Don’t Blame Us
As we begin another Trump presidency, it’s important to remember that the political choices that were laid before us in November were not polar opposites. Despite the stark contrasts presented in campaign rhetoric, the underlying agenda of both Democrats and Republicans converges in their loyalty to the capitalist status quo.
Mainstream politics runs on a predictable loop that keeps power in the same hands. Politicians stir up outrage over certain issues, choosing ones they know will get people emotional and angry. When they’re not in charge, they use these issues to point fingers at the other side and promise they’ll fix everything. But once they’re in power, those promises fade, and nothing really changes at the root of the problem.
Instead of fixing things, they shift the blame—claiming their hands are tied by opposition or external forces. The promises they make are loud and flashy, designed to pull people in during elections, but they’re hollow at their core. These tactics are all about keeping the public distracted, emotional, and focused on the surface, while the deeper systems that create the problems stay untouched. It’s like a constant performance designed to make people feel like change is happening, even though the game is rigged to stay the same.
The fight over abortion rights exposes how mainstream politics, regardless of intent, perpetuates a cycle of failure and manipulation. Democrats position themselves as defenders of reproductive rights, but their inability—or unwillingness—to secure those rights has allowed access to erode for decades. Even before Roe was overturned, abortion rights were hollowed out in much of the country: Planned Parenthood was defunded, clinics were closed, and restrictions piled up. These losses weren’t sudden; they were the result of long-term neglect, systemic inaction, and reliance on Roe as a fragile shield.
When Democrats held power, they could have codified protections or fought harder for structural change, but they either lacked the ability or the resolve to do so. Even if their failure wasn’t intentional, the outcome is the same: abortion rights remain precarious, leaving voters in a perpetual state of crisis. Democrats still present themselves as saviors in every election, knowing they likely cannot deliver. This framing isn’t just ineffective—it’s dishonest. By rallying voters around promises they know the system won’t let them keep, they turn reproductive rights into a tool for political survival rather than a guarantee for women.
The system depends on keeping people in crisis—abortion rights are just another battleground to mobilize voters, not an urgent problem to solve. It’s not simply a failure of individual politicians; it’s how the game is rigged.
Both factions—Democrats and Republicans—operate within an infrastructure designed to maintain the capitalist status quo. Though their methods differ, both focus on funneling resources upward and diverting dissent by turning anger against each other. This tactic shifts attention away from core issues, pacifies voters, and guarantees the uninterrupted flow of capital.
As Immanuel Wallerstein demonstrates in World-Systems Analysis, elite dominance is sustained through the complementary roles of liberal and conservative factions. Liberals prioritize steering dissent into reforms that maintain the system's legitimacy, while conservatives concentrate on reinforcing hierarchy and safeguarding elite interests.
The Mirage of Progress: How Liberal Reforms Stabilize Exploitation
Liberals tend to cloak their agendas in soft rhetoric of “reform,” “progress,” and — in Obama’s case — “hope and change.” They might even claim to champion regulation and welfare. However, the function of such policy agendas is not to transform the system but to stabilize it, preserving elite interests under the guise of progress. Such superficially benign measures are better understood as surgical cuts that create a stable landscape for capitalists to map long-term profit without fearing the unknown.
When labor laws are just tight enough, they allow for great exploitation without risking revolt. When environmental standards are firm but not too firm, they facilitate immense resource extraction while ensuring there will be resources to extract tomorrow. When corporate regulatory laws are strict enough to curb outright fraud but lenient enough to allow monopolies to thrive, they ensure profits continue flowing while maintaining the illusion of accountability.
Such regulatory schemes enable corporations to forecast risks and adjust their strategies without fear of sudden or destabilizing changes. It's control — not for you, but for them. Every law, every regulation, builds a predictable cage, where profit can be measured, managed, and multiplied.
For liberal politicians, welfare is the leash. A thin, frayed cord that keeps the masses just comfortable enough to stay in line, to keep moving, to keep working. Just enough food. Just enough healthcare. Just enough student loan relief to keep the middle class compliant. Just enough to prevent the streets from erupting, to prevent that scary word, “revolution.” It’s not compassion. It’s maintenance. A system designed to patch the leaks just before the dam bursts, ensuring that the flow of capital is never interrupted by social unrest. Keep them hungry, but not starving. Keep them desperate, but not hopeless. And the capitalist system keeps breathing.
The Democrats’ strategy looks like change. Extended paid leave—more time to "rest." Small business loans—more "opportunity."
It’s a mirage.
These concessions are the chains that bind us tighter to the machine. They offer us an inch of relief, so we will work harder when we return to work. Boost small businesses, just enough to keep up the illusion of competition, but never enough to threaten the monopolies pulling the strings. The whole setup is designed to sugarcoat capitalism, to wrap it in layers of appealing rhetoric, make it softer, easier to swallow. It’s a system retooled to look almost humane, all so the capitalist class can keep gorging on wealth, piling plates high with the fruits of our labor. Meanwhile, we’re left scrambling for crumbs, clinging to a few hundred dollars in tax savings—an amount so insignificant it barely makes a dent.
There has never been a tax cut that erases the fact that we’re stuck in jobs that siphon away our energy and ambition, draining the best hours of our day under sterile lights in cubicles or factory floors, our creativity flattened by routines that suffocate any spark left in us.
These jobs numb us, turn us into automatons, dulling our minds to the point that even our dreams fade into monotony. And when we leave these jobs, stepping back into communities where faces blur together, where neighbors are just passersby in the background of our lives, we feel the emptiness even more.
Our towns, our cities, are filled with strangers—people we brush past without a glance because there’s no space, no moment, no reason to stop and connect. Public spaces are commercialized or surveilled, and any real communal bond feels far off, intangible, out of reach. We’re atomized, scattered like particles in a machine that’s only interested in grinding us down for profit, making sure we’re too busy, too worn out, too alienated to ever think about what a life rooted in real human connection could be.
And through it all, those at the top keep feasting, their banquets, like today’s inaugural ceremony, never interrupted by the exhaustion of our lives. They dine on the fat of the world, cloaked in comfort, oblivious—or worse, fully aware—of the isolation and fatigue their system creates, while we are conditioned to be grateful for the scraps, to believe that this is the best we can hope for.
Divide and Conquer: The Conservative Playbook for Sustaining Exploitation
Republicans refuse to match even the meager concessions offered by Democrats—not out of sheer cruelty, but calculated strategy. They grasp a fundamental truth: give too much, even crumbs, and you risk awakening a hunger for more. Frederick Douglass’s chilling observation on enslavement resonates here. The enslaved under a cruel master dream of kindness, but those under a kind master dream of freedom. Kindness, no matter how small, risks inspiring hope, and with hope comes rebellion. To prevent this, control must be enforced through raw fear and coercion—a strategy not lost on those determined to preserve power at all costs.
Historically, conservatives learned this lesson in the post-WWII era when liberal reforms like the New Deal and Great Society programs provided some breathing room, leading to a surge in labor organizing, civil rights activism, and other resistance movements. Republicans today, recognizing the dangers of such concessions, often oppose even modest reforms to prevent the conditions that enable questioning, empathy, and ultimately, resistance to systemic inequality.
Conservatives understand that to maintain control, they need to prevent solidarity from forming among the people. They know that real change begins when people see through the system and unify, so they turn to tried-and-true divide-and-conquer methods, using everything from racist dog whistles to xenophobic fearmongering to keep people divided. They stir up homophobic rage-baiting, channeling the anxieties and frustrations of everyday life toward scapegoats rather than the economic system that breeds these inequities. By inflaming these social tensions, they can keep people distracted from the raw economic plundering happening right under their noses.
This tactic is as brutal as it is effective. When the public is busy fuming over cultural grievances—whether it’s fear of immigrants “taking jobs,” disgust at queer rights, or resentment against racial justice movements—they’re not reflecting on and discussing how the elites are quietly rewriting economic rules in their favor. Every time conservative politicians amplify racial and cultural divisions, they’re creating a smokescreen that allows them to strip away protections, slash taxes for the wealthy, and gut regulations that slow the flow of capital into corporate bank accounts.
Republican scapegoating tactics don’t just distract—they actively reframe people’s understanding of their struggles, channeling anger toward cultural scapegoats instead of systemic causes. By demonizing immigrants, queer people, or marginalized communities, they create a false narrative: the idea that these groups are the ones taking jobs, destabilizing society, or draining resources. This narrative shifts focus from corporate exploitation and economic inequality, making it harder for people to recognize how policies like tax cuts for the wealthy or deregulation hurt them directly.
These tactics also create emotional investment in cultural battles, which makes it more difficult for people to see the broader economic forces at play. When someone is consumed by fears of “immigrants stealing jobs” or “moral decay,” they’re less likely to critically examine how low wages or the lack of healthcare access are actually the result of capitalist profit-seeking. The manufactured cultural conflict divides people into opposing camps, ensuring that frustration and energy are directed toward fighting each other rather than confronting those at the top who benefit from the system’s dysfunction. This misdirection isn’t just a distraction—it’s a deliberate method of ensuring that economic exploitation continues unchecked.
While they point fingers at social programs, framing them as “special treatment,” the real plundering happens at the top. Corporations get tax breaks that drain our schools, leaving classrooms packed and teachers underpaid. Housing costs soar, not because of “urban sprawl,” but because developers are given free rein to price-gouge. Meanwhile, our streets are filled with fast-food chains and empty storefronts while billionaire developers hoard empty high-rises as investments, waiting for values to rise even further. They’re robbing us all, yet they want us to believe the problem is with marginalized communities “draining” resources.
Their approach is raw, unapologetic, and brutal. It’s about short-term profit, here and now, squeezing every last drop of wealth out of the system, bleeding it dry. There’s no talk of sustainability. No concern for the future. Why plan for tomorrow when you can drain everything today? As Wallerstein informs, the Right isn’t interested in correcting capitalism’s inherent instability. Rather, they embrace and enable its most destructive tendencies.
To those who resist, the Right offers force — pure, naked force. While Democrats rely on a subtle hand and may even endorse the odd police reform (though they are doing so less and less often), Republicans don’t even pretend. State violence is their tool to stamp out any spark of rebellion before it grows into a fire. They don’t need to win hearts and minds. They’ll beat them into submission.
Protest? Crush it. Union strikes? Break them. Any murmur of revolt, any hint that the people might rise up against this system of exploitation, and they come down like a hammer.
Republicans don’t think the system is fragile. They think it’s indestructible. In their quest to deliver the capitalists short-term dominance, they neglect the long-term instability they create. They believe that, as long as the state is strong enough, they can keep this machine running indefinitely — no matter how many people get chewed up in the gears.
Two Faces of Control: Efficiency vs. Domination in Capitalist Strategies
The contrasting strategies between Democrats and Republicans today mirror a historical dynamic dating back to the Civil War era. Back then, Northern industrialists and Southern plantation owners had differing approaches to maximizing profit and maintaining control, just as modern-day Democrats and Republicans do.
Industrialists saw that wage labor was paradoxically more profitable than slavery, even after the advent of the cotton gin. The morality of slavery wasn’t the primary issue. For Northern elites, slavery had to go because it was inefficient! It requires immense resources: housing, feeding, overseeing, and punishing enslaved people to keep them in line. Wage laborers required none of that. And they’d still do whatever was asked because they knew they could be replaced at any time. This competition also drove wages down, increasing profits.
Moreover, as the ranks of the enslaved swelled, rich whites increasingly feared large-scale slave revolution. So, as an alternative to slavery, Northern industrialists championed “free” labor. But the purpose was to fatten their wallets and make capitalism not just more efficient but easier to justify by creating the illusion of two equal, consenting parties entering into a contract. Democrats today do a similar thing, offering seemingly empowering reforms while actually securing capitalism’s long-term survival.
Republicans, on the other hand, mirror the Confederacy. Republicans prioritize dominance over any true efficiency or productivity. Their strategy isn’t about refining the system for optimal profit; it’s about raw control. Just as Southern plantation owners clung to the brutally inefficient system of slavery—where domination, not productivity, was the goal—today’s Republicans would rather wield visible, crushing authority than embrace policies that might make the economy more sustainable or humane, like a four-day work week or fair labor reforms. These measures could indeed boost productivity in the long run, but Republicans resist them because they don’t align with a philosophy of control that demands a clear hierarchy of power.
For them, deregulation, union-busting, and cutting social safety nets aren’t just economic tools; they’re strategies to ensure that power stays firmly in the hands of the few. The logic is simple: it’s better to keep workers in line, exhausted and desperate, than to give an inch of breathing room that might lead them to question the power structure itself. This is why they’re willing to gut labor rights, to force people into unlivable conditions, even if it’s ultimately less efficient. Dominance takes precedence over any long-term considerations, and they’re willing to accept economic instability down the line if it means asserting their grip in the present
In this framework, short-term profit extraction isn’t just about money—it’s about keeping people dependent, fearful, and powerless. Deregulation isn’t a means to unleash “freedom” in the market; it’s a way to ensure that corporate and political elites operate unchecked, without interference.
Crushing labor rights isn’t just about saving money in the short term—it’s about maintaining control. Giving in to workers’ demands might be cheaper than enduring a prolonged strike, with profits lost and resources spent on legal battles, but it would send a dangerous signal: that collective action works. Once workers see they can win, they’re empowered to demand more, and the balance of power shifts. To prevent this, employers make every concession a costly fight, forcing workers to endure the pain of lost wages and job insecurity. The goal isn’t just to deny their demands—it’s to remind them of their vulnerability and reinforce the belief that resistance is futile. This is domination disguised as policy, where submission matters more than productivity, sustainability, or even immediate profit.
The Illusion of Democracy: Why Real Change Lies Beyond the Ballot Box
Thus, we see the duality in their approaches. Democrats appear to offer progressive reforms but ultimately reinforce corporate power—like public-private partnerships in healthcare, which funnel profits to private insurers while offering minimal relief. Similarly, their green energy subsidies enrich corporations while fossil fuel interests remain largely intact. On the other hand, Republicans pursue overt deregulation and prioritize dominance to ensure immediate profit for the elite, stripping protections and relying on divide-and-conquer strategies alongside state-sanctioned violence to maintain control.
Donald Trump and the Republicans won this round. As Trump’s administration pursues its agenda, the public, particularly those on the left, will be demeaned for their failure to elect the other candidate running on a platform of ecological collapse and genocide, Kamala Harris.
The absurdity of it all is staggering: politicians dare to chastise the public like unruly children, all while serving as the architects of manipulation, ensuring we sustain the very system that causes our suffering. Voter turnout dips—not because of apathy, but because people are exhausted, burnt out from being dragged through cycles of empty promises and betrayals.
And yet, in an astonishing show of audacity, these so-called “leaders” twist this very burnout into a moral indictment against the people themselves. The same people who they systematically disenfranchise, manipulate, and pacify. It’s as if they’re gaslighting an entire population, scolding them for feeling exactly how anyone would feel after decades of deception and disregard.
Imagine the gall it takes for these politicians to wag their fingers at the public, saying, “Well, if you’d only come out to vote, this wouldn’t have happened.” Or as Chuck Schumer said recently, “we did a lot of good things” but “average working families…didn’t realize how much we had done and how much we care for them.” They’re shifting the blame, not out of ignorance, but out of sheer calculation.
They know precisely why voter turnout falters. They know it’s a rational reaction to a broken system that has made a habit of using people’s hopes and fears as fuel. And yet they still perform this act of parental scorn, as though the electorate are petulant children who just need to “grow up” and accept that this is how things work.
Who are they to lecture anyone about responsibility? They are, fundamentally, no different from the rest of us—fallible, self-interested, and in this case, complicit in a rigged game. The only difference is that they’re sitting in the driver’s seat, steering a machine that grinds people up for profit, and they’re expecting the collective will be too cowardice to stand up to them.
The system counts on people to believe that participation is their “civic duty”—a holy obligation that absolves the government of any real accountability. If the public doesn’t show up, well, that’s on them. This twisted narrative conveniently allows politicians to wash their hands of any responsibility to actually represent the people. They’re masters of deflection, creating a self-perpetuating loop: each election becomes a judgment on the people, rather than the politicians. We are supposed to believe that every failure is our failure, not theirs.
In reality, though, this isn’t civic duty; it’s a scam. It’s a carefully constructed illusion that casts political engagement as a moral responsibility, even when that engagement offers no real choice.
They want you to vote, yes, but they’re betting you’ll stay blind to the fact that both options represent the interests of your antagonist. They’re counting on people to keep participating in a spectacle that is only capable of delivering more of the same ever-intensifying oppression, dressed up in new slogans and new faces.
When the results inevitably disappoint, they’re right there to pin the blame on you. It’s a cycle that infantilizes the public, making them feel like they’re perpetually in need of guidance, always failing to live up to some unattainable standard of “good citizenship.”
The reality is this: those in power are just apes in suits. They’re not elevated beings with grand visions; they’re individuals with agendas, ambitions, and very human flaws. Yet, they wield power as though they’re ordained by some higher moral calling, as though they’re entitled to discipline the public for not playing their part. The people are expected to trust these “leaders,” to believe that they’re somehow different, somehow wiser despite what our eyes and ears tell us so plainly.
In their song “War Monger” the Simpkin Project sings:
“Why didn't we see this thing, why didn′t we see this coming?
How could we forget all of the symptoms showing?
It′s some kind of denial that has made us blind.
How could we forget, how were we fooled this time?”
Abuse of power comes as no surprise. How can we still be so naive, so willing to elevate those who crave it?
Voting is the barest, weakest form of engagement—a hollow ritual, a mere gesture to a system that was designed to sell us out. It’s a theater, a carefully staged illusion that our voices mean something when cast into a rigged game that only knows how to perpetuate itself.
They tell us to vote, to hope the right choice prevails, but when has that ever brought true freedom? When has that ever transformed the world, cracked open the foundation of exploitation, ripped up the root of oppression?
In his last book before his assassination, even Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledged the limitations of political reform and voting within a system built on exploitation. He wrote in Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? that while civil rights victories had been won, they were insufficient to address the deeper economic inequalities and systemic oppression at the root of injustice. King recognized that true freedom required a radical restructuring of society, one that voting alone could never achieve.
When we understand our political potential as wrapped solely in voting, we are kept locked in a dream—a dream where change can be handed to us, as if real liberation ever came from passive acceptance. The whole system thrives on this passivity, banking on the hope that we will remain in our seats, ticking boxes, while they profit off our compliance.
For the elite, the sanctity of voting is all about keeping you docile, keeping you sedated, keeping you endlessly choosing your own rulers. Because the owners of this world don’t care which puppet you pick. They only care that you keep picking.
Before the election, Barack Obama declared, "Voting is a part of your birthright as a citizen." Voting is a birthright? No. Stop with the hollow sanctity. There is no such thing as a birthright—there never was. We’re apes on a spinning rock, clawing through the chaos of existence, pretending rituals like voting will fix a system that was designed to keep us powerless. Why cling to this farce? Why sanctify a broken order that feeds on inequality, desperation, and fear? It’s time we face reality. Tear down the illusions. Stop pouring faith into this machine that grinds us down and calls it progress. We must band together, reject the lies, and build something real—a social order where everyone is provided for, where survival isn’t a privilege but a given. A world where harmony isn’t a utopian dream but the bare minimum we demand. Enough of this charade.
The truth is that the powerful fear one thing above all: a world in which people find strength in each other rather than the empty promises of politicians. They know that if we turn to each other, if we build connections and care for each other without their interference, we will start to see them for what they are: parasites clinging to an outdated world of control and domination.
Imagine a world where we don’t play by their rules—a world built on cooperation, not competition. Imagine communities where people come together out of true respect and shared purpose, where our needs are met by each other, not through wages or scraps from the powerful, but through mutual care, through systems we create together. In this world, we’re not just striking for better wages or playing by the economic rules they set. We’re leaving those rules behind altogether, building something so radically different that their hierarchies, their laws, their whole order of power becomes irrelevant, obsolete.
Picture people organizing food production and distribution networks so no one goes hungry, people caring for each other’s health not because a paycheck demands it but because they truly see each other’s humanity. We form networks of solidarity where every person has a voice—not just every few years, but in every decision, in every moment that shapes their life. We don’t beg for change; we make change, directly, with our hands, with our time, with our love for each other. It’s not charity, it’s not some feel-good gesture—it’s survival, it’s power, and it’s freedom. It’s mutual aid. This awakening would be the birth of a new way of being, a transformation driven by the idea that we don’t need them, that we can create a society based on free agreement and collective flourishing without ever looking up to their thrones.
We will care for each other, we will feed each other, we will house each other, and we will defend each other—not because some politician says we can, but because we know we can. Every act of mutual aid, every community council, every time we choose each other over them, we chip away at their power, building a foundation for a world that renders them obsolete.
This is about taking back life itself from a system that tries to parcel it out to us, one vote at a time, one dollar at a time. It’s about declaring that we are not cogs in their machine, not consumers, not mere voters, but free beings, producers, ready to create something new. This world we imagine isn’t some dream—it’s possible, it’s tangible, and it’s already being built wherever people choose each other over power, wherever they refuse to live by laws that benefit the few over the many.
As Gil-Scott Heron famously suggested, the real revolution won’t unfold as a televised spectacle like the staged theater of voting every four years. It will rise from the ground up, born of people who are done asking for permission. It will emerge in every neighborhood where people choose solidarity over division, where they create systems of care that need no overlords, no lawmakers, no gatekeepers. It will be raw, it will be messy, it will be beautiful, but most importantly, it will be ours.
As Bob Marley sang, “Soon we'll find out who is the real revolutionary.”
Peter S. Baron (http://www.petersbaron.com) is the author of If Only We Knew: How Ignorance Creates and Amplifies the Greatest Risks Facing Society.
