One of the lessons of the Tuesday election show is that voting matters when the results are open to competition. In one party states, voting is ceremonial as the results are always the same. America is well on its way to becoming a one party state, so voting is no longer a part of politics. It is another lottery, a thing to let stupid people think that one day something magical will happen.
Voting is not politics. In this age, voting is just the process of trying to guess who will be selected as the winner. Politics encompasses much more than voting. One of the great defects of democracy is that it convinces people that their politics begins and ends with the process of voting. This is most common with conservative people who want to think of politics as a part time thing.
This is why the conservative movement was a grand failure. It argued that politics should be a small part of life. They wailed about the Left politicizing everything, as if that would stop them. Instead, it just convinced naturally conservative people to do politics part time while their enemies did politics fulltime. The result was that conservatism managed to conserve nothing.
For dissidents, the only way forward is to develop and counter-culture, which means politicizing our own lives fully. How you spend your money, where you spend your money and on whom you spend your money must be political. How you live, where you live and with whom you live is political. In order to build a counterculture, the dissident must become a fully political animal.
That is easier said than done. Almost all people in the dissident space came through one of the doors of official conservatism. The former libertarians, paleos and Buckleyites all came through a conditioning that said politicizing everything is what the Left does, so it is wrong. Breaking that conditioning is harder than quitting smoking, because there is a billion dollar industry promoting it.
The place to start is to get small. The show this week is about the small businesses popping up within the dissident space. We are seeing more of these which is the most important political development in generations. The parallel economy, as Andrew Torba calls it, a form of quiet quitting, as the regime calls it. Simply finding a way to remove yourself from their grip is the best thing a dissident can do.
Let's Get Small