On a national level, our electoral system has failed repeatedly in the last 30 years to deliver solutions to our most pressing problems: structural racism and police brutality, the increasing gap between rich and poor, good health care for all, climate change, gun violence, a fair and humane immigration policy — you name it. All of these problems amount to our corrupt, corporate-elite-dominated government killing us. This isn’t happening because the majority of Americans don’t want positive change, and in many cases agree on how to get it; polls demonstrate that. It’s because the electoral system is undemocratic. It was designed that way by the founding fathers, elites of their time who feared “mob rule” (thus, the Electoral College, a Senate that represents populations unequally, etc.), and has been made even more undemocratic over time — by gerrymandering, suppressing the vote, and in other ways. Continuing to use this obviously undemocratic system while expecting different results is a fantasy, and it isn’t likely to reform itself. We the people will have to come up with a hopefully nonviolent answer — like creating our own democratic governments and refusing to comply with or pay taxes to the illegitimate government claiming the right to rule over us now. Case in point: even if Trump doesn’t cancel the 2020 election, and Biden is elected to replace him, he’ll just reproduce the policies of the Clinton and Obama administrations that got us Trump in the first place — policies that don’t address our needs and tempt us to believe demagogues instead of thinking things through for ourselves.

I’m still going to vote for Biden, and am excited to hear Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in 2024, but have serious doubts about getting the country many of us want by changes “from within.” I think we’ll have to be like the little red hen, and do it ourselves.