In the United States, presidential elections can be mesmerizing. Even people whose political work does not center electoral politics often become spectators at the electoral circus. Keeping up with the news about a presidential race can quickly morph into a hyper-focus on every meme, sound byte, and mud-slinging “debate” that the electoral circus has to offer. We live in an era of reality TV politics filled with DIY controversies. Any of us can generate a social media debacle that observers will waste hours on — how democratic! The press, politicians, and our education system all reinforce the idea that our electoral choices are the sum total of our political lives. This misperception leads people to feel righteous in their electoral obsessions and has convinced many that sharing memes and yelling at each other about elections not only amounts to political action but also constitutes a meaningful political life. However, politics dictate the conditions that inform our lives each and every day, so our engagement with politics — the work of shaping those conditions — must be ongoing. We must not allow the electoral circus we’re experiencing to reshape our ideas about what is possible. We should be reshaping the standards of candidates rather than the reverse. For example, we have not been in the streets for the past ten months demanding a more “empathetic tone” towards Palestine. We have been demanding an end to the genocide, an end to apartheid, freedom of movement for Palestinians, and an arms embargo. Those demands must continue to echo across our politics. When it comes to abortion, the codification of Roe was never enough, and it’s still not enough. The list goes on.

Resisting the erosion of our politics also means resisting the normalization of troubling rhetoric. That means rejecting the “she’s a prosecutor and he’s a felon” nonsense. People who argue that being a “prosecutor” positions someone as a savior in an era when carceral systems mark people for mass disposal amid the ongoing normalization of mass death and mass murder are not well-positioned to save themselves or each other as our situation declines. People who believe the label of “felon” should disqualify someone from political life do not understand the nature of the power struggle we’re experiencing. It is Trump’s life as a member of the ruling class, who are typically exempt from criminalization, that has positioned him to do great harm. This is always the case. Think about the oil executives who knew decades ago that they were driving us toward a mass extinction event. These men are responsible for mass death on an incalculable scale. People are dying from heat stroke, fleeing from wildfires, and being drowned by floods as I type because of the conditions that these executives knowingly cultivated. They are mass murderers, but they are not “felons” because the system exists to facilitate their........

© Truthout