Why I Didn't Vote on Tuesday

An article by , November 5, 2026

Amber-ink watercolor doodle: an empty voting booth with its curtain half open, a ballot box left untouched beside it, and a paper coffee cup resting on the booth's shelf.
Doodle by Eunice, in amber ink and watercolor.

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Tuesday came and went, and I did not vote. Here is the reason.

I have never been a Republican. The closest I have ever come to being one is Anglo-Catholic and a Freemason. My family is liberal. My mother protested the Vietnam War. My father went into the Marine Corps, luckily fought no wars, and spent the rest of his life trying to keep me from joining up, even though I had elite-level training in my high school JROTC ranger club. I celebrated when Bill Clinton won. I celebrated when Obama won. I was in Germany for that one and went out to Potsdamer Platz, and then to the celebration outside the American embassy near Checkpoint Charlie.

I voted for George W. Bush once, for whatever reason. I voted for Donald Trump three times, and I can tell you exactly why. I did not want any more neocons. I did not want any more neolibs. I did not want any more identity politics, any more social-justice obsession, any more of the arrangement where 1 percent of the population gets to define what the other 99 percent can and cannot do. I wanted the 20 percent to stop trying to control the 80 percent. I hoped I would be part of a populist coalition that voted against identity politics, against anti-white hate and anti-male hate, and for free speech. The internet had ended the old gatekeeping. Then came the COVID censorship, and it has only eased because Elon Musk bought X and every competitor had to lower its guardrails to compete.

The coalition was always a transaction. That is what I wrote on Substack before any of this happened, in "The Populist Bloc Just Switched Tickets": the bloc is held together by material interests and by two promises—no more foreign wars, and an end to rule by the identity-obsessed few. Its loyalty was rented, not owned. Break the promises and the bloc moves. I wrote the companion piece too, "The DSA Isn't Confused. It's Correcting": the left's class-first wing is standing right there to receive the voters the right loses, running on rent and groceries instead of pronouns.

We Americans are perfectly happy having terrorism and having shit blowing up in our country if our cost of living is low—if our gas and diesel is low, if our beef and potatoes and steak is low. We don't care about terrorism. We don't care about cities blowing up, as long as prices are low. Those are acceptable risks. We're Americans.

We live in a country where 200 to 500 Black inner-city youths die in every city every year. When I was at GW, DC was murder city. We live with 2 million people in prison, where there is street crime and everybody owns guns and there is gun crime. There has been zero terrorism from Iran since 9/11—it wasn't even Iran then. The only terrorism that's happening is in the Middle East. It's not on our shores. Why should we even care about Iran? That's a local and a regional issue—especially in a coalition of populists who are anti-interventionists.

And do not hand me the plots. If it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. I believe in the six-week cycle: anti-terrorism theater needs to create something to fight every six weeks or it starts losing its budget. So I believe most of those avoided plots never actually happened, and the rest were dumb people talked into doing dumb things by the same men who then stopped them. According to the CIA and Delta Force and Langley and Five Eyes and the FBI anti-terror squad and the policing and the military-industrial complex, 8 million dirty bombs, 8 million assassinations, 8 million disco explosions, 8 billion nuclear Armageddons, 8 billion IEDs, and 8 billion suicide vests have blown up 12 billion people in America in the last 10 years. In actuality, I didn't see any of that happen. You have to let a few slide through, though, and not get your hands caught actually producing it. We saw on January 6th what it looks like when actual Americans try to emulate and simulate a terrorist attack—you can always tell. So you need to let a couple of real ones through, and then you need to make people really scared, not just fake scared. Because we would be willing to suffer grievous, grievous terrorism by our enemies if we had cheap gas, cheap beer, cheap eggs, and cheap beef and cheap steak. We would prefer to be able to afford a house and an education and to raise our kids and then die in a giant discotheque bombing than the other way around.

We have proven as a people that liberty doesn't require safety, and that safety without liberty is tyranny. Why do they think we are so worried about getting hurt? Most Americans are itching for a fight. We want cheap rent and cheap houses and low interest, cheap beer and cheap dinners out, cheap diesel and cheap fuel, cheap ground beef and cheap eggs and cheap milk, more than we care about a 100 percent safe world. We have domestic terrorism all the time, fomented by people in this country—environmental terrorism, eco-terrorism, mostly peaceful protests, arson—and of course the real terrorism is the Black-on-Black crime happening in the inner cities. That doesn't mean we should bomb Chicago.

I understand how noble you are, you FBI and CIA and Marshals and cops and State Department, all you brave people. But you don't get credit for all the things you prevented, because we would prefer all the harm if the price of living went down. You only get credit for letting the terrible things through that then allow us to have cheap shit.

We would trade terrorism and an unsafe living environment for cheap shit and cheap houses. I am also the guy who believes ISIS was completely manufactured by the State Department and the CIA. Manufactured enemies are how the war party keeps both.

Then came the break. The United States attacked a sovereign country called Iran. That was the break for me, and there was no coming back across it. We have run the intervention pattern inside our own sphere of influence for as long as I have been alive, Venezuela and the rest, and I knew that history. This one was ours, done by the coalition I had voted into power on the promise that it would never do exactly this.

I like Iran more than I like America, most of the time. That comes from my life. I have known Persians and people from Tehran. I knew Iranian women in Berlin, in the Goethe-Institut world, free to study and travel and live as they liked. The foreigners I have known, at GW and at UEA Norwich and in Berlin, were the elites of their countries—the crème de la crème who get the visas and the institute places, brothers in business class.

You can never pin me down based on being loyal or disloyal, patriotic or whatever the opposite is. The only loyalty I have is for family and friends. And growing up in Hawaii means my patriotic attachment to the USA is negligible. I am the only person who knows betrayal. I am just a putz. My betraying you, my country, is different than you, my country, betraying me—especially the MAGA coalition.

On Ukraine I held the same line the whole way through. The war was provoked, by Ukraine and by the West: Victoria Nuland of the "fuck the EU" call, Samantha Power, Biden and the Biden family, the neocons and the neolibs, and above all Senator John McCain and his people, who fomented it. I was against the pro-Ukraine effort, against the pro-Palestine effort, against USAID, against exporting democracy as an injection of 20-percent liberal values into other people's countries. I believe in proper pathways to citizenship, and I believe the undocumented should be removed for their own protection, because a person who stays undocumented here gets treated like chattel—underpaid, unprotected, frightened, extorted into garbage work at a quarter of the market rate for a decade, living for the remittances. Exploitation is what an unprotected status is for.

So Tuesday arrived with two tickets on offer. One belonged to the coalition that broke its word on the one promise that mattered most to me. The other belonged to the party of the identity politics and the neoliberal economics I had voted against three times running. Neither ticket carried a single thing I had ever voted for.

The results came in and the bloc did what I said it would do. It moved. Even the losing side's own people spent the aftermath saying the war cost them. The bloc switched tickets and handed the Democrats their sweep—all of it except one voter in Arlington, Virginia, who stayed home, because switching tickets requires a ticket worth switching to, and nobody printed one.

The only loyalty I have is for family and friends, and a party is neither. I did not stay home out of apathy. I stayed home because my vote is a transaction, and on Tuesday there was nothing on the shelf that I buy.

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