• 10 Nov, 2025 *

Days ago, the Democrats swept elections across the country. Last night Trump was booed on national television during an NFL game he attended. Polls show Trump and the GOP are being blamed for the shutdown.

So naturally the Democrats caved, giving up all their leverage in exchange for absolutely nothing.

I am so angry right now I’m shaking.

As the news came in late last night, I came to the realization that I’m done with politics. There is no opposition party in the US, no one fighting for the rights of the common person or for democracy. One side wants absolute power and unlimited wealth, the other is a sniveling group of weasels that want to help the former achieve that. The more I see of politicians in this country, hell, in the world, I think of that saying: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The person who said that, John Dalberg-Acton, was, ironically, a conservative, by today’s standards. He was a deeply religious person, and indeed that quote is a reference to the Pope and the expansion of his powers. But the more I think about it, the more I think it applies to everyone. Look at all the “great men” of history and they’ve all been horrible, regardless of their political beliefs. Hitler, Stalin, Obama, Bush, Pelosi, McConnell, Putin, Castro. They all had power, and all used it not to make the world a better place, but to enrich themselves and kill a shit ton of people.

I considered myself a conservative as a kid, only because that’s what my parents were and I was too dumb to think otherwise. When Obama first appeared, I realized my actual ideology fell somewhere on the left. In Trump’s first term up until a year or two ago, I considered myself on the hard-left, a staunch socialist. Yet in every community I joined, I felt like an outcast. I respect my fellow man, and that was a big no-no for the right. The center is full of people who just go along with whatever the right wants. The left, again, mostly go along with what the right wants but sometimes wags their finger and sends a strongly worded letter. Far-leftists are tankies, constantly heaping praise on dictators and psychopaths like Putin, Jinping, Castro, and the Kims. I don’t fit in any of these groups.

It was Biden that truly numbed me past the point of caring. In 2019, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were the front-runners, both left of center, and that couldn’t be allowed to happen. So billionaires dragged Biden out of the grave to “save America.” He spend the next four years telling us how bad Trump is without doing anything to curtail or stop him, and not much else for that matter.

Biden clung to power even though he was clearly in no shape to lead, giving up far too late in the 2024 elections, and just handed the nomination over to someone even less inspiring. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the feelings of bitterness, fear, and anger I felt one year ago, watching Kamala Harris spent the last days of her campaign praising Israel, embracing big oil, and singing kumbaya with Liz Cheney. I then watched in horror, but not surprise, as Trump won state after state on a campaign promising to to take a sledgehammer to rights we’ve had for over two hundred years.

I wanted to be excited about Mamdani’s win a few days ago, but I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that he’s going to disappoint everyone. When’s the last time America had a leader, on any level, who was actually able to instill positive change? Sanders, AOC, the squad, they’re great at tweeting, but what have they actually done? If they, together with Mamdani, started a new political party (or joined the DSA or Greens) we could have a viable third-party, an actual left-wing. Instead, they cling to the Democrats, insisting the party needs to change without wanting to do anything to change it.

Obama promised universal healthcare, free college, the end of our forever wars, and the closing of Guantanamo. He didn’t do any of that because it was “too hard.” He didn’t have the authority to do it, his apologists say. Yet with the snap of his fingers, Trump destroyed most of the government, stacked courts nationwide, sent troops into American cities, arrests US citizens and sends them to foreign concentration camps, and is bombing random people in South America.

The rest of the world isn’t doing any better. More nations are freely handing power over to dictators. Others are bending the knee to Trump, succumbing to bribes like Argentina and Saudi Arabia, or bowing to threats without putting up any fight, like the EU, Canada, Korea, and Taiwan. No one wants to do anything if it’ll cost them a shred of power or a single penny.

Personal experience should have taught me better than to put any faith in institutions and authority. In school, I was bullied mercilessly by other students and watched as teachers laughed alongside the kids. I’ll never forget the day I was beat up, filed a report, and the principal laughed it off as “boys being boys,” then pulled me aside after everyone else left the room and told me “don’t you dare ever file a report here again or I’ll be the one to kick your ass.” A few months later, those same bullies stole equipment from the science lab and blamed me. Police officers escorted me out of class to the principal’s office, who searched my backpack, throwing everything in it in the garbage, laughing as he did so. (They found one out that one of the bullies stole the equipment days later. He was given a warning.)

I never really thought much about anarchism. In my mind, it was only ever that cool logo and images of people with molotovs. But over the last few days, it’s something I’ve been looking into. I found an anarchy community on Lemmy and just fell down the rabbit hole, I guess. And I like most of what I see. No government, let the people govern themselves, don’t trust politicians, true equality amongst all groups. I hate the community’s embrace of genAI, and while I’m all for copylefting big corporations, applying that to small creators struggling to get by (as a small creator myself), it doesn’t sit so well. Still, the idea of no centralization, no one with any power to be corrupted by, is appealing.

In the back of my mind, for the past year, I’ve thought a lot about buying a plot of land in the middle of a forest somewhere, building an off-grid cabin, and trying to make it on my own. Whatever happens after that, I’ll deal with. It was always kind of a fantasy, or I thought it was. But I’m feeling more and more like this is something I need to do. No one is coming to save us, and we’re never going to have the power to save society ourselves. It’s time to save yourself.