037: The Excrement End of Social Change

The Future Is A Mixtape

Dejected and defeated—by the slimmest of electoral margins—Donald J. Trump spent his post-election nightmare hiding at a Washington golf club straddling between swings of his Titleist 910D2 Driver and plans for a bitter campaign of denials, recriminations and lawsuits. Having narrowly snatched victory out of the jaws of their own defeat, McLiberals celebrate the vanquishment of America’s cosplay fascist and promise to “save the soul of America” by bringing “decency and compassion to The White House”—a castle built by the ruthless exploitation of African slaves. Grazing through the deforested wasteland of our celebrity-food-chain media-scape, Blue-State Brunchers raise their champagne flutes to toasts of a “return to normal” on social media, while millions of desperate Americans remain unfed, unhoused, and unloved. Covid-19, like a knife that never stops, slashes into wounds already open. In the words of Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” So what must be done to bring a new world to life? While electoral politics should not be simply ignored or discarded, we must recognize that its feckless attachments to spectacle at the expense of direct democracy leave the world more disfigured than transformed. Voting is, ultimately, the excrement end of social change. It’s a sign of where power turns to shit: sometimes fertilizing gardens of future flowers; but more often than not, it ends up poisoning our local water systems (e.g. Flint, Michigan). Real democracy requires deliberation: with strangers in the streets, with neighbors on the corner, with colleagues in the workplace, and at home with family & friends. More than just an American obsession with the reality-show dumpster fire of 45, the world has for decades suffered from a sick addiction to Presidential politics, a myopic deference to the almighty power of a single individual. Instead, what we desperately need is real democracy. So, for this episode, Matt & Jesse will consider practical solutions that can finally end the shit-parade of legalized bribery and pay-to-play campaigning that comprise electoral politics as we know it. Beyond the long list of obvious and necessary reforms (including abolition of the electoral college, public financing, and universal suffrage) lies the unearthing of a long-forgotten central pillar of democracy: legislative appointment by lottery. Sortition, or the drawing of lots, is a democratic tool as old as the notion of democracy itself, and may be a key to designing an egalitarian future. Democracy is a fragile, morpheus dream. And ultimately, democracy is a wish we release into the air like a question mark or a song; some sounds dissipate quickly, but others echo through the forest into the ears of others. As Mark Fisher once wrote, “The long dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.”

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

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