---
title: "How Do You Opt Out Of Democracy?"
type: "post"
post_id: "12709"
slug: "how-do-you-opt-out-of-democracy"
canonical: "https://bombthrower.com/how-do-you-opt-out-of-democracy/"
markdown_url: "https://bombthrower.com/how-do-you-opt-out-of-democracy.md"
json_url: "https://bombthrower.com/how-do-you-opt-out-of-democracy.json"
txt_url: "https://bombthrower.com/how-do-you-opt-out-of-democracy.txt"
published: "2026-11-07T18:19:15+00:00"
modified: "2026-11-07T20:11:29+00:00"
author: "Mark E. Jeftovic"
categories:
  - "Zeitgeist"
tags:
site_name: "Mark E. Jeftovic is The Bombthrower"
publisher: ""
language: "en-US"
generator: "easyPress AI Visibility"
generator_version: "2.0.9"
---
Stop “voting harder” and start building something you control.
--------------------------------------------------------------

*What the last few weeks of elections tell us about exits, optionality, and the perennial disappointment of voting for “the right leaders”.*

American non-leftists\* are grappling with a stunning Democrat blow out: the House and the Senate both flipped on Tuesday night, with seven Senate seats changing parties, and one of them was in Texas.

(\* I still don’t know what to call it. It’s not conservatism per se as I don’t really identify with being Conservative, either, and I’m not alone).

Here at home (Toronto) we, in our collective wisdom, re-elected a left-wing lunatic for mayor (with 54% of the vote), who basically fended off a credible challenge from an experienced city councillor through what was a largely made-up story that “Brad Bradford was going to give our water to Doug Ford, who would privatize it”.

> @oliviachow you can just say stuff, i guess
> 
> — Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) [October 20, 2026](https://x.com/jeftovic/status/2112568632865911145?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

Just wow.

“Not even coherent”, as Wolfgang Pauli may have lamented (of “not even wrong” fame).

Neither the fact that no legal path existed for the mayor to “privatize water”, nor that Bradford’s plan called for the creation of a publicly owned trust, à la Toronto Hydro (omg, privatized electricity?), had any effect on public sentiment.

Facts be damned, it was just jingoism that connected to the lizard brain stem in enough voters that it carried the day.

Six months earlier, a pair of Toronto by-elections put the Federal Liberals over the top for another majority government – the first in Canadian history to be assembled between elections, out of floor-crossers and by-election wins – and all of that after a decade of Trudeau’s post-national woketocracy.

The Liberals were on track to be gutted in the last election, but they were saved when Trump started his “51st State” talk, Canadian boomers started flapping their elbows… and the rest is now our lives under another five years of Liberal supremacy.

> That one is real and must count.
> Sometimes real life is better than parody.🤪
> 
> Elbows UP™ to you too dear #LibAnon friend❤️ https://t.co/RxmuosiykD
> 
> — The Canadian Boomers🇨🇦🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦 (@CanadianBoomers) [November 6, 2026](https://x.com/CanadianBoomers/status/2118770006741995751?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

When I was still in touch with Steve Bannon, he more or less told me that Trump deliberately did it to tilt the public toward the libs (a textbook “psy-op”, I guess). “*Four more years of liberal rule and Alberta splits off and comes to us, with all that oil and gas”*.

Speaking of Alberta, Bannon’s thesis seems to have been negated and the separatist movement was dealt a blow when the long-awaited referendum (on holding a referendum) completely stiffed: 75% voting to stick with Team Canada. I wasn’t exactly *hoping* for a viable Alberta secession, but it was a glimmer of hope that *somewhere* there would be a critical mass of people who would signal severe displeasure with the direction of leftist, post-national, globalist-inspired rule.

Surprisingly, the only thing we’ve seen come close was a Conservative landslide in BC, winning roughly two-thirds of the legislature, in a snap election the NDP premier called himself.

Overall, it doesn’t look like electoral politics is being kind to whatever you want to call anybody who doesn’t want collectivist, soft-on-crime, open-borders, state-planned, anti-technology griftocracies running the show (we know what the media calls it: [“far right”, but what is it really?](https://bombthrower.com/what-does-far-right-even-mean-anymore/))

When the left loses elections, you see a lot of crash-out reels on social media: purple-haired pronoun people of undetermined gender shrieking into their smartphones…

> Ever notice how we don’t see much of this from the non-lefties every time we lose an election… https://t.co/V1Xx7IEjJj
> 
> — Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) [November 7, 2026](https://x.com/jeftovic/status/2118873283017732509?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

You don’t see a lot of that from (I still don’t know what to call it) “the far right”? Non-leftists? Conservatives? Individualists? Whoever it is that sits on the other side of the political spectrum. More often what you get is quiet resignation, punctuated by sardonic wit:

> Every data center in America is getting converted into a Somalian daycare tomorrow
> 
> — LilMoonLambo (@LilMoonLambo) [November 4, 2026](https://x.com/LilMoonLambo/status/2117810068611543085?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

We lose elections all the time
------------------------------

We’re used to it, I guess. Or at least we should be.

I’m now used to it – and, as I’ve been telling my readers since the last Canadian Federal election in 2025, getting used to it helped me understand something I had gotten so fundamentally wrong after COVID: this idea that the mass public was going to hold the technocratic class to account for their gross ineptitude around *everything*.

This transcended the pandemic. It was the culmination of decades of unaccountable and institutionalized incompetence, but COVID brought it all to a head, especially now that it’s all but a foregone conclusion that the entire outbreak was caused by a technocratically funded lab-leak in the first place.

*Surely the mass voting public would exert collective justice on the ruling class?*

In [earlier pieces during the pandemic](https://bombthrower.com/nation-states-are-more-fragile-now-than-ever-before/) I glommed on to the sentiment that *“World War III was going to be everybody vs their own governments”,* going so far as to declare that nation states were more fragile than ever before…

> *“There is a point beyond which the citizenry will stop viewing each other as enemies (left vs right) and start viewing their own governments as the enemy (overlords vs rabble). If that happens, then the incentives and conditions will be in place for #WorldWarWe.”*

Pure cringe, given what’s been happening since.

What I predicted then was that practically every incumbent government that was in place during the pandemic was going to be voted out of office, that there were going to be public inquiries and comeuppance galore – and once the fallout from the flawed vaccine rollout [became undeniable](https://bombthrower.com/they-promised-safe-and-effective-we-got-sudden-and-unexpected/) – pitchforks and torches, if not tribunals.

Not even close.

> @LamareSaint https://t.co/ZFBY1fxLXW
> 
> — The Reaper (@TheRaperHimself) [October 27, 2026](https://x.com/TheRaperHimself/status/2115171098027540690?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

Trump was re-elected in the US, but only after it was no longer deniable that the country was being “run” by a senile vegetable, which makes that result less like a reckoning and more like a default judgment: the Dems basically forfeited that election for lack of a functional candidate.

However, the institutions that had produced the situation we’re talking about carried on more or less as before; the only difference was that it was now permissible to take the pronouns out of your email sig.

Alas, TheDonald managed to botch a winning hand. Where he could have leaned into the AI boom and an economic dynamo, he chose to plunge his country into yet another US military quagmire. My suspicion is that when Trump launched the bombing run on a Friday after markets closed, he honestly believed it would be wrapped up by the opening bell on Monday.

But Iran is not Venezuela. Not by a long shot.

Future historians will look back on it as a major expansion during the early innings of WWIII.

So here we are, two years later, and the same electorate handed both chambers of Congress back to the party it had just thrown out. No accountability, more like reversion to the mean – normality – and what is normal in contemporary political economy is one big secular shift toward big government (I call it [“State Capitalism”](https://bombthrower.com/repricing-sovereignty/) in The Sovereign Capitalist) and a seemingly unavoidable civilizational experiment with collectivism.

From long overdue to past its expiry date
-----------------------------------------

I’ve often told my daughter that every social movement, every step in political structure, traverses an arc from necessary and long overdue to past its expiry date and malignant.

She’s majoring in criminal justice and public policy, and we were talking about labour unions. There was a time when children who should have been in school worked 14 hour days in coal mines, when workers had no sick leave or benefits of any kind – in working class towns in the early industrial revolution, the average life expectancy dropped as low as age 17. Organized labour was the necessary and long overdue response to that. (I’ve always thought that if the early industrialists had offered a share plan from the outset, we probably wouldn’t have such a deep schism between capital and labour as we do today.)

The abuses were real and the correction was inevitable. But once the fight had been won and written into law the institution carried on, as institutions are wont to do, and somewhere along the way its purpose shifted from ending abuses to protecting the managers. Carroll Quigley, in *[The Evolution of Civilizations](https://link.amazon/B0ihgaC1n),* called this *“institutionalization of instruments”*, which he believed to be a general rule of history: any *instrument* created to meet a real social need, hardens into an *institution* that mainly serves itself.

The pattern holds as far back as you care to look. Chieftains and noblemen were probably necessary to lift people out of Hobbesian wars of all against all – somebody had to accrue a monopoly on violence and authority before anybody could plant a crop and expect to be around to harvest it. As the centuries piled on, the same arrangement had hardened into hereditary privilege and the divine right of kings.

Then came the Westphalian system and, eventually, democracy: the nation-state as the unit of sovereignty, and then democratic elections as the mechanism by which everybody inside it finally got a say. Both were necessary and long overdue, and yet neither is exempt from the arc.

Democracies turned into welfare-states, and welfare states are the precursors to collectivism.

How does one exit a democracy before they become socialist dystopias?
---------------------------------------------------------------------

The U.S. midterms went more or less the way I expected and had been telling my premium subscribers ([try it for $7 here](https://thesovereigncapitalist.io/blueprint-launch-offer/)). And if I’m right again, what they do is set the stage for a Democratic Socialist to be elected president of the United States in 2028 (I also ascribed a kind of “Napoleon’s 100-days” inevitability to Trump’s 2024 win, in case you were wondering).

![](https://bombthrower.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/AOC2028.png)

There’s a saying: you can vote your way into socialism, but you have to shoot your way out.

What I’m more interested in: how does one exit an early stage social welfare-state while it’s still called “democracy”? Especially one that’s hell bent on closing the loop into *democratic socialism*.

Nobody wants fascism, even though we drift closer to it than one might admit in polite company. But even though socialism and communism are really just shades of totalitarianism, they are inexplicably and perennially fashionable ones.

It’s cool to be commie these days.

And yet the moment anybody wonders out loud whether there might be a third door, the reaction is instructive. Back in July, Shopify’s Tobi Lütke was pilloried for endorsing a tweet proposing that votes be weighted by income tax paid (no vote if you pay none, capped at five for the highest earners). His reply ran to two words, “Good system”, with a few follow-ups that went further still, igniting a twitchunt that ran for days (he has since deleted that tweet).

The idea was lambasted as heresy, but it’s a concept that has a longer pedigree than the outraged would realize:

- John Stuart Mill, nobody’s idea of a far-right reactionary, argued for plural voting in 1861.
- Britain kept extra votes for business owners and university graduates until 1948.
- Lee Kuan Yew told *Foreign Affairs* in 1994 that Singapore would be better served by giving a second vote to every man over 40 with a family, on the grounds that he’d be voting for his children as well.

In fact there are “many such cases”, as the quip goes, at least one of which is *still in force today:*

In local elections for the *City of London Corporation*, residents have one vote each, but businesses can appoint additional voters according to a scale based on the number of employees working in the City.

The instinct underneath all of these is the same, and it’s a hard one to argue against. What *exactly* is the argument against decisions being made by people with skin in the game, and public policy being shaped by those whose wealth is actually being used to fund it?

Singapore is the usual exhibit: nominally a parliamentary democracy, in practice a city run like a well-managed corporation by the same party since 1959, with ministers paid on a private-sector scale and expected to perform accordingly. City states in general have a long history of punching above their weight, from Venice and the Hanseatic League to Dubai, and tiny Liechtenstein went so far as to codify into its constitution the right of any municipality to secede.

Then there’s Curtis Yarvin, who has spent the better part of two decades arguing that the natural successor to the democratic state is the sovereign joint-stock company: a CEO answerable to shareholders, residents as customers, and a patchwork of small jurisdictions competing for them. And there are the corporate sovereignties that already exist in embryo, like Próspera in Honduras (which the Honduran government has spent the last few years trying to legislate out of existence, which tells you something) and Titus Gebel’s Free Private Cities, where your relationship with the government is literally a contract that either side can be held to.

These are early manifestations of [the Sovereign Individual](https://link.amazon/B053PhqBW) thesis in action.

Some of these may strike you as… ambitious (others view the prospect of privately run micro-sovereignties as an affront). I’m less interested in the specifics of any one of the blueprints than in the single unifying theme that they all have in common.

All human rights come down to one thing
---------------------------------------

Choice.

The private micro-sovereignty movement has it right: exit is the ultimate balance between political economy and personal agency. The ability to exit, with your life, liberty and capital, is the ultimate expression of self-sovereignty.

Historically, that last piece was the toughest. When my mother’s family fled the Russians invading from the East in the closing weeks of World War Two (the name of the game was to surrender to the Allies, coming from the West), they buried their silverware and other valuables in their basements and took what they could carry. Everybody did. The Russians got it all.

In this era of cryptocurrencies and, more recently, tokenized assets, capital mobility is frictionless to an unprecedented degree. (Our focus in the cryptocurrency sleeve[ of The Sovereign Capitalist portfolio](https://thesovereigncapitalist.io/blueprint-launch-offer/), our “Post-Singularity Stack”, is on AI inference, privacy coins and tokenized RWA – Real World Assets.)

Albert Hirschman laid out the framework back in 1970: when an institution starts to decline, the people inside it have two ways to respond, voice and exit. Democracy is built almost entirely around voice, and it hands each of us a share so diluted (one vote among millions, every few years) that whatever else it is, it’s a long way from a lever. It’s more like a ritualized ratification of nearly homogenous policy tracks, all of which are put forth to either enrich an entrenched Griftocracy, or to nominally appease society’s biggest losers.

Exit is the one option that requires nobody else’s permission (or at least it *shouldn’t*; if you’ve ever read [We The Living](https://link.amazon/B04yyqHid), you know that whatever else happens, you want to stay ahead of needing it).

In an ideologically captured or functionally brainwashed society, it’s The Exit that provides the escape hatch from everybody else’s lunacy.

Communism doesn’t allow for exit: they built walls around entire countries to keep people in. Nor is there room for voluntaryism within collectivist societies. They must all be uniformly collectivist, with no ability to choose anything but collectivism.

The asymmetry is worth dwelling on: in a free society you and your friends are welcome to pool your property and run a commune, and nobody will stop you, whereas no collectivist state has ever extended the reverse courtesy.

> Fascinating https://t.co/RCCqBIZln1
> 
> — Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) [May 11, 2026](https://x.com/jeftovic/status/2053924595388866885?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

Democracies don’t build walls, although things like Canada’s departure tax, which deems you to have sold most of what you own on the day you stop being a resident, suggest the instinct isn’t entirely alien.

More recently, a Canadian Liberal functionary attacked a US work visa program *that he himself used* to snag a $300K / year job with Microsoft after he graduated, and called for a $500K exit tax on anybody who comes *after him* who does the same thing.

> The Liberal party has Patrick Pichette a former Senior VP of Google on stage who lives in Europe by the way, say that if Canadians want to leave Canada to work in the US they need to pay an exit tax of half a million dollars. The guy did the very thing to get a Microsoft job decades ago and paid 30 bucks. Now he wants young Canadians to be trapped here. The Liberals are nuts.
> 
> — Ryan Gerritsen🇨🇦🇳🇱 (@ryangerritsen) [April 11, 2026](https://x.com/ryangerritsen/status/2042964863513661686?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

Electoral democracy is another milestone in the unfolding of the human story, one that has gone from necessary, in order to give everyone a voice, to devolving into lowest common denominator popularity contests that amount to yet another situation of other people telling you what to do.

> Leftists want to “protect democracy” but they don’t think any other parties should be elected… so they actually want a leftist dictatorship with no ability to choose anything but leftism… but they see this as “protecting freedom” it’s f\*cking insane.
> 
> — Ben Bankas (@BenBankas) [October 25, 2026](https://x.com/BenBankas/status/2114453851395006973?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

It’s traversing the same arc as everything that came before it, and my guess is that we’re well past the midpoint.

The Apex Asset
--------------

So how does one actually exit, short of handing in a passport and moving to a charter city that may or may not outlive its host government?

Most of us aren’t going anywhere, and as we’re already seeing, “somewhere else” has a way of changing beneath you anyway. The more practical form of exit is to ensure that the decisions that matter *the most* in your life are moved out of the realm where they get put to a vote, by other people, and into structures that you own and control.

I have a label for the holding that sits above all the others: the Apex Asset. There was a time I thought that was Bitcoin; that time has now passed. What I realize now is that it’s what I’ve been doing all along anyway: the Apex Asset is business ownership (Bitcoin simply being one of the many things a business can own). From the September issue of *The Sovereign Capitalist Letter*:

> **THE MICROGLOMERATE: A PERSONAL CONGLOMERATE FOR SOVEREIGN INDIVIDUALS**
> 
> *Anybody who is telling you that some asset class, be it gold, Bitcoin, real estate or even equities as an asset is far superior to anything else you can do with your capital, the way some Bitcoin maxis would chide you for investing in anything other than Bitcoin, is completely missing the point.*
> 
> *A business can hold gold and Bitcoin (it can even take BTC for payments). It can own real estate. It can acquire other companies or take stakes in them. It can change its product lines, react to changing circumstances, set up layered capital structures and generally “do things” for the most part, and do it with pre-tax money.*
> 
> *A business has legal personhood, it retains lawyers and accountants. It can span generations over time and straddle multiple jurisdictions in space. A business can harvest tax losses, spin out subsidiaries, secure government contracts and guide public policy – and while all this may sound like the domain of a megacorp, this is fractal: it can be applied across any scale – from a local family-run company in its own municipality, to a transnational conglomerate.*
> 
> *Most importantly – business ownership confers the ability to set or influence policy and actions within the organization in ways we don’t possess when it comes to “holding Bitcoin” or gold.*
> 
> *We all need to think of ourselves as “microglomerates” – and like-minded operators can form Keiretsu-like mesh networks of these, which over time can serve as alternative structures to withstand the non-linear, phase transition coming straight at us.*
> 
> *Think of these “personal conglomerates” as the practical implementation layer for The Sovereign Individual.*

![](https://bombthrower.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/microglomerate.png)A business you own is also the one polity most of us will ever belong to where the decisions get made by the people with skin in the game.

Nobody is coming to save us
---------------------------

This is the most recent theme I’ve been developing since my great disillusionment with the public polity – true liberty, personal responsibility, sovereign individuality will never be a mass movement; it is by definition precluded from being one.

Voting for “the correct leader” or the right political party is not going to save you. Only *you* are going to save yourself.

Texas is the latest case in point. For the better part of a decade it has been the default answer to “where do I go?” for people leaving California and New York, and for more than a few Canadians as well. On Tuesday it elected a Democrat to the Senate and another one as governor.

> Every single time https://t.co/Fl5ItUQM3y
> 
> — BowTiedMara (@BowTiedMara) [November 4, 2026](https://x.com/BowTiedMara/status/2117945360320757826?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

I made a similar point the other day about the Canadians who thought our salvation was either merging with the US or relocating to it:

> so… do the disenfranchised Canucks still want to do the “join the USA” thing?
> 
> They’re gonna vote in a DemSoc president in 2028.
> 
> Book it. https://t.co/J1PhZb2NYR
> 
> — Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) [November 4, 2026](https://x.com/jeftovic/status/2117812626847854682?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

Relocating, it turns out, is less like arriving at a destination and more like putting on a trade: the jurisdiction you just bet heavily on can reprice, re-align, flip, or otherwise self-immolate like Texas just did, and as the US will likely do in 2028.

The thing you moved to get away from can follow you there, and every so often it wins the election.

(As I wrote [back in September](https://bombthrower.com/will-there-be-an-alternative-for-canada/), the Alternative for Canada was never going to be a different party in power, and it was never going to be the 51st state either.)

The midterms set the stage for a Democratic Socialist president in 2028 (#AOC2028?), and presumably the pendulum swings back again at some point after that – maybe. Here in Canada the Liberal Party calls itself “the natural ruling party of Canada” and all indications are that they are correct (because the Canadian mass public, so inexplicably uppity and sanctimonious, are amongst the dumbest authority-worshipping bootlickers on earth).

All this shows that political stability is ephemeral. Putting your faith in MAGA, or Conservatism, or Bitcoin Maximalism is a fool’s errand (and yes, that goes for those of us tempted to read too much into BC). They will let you down eventually, because it’s all hopium.

Welcome to the “kill your heroes” phase of political economy.

Only being resilient, cultivating optionality, and being financially diversified and independent will save you.

*If you’re thinking about ways to acquire more personal agency in a chaotic world, check out the executive summary of my forthcoming book* ***The Blueprint****, free when* [*you sign up for The Bombthrower mailing list*](https://bombthrower.com/join)*. We’ve also created* [*Ready.ca*](https://ready.ca)*, a meeting ground for politically homeless Canadians. Follow me* [*on X here*](https://x.com/jeftovic)*.*