US Electoral Politics as a Prisoner’s Dilemma
Not only are we led to believe that Democratic and Republican candidates are our only “legitimate” choices, we are also duped into believing that voting for one of those two choices is our only avenue for societal change.
In her article “Electoral Politics Use The Same Containment Strategies As Alzheimer’s Facilities” (https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/electoral-politics-use-the-same-containment), Caitlin Johnstone draws a great analogy. We “patients” (in the US) are redirected to voting for Democrats as a “way out” of the suffering our political system causes us, much as Alzheimer’s patients who want to get out of the facility and “go home” are redirected away from the exits by distracting and misleading them in certain ways (e.g., “Wouldn’t you like to have something to eat before you leave?”) and depending on their poor memory to lead them to forget that they wanted to escape. Though our memory is intact, much like Alzheimer’s patients who become agitated at their confinement and want to escape, we become agitated about the way the oligarchy is screwing us, keeping us living paycheck to paycheck while they spend the wealth they have stolen from us on foreign wars, yachts, mansions, and the like, but the Democratic Party is falsely presented to us as an exit door, as an escape. As Caitlin goes on to say:
Meanwhile the actual exit from the abusive system is kept carefully hidden. A lot of dementia care facilities will disguise their exits by painting them to look like murals or bookshelves . . . That’s where fighting the propaganda machine is hidden. That’s where direct action is hidden. That’s where a critical mass of people waking up from the manipulations and using the power of their numbers to directly force real change is hidden. Cleverly disguised behind a bunch of gibberish about “conspiracy theories”, “Russian propaganda” and “extremism”, with a bunch of staff members pointing the way toward a false exit that cannot ever lead to our escape.
A similar way of looking at the electoral system is as a multimillion-person prisoner’s dilemma game in which the jailers misinform the prisoners (us) about what the cooperative vs. defecting choices are. In the US we’re told by the Democrats (if we’re on the left) that voting for their candidate is the necessary choice people must make to prevent the big, bad Republican from winning. “Defecting” (voting for a third party with vastly better politics such as the Greens) is bad because it risks increasing the chances of a Republican winning. There are a couple of ways in which this is like redirecting Alzheimer’s patients (or like a jailer misinforming prisoners about their choices regarding ratting on co-conspirators). The first is that in US Presidential races, the electoral college system means that the vast majority of voters live in states where the election isn’t close, and voting third party doesn’t make it more likely that the Republican will win. But the second, more important one, is that the reality of what the choices are has been stood on its head. The cooperative choice is actually voting for the best candidate. If enough people did that, we’d all be better off, because the best candidate would win. The defecting choice is voting for one corrupt warmongering candidate to defeat the other one. Whichever one it is who gets elected, we all lose.
The power of US propaganda prevents most of us from recognizing the true nature of the social dilemma that we’re in. I should include the caveat, however, that I’ve oversimplified the dilemma a bit, in that I haven’t factored in that the US electoral system is heavily rigged against third parties — though they occasionally succeed anyway. Many states have extremely difficult hurdles, such as requiring a very large number of petition signatures (not required of major party campaigns), for third party campaigns to clear simply to have candidates’ names appear on the ballot so that voters can see that they are choices. In the fall 2020 US election, the Democratic Party even filed lawsuits, decided upon by corrupt judges, that knocked Green Party candidates off the ballot even though they had well over the required number of petition signatures. Third party candidates are routinely kept out of candidate debates.
And not only are we led to believe that Democratic and Republican candidates are our only “legitimate” choices (or our only choices, period), we are also duped into believing that voting for one of those two choices (in reality, often a choice between chocolate dogshit and vanilla dogshit) is our only avenue for societal change. Kept carefully hidden from us is the power of mass protests, strikes, boycotts, and other forms of direct action that disrupt the system, make discussions of vital issues and progressive solutions “go viral,” and exert pressure for change.
We, “the 99%,” vastly outnumber the “1%” who keep us confined to an exploitative system. Our oppressors will do everything they can to keep hidden from us our latent power, the fact that by virtue of our sheer numbers, the working class has the power through united mass action to force systemic change — to reform and ultimately even to overthrow the capitalist system that is robbing us of a decent and secure standard of living and even destroying the very planet we live on. But we do have that power. It is up to all of us who understand this to awaken the rest of society’s oppressed masses to that fact, and in turn to help light the path that will lead us to our liberation.
