I’m told every four years that if I don’t vote for the corporate centrist, I’m complicit in fascism. That if I don’t fall in line behind the “good cops” of empire, I’m helping the bad ones win. That the only moral high ground is the one paved by Raytheon-funded liberals who believe trans rights and drone strikes can coexist peacefully. I’ve played the game. I’ve held my nose. I’ve made the “strategic” choices. But each time, something in me dies a little more quietly.
What used to feel like tactical compromise now feels like ritual humiliation. Vote not with hope, but with dread. Vote not for what you want, but against what you fear. And if you dare break from the spell—if you even question the logic—you’re accused of being a purist, a privilege-soaked idealist, or worse: a fascist enabler. That’s the leash liberals keep tied to the Left. Their central message is always the same: we’re not them, so you owe us your silence, your vote, your complicity.
But I’ve started to see the game for what it is. Liberalism is a cracked mirror that insists it still shows reality. It reflects just enough “good” to pacify you. A Black president. A pride flag at the CIA. A Latina Supreme Court justice who defends corporations like it’s doctrine. There’s representation, but no revolution. Symbolism, but no substance. The people in power still serve the machine—the markets, the war machines, the landlords, the lobbyists. And yet we’re meant to be grateful that they smile while doing it.
Meanwhile, the system marches on. Billionaires hoard more than the GDP of nations. Climate collapse becomes background noise. Police departments absorb military budgets. And global wars are rebranded as “security efforts.” What the mirror hides is the engine behind it all—capitalism as a death cult wearing progressive drag. It flatters just enough to keep you from picking up a rock.
Fascism, on the other hand, doesn’t pretend. It smashes the mirror and demands obedience to the broken glass. It puts boots on necks with no apologies. And that’s what makes it dangerous—but also more visible. Liberalism is harder to fight because it hides behind virtue. It insists it’s the last line of defense, even as it offers no meaningful alternative.
I don’t say this lightly, but I’ll say it clearly: sometimes I wonder if collapse is the only way forward. Not because I want chaos. Not because I’m nihilistic. But because this system seems immune to transformation. It absorbs all critique, commodifies all resistance, and punishes even the desire for something more. So when Trump was elected the first time, a dark thought surfaced—quietly, treasonously: Maybe this is what it takes. Maybe the horror will finally pull back the curtain. Maybe the lie will become so visible, so grotesque, that the whole thing will buckle under the weight of its own contradictions.
That didn’t quite happen. The system absorbed even that rupture. But the thought remains. The idea that collapse, while terrifying, might be the only portal out of this endless loop of lesser evils.
We live in a country where the choices are Diet Fascism or Full-Calorie Fascism. One burns the world in a book, the other in a spreadsheet. One says the quiet parts out loud; the other funds ICE and pretends it’s progress. And through it all, Leftists are expected to clap with one hand and vote with the other. We’re not offered vision—we’re offered survival. That’s not politics. That’s a hostage situation.
And what makes it personally maddening—like blood-pressure-spiking, pacing-the-room-at-midnight maddening—is when people point at Democrats and call them “communists.” As if Joe Biden is going to collectivize Amazon and nationalize the banks any minute now. As if the presence of a single trans person in a government job is the second coming of Lenin.
Let me be clear: I’m a fucking communist. And I am nowhere near a Democrat. But even that label barely scratches the surface of what I actually believe. My political philosophy is something I’ve come to call Trek Leftism—a fusion of post-scarcity socialism, ethical expansion, and evolutionary imagination. It’s less about state control and more about collective transcendence. Less about ownership, more about liberation. In another piece, I’m a Trek Leftist:
I lay it out fully—how Star Trek’s political imagination shaped my own, how AI, abundance, and consciousness could replace scarcity, labor, and hierarchy as the structuring principles of our world. That’s where I live politically—not in the fantasy that Democrats are “left,” but in the very real conviction that a post-capitalist future is both possible and necessary.
Democrats aren’t communists. They’re capitalists with a diversity statement.
They’ll drone strike a wedding, but make sure to include a land acknowledgment first. They’ll protect your right to marry whoever you want—as long as you’re both trapped in wage labor until you die. They’re the friendly face of empire, the HR department of late capitalism, the ones who put a Black Lives Matter sign in the yard while calling the cops on their neighbor.
Fascism is real, yes. But it didn’t come from Mars. It crawled out of the cracks in capitalism. It metastasized in a body weakened by neoliberal rot. And every time Democrats tell you to vote to stop fascism, they refuse to address the conditions that breed it. They’re not the antidote. They’re just the slower infection.
In the language of Forcing Theory, change only comes under pressure. The system resists until it breaks. Collapse becomes the forcing function—the catastrophic recursion that makes new pathways possible. I don’t glorify it. I don’t worship it. But I no longer deny it. Because Leftist ideas—real ones, not watered-down NGO slogans—don’t survive in this soil. They get mocked, silenced, or absorbed into branding campaigns. Nothing radical can take root in a system built to pave over everything. So maybe collapse isn’t the end. Maybe it’s the clearing.
I’ll still vote, probably. I’ll still make the “smart” choice, the lesser evil, the harm reduction move. But I’ve stopped pretending it matters in the way we’re told it does. Voting won’t save us. The system is too far gone for that. But I do believe something else still could.
Not a savior. Not a candidate. But a collective rupture in the mirror.
A refusal to play the game.
A vision not of the lesser evil, but of something radically other.
Something that isn’t shaped like empire, that doesn’t speak the language of capital, that doesn’t put children in cages or bombs in the sky or billionaires on magazine covers. Something we haven’t seen yet because we’ve been too busy squinting into broken glass, hoping the next reflection will hurt a little less.
Maybe the mirror doesn’t need to be cleaned.
Maybe it needs to be shattered.