That psychic friction you feel? That sense of growing frustration about everything that nevertheless eludes you when it comes to providing a definite reason or culprit behind your pain? It’s the slow realization that the ways you traditionally engaged with politics and felt like you were having some kind of small influence of which levers got pulled don’t work anymore.

You have no control. The funny thing is that you never did. The levers you thought you were manipulating were hooked up to nothing.

It’s becoming harder and harder to find any kind of “sensible” non-materialist explanation why your life sucks. Every day the idea that there are problems in the “American system” that can be isolated, cured, and inoculated against with smart tweaks is looking more like hogwash -- the American system is the problem.

The system is configured to consolidate power for the already-powerful and keep you away from power by giving you a controlled VRChat-like pantomime of democratic power every two years. This is how it’s always been. The only difference now is that the machine has become so rickety and fucked that the casing is falling away from the motherboard and the Oculus is dangling off the side of your face.

So What?

Anyways why does any of that matter? Now that the U.S. is facing down a near-inevitable 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, the VRChat app has truly locked up and crashed to desktop. The Republicans will not wait until “after the election” to vote on a replacement for RBG and frankly you’re dumb if you thought they would. This is the moment they’ve waited half a century for. They recognize that this system isn’t about norms or maintaining responsible and civil stewardship of the nation -- it’s about power, and it always was.

It matters because if you genuinely believe in any kind of effort to improve people’s lives then “norms” and “civility” are now not just useless, but actively counterproductive. Begging and pleading with people on social media to “VOOOOOTE” is well and good, but implying it’s going to make any difference re:the SCOTUS is borderline disingenuous. Your normative, civic duty of voting in the presidential election will do nothing against the dark mechanisms described in the previous paragraph. Even if Joe Biden is elected, there is little to no chance that he’ll pack the SCOTUS with liberal justices -- hell, even Bernie Sanders said that he would never do it.

Moreover if the fabric of your political system is dangling on the tenuous health of one 87-year-old woman, maybe that says something not just about the meanness of your enemies but the fucked fundamentally broken nature of the system itself.

It’s out of your hands, because it’s not that the system has bugs -- the system is the problem.

So Then We’re Fucked?

Well, yes, but having the ability to recognize that things are going to get way, way worse but still keep fighting, even for things you may never see in your lifetime, is a muscle everyone’s going to have to develop.

The thing is what constitutes “fighting” now? If we recognize the limitations of voting then what else can be done in a society that’s enshrined your vote as the one sacred civic duty?

Uh, I don’t really know. What I’m pretty damn sure about is that norms and civility have to go out the window. Eschewing those things is no longer going to be the sole purview of dirtbag Bernie bros who want “pie in the sky” things like Medicare for All and student loan forgiveness. You’re going to have to go dirtbag just to hang on to the things you have.

And “go dirtbag” doesn’t just mean being mean to chuds on social media. The end goal has to be finding and consolidating real power. We sure as hell aren’t going to be getting any kind of power in elected politics anytime soon. Both parties have made that very clear this year. The only other place normal people have been able to exert power to change fucked up political systems is through organized labor. I hear that’s not doing so hot in America these days! We may want to get on that.

You might also want to get accustomed to the idea of having to break the law to do what’s moral. Rather than being the liberal middle class arbiter of which illegal acts are acceptable or not you may just come to a new understanding of what it takes to have someone, anyone recognize your collective rage. I get the sense it’s going to take something more than putting this shit on your front lawn.