Every election cycle, the right-wing rehashes a new version of a very old debate: should we keep voting Republican or consciously abstain from voting altogether?
In the wake of the 2020 election, with Trump apparently losing through what seems to be obvious ballot fraud, and with the feckless Republicans unwilling to help him challenge the results—even as they demand support for their own Senate candidates in Georgia—the debate has returned with even greater force. During the most recent “Stop the Steal” march in DC against election rigging, Nick Fuentes led a crowd of Zoomers in chants to “destroy the GOP” and booed Georgia Senate candidates David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler. Likewise on the dissident right, Z-Man did an entire podcast encouraging his listeners to stop voting. But with the fraud so obvious and the Republican so cowardly, the idea of withdrawing support from the Republican Party has even taken over the normie right. You see the same sentiment from Fuentes and Z-Man echoed in Breitbart commenters, Rush Limbaugh callers, and “MAGA Moms”-type Facebook groups.
While it is nice to see people fed up with the truly useless GOP, a so-called “principled refusal to vote” is just another dead end. While its proponents often claim it is some radical break with the failures of the past, it has more in common with the old cuckservative ethos of preemptive surrender than they would like to admit. It is just another example of the right’s never-ending ability to shoot itself in the foot, and to rationalize a decision to stay on the sidelines as some kind of moral victory. In decisions like these, the tendency to overthink things is fatal. It would be better to act like your dumb Boomer uncle, and just vote straight GOP reflexively.
No one likes to have to make these arguments among the kinds of circles that read the American Sun. It makes you seem like a shill, trying to convince the radicals to shut up and make peace with the system. On the other hand, the Catechism of the Catholic Church holds that each person’s duties of “submission to authority and co-responsibility for the common good make it morally obligatory to . . . exercise the right to vote” (section 2240, emphasis added), so I’m in good company aside from just the attendees at CPAC. Similarly, Noam Chomsky took a lot of heat from the radical left when, earlier this year, he told the Bernie Bros to vote for Biden. But if you believe in Chomsky’s ideology, then the recommendation to Biden was entirely sensible. In every situation we find ourselves, we should choose the option that makes us marginally better off in comparison with every other one. All of the arguments against voting are really just efforts to ignore this simple and fundamental truth.
For instance, we are told that voting is a waste of time. But I’ve voted in several presidential elections now and longest it ever took me was about one hour (and in the age of early and absentee COVID voting, it takes significantly less time than that). Can you really not spare a single hour of your day?
Well, in response, we are told that even if voting is quick, it is a waste of time because it won’t change anything. But since the Georgia runoff elections were announced, our enemies have been working every day to make sure their side wins, racking up record amounts of donations for a candidate who said that “America needs to repent for its worship of whiteness.” Even if you don’t think elections matter, it should certainly give you pause that the likes of Stacey Abrams do, and that they are working overtime to win a battle on behalf of these kinds of candidates, while you think it is revolutionary to sit the battle out entirely.
Next, we are told that if we keep voting Republican we will only encourage the Republican candidates to keep doing the same bad things they have been doing in the past. But by the same token, if we abstain from voting and let the Democrats win, then we will only encourage them to keep doing the same bad things they have been doing—which are of course much worse.
Supposedly if the Republicans lose, we are told that they will see the error of their ways and start running better candidates that are more congenial to us. I certainly hope that happens, and wish everyone all the best in making it so, but it is far from a guarantee. After the disaster of the Bush years, we still got McCain and Romney candidacies. Even Donald Trump’s election didn’t lead to a big increase in down-ballot Trumpist candidates. Kelly Loeffler, after all, beat Doug Collins the Trump loyalist to become the Republican candidate in Georgia, while the mainstream Tommy Tuberville, despite outwardly praising Trump, beat out the genuinely populist Jeff Sessions in the Alabama Senate primary earlier this year. There is no reason to believe that letting flesh-and-blood Republicans lose now will lead to hypothetically better ones in the future—it may just convince the party to start listening to the Lincoln Project instead.
Finally, nearing the end of the argument, the vote-abstainer will usually scoff and say something sarcastic like, “What are you going to do? Keep voting harder? You really think voting will solve our problems?” and then laugh in disgust.
This is really the most important reaction because it shows that the vote-abstainer, much more than the voter, is the one who over-emphasizes the importance of voting. At this time no one on the so-called dissident right would doubt that our multiculturalist post-America is too fractured and our problems are too deep for any Republican candidate to be able to fix. But voting Republican doesn’t actively harm us, requires very little effort, and, in the end, may make the gathering darkness darken a little slower than it otherwise would. Surely that counts for something.
Imagine you graduated college a few years ago and began a career as a chef. You could have chosen any career, but you decided on this one. You moved away from your family and lost touch with your friends to work at a restaurant in New York City. Now, of course, all the restaurants are closed due to COVID and you lost your job. You are stuck in a city you no longer want to live in, with student loans and no support network, and your only options now are to apply for welfare benefits or start driving for Uber.
It would be callous and non-responsive to advise such a person by saying, “you wouldn’t be in this situation if you became a lawyer.” The past is irrevocable and constrains our opportunities in the present. We can only choose between the options available to us now. And while the aspiring chef’s remaining options aren’t good, they still present real choices, and some will be better than others. The voter choosing between Kelly Loeffler and the black supremacist pastor–or between David Perdue and the woke corporate bugman–is faced with the same type of choice. Certainly the Republican Party should be better, we should have better options, and people should be working to make our politics better for the future. But to say “all these choices are terrible so I abstain” adds nothing but pointing out how bad the situation is and so forsakes the ability to find a way to make it better.
Voting should only be part of the background of a well-ordered life. It isn’t an opportunity to save the country; it is just a thin straw you might grasp every couple years to make your life marginally better and prevent your enemies from making it worse. To not vote is to leave weapons on the table–weak weapons though they may be–that your enemies have no scruples about using against you. Conceptualized like that, it always makes sense to vote for the lesser of two evils.
The American Sun 
We need to stop expecting cost-free solutions. Voting is not enough if you don’t have force to back it up. Voting is not enough if you’re not actually putting our people in office. Mainstream GOP is not us.
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We’ve reached the point where both sides of the aisle are saying basically the same thing. I cannot think of a single issue in which the (majority of the) Republican party meaningfully opposes the Democrat party except in regards to domestic spending in which regard the Republican party is almost demonstrably worse, as shown by the recent stimulus fiasco. In order to convince people that the vote matters, you’d have to make the case that things would be different with the Republican senators vs the Democrat senators and I don’t believe you have.
Additionally, yes, abstention from voting is no guarantee that they’ll ever start fielding better candidates or that our guys could win. However, I think I could make the case that there’s much more of a rift between the base and the elites now than there was at the time of the examples you gave. There’s a reason why all these senators (including the aforementioned Tuberville) feel the need to be throwing these electoral college challenges now, ineffectual as they will probably be.
I could also counter your narrative about the establishment believing democracy and votes matter with how the Republican party has put in only the bare minimum of effort to keep president Trump in office, as Fuentes himself pointed out. They’re going so hard to get us to vote for Loeffler and Perdue, but they don’t care about having Pence as their tiebreaker vote in the Senate should those two lose? Of course they don’t. This whole ordeal is about showing the donor class that they can still run on these boomer neocon platforms and still win. It’s about keeping the gravy train going, and that holds equally true for the Democrats and their policies.
We’re not “rewarding” the democrats. They’re gonna be what they are regardless of what we do. Holiness spiral and all. We simply know the value of killing a traitor before an enemy.
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“Aidan”
We don’t vote anymore – we hack or are hacked.
Wanna vote? Learn to Code. Or read the Dominion manual, it’s no hard hack.
The real question Aidan is: What would the Irish do?
Well, what the Irish did.
Voting is part of the solution; it is the religious ritual that justifies what actually WORKED.
The ancients would gut a bird and examine it’s entrails, we vote.
But this requires that the election in some way be honest, it is not.
It’s all software stolen elections from now on Aidan et al.
We’ll never even be given the appearance of legitimacy again, just as we cannot gather, just as we cannot go to Church but must worship from Zoom Priesthole’s we shall not have electoral legitimacy.
Wanna ‘Vote’? sure. Here’s the Dominion user manual, as you can see it’s far from a complicated or difficult Hack.
Click to access 2-03-EMS-FunctionalityDescription-5-11-CO.pdf
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We’re not voting our way out of this. Once we get a critical mass that accepts this, progress can be made. Wasting our mental energy on debates about why to vote for the next crap sandwich dilutes that energy.
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Agreed, but other people are encouraging us to not vote, which is counter-productive. You should keep voting while searching for other solutions.
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You should only vote if you have a solid reason to believe that you’ll get something for it – either in protection or gibs. I don’t know of even one national politician in either party who’d be a good bet for either.
And the catechism has no relevance to modern American politics or frankly even to most modern Catholics for other purposes either.
Voting locally makes sense. Possibly even in some state-level races in small pop states. But voting for national offices is an obvious net-negative in terms of energy/time vs. positive results. If you can’t even look the politician in question in the eye and ask him questions in person on a regular basis, he’s prima facie insulated from accountability to you. So national politics are a non-starter.
Our concept of representative government developed in a time and tech where representatives were much more directly tied to and accountable to their actual communities/constituencies. In terms of numbers alone, the current 535 national senators & reps “represent” so many people with conflicting interests that the entire concept is a sham now. Presidential politics is 535 times more fake & gay. Quantity has a quality in this context.
Unless and until the parties change, this won’t change.
You’re living in a Jewish ethno-plutocracy and voting for politicians who cold-bloodedly lie to you in saying its a deracinated civ-nat democracy.
A dictatorship would be more honest about its use of power and more likely to advance your interests.
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Nine times out of ten, it’s good to go against the prevailing alt-right grain, but not this time. As well as Fuentes and Zman, even Andrew “Trust The Plan” Anglin has jumped aboard the #NoVote bandwagon recently. Here’s why they are right to do so:
https://affirmativeright.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-no-vote-movement.html
TL;DR: Voting, particularly for the con party, is the number one mechanism ensuring permanent cultural revolution. It upholds the value of Bioleninist client groups to the state. It keeps potential reactionaries on a comfortable, sinecured, powerless political fringe, thus locking them out of real power. Lastly, it exerts such a strong delusive effect on the dissident right (case in point, the last four years of insanity and cope) that the collective mental health of our little community would be reason enough for us to stop doing it.
Now, if the Catholic Church (which should have stuck to religion long ago) tells you that you have to vote, then why not just write None Of The Above on your ballot and say that you’re voting against the politicians? Or, if you really want to “submit to authority”, then vote for the leftist inner party on the grounds that they represent the actual government. Conservatism is a self-deluding, self-perpetuating con-trick, and true reaction will find no place in the West until its hollow-hearted doppelganger is seen for what it really is.
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Voting isn’t legitimizing anyone’s values; it is just a defensive action to make the most of a bad situation. And it doesn’t need to have any delusive effect on anyone. You can just vote, forget about it, and go back to doing more important things. The right’s downfall is over-intellectualizing everything, where withdrawing from a fight is somehow considered a long-range victory strategy. The left never does this, which is one of the reasons why they win.
Also, I don’t think you should vote because the Catholic Church says so, I think you should do it for the reasons I stated. But the Catholic Church, whatever its failings, is still a greater authority on moral judgments than Andrew Anglin or assorted e-celebs.
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I’m not saying “follow Andrew Anglin and the e-celebs”, I’m saying “even Andrew Anglin and the e-celebs have woken up to the wisdom of no-voting, and that should tell you something.”
“Withdrawing from a fight” is cowardly if you have a fighting chance. But when the game is rigged, the other players are in on it, and your assent to the rules is just a way of rubber-stamping your own robbery, then withdrawal is the only right choice. Consider also the difference between “giving up” a real heroic struggle (surrender), and “giving up” an addiction to a delusional fantasy (victory).
I agree with you that the right tends to die from overthinking. But this is better applied to the tortured rationalisations of votecucks who simply can’t give up the illusion of control. When the right stops generating fantasies in its mind, and starts listening to its gut, what does it find there? Apathy. Pessimism. The black pill. This is why we can never muster the energy to do anything, despite the fact that we are watching our civilisation being eaten alive. But the black pill comes from a deep awareness that voting, activism, and “democratic rights” amount to so much self-deception and masturbation, and unless we face up to the truth of this we are never going to find an alternative.
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Big lol at the implication that the Roman catechism isn’t worse than a typical platform that comes out of CPAC. Literally the very next sentence to the “right to vote” one is “The more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin.” Sorry, your church has been totally co-opted by liberals, and the only reason they aren’t full Episcopalian yet is to keep normie cons from jumping ship with their moolah. I hope you’ll wake up before the boomer on the throne shilling civil unions writes them into the catechism too.
Your major premise is essentially that protesting by abstaining from voting is hardly guaranteed to lead to better candidates. Even if that is so, we can be 100% certain that the Republicans aren’t going to re-evaluate anything if they’re sailing along smoothly, even to defeat if they think they can cast themselves as gracious losers (they have been playing this for forever and somehow the next generation of agitators never seem to appreciate that their enemies rolled over and surrendered without a fight). If they actually suffered a shock loss, the party would have to do *some* level of soul-searching, and at least we have a shot at being heard over the snakes of the ilk of the Lincoln Project whispering about winning over the ethnics by selling out their core constituents who the establishment love anyway.
Of course, the ballot box is the absolute least consequential arena for politics. The threat of withdrawing support is spineless if you don’t have boots on the ground protesting, which we have. Is “I guess we’ll have to bite the bullet and vote for the awful boomercon as the lesser of two evils” a serious rallying point? Can you meaningfully demonstrate against a politician you admit are good enough to vote for by your standards? The squeaky wheel gets the grease. The GOP haven’t done a whole lot of listening to the demoralized plebs who grumble to themselves while they tick R, that’s for sure.
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The next sentence after the one you quote is “Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants’ duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens.” This isn’t promoting the mass immigration we know.
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The pontifex doesn’t read it that way, and I hear he’s something of an authority when it comes to interpreting the teachings of your church. Regardless, I don’t think the concession “may make subject to various juridical conditions” seriously counterbalances the supposed obligation to respect the “right to immigrate” for “means of livelihood”. At best it is the pure boomercon “infinity immigration is okay as long as it’s *legal*”. Do you seriously believe that is a valid inference from “honor thy father and mother”? The catechism hardly stops there too: even on that topic, 2433 adduces from “thou shalt not steal” the obligation not to discriminate in hiring even between citizen and immigrant. And that’s as it stands today; as we all know, the pope can amend his catechism as he likes, up to and including deciding that two millennia of Chrstian teaching on the death penalty can be overturned. But let’s not get caught in the weeds autistically dissecting the Roman catechism. The long and short of it is the Vatican is not our ally, as they clearly align themselves with the political and economic agenda of the global empire, and the Roman church is not going to save you.
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Wanna vote? Learn to Code. Or read the Dominion manual
Vote with your 2A
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Considering that OP completely misconstrued what Fuentes et al. were saying to do (or not do), I have to assume that OP is full of shit.
The power of the ballot box, however big or little it might be, only means something insofar that the voter has the willingness not only to show up vote but to withhold said vote from their supposed “Representatives” when they fail to deliver (or just outright backstab them). Instead of cucking to the GOP in the hopes that they will one day they stop backstabbing us, we need to fucking crush them through whatever means we have; whether it be withholding our votes, primary challenges or whatever.
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No use in voting. It is all rigged.
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Voting only works if the Ballot Box is respected…
2020 proved, once and for all, that the Ballot Box is not respected.
Everyone needs to read Bev Harris’ “Black Box Voting” from 2004:
https://blackboxvoting.org/black-box-voting-book/
It actually is a rigged system. That’s not a lie, not an exaggeration, not some useless fatalistic view, it’s Reality.
Trump’s win in 2016 was a fluke. They didn’t expect him to be that popular. The machine voting algorithm broke and Trump won through the Fraud of 2016.
Trump also was hugely popular in 2020. Again he broke through the Fraudulent machine algorithm. That’s why they needed to scan 10s of thousands of fake ballots in the middle of night.
It is rigged. Read the book, and read the Antrim MI report. It’s all there in black and white.
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You should think of voting not as an explicit expression of your self-interest, but as a tool to camouflage your true nature, while subverting your enemies (GOPe, neo[cons/libs], commies). The wisest thing you could do is vote for someone who harms all of them more than they harm you, and do so in such a way that no one can claim you’re a not-see and hunt you down for doxing. A far left anti-war party would work, as would the loonyiest lefty you can find.
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Vote.
Vote for whatever destroys the fake opposition the fastest so we can get a real Right.
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great one
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