alias Bruce.

The real reason why so many Americans don’t vote.

It’s not ignorance or apathy. It’s bitter awareness.

On November 5, the day before the midterm elections central to the continued power and influence of dictator-in-progress President Donald Trump, a Washington Post story went against the dominant narrative about American nonvoters. Instead of offering yet another bewildered eulogy to the lost civic conscience of the more than half of Americans who don’t vote, the Post story let nonvoters from across the country explain, in their own words and in detail, why they chose to refuse their ostensible civic duty in one of the most momentous elections in the nation’s history. For instance:

Charlotte Greenleaf won’t be voting on Tuesday. Neither will anyone else in her family. Never have, never will, she says. It’s not that she’s too busy. Greenleaf, 60, is unemployed and trying to make it on disability benefits, plus the pigs and chickens she raises on a small farm near this scruffy town in central West Virginia. And it’s not that she’s satisfied with how things are. Unhappy with President Trump, she quoted her mother: “If you don’t got nothing nice to say, say nothing at all.” No, this is why she’s not voting: She figures the country’s leaders are chosen by rich and powerful people far from any place she’s ever been. “My favorite subject in school was history, and I learned that’s how it’s always been,” Greenleaf said. “Politicians just think about themselves.” So she tunes them out: Doesn’t read the news, doesn’t watch it on TV. And most certainly does not vote.

Read the entire Post story. Its importance is not that it blows the cover off some national secret about why people don’t vote, but that it says out loud what is literally a matter of common knowledge to most of we Americans. A good number of the more than half of Americans who elect to not vote — many for their entire lifetimes — do so because they choose to not insult themselves with the sorry pretense of having participatory power over the country’s policy decisions. They may possess or lack formal education; they may have enough money to get by or they may not; they may live in a hamlet in eastern Idaho or on the west side of Manhattan. But what these boycotters all have in common is a deep and often bitter clarity about the fact that the United States, with its flood of corporate campaign money propelling public policy from top to bottom, is not a democracy. So why would they vote when the one shred of civic power many would-be voters feel they possess is to tell big money, in effect, “You can’t fire me. I quit.” This is not a position to mock or to dismiss. It reflects a serious and fierce understanding by which millions of competent adult American nonvoters reach a cogent decision to abstain from the charade.

I am not one of those people. I vote — despite my rage at the corrupt moneyed machinery that runs the nation and controls its major decisions — because the outcomes of voting can mean life or death in people’s real lives and because voting is not incompatible with my determination as a progressive to lay waste to the structural monarchy of money on which modern capitalism rests. The two coexist, and electoral casualties are real and present. Donald Trump’s 2016 victory — courtesy of the Electoral College but theoretically preventable had more nonvoters turned out and made it harder for digital interference to ensure a Trump win — has already killed people and will kill and devastate more. In Florida, Ron DeSantis’s gubernatorial win, if it holds, will embolden racial murders and deadly statewide policies on health care, guns, and policing, while Andrew Gillum’s victory there, if it happens, will mollify some of these and lend strength to those who resist them. Ted Cruz’s victory in Texas will buoy racist and fascist attacks, economic savagery, and suffering and death for women denied reproductive rights in that state. Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez’s New York victory has put the fear of progressive outrage into the hearts of cowardly Democrats locally and nationally.

But we betray a huge number of outraged and aware people who refuse to vote — and we weaken our shared clout as a force for overturning this corrupt corporate-funded system of governance — if we trivialize or demonize nonvoters instead of recognizing that many of them are simply expressing, in a different way, the very same things that we want in a society.

This is not about whether or how someone voted in this filtered popularity contest that we call a democracy. This is about voters’ core sense of what serves their interest. Never, ever forget that most Americans, no matter how they act out, ultimately want the same things we progressives want: an end to corporate money in government, a citizen-driven system of single-payer universal health care, and policy that serves the public will rather than private wealth.

That is our greatest strength, and it is our way to ultimately win.

The midterms proved that most voters don’t want Trump. The GOP is betting it won’t matter.

The Democrats have taken the House. Good. It will save lives. Some of us who would suffer and die under GOP-ruled policies on health care, policing, poverty, and poisoning of our air and water will instead live longer lives because of particular bills that Trump and his supine party will be unable to ratify. You and I awoke this morning to a better reality than we feared.

But that is not the only truth today. Here are some others:

- The Electoral College is the Trump Party’s last weapon. Money, male rule, and racism are the traditional toxins that have prevented the United States from being a democracy. Structurally, the Electoral College is the hangman’s bridge for all travelers in American government. Virtually no seekers of the presidency cross it intact without proving allegiance to those who stand to lose money or power if their policy needs are not met. Trump, as Charles Blow has said, represents a war: money’s last hope of directing the rage of non-rich white males at someone other than the white rich super-minority whose explosively greedy choices have decimated what remains of non-educated white privilege. Aside from white rage and male crotch-clutching, today’s Republican Party platform of enabling rich cheaters offers nothing — nada, zero — that non-college-educated white Americans can embrace or believe. From omnivorous political rodents like Mitch McConnell to self-promoting brayers like Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh, the sole remaining salable alternative to a progressive money-shouldn’t-rule pitch is a white-or-male-must-rule pitch. That’s all that the CEOs have left to offer before the incessantly climate-heated, increasingly brown, increasingly young and non-rich population of the United States inevitably surges progressive. The Electoral College, whereby states secure representation without regard to population, is the last anachronism protecting the artificial dominance of old white racist senators and presidents in America. It elected Trump in 2016 — where he lost the popular vote — and it will, unjustly, thanks to Republican white and rural gerrymandering, re-elect him in 2020, absent some sea change of popular revolt.

- Today’s institutional Democratic Party will not lead. It will follow. You already know more about this than any pundit needs to tell you. From Bill Clinton’s smarmy supply-side myths to Hillary Clinton’s empty corporate “Stronger Together” jingle to Nancy Pelosi’s and Chuck Schumer’s we-can’t-go-there calculus of mannered self-censoring to the DNC’s sabotage of Bernie Sanders’ actual progressive momentum, the institutional Democrats have excruciatingly shown us that they and their donors forbid authenticity about how corporate-funded policy actually works. Key Democratic candidates who won this season — like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — led on their own, defiant of party norms. Key progressives who lost succumbed to plain old institutional corruption (as with Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, whose opponent used his official position to implement policies undermining her voters) or, to my mind, to bad “moderate” advice (as with Beto O’Rourke, who inexplicably met a bloodthirsty Ted Cruz with soft anecdotes about voters’ family stories instead of a savaging of Cruz’s empty and corrupt claims. Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic Party, terrified of the gall it takes to piss off today’s corporate DNC donors with passionate truths about the corporate-funded modern American pretense of democracy, will, in future history, appear as the fading rear guard of small-d democratic values. True leadership will come, and is already emerging, from those who dare to run and win (or lose) on honest arguments about corporate power. At some point in the future, this truthful baseline will become a new normal, which the fearful inheritors of today’s DNC will then timidly claim as their own.

What will make the difference is what you and I now do, in public as we face politicians and police, and in private at our gatherings of family and coworkers and friends. It has happened at decisive moments in all repressive regimes.

Our move.

When white people say “don’t panic” about Trump’s autocratic potential, don’t listen.

Image: Getty - Foreign Policy

“Don’t panic. Organize,” are the final words of Joe Scarborough’s July 2 Washington Post missive to Democratic voters horrified by the Trump presidency’s actions to date and its autocratic potential. Scarborough’s well-intentioned message is true as far as it goes. But what’s worth remarking is how his attitude epitomizes the white, privileged, short-sighted arrogance by which the Democratic Party blew the presidency in 2016 – and may lose again in 2020 if it doesn’t pop out of its bubble.

Here is Scarborough:

“Instead of viewing this accidental president, who lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes, as the apocalypse du jour, Trump skeptics should treat him more like [an anomaly]. The danger created by Trump’s presidency is real. But it is not the sign of a coming Armageddon. Instead, these electoral aftershocks are more political proof that Democrats must face the ugly truth that their cataclysmic losses in 2016 were not caused by Fox News, Susan Sarandon, Vladimir Putin, the New York Times’ email stories or the sudden spread of racism in Midwestern states carried twice by Barack Obama. Rather, their shellacking was the result of a lackluster presidential campaign that had no coherent message, ignored warnings from Democratic leaders and forgot to visit Wisconsin.”

Okay. Reality check number one: Trump is not an “accidental” president, nor was the 2016 outcome an inaccurate reflection of the state of the nation. With blue-suited red-necktied senatorial and congressional zombies proffering corporate-purchased public policy (thanks in part to Citizens United) that drowned out the legislative voices of non-rich Americans, and with nearly 50 percent of voters bailing on voting altogether, it was perfectly logical that a candidate who picked up on both long-boiling voter rage and bitter racism enjoyed the results. Despite the abominable Electoral College and mind-boggling Russian interference, the Dems shouldn’t have even been within cruise missile range of a Trump victory. The collusion of the DNC with the Hillary Clinton campaign to sideline Bernie Sanders’ defiant presence and platform created a crucial political vacuum that never should have existed. Trump, the consummate bullshit artist, seized that available space to con a credulous base. Accident? More like neglectful calculus. It was the Democrats themselves who flunked that test.

Reality check number two: Trump is an “apocalypse du jour” only to insulated whites like Scarborough who have never been first in line as targets for America’s genocide, discrimination, state-sponsored brutality, and incarceration. To use the flip term “apocalypse du jour” for the presidency of a man who has dehumanized Native Americans for decades, demonized and created prison camps to tear apart refugee families at the Mexican border, and made anti-Muslim discrimination a national immigration policy, is an obscenity made possible for Scarborough by America’s centuries of bloody white immunity. Only an American white person – who has never seen themselves in a lynching photo, has never had to live with ceaseless inexplicable stops by cops asking them why they are in this neighborhood or boarding this train, has never heard the click of a car door lock at a red light when a driver sees them standing on the corner, has never had a white person clutch a purse or knapsack in their presence, has never routinely been the last person on a subway car to have someone sit beside them, and has never been at the front of the line of those chosen by the state for routine or “emergency” incarceration – can so cavalierly dismiss a white supremacist autocrat as an “apocalypse du jour.” With this, Joe Scarborough has unintentionally indicted himself and the Democratic leadership for being complicit in the casual acceptance of America’s loathsome economic and racial regime. This is the real reason why Clinton’s vapid “stronger together” campaign theme rang hollow to voters. The kinds of profound economic changes that voters of all colors would have full-throatedly supported are disallowed by the bankrollers who finance the Democratic Party – not to mention the Republican Party, which in its modern incarnation has been auctioning off its soul since Richard Nixon if you start with race-baiting, or Ronald Reagan if you start with supply-side trickonomics.

Reality check number three: Notice how Scarborough, even in his withering criticism of the Clinton campaign, stops short of defining what a “coherent message” for a Democratic presidential candidate would actually be. We hear that same deafening silence from the Democratic Party as we enter the mid-terms and as we approach 2020. That’s because the narrative necessary to galvanize a large chunk of the non-rich electorate, of all races, is one that Scarborough and the corporate Democratic Party cannot embrace: today’s plutocratic capitalism, with its fiscal chokehold on who runs for federal office and what messages air to voters, is incompatible with democracy. A policy plank that would excite voters would include, just for starters, mandatory public financing of all political campaigns and the prohibition of private contributions to all electoral runs for public office. It’s a no-brainer: public office is public property, and access to it must not, in any true democracy, be purchased by private wealth. The sole obstacle to this elemental truth is the absurd but accustomed dominance of private electoral money itself.

The good news is that, amid the Democratic Party’s willful spurning of its base, Democratic candidates themselves are forcing the party’s hand. The most recent and remarkable success is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who spectacularly dethroned longtime Democratic mainstay Joseph Crowley and his posse of corporate backers by bringing a straight-up version of what Trump faked and what Dem officials have ducked: an in-your-face progressive populist message about reversing corporate rule. Mainstream American journalists breathlessly report that she is a Democratic Socialist, which, when you strip away reporters’ exclamation points, simply means that she, like most Americans (including many Trump voters), favors a capitalist economy with sane state guarantees of things like health care, wage security, and retirement. Voters across party lines have long hungered for such authentic courage in candidates. In 2016 Michael Moore famously and correctly predicted that Trump would win if the Dems didn’t show more nerve. In 2015 some, including me, felt a queasy sense of possibility about Trump’s dishonest populism while mainstream media dismissed him. Observers have been saying for years, amid the moneyed, amoral monologue of American politics, that we progressives need passionately principled candidates who aren’t afraid to lose. It remains to be seen how much the Democratic Party will heed the success of candidates like Ocasio-Cortez and face up to the flagrant contradiction between the needs of its entrenched bankrollers and those of its long-term political base. The party can’t satisfy both.

Meanwhile, no one should confuse values-based revulsion at Trump’s agenda with “panic.” For many of us, be we survivors of early American genocide or slavery or holocaust or internment camps, the horrors that Trump makes possible are not new. We have fought and died and collectively survived them before. We will again. There is nothing “panicked” about our resolve to see these threats for what they are and to defeat them.

The only people panicking are those who are too privileged or too afraid to face the reality of what is at stake.

- Thanks to Allie.