Today, in the United States, the right to vote is more precarious and more contested than ever. “I have had front row seats to voter suppression,” writer, poll worker, activist and Georgia resident Anjali Enjeti tells me, referring to Shelby County v. Holder, a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 2022 that gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Enjeti explains that things have been going downhill ever since, because “states can now enact voter-suppressing laws and policies that erect tremendous barriers,” especially for Black, brown or Indigenous Democrat voters.

Enjeti’s recent book, Ballot, is a history of voting in the US, and it certainly delivers. However, along the way, the book equally exposes a corrupt and manipulative system that destabilizes democracy by making it harder for people to physically go and vote.

Being a Democratic voter living in the state of Georgia offers a particularly important vantage point, in her case.

“I've been gerrymandered out of districts that I helped flip blue in 2018. I've seen it. I felt it. My dropbox for my absentee ballot was closed down. It used to be close to my house,” she says, “now it's 30 minutes away. I was directly impacted, as many voters have been, who live in these red, Republican-led states that have been enacting a cascade of laws.” With almost no oversight from the federal government, she adds, these laws “have a wide berth of destruction.”

Even as the Republican party has been shamelessly and strategically enacting such destruction for decades, she says, Enjeti is unsparing in her criticism of the Democratic party. She admits that while there were more checks and balances that affected both Republicans and Democrats at some point in time, the Democratic Party today is entirely overrun by corporate interests. Democrats are neither able to counter the vile and dehumanizing rhetoric deployed by the Republicans, nor effect a bulwark of opposition to their policies.

“There's something ingrained in Democrats about the fact that they want to be friends with extremists,” she says. “They want to erase themselves and their belief system because they feel that that will get them the ability to be elected again…They care more about donations from billionaires for their next election than they do about actually serving in office. They will watch Palestinian babies being blown up and vote for more weapons going to Israel because they care more about the belief that that will get them reelected than they do about the fact that we've had some of the largest protests in this country since the Vietnam War for a ceasefire, for stopping the armament of Israel.”

In her book, Enjeti wanted to give readers a sense of the magnitude of this moment and the role of elections, but she is aware that voting is only one element in a vast political ecosystem.

“I have been a progressive activist for many years, so I've actually never felt that elections paved the way to liberation,” she tells me. “We've got strikers. We've got protesters. We've got people boycotting corporations. We've got a big mix of tools in our toolbox, and voting is one of them. We need to not have the police, we need to not have ICE, but we can hold that and understand that we've got to have the abolitionists and then we've got to have the people doing something about elections. We have to hold these multiple roles at the same time, and elections are still very important.”

Further reading:

Ballot by Anjali Enjeti https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/ballot-9798765126202/

Hosted by Bhakti Shringarpure.

Edited by Agatha Jamari. Radical Futures is produced by Warscapes

Title Music: “Cottonstorm” by Bayern Boom Beat

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“Satire is dead. Long live satire,” Tanzanian political cartoonist Gado declares, laughing, as we sit down to discuss the role of satire, humor and cartoons in modern public discourse. Godfrey Mwampembwa - pen name “Gado” - is a prolific and prominent political cartoonist with a career that has spanned three decades.

Gado’s talent for drawing, coupled with a voracious interest in the news, led him to cartooning at an early age. Studying architecture at the university in Dar-es-Salam did not quite hold his attention, and he landed a job at The Daily Nation, Kenya’s leading daily and one of the largest newspapers in Africa. He took off for Nairobi, young and alone but eager to learn. He felt he was lucky to find mentors and an environment that was open to his ideas and creativity.

Over his many years working for The Daily Nation, Gado boasts of having offended every possible powerful person in Kenya, as well as in the broader African continent.

“I have no regrets,” he says, despite having endured threats, silencing attempts and high-pressure backdoor negotiations which found presidents, ministers and businessmen demanding accommodations.

“I am one of those people who has a knack for disrespecting authority,” he jokes. But Gado has a steadfast commitment to his work, and believes that provocations via satire “enrich the debate and bring to the table ideas and things that we are afraid to discuss.”

But when it comes to poking fun, how far is too far? I ask.

“I remain true to the principles of satire,” Gado replies.“One of the things about good satire is it doesn't punch downward. You always punch upward. And so, in a situation like Gaza, you won't do a cartoon to laugh at Palestinians. It would be ridiculous. But that does not mean you shouldn't do drawings on what is happening in Gaza, because satire remains a medium that should delight, it should poke fun, it should educate, and it should also punch upward in the sense that satire should always afflict the powerful and not the minorities and the marginalized.”

The rapidly evolving global media landscape has brought about a shift in how media is consumed. The decrease in print runs of newspapers has meant that fewer and fewer editorial cartoonists are being hired, while the advent of streaming services and video-based social media has also meant a decline in viewership of satirical late night talk shows. Gado believes that “satire is in turmoil in many countries” due to a political climate dominated by right-wing movements, censorship and “cancel” culture. But he remains hopeful:

“I might not have answers in terms of ‘the how’ and what are we going to have in the next 10 years, but I'm very confident that it will survive. Satire still remains a very powerful tool to speak truth to power.”

Hosted by Bhakti Shringarpure.

Edited by Agatha Jamari. Radical Futures is produced by Warscapes

Title Music: "Cottonstorm" by Bayern Boom Beat

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“Border regimes are some of the most normalized forms of violence,” writer and activist Harsha Walia says, because even the most progressive people “really struggle with the idea of abolishing the border.”

Recently, the murder of Renee Good in the bright light of day, in Minneapolis, has sparked outrage across the US. However, this is a culmination of the past several months of an escalation in the war on migrants and in policing practices. The stories of Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk and Kilmar Ábrego García were early signs that an escalation in abductions and brutalization was coming. ICE now appears to be wielding spectacular levels of power and unleashing daily violence on a new scale. Walia, who has followed and written about borders and migrations for several years, is horrified at what she is seeing but not entirely surprised by this escalation.

Walia wants to broaden the scope of this conversation. Today ICE “is one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the United States. In fact, its budget outpaces many militaries of the world.” But even before there was ICE, the core function of any border regime is to “enforce borders, to enact deportation and detention, and to escalate border enforcement in different places.” This escalation can occur at the border itself as with US border with Mexico or as a maritime build-up with the Caribbean or “inland” which means within neighborhoods and within the so-called territory of the US.

“Even though at different times, the spectacle and horror is different, the ideology and premise is the same, which is to terrorize migrant communities and to enact detention and deportation...It is not to always deport people, but it's to make them more vulnerable to employers and to the social context in which migrants live.”

In offering a brief history of ICE, Walia stresses the bipartisan nature of the agency. It was created by George W. Bush in 2003 in the aftermath of 9/11. “An immensely violent and large agency,” ICE comes out in a moment “when the war on terror was increasingly merged with the war on migrants.” But she argues that it is the Clinton administration that “laid the ground for border militarization as we know today. And that was by putting in millions of dollars to securitize the border, all of these different operations in California and Arizona and Texas to basically make it so that crossing the border became a matter of life and death for people.”

The Obama and Biden administrations have followed suit and have been instrumental in harnessing brutal bordering practices, a key element of which has been the externalization of the border. They have poured billions of dollars on “border enforcement into other countries, which is why now Mexico has a much larger detention and deportation system than the United States, because the US has outsourced its violence to countries in South and Central America.”

None of this takes away from the fact that Trump has taken it to new levels by putting thousands of ICE patrols on the streets, by pausing US visa applications from 75 countries, and by giving leeway for hate speech and racism against migrants. Walia warns against exceptionalizing Trump’s villainy because “Trump did not create this entire administration or structure. All of the infrastructure that goes into border enforcement predates him.”

Additionally, Trump is part of a global trend, “whether it is the escalation of Zionism and Zionist and genocidal violence, the escalation in India and of Brahminical Hindutva forces, and we can look at other parts of Europe where this is happening.”

Walia rightly points out that even if the American empire collapses today, countries like India and UAE will push the same horrible agendas. Thus regardless of American hegemony, “there is no denying that transnational accumulation, capitalist accumulation and empire-making is no longer the domain of the imperial core. Even if these are...