While the phrase originally came out of a parody presidential campaign run by Wavy Gravy, the clown who MCed Woodstock, my introduction to the phrase came from Grant Morrison’s *Doom Patrol*, the relevant volumes previously reviewed here.

The title of this piece probably doesn’t come as a big surprise to people. I’ve expressed frustrations with electoral fundamentalism – the idea that the only way you can interact with the political system is to vote in the big elections – and I’m seeing that more and more people are getting fed up with the status quo. To this end, I want to make a pitch to you regarding the democratic primaries: vote for nobody.

Specifically, I’m expressing that I think that the recent movement in Michigan, and elsewhere, to vote “uncommitted” for the Democratic Primary is a good idea. This campaign – the electorate signaling, essentially “I don’t know who I’m going to vote for, because this isn’t an option for me” secured startling but non-majority numbers on Super Tuesday. Altogether, it seems that more than 350,000 people have voted for “not this guy” in regard to our current leader.

It’s clear why the sitting president is unpopular. He has delivered some modest gains: he made some significant, but less-than-promised, changes to the student debt situation. He passed a major infrastructure bill. He has generally been more pro-union and pro-LGBT than any prior president – though I will note that the last four words of that prior statement are doing some heavy lifting.

Domestically, he has dropped the ball on forgiving student loans, raising the minimum wage, and substantively reforming healthcare. While he killed the Keystone XL pipeline, oil production thrives domestically. He did nothing to counteract Republican court-packing and actively resisted efforts from the left to pack it right back: this, in short, led directly to the Dobbs decision that gutted abortion access for much of the country. Maybe he didn’t believe the Republicans would actually do it, despite the fact that they’ve been threatening to do it for as long as it’s been a thing (which has been most of his political career). They’re totally going to codify it, just like every other time they’ve promised to codify it.

Internationally, he caved to every Republican demand on the border, and that bill is only stalled out because they don’t want him to be the one to pass it; he is committed to the genocidal project of zionism, which has led to the paradoxical situation of US aid and US bombs both being dropped on the same land; and this has dragged us into a new phase in the war in the Middle East, involving strikes in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.

Do I think that the other guy is worse? Yeah, I do. However, I’ll be honest: at this point I’m having trouble imagining how. He’d probably say some inflammatory, vulgar bullshit while doing it? Maybe make a typo on a social media platform that we have to pretend is interesting or funny for a news cycle?

The fact of the matter is that – for as long as I have been able to vote, which is twenty years now – every election has been a referendum on democracy and a fight for the soul of this country. Every single time, I’m told to be pragmatic and vote for the lesser of two evils.

Now, I’m being told that the lesser evil was refusing to materially improve people’s lives and now is enabling a genocide and has gotten us into what essentially amounts to an unacknowledged world war.

I’m done.

I’m not sure where I first encountered this meme — possibly referenced on *Trashfuture* — and would be fascinated to learn about where it originally came from. Regardless of whether this is the design, it is important to remember that the purpose of a system is what it does. It doesn’t matter if ratcheting the Overton Window to the right is what the system was meant to do, it’s what it does, and you’ll notice that we haven’t traded it out.

When it comes time to vote, I will – and I’m going to vote “nobody for president” (or the nearest “uncommitted” option that’s available on my ballot). Because there’s never been a President in my life who has actually made things better for the average American; there’s never been a President in my life who has not enabled the worst excesses of violence and militarism abroad; there’s never been a President in my life who has deserved to wield the kind of power that a President has.

Because nobody should have that kind of power. Nobody can be trusted with it.

And instead of following this election I’m going to give my time and what material support I can to things that actually make life better for people in my community – all people.

Wikipedia says this is what John Morton looked like.

Because, you see, I’ve figured it out. There’s a logical fallacy called “Morton’s Fork” that we’ve been staring at the tines of for as long as I can remember. In the late 15th century, an archbishop of Canterbury claimed that the Benevolence – a tax paid to the church at the time – should be raised, because people living frugally had obviously been saving money, and people living extravagantly obviously had money to burn. In short, it’s a situation where both options lead to the same outcome.

And right now, the “same outcome” appears to be misery at home and mass death abroad. I refuse to be a part of it. If my vote doesn’t matter, if it’s just a symbolic nodding or shaking my head, I’m going to walk away and try to find something I can do to make life better.

As Jon Stewart said on one of his inaugural first episodes back on The Daily Show – a program I watched religiously through college and graduate school and which helped informed my political development, though in recent years it feels as if it’s become synonymous with a certain degree of culturally-left American Cringe (often abbreviated to “orange man bad”), the Stewart run was, by and large, both funny and insightful – “The work of making this world resemble one that you would prefer to live in is a lunch-pail ----ing job, day in and day out.”

And you should clock on to this job. Even if you don’t understand that those people are human beings and deserve your compassion, even if you aren’t interested in Palestinian culture. You need to understand that it will one day come back to you. Gaza is the laboratory of empire, the techniques and technologies used over there will one day be used to police you and prevent you for asking for one crumb more. Even if you don’t care about the US-Mexico border, you should remember that the Federal Government deployed the Border Patrol against protesters in Portland. The policing that happens at the border determines how policing happens elsewhere in the country.

Now I’m running out of steam, and I’m coming to the conclusion that I cannot end this piece without mentioning Aaron Bushnell, the US airman who self-immolated outside of the Israeli Embassy in the Capitol. A lot of ink has been spilled and pixels have been sprayed about it, ranging from the New Yorker saying – accurately, I believe – that it is an act of nonviolent despair. The BBC simply positioned it in the headline as “US airman dies after setting himself on fire outside Israeli embassy in Washington”, erasing his clearly stated motivation and agency, though they do acknowledge it in the text of the story. A similar headline is used by the New York Post, though the story scaremongers somewhat about Bushnell’s association with anarchist groups and makes a great deal out of how “[h]e also gave the thumbs-up to an account belonging to the Kent State University chapter of the radical pro-Hamas group Students for Justice in Palestine.”

It was hard not see the resonance with the self-immotlation of Thích Quảng Đức, the Vietnamese Buddhist Monk who took the most extreme form of non-violent protest against the war in his country.

I have not watched the video. I don’t know if I will at any point.

I have heard this action called an “appeal to heaven” but I think that is perhaps not entirely accurate. It is not an appeal to heaven, but an appeal to history.

“We were here. There were people at this time who refused to be complicit.”

My plans don’t include self-immolation.

But I agree that we cannot be complicit.

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Nobody for President