’s a lot more that this framework links to, I’m sure. There’s meaningful conversations to be had about the relationship between somatic healing and capacity to scale up in political thought, about the intersections of identity and proximity with capacity to see beyond our own communities, about the funnels that the propaganda model of the system we exist within create to neutralize emergent awarenesses, like the poor-working-class into right-wing proto-fascist funnel, and the left-wing-emergent-critical-intersectional-analysis into purity-politics-and-isolation-leading-to-erosion-of-community-organizing-efficacy funnel. Those are necessary and meaningful conversations. But I think I’ve wrapped up the salient subject of this piece, so I’m going to set those down for now, and end with this:
May we all see with ever-clearer eyes and hearts.