Your vote will not make you a white man.
Your role in a political position will not make you a white man. In this last day before the midterms, if you’re still on the fence, decide whether you’re voting to make the country better for everyone or to make yourself feel better about your perceived deficiencies.
Now, when I say deficiencies, you might not think you have them. Vivek Ramaswamy has written extensively about how special he is because of his Brahmin birth. He put in writing that he was meant to have servants and outrank Kings. Think of what even he had enough self-awareness not to put in writing. Ramaswamy does not think he is deficient. He sees the system as just a little behind on including him in the power structure of white supremacy. His reasoning for his hierarchical position is different than the white men on the trail talking about women’s subservience. But the rhetoric is analogous; I deserve unearned power. My role is clear if you had “a proper understanding of the world.” You’re wrong to miss that I deserve the power history affords me.
But we don’t live in the past; he does. His delusions are a deficiency as a leader and a human for a leader who is working for a better tomorrow. That is the challenge with MAGA. They want to go backward. They want this, not because it will make the nation better, but instead, for their own self-interest.
As Brian Poindexter, running against a Ratner heir in Ohio’s seventh, said this year, character is on the ballot. His opponent comes from one of Cleveland’s wealthiest families — a large and storied Jewish family. You can drive through Shaker Heights to see their glorious old mansions. Their quiet money has helped support synagogues, museums, and schools. But they’ve largely supported liberal causes. Max Miller graduated from Shaker, largely friendless despite being from an old Shaker family, and had to go across town to find people who would celebrate his alleged wife-beating, cheating, and financial misdeeds. Pointdexter, on the other hand, is from the west side, at the heart of the gerrymandered-to-hell district that attempted to undermine the political power of pro-union, pro-Black Cleveland politics. Pointdexter is a local, well loved in that area. He loves the deals in town because he’s raising three daughters. He knows the best place for ½ price pie night and how to shop for deals. In his remarks ahead of the election, he said that he wants his neighborhood to have someone who knows the plight of local families in DC. But he also wants us to remember this isn’t about party but about character. Vote in people who show they believe in you.
Max and Vivek’s delusions start with their upbringing but no doubt percolated in their broken souls. They, like most MAGA politicians, use the rhetoric of us versus them in hopes that hate will help them get voters to notice they too are minorities. In Michigan, Haley Stevens did the same over the weekend. In all their tales, we see how much main character energy MAGA and MAGA-adjacent folks have. They yearn for power to assuage whatever self-hate lives inside them.
Politics should not be about personal aggrandizement. It should be about people who want to serve the public to make this a better nation to live in. If your only talking point is hate your neighbor, I’ll assume you’re hateful. But if your talking point is to hate your neighbor for being a minority, and you are a minority, I’ll assume you hate yourself. American politics needs to rid itself of self-hating children who have tried to suck our national soul like bloodsuckers, hateful ticks. We need to stamp out their ambition and allow ourselves to flourish free from the hateful parasites.
Every ballot on Tuesday is a choice. The person who wants to continue the grift of MAGA, who reminds you about hell and damnation to scare you into a vote. They pull on your insecurities. Their actions show their ideas much better than their word. If you’re working class, brown, Black, or a woman, they’re planning to keep making life harder. On Tuesday, tell them you’d like someone who sees you as human and wants to start making change.
