The Anarchist Voters' Guide

Bush vs. Kerry

Statements prepared by Ran Prieur, October 19, 2004

Creative Commons License
Statement for George W. Bush
George W. Bush has done more in four years to advance the Anarchist agenda than 200 years of presidents before him. By running up record deficits, bullying the rest of the world, and channeling nationalist fanaticism into two unwinnable wars, he has accelerated and assured the fall of the world's most powerful and dangerous empire. In four short years America has gone from an undeservedly respected world-spanning colossus to a globally despised near-third world dictatorship, its corporate economy crumbling, its military aggression neutralized in conflicts from which it will never recover.

Also, more than any world leader in the last 50 years, Bush has discredited right wing thinking and revealed the barbarity and untenability of the utopian imperialist philosophy. But he needs four more years to finish the job. More than 40% of Americans and 20% of people worldwide are still hypnotized by his ruthless dominator persona, his politics of blind faith, and the mythology of omnipotent puritanical good vs. shadowy unpredictable evil that he represents. Can we afford to leave these people believing they're right, itching for their next messiah? George W. Bush needs four more years to crash that train so hard that no one ever again advances a mystical world view based on the demonization and annihilation of enemies, or uses "terrorism" as an excuse for state terrorism, or dares to imply that their nation should have rights of weapon-making or warmaking not shared equally by all.

Finally, by giving institutions -- government, corporations, banks, schools, police, the medical system -- the freedom to indulge in corruption and abuse and destroy themselves, Bush is undermining our belief in, and our dependence on, hierarchical centralized systems. In the next four years under Bush, people will have to learn the skills to provide their own food, housing, education, self-defense, and health care, building the foundation for the neo-indigenous land-based tribes and post-urban techno-industrial collectives of the future. Let's begin now! Vote George W. Bush on November 2nd.


Statement for John Kerry
John Kerry represents an easier, softer transition to a non-coercive society. For a number of reasons, including declining oil production, depletion of topsoil, and human-caused ecological disasters, the present system is already doomed. We don't need George Bush to hasten its collapse -- we need John Kerry to slow it, to give us a breather, four more years to learn self-sufficiency, to form networks, to find land, to build the bottom-up social organisms of the world to come.

There is no danger that John Kerry will restore American world domination. Bush, to his credit, has damaged it beyond recovery. But now we need a competent, reality-based leader to use America's remaining strength to check the coming world domination of China and/or the Islamic nations. We need to be forward-looking in our opposition to Empire, not fixated on the dying empires of the past. John Kerry will give us a declining world in balance, where China does not get a chance to bomb us before it succumbs to industrial exhaustion, where all nations will crash together in harmony.

Most important, President John Kerry will not put you all in camps. How much of a bad example do you need? The Bush faithful will never learn -- they only must be kept out of power until they die bitter and confused. But liberals can learn, and only a Democrat can shatter their hopes and teach them: that the system cannot be reformed, that national politics are a distraction, that their energies are best applied on deeper, more effective levels. Kerry will stay the course of our corrupt system's self-destruction, but do so in an intelligent controlled implosion that minimizes suffering and leaves us unscarred and alive to build a better tomorrow. Vote John Kerry.

. . .

(If you're curious, here's the much more cynical essay that I wrote while practicing for this one.)