HORIZONSOur most important elections yetBy: Richard Heydarian
Philippine Daily Inquirer
February 26, 2019
If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal,” the feminist-anarchist Emma Goldman once said. Her semi-contemporary Mark Twain was said to have made an almost identical observation: “If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.”
Both of them had ample reasons to be skeptical about the democratic process back then. Goldman, an avowed opponent of centralized authority and oppressive patriarchy, saw in the American electoral process the perpetuation of the same patterns of exploitation, where white, privileged men, who were inextricably wed to the logic of retail politics within the framework of Darwinian capitalism, controlled the levers of power.
As the coauthor of “The Gilded Age” (1873), Twain was an eloquent chronicler of American oligarchy, where a few conglomerates viciously exploited the working classes and dominated a hopelessly corrupt political system.
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