You must log in or # to comment.
If you’re always on the defence, you are losing long term.
Voting might stop a problem from getting worse, but it’s not a viable solution to fix the underlying issues that require real systemic change to occur and that cannot happen from inside the system.
So vote, do all you can to stop it from getting worse. But remember that to fix it you need to fight for a revolution.
You can fight to install progressives at the local level while voting defensively at the national level. Local progressive movement are not only a LOT easier to pull off, but will help create widespread acceptance of progressive ideals as they get good outcomes. Then you expand to the state level and house, then the senate, then you’re well positioned to push for a progressive in the presidency.
See: Zohran Mandani, Katie Wilson…
Next could be Nithya Raman?
These are good examples of what it takes, however, including primary participation and grassroots activism. In addition, the NYC mayoral featured ranked choice voting.
In other words, Duverger’s Law can’t simply be ignored in FPTP systems like those of the US, and anyone who suggests otherwise (like saying you should vote non-strategically to defeat the MAGA opposition) is either terribly ill-informed or, more likely, is working for the opposition.
duverger’s “law” is literally a tautology and has no predictive power at all
duverger’s “law”
The name is a historical artifact of his 1950s phrasing. It’s a tendency theorem with scope conditions.
literally a tautology
Cox, Riker, Lijphart, and Clark+Golder have all reformulated the law as a conditional strategic-equilibrium claim.
that’s a lot of ink spilled for “literally a tautology”
Or, hear me out, you just let people vote for progressives if they want and don’t blame them for dems losing. Maybe look at why people stopped voting after Obama? Maybe he happy that people vote at all because it allows more votes for progressives/dems in the local level, even if it doesn’t help at the national level? Cuz dems have a lot of issues, not just leftists “not” voting for them. (sure, some don’t but iirc they’re actually the highest % dem voting block, even if they are much smaller in population. )
I’m not blaming them for dems losing, and they can vote however they want, I’m not stopping them. This isn’t about how you can and can’t vote, it’s about how to make your vote work to prevent situations like we’re in right now, while also pushing for longer-term outcomes, and we can all have - and share - our opinions on how to do that.
Personally, I think it’s counter-productive to refuse to actively vote to prevent our current situation in the name of ideals or whatever else. It’s going to take years if not decades to fix the damage being done right now, in all likelihood. But you’re welcome to have your own opinion on that matter.
if that sort of voting prevented this situation at all we wouldn’t be here?
Do you think supporting the lesser evil magically makes the two parties put forward BETTER candidates? All that shit does is lead to parties racing to the bottom, voters getting fucking tired of it and either stop voting, or look at trump and go “at least he isn’t a politician he’ll do something different” and vote for him. Dems refuse to do shit about it but run shit after shit after shit. When they had huge turnout for Obama’s message of “change” and now their message with biden is “nothing will fundamentally change” which… cool. Great. Way to energize your voters. “Not trump” isn’t enough. and until the DNC learns that, they can fuck themselves as they aren’t improving or preventing shit. I’ll always vote, but I’m voting for candidates that are the most worthy of a fucking vote.
if that sort of voting prevented this situation at all we wouldn’t be here?
Is your stance that Harris would have been doing the same shit Trump is doing, had she been elected instead? That it wouldn’t have been any better? If that’s what you’re positing… I strongly disagree, and I really don’t know how you can even start to back that claim up.
Regardless, vote how you want. I’ve had this conversation with enough people with your exact stance to know that there’s nothing I can say to change your mind and there’s nothing you’re going to say to change mine, so continue doing you and I’ll continue doing me.
No, you’ve said voting defensively prevents exactly what is happening. As if people don’t vote defensively. As if we are not here.
Harris being run is WHY we are here. The DNC thinking they can get away with being antidemocratic (attacking third parties, suing to get them off the ballot, don’t get me started on the “victory fund” bullshit) is WHY WE ARE HERE. It’s on them. The DNC has fucked itself since after Obama. That’s why so many normal ass people haven’t voted since Obama. I’m not talking super principled leftists. I’m talking normie shit. They don’t vote anymore because it’s fucking garbage. Because even if the DNC won they wouldn’t do anything of substance to help. Half of what happened in Palestine was in collab WITH Biden, planned by him and passed on to Trump. Maybe it would’ve been slower. Draw out the suffering more, but it wouldn’t have been changed for the better, which is the problem. Better than the worst imaginable isn’t good enough for people.
What I said was that voting defensively makes your vote work towards preventing this sort of thing, whereas voting third party does not. Protest votes, ballot spoilage, 3rd party votes and similar actions make a statement, but so does voting for progressives down ballot.
To put it succinctly, people voting 3rd party didn’t cause the current situation, but they did nothing to prevent or obstruct the current situation, either.
She said she’d do the exact same amount of genocide in Gaza. She would absolutely let Israel start a war with Iran.
This is true, but it’s also important to be aware that if all americans ever do is vote then things will never improve. It’s important to vote still, but it can’t end there
Yeah, but also, things would get better faster if we only focused on getting more people to THAN IT WOULD if we only focused trying to get people who dont take other actions to do so.
You can fight to install progressives at the local level while voting defensively at the national level.
And the national party does everything it can to make sure you’re stuck with trumpist shit like Henry Cuellar.
Yeah, people seem to forget history. Often institutions become so sclerotic that the only way forward is to work outside of them. Look what it took to defeat slavery in the US. Slaveholders had co-opted both major parties. Abolitionists tried for decades to work within the existing two party system, voting “lesser evil” election after election. In the end, this strategy failed at ending slavery. It took the founding of a new party, the Republican Party, to really make progress on abolition. It ended up leading to the Civil War, but slavery would have continued for another generation at least if abolitionists had just kept voting defensively election after election.
So you’re saying they just stopped voting for a few elections and let the bigots have free reign for a few elections? Or did they keep voting for the lesser evil in the mean time? Because that’s what this discussion is actually about, and your example doesn’t seem to apply.
No. They didn’t vote lesser of two evils. You need to get out of the headspace that the only option is to vote for one of the two parties. That’s an ahistorical viewpoint. They just voted Republican until their candidate won. The Republican party was only founded after “voting for the lesser evil” failed after decades of trying. This is what I mean when I say people need to learn their history. We’ve been in this situation before, and our ancestors did not escape it by voting for the lesser evil.
We live in a two party system. We’re going to have two parties. However, the parties themselves are not eternal. We’ll always have two parties, but which parties those are can change. And often it’s easier to completely swap out parties than to reform one from within.
If you want to create a new party in the US, the only way to do so is to destroy one of the existing parties. Namely, that means making the other party completely electorally nonviable.
Imagine if the most liberal 20% of the electorate simply refused to ever vote for the Democratic Party again and switched over to the DSA. Yes, that would mean losing for a few cycles. But again, history shows that sometimes you have to put up with pain now for a better future later. Centrists will slander this as “accelerationism,” but this isn’t really that. You’re not hoping things get worse before they get better. You’re just recognizing that the only way to create a new party is to destroy an old one. Politics becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you make one of the existing parties nonviable, then a power vacuum is created, and the whole electoral alignment shifts. If leftists completely abandoned the Democrats, the Democratic party would completely collapse. It would go the way of the Whigs. When a party dies, the electoral coalitions realign. And they would realign around the old Republican Party and the new DSA or other chosen party.
I know this is hard. But really, this is just learning from history. Yes, it means you sometimes lose ground in the short term to gain ground in the long term. And that is hard. It’s painful. But compare that to what we’ve been doing instead - hoping to gain ground in the short term while losing even more in the long term. Voting for Democrats now is just voting for the lock on the ratchet. They have no real desire to change anything. At best you get a temporary reprieve from creeping fascism, while nothing changes in the circumstances that lead to the fascism.
The Republican Party was formed in 1854 and Lincoln was elected president running as a republican in 1860.
“John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.”
credit to slrpnk.net instance admins for sharing this often:
⬛ Union Resources 🟥
These are unions from around the world who can train you to become an effective organizer to form a grassroots union with your co-workers!
But remember that to fix it you need to fight for a revolution.
Nah. We got LGBTQ+ marriages without a revolution. Civil Rights got better for a time. You’re going to have to give examples in the last 20 years where a revolution worked. Meaning, the government wasn’t taken over by an authoritarian and/or military leader.
To be fair, both of those were won with plenty of violence and took decades to accomplish.
The first Pride was a riot started most likely by a black trans woman who refused to be grabbed by the cops during one of their usual roundups of gay people and threw the first punch (brick to the face?) that set off a brawl across the whole area. IIRC, 100 cops were injured in the fight. But it still took nearly 50 years for gay marriage to be completely legal in the US. 1969 was when Stonewall happened, 2015 was the Supreme Court ruling (and that can be repealed at any time, like they did with abortion). Even the first state to officially write it into law, Massachusetts, only happened in 2004.
MLK Jr credited the Black Panthers being armed and willing to do what he couldn’t as a major part of why he had the success that he did. And his protests were already illegal, risking possible prison time for those involved if they weren’t done very carefully. And even after 10 years, Civil Rights laws were only written after a week of riots and billions of dollars in property damage sparked by his murder. 10 years of protests, but it took less than a week for the laws to be drafted and signed into law when entire city districts started to get burnt to the ground.
However, revolutions can be cultural as well. Gay marriage is a great example with actual polling numbers to present. By the time that the Supreme Court ruled on it, polls said that the country was equally split on the issue while as of 2021 a full 70% of the US apparently supports gay marriage.
Civil Rights got better for a time.
Widespread riots gave us the Civil Rights. Crack open Wikipedia for a minute on that champ.
First of all, Civil Rights wasn’t a revolution. Second, that’s one of the reasons I said in the last 20 years, the military wouldn’t let that happen again.
First of all, Civil Rights wasn’t a revolution.
I don’t give a shit what you call it.
Point is it wasn’t brought about by voting. Certainly not by voting for pro-corporate trash.
It would have been if the government hadn’t acquiesced.
Wow it’s almost like change can occur without literal revolution after all!
Not lasting change.
finally, a real fucking take.
Hence the crabby letters and the protests. Right now in the US, there are a lot of issues that are popular, and Democratic candidates can be pressured into movement on those issues. Republican candidates have to obey Dear Leader or face getting primaried by the propaganda machine, hence billion-dollar ballrooms and no accountability for the $1.776 billion slushfund.
…or the inadvisable elective war on Iran.
If Americans were more literate about their elections (which is a prerequisite for democracy to work) then we wouldn’t be in this mess.
Democratic candidates can be pressured into movement on those issues.
Why didn’t they do so thrice when they were in power?
You’re going to be able to find instances where it doesn’t fully work, where positions don’t evolve. Obama era Democrats were mostly neoliberal, which factored into why Trump was able to take power.
But that shouldn’t stop you from voting against the guy who is going to do more damage.
Voting is the least an activist might do.
You’re going to be able to find instances where it doesn’t fully work
What you mean is it never works when it actually matters. The two pivotal moments of Biden’s presidency was the rail workers gearing up to strike and the protests around support of Israel. In both instances he and nearly every Democratic politician told voters to go fuck themselves.
Which is infuriating enough and the only thing more irritating is the endless number of people like yourself trying to tell us that didn’t happen.
I’m not saying it didn’t happen. I’m saying it distracted enough voters from the threat of the GOP, of Trump, of Project 2025, of the white Christian nationalist movement, that they allowed it all to happen.
Now Palestine is even worse off, as are the rail workers. As are we all.
Your position raises a valid concern. The human species just might not be able to organize from the left well enough to stop the right with a charismatic strongman, a base of uneducated soldiers and the financial support of the ownership class. The left may, in fact, be unable to organize due to internal differences. It sucks if that’s the case. I hope not, but I haven’t ruled it out.
The left may, in fact, be unable to organize due to internal differences.
The politician you expect me to vote for tells me to go fuck myself and you call it “internal differences”.
Yeah okay bud.
You’re speaking as if there’s equal blame here. There isn’t. Liberals have treated leftists like second class voters for decades rather than making real concessions. They’re calling all the shots and that means they own all the responsibility.
And curiously, you think the solution is to let the Republicans, who hate you even more and have now set up concentration camps, win.
I do not refute that some of the Democratic organizations are captured by corporate interests, but the Republicans are even more captured, and pose a dire threat to the meager democratic features of the US political system.
Maybe you’re an accelerationist?
Leave your electoral apologia out the /c/: Your votes all amounted to empowering Nazis back into power. You refuse to directly act, because it’s inconvenient to your positions.
Voting is exactly how the electoral college elected them 5 times. Thrice against you, twice for you.
That’s the problem. More people voted for Biden than voted for Harris or Clinton. Democrats were unmotivated to stop Trump from winning, and in all three elections, he was a greater threat no matter who was running against him.
I don’t like the EC either. In fact, no-one other than the far right likes the EC.
I don’t like the EC either. In fact, no-one other than the far right likes the EC.
Then directly demolish it. Ensure it never exist.
Blue Nazis are still Nazis.That’s not a power I personally have, though there have been two attempts to amend the Constitution to eliminate it, and currently there is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is only a couple of states away from having legal force.
The worst of Democrats, establishment Democrats who focus on serving their donors are not fascist. They’re neoliberal, and granted, neoliberalism makes states vulnerable to fascist movements (a problem faced in the EU, Australia and Canada as well as the US) but that doesn’t actually make them fascist.
Democrats were unmotivated to stop Trump from winning,
Because your shitty genocidal wing of the party keeps betraying them.
You’re going to be able to find instances where it doesn’t fully work, where positions don’t evolve.
Positions evolve in the direction you want. Which is why we’re here.
Right now in the US, there are a lot of issues that are popular, and Democratic candidates can be pressured into movement on those issues.
This simply isn’t true. Biden witnessed the protests regarding him supporting Israel and he told them to go fuck themselves.
One counterexample does not make it untrue. I have the same complaint regarding Obama’s failure to rise to the moment after the slaying of Michael Brown in 2014 and the Ferguson unrest. That incident demonstrated that law enforcement was due some severe reformation. It did happen, and the high rate of officer-involved homicide entered public consciousness and the Overton Window. We’ve actually seen some police reform since in some counties, but not coming from Obama or the Congress of the time.
It doesn’t take every time. But it does sometimes.
Right now things are severe, especially now that SCOTUS can pretty much veto anything it wants (including the Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments). The US public may have to resort to noncooperation, general strikes or even civil war to create a governmental system that is public-serving. At least those of us who survive will have to try.
But for now, we’re focused on the midterm elections, to see if we really can push enough of the GOP out to stop Trump and his push towards autocracy. Things are going to get far worse if the Republican party is able to lock in a permanent majority in both houses of Congress, and that’s exactly what they’re trying to do.
We’ve actually seen some police reform since in some counties
Oh wow. Such a victory.
Give me a fucking break.
Women’s rights were rolled back nationwide, but a few counties had some minor police reform!
Incremental progress! /s
It’s certainly progress in the direction centrists want: toward fascism.
So your complaint is that we’re not moving far enough fast enough?
I share your frustration, especially as the Trump regime is moving fast and breaking things, breaking laws and then defying either courts or Congress to stop them since much of law enforcement is on its side.
I don’t know if we’re still at the point where we can a) get the Democrats back into sweeping power and b) depend on them to make sweeping reforms of elections and the US Supreme Court, and then start to rebuild what the Trump regime has destroyed, or if we’re already doomed to a one-party system and need to focus on organizing resistance like a general strike. Spelling it out like that, it seems like a long shot.
Part of it depends on how the
20162026 mid-term elections go, if they go. I suspect that swing voters may still be under the influence of the massive far-right propaganda machine that dominates social media and mainstream news. If that’s the case then the US will fall to one party autocracy and then to civilization collapse.All that said, so long as we do have elections, it’s still worthy to consider voting defensively, especially if the alternative is voting third party or not at all.
depend on them to make sweeping reforms of elections and the US Supreme Court,
They won’t. You know they won’t. Stop trying to pretend like you think otherwise. Nobody is buying it.
Trump was convicted of 34 felonies and we depended on Democrats to make sure he was sentenced. They did not.
They might reform SCOTUS now that their careers, and possibly their very lives, depend on it.
I do fear they might not do enough. The damage caused by allowing this Supreme Court to run amok is overwhelming and might not be easily reversible. They need to not merely add term limits and expand the court (possibly to over a hundred) and mandate an enforceable code of ethics, but it may be time to strip SCOTUS of jurisdiction so that they no longer have total veto power over legislation and executive action.
Curiously, term limits might require an amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Stripping them of jurisdiction only requires legislation.
So your complaint is that we’re not moving far enough fast enough?
My complaint is that centrists demand we accept a token effort as a complete permanent solution.
One counterexample does not make it untrue.
Name one centrist that has changed their mind on genocide. One.
Democratic candidates can be pressured into movement on those issues.
No, they literally can’t. Kamala chose to lose rather than change the dems stance on Israel. They chose genocide over winning.
deleted by creator
ML users : reeeee
at least you and them can bond over your shared joy of using ableism to make points!
- Not, Skullgrid, def. not ableist.
- Liberal concessions is what allowed the deaf & blind to be segregated from public life, until one too many of us had enough. Directly intersect every time you can.
I don’t know a thing about this skullgrid person, but ‘reee’ is a 4chan thing making fun of autistic/nd people. Certainly something we can move beyond when wanting to say people are angry.
So why aren’t you leading a revolution?
It’s a LOT safer, and more comfortable to throw insults and point fingers.
I am, a neighbor at a time.
I already have a canteen going.
Something everyone enjoys.I wonder why Americans can’t even free food.🤔
Hey, it’s great that you’re doing that! I don’t want to demean what you’re doing, which, after all, is the most anyone could reasonably ask of you, but that isn’t going to result in an actual revolution is it? At least not in the next five years?
With that in mind, is it not also reasonable to ask that every few years you go to a ballot box and tick a box if that might result in slightly fewer of your neighbours being deported?
Thank fuck someone is saying this. There are a few posters in c/progressivepolitics that seem to be saying Democrats have to pass all their purity tests or you shouldn’t vote and that’s nuts because it hands Republicans elections. Luckily they usually get downvoted
“Purity tests.” And the test is just don’t do a genocide.
Fucking literally.
“Purity test” just means “I have no standards and I expect you to abandon yours.”
deleted by creator
How did Biden & Obama free ICE Slavery & Guantanamo again?
How did Biden & Obama free ICE Slavery & Guantanamo again?
Exhibit A. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good in a first past the post voting system, or you lose hard
Yes, obviously to anyone paying attention. How does letting republicans get elected help get rid of first past the post though?
Then what populist do I motion to get rid off the electoral college?
If you want to lay down and die that’s your perogative.
The rest is self righteousness.
Why would I lay, when there’s victims to intersect, and people to empower?
I wish you the best.
Where is the good?
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good
Centrists think genocide is “the good”.
Obama literally tried to close it and Republicans fought tooth and nail to stop that.
https://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/republican-senators-guantanamo-114223
Damn Democratic Senators and their Nazi ways!
Why didn’t Obama do another executive order to bypass the Senate‽
Every dumbass voting this down is EXACTLY why we have Dumbass as president.
… don’t you think a lot of Trump votes were defensive votes against Hilary/Harris? Telling people to vote against the worse candidate is morbid and devoid of hope.
Elections should be restructured so people aren’t forced into 1-on-1 battles. People naturally have more diverse beliefs than a left/right spectrum. The current system was gamed into crisis. Time for an amendment
The system needs to be changed, absolutely.
Do you think that is going be easier with a Democrat in charge or Trump? Given that Trump has already done everything possible to destroy what little voter rights Americans do have. And may not be done.
At this point wouldn’t be surprised if he made up some bullshit excuse to cancel the fall elevations all together.
Voting “defensively for trump” is like setting your house on fire… defensively!
Your Americentrism is repugnant. Please keep it in your country.
Pretty sure America is the most obvious place this would be referencing.
It has to be a FPTP country, and it has to be a country with so few possible parties that the choices are bad or worse. Not to mention it has to be a country with free and fair elections.
How many countries fit that bill?
Elections in the US are far removed from free and fair, especially now we’re past Louisiana v. Callais and SCOTUS can and will veto any efforts by Congress to reform them.
SCoTUS has neither a military nor a law enforcement arm. With enough political will there is nothing they can do to stop court reform.
Ellie Mystal pointed out that was a risk of civil war: If congress were to strip SCOTUS of jurisdiction (no longer decides what is Constitutional or not) and the court then responds by saying that law is unconstitutional, the blue states side with Congress while the red states side with the Court, and we have a crisis that cannot be resolved by institutional procedure.
Personally, I’d like to see more of They’ve made their ruling, now let them enforce it. But as we recently saw with the Virginia redistricting referendum, their governor obeyed in advance.
That’s possible, but the US doesn’t have the institutional capacity for civil war. I think that while the possibility of violence is high, actual civil conflict is low.
Civil war will certainly not look like the first one with battle lines, though if we see an interstate conflict, we might see fights over strategic points. The experts I’ve read suggest there would be flash strikes coordinated the way that flash mobs are, only armed.
We certainly have enough firearms to make for a bloody mess.
Lol
Scroll up. You’re scaring the Aussies, Bri’ish, & Deutsche in this /c/.
Finding @uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone was talking about omnium California midterms took a secondary retort to press.
free and fair elections.
Ahistorical take, or rhetorical?
deleted by creator
I voted third party. I am glad we can still be friends 🥰
You should look up “First Past the Post”, check out how many times a 3rd party has won the presidency in the 60 elections held over the past 325 years, and slowly realize you actually helped ensure Trump was elected President. Then I don’t know… take a victory lap? Keep telling yourself you did the right thing because it’s easier?
You have a point. Maybe it’s time we actually put some effort into getting a different party in office, since both the dems and repubs hate us
Sure, then we can have the republicans and the neo-whigs as the two parties fighting over the presidency. Much better. /s.
We need to change the system, and letting the republicans put their finger on the scale by letting them in office will only solidify and amplify the inequities we have now. Strategic voting is necessary to keep the avenues of change open.
So while we’re changing the system, can we all agree to vote against Republicans by default?
Because let’s be real here, the Republicans have consistently fucked this country up, while Democrats have largely had to spend thier time in office getting shit back to normal.
This has been the pattern nearly my whole life: Republicans get elected, fuck everything up, take away rights, economy crashes. People get pissed, vote in Democrats. Democrats spend their whole time in office just getting stuff back to the status quo, then also sometimes maybe make itty-bitty steps of actual progress. People forget how bad Republicans were and vote them back in because they’re fucking stupid. Republicans fuck everything up again. Repeat, ad nauseam.
So pretty please, with sugar on top, vote against the fucking republicans.As opposed to letting the Democrats put their finger on the scale by letting them in office to amplify the inequalities we have now. As it stands, you offer the Democratic party absolutely no reason to offer progressive policies, because they don’t need to appeal to the leftist demographic at all.
Thanks to your strategic voting, the best strategy for the Democrats is to be just left of the republicans. The further right the republicans go, the further right the Democrats need to go to pull votes from the other side, because they can already count on your vote. Who cares if a politician voted to protect ICE, as long as they have a D next to their name? That’s bad, we should discourage that, but we should keep voting for them!
In 2038, when the Democrat candidate is even more rightwing than Trump is now, are you going to earnestly argue in favor of voting for them because their opponent is even worse? Don’t you want to avoid an eventuality where you end up fighting for a rightwing president? Don’t let the Democrats treat your vote as a given.
What you’re not getting is this,
Democrats dont’ cater to leftists, because leftists generally don’t vote. They don’t need to apeal to your vote, becasue you already don’t vote for them.
If leftists got organized and became an actual voting block (the same way the religous right is, for example) then Democrats would be forced to apeal to them. But leftists by and by don’t vote. They’ll do other things like go to protests, but they won’t go to the polls.
That’s how voting works, your’e not asking the politican to do something, you’re telling them to do it. And if they don’t do it, you vote in someone else. The insane tea-party maga crazies understand this much, it astounds me that leftists in this county don’t do the same.
enjoy 2 shitbird forever then american, you’ll never learn.
Lol ok. Like Canada is any better.
Your hillbillies are like 10 times worse than ours.
I guess this is what you do if there are only two candidates running and they are "100% Hitler’ and “99% Hitler”. Fortunately, I’ve never encountered this situation, but I’d really be in a moral dilemma if I did.
We should have a “None of the above” option on the ballot. If “None of the above” got the most votes, then they’d have to run another election with all new candidates.
We would still have centrists going “I am looking for a 99.6% Hitler.”
There are a number of election system models better than the ones used in United States elections. Sadly, our elected officials get more power with the system as it is, and it’s difficult to organize general strikes around election reform…or court reform for that matter. And I say that since the US Supreme Court has succeeded in vetoing the VRA and is carving into the 14th and 15th amendments.
Tiered voting!!!
Better do of the other acceptably functional democratic models that don’t result in a 2 party system. Proportional representation, instant-runoff, …
Nice try, Kamala
Here’s the thing that bothers me with the whole harm reduction/purity test/don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good argument when it comes to US politics:
-
Saying that I should vote for the person who agrees with me on some stuff even if it’s not everything kind of assumes that for some list of policy stances, they’re all essentially equivalent. Not saying mean things about minorities is put on the same level as continuing to run a massive, racist prison and policing system or a massive military that is essentially only used for killing foreigners to exploit their resources. It’s insane to argue that I should be able to overlook these truly reprehensible and harmful actions because they’re a bit better on some smaller thing.
-
Even if you ignore the bad things that are still done by the less bad party, structurally, the systems we have in place all but guarantee that we will repeatedly have more of the worse party every election or so and that they will have access to tools that let them abuse their power. So at best, voting for the lesser evil just slightly delays the greater evil. If we just go vote every few years then go back to brunch and trust that the people we elected will be doing a good job, nothing will ever change. We never see these blue no matter who people go “I know it sucks, lets do this for now, but here is the plan for the next few years to make sure we can get a better option in the future.”
-
The way things work now, even if a politician says they agree with you, you just have to trust them. There is no real recourse for holding them accountable if they were lying. You just have to let them do whatever they were going to do, maybe write some strongly worded letters, and then in 2/4/6 years you end up having to vote for them again because of the way the system is fucked. And as long as they are taking corporate money, they aren’t representing you. You can’t trust anything they say.
If a Democrat came around who:
-
Didn’t take corporate money and seemed trustworthy.
-
Promised significant democratic reforms in both how elections work and the government works so that we can actually have real choices next time.
-
Promised to significantly reduce the military so we couldn’t keep doing imperialism everywhere.
-
Promised to significantly reduce the police and surveillance state so that they won’t have the capacity to keep spying on us and disrupting real opposition.
Then I would 100% vote for them and even canvas for them even if I disagreed with them on some other issues that I cared about. At least then we’d be moving forward. We’d have a chance to do better in the future. But they’re not going to do that because the people who have made it into power benefit from things as they are, so they’re not going to change that. As things are now, we’re just stuck in an endless loop, slowly drifting towards oblivion.
To be clear, just not voting and doing nothing else isn’t super helpful either, but the key is we need to get everyone on board with an organized plan to fix things. The people who show up every election just to tell you that actually trying to organize a new party is bad, voting for the progressive in the party primary is dividing the party, and you can’t complain too much about the bad things the lesser evil does because it’ll hurt our chances next time are NOT HELPING.
The question then is how do we do this? We have a bunch of people who know the system is fucked, but there’s no direction for them to express that. How do they even begin to fight? “Let’s organize a new party for this purpose!” Ok now we have yet another 3rd party to divide the vote even further. (Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/) “Lets all pick this existing party and use it for this purpose!” Ok, which one? The DNC? They’re part of the problem and actively work against progressive candidates in primaries. Sure, we sometimes get the win, but those victories often take all of our time and attention just to secure one relatively small seat of power that is useless without winning way more of them. Another existing 3rd party? Can we get people to agree which one to join? This is where the leftist infighting argument holds some water. There are a few existing parties of varying lefty persuasion, but people aren’t necessarily going to agree with all their policies, so getting people to compromise on one of them when we have no central organized structure is borderline hopeless. And that’s before you even consider the collective action problem of getting enough people to take the leap that they aren’t worried about the splitting the vote issue.
And regardless of what path we decide to take, how do we spread this message to get people on board? All of the major channels for mass communication are captured by corporate interests. Even social media, which had the hope of being a place where the people could talk to each other directly, has become almost useless for that function since the corporations that own them control the algorithms that allow messages to spread beyond their starting group.
And I already know someone is going to say something to the effect of “Don’t worry about the big picture. It’s too big for you to handle, so try to do things locally that are more possible.” To that I say: Holy shit we are running out of time. The government keeps getting more and more fascist, he environment is falling apart and will kill us at some point, and technological advances in surveillance and military technology are going to keep making it easier for the powerful to cling onto power without care for what people want. Getting on your town’s school board or something sounds nice and all, but it’s like being on the Titanic and telling people to grab some buckets. Like I said earlier, even winning a single seat in congress doesn’t mean much if it took our entire movement’s collective effort to get that seat while the capitalists used their money to win the rest of them.
I really don’t know what to do, but I’m so fucking sick of hearing people chastising people for not wanting to just keep doing what we’ve always been doing when that clearly hasn’t been working and not only not helping to change things, but actively working to disrupt the efforts of people who do want to try to change things.
EDIT: Just to add my own personal anecdote to this: In 2020 I both volunteered for Bernie’s campaign and worked on the campaign for a progressive congressional candidate in my district. The mood felt so optimistic. We were all working so hard to try to change things and for a while it seemed like it had a chance… and then we just straight up lost both elections to some absolute pieces of shit. Our incumbent representative was such a fucking terrible person he might as well have been a Republican.
Not that this has any bearing on the broader argument, I just want to share how my own experiences have shaped my feelings on this, but the broader pattern kind of reinforces that.
Love this comment. You expressed so well what I’ve been feeling these past few months. And when people say “idk the dems don’t seem too promising” they get attacked with people saying they basically let trump win and you need to vote blue etc etc.
We do need something different but that task seems near impossible. I feel like I’m trapped in the passenger seat of a car that’s crashing in slow motion and i can’t get out.
Especially hard when 1/3 of the country is still rooting for trump. Legit overhead a guy at my work say “I have to pay twice as much for gas but he’s having a UFC fight at the white house so that’s pretty cool.” Like dude… gahh idk man.
Still cast a vote to show you’re willing to vote. People can’t read your mind.
Yep, and unlike a lot of other people, that dude goes out of his way to vote for the orange turd
-
You can do this as long as your are also working to build alternative (worker’s) political parties. If you are only voting defensively you are going to lose everything eventually. There is nothing wrong with defensive voting from a moral standpoint but it is a defeatist strategy. You must build something better in the meantime
Don’t let .ml see this.
They were yelling at me to not vote Platner, to start a single man revolution.
I’m ready for one, I hate our system, the democratic establishment is aiding fascism as much as the terrorist republicans. But not voting for the guy advocating for policy to help working class people, that calls out both democrats and republicans, that both parties are spending against…
That’s just shooting ourselves in the foot at that point. People will die if a republican wins. Healthcare will be pulled back further. Etc etc.
You would think the people yelling at you to read theory would understand it themselves.
From Marx: dialectical thinking, I can work with 3rd party advocacy while recognizing the material and concrete situations as the exist currently and make strategic decisions.
From Lenin: being a single individual starting a revolution would do nothing buy get myself killed and harm the building of a revolution. The first person who dies would not be a billionaire in such an ill conceived violent revolution without mass support and parallel alternative systems to capitalism to support revolutionaries.
This image I’ve been resonating with as, of course, I’ve been attacked by the right, but now I’ve been fending off the authoritarian left and I think this is where the whole “horseshoe theory” really comes from. It’s just authoritarianism.
This kind of post isn’t helpful. It’s useless finger wagging at this point that isn’t actually going to substantively change things and it does nothing to challenge Democratic ineffectiveness.
Is the Democratic party better than the Republicans? Sure. But during the whole time Biden was in office that didn’t stop my rights from eroding in the state I live in and the current Democratic status quo is to claim that standing for some civil rights is a problem. I won’t say some things didn’t get better but an improving economy didn’t help with the cost of living for those of us who actually have to live in THIS economy.
The general argument though, is that if you vote for the lesser of two evils, therefore you’re picking the opponent that you feel you are most likely going to nudge on the issues. The DNC ran a postmortem, claimed that they were going to be open and honest about the results, then hid the results when it contradicted their pro-Israel stance.
Nevermind that our leaders are fighting corruption and fascism with strongly worded letters, while the establishment is engaged in actively trying to destroy any momentum from their left while they seek out this mythical centrist Republican that’ll vote for them. Am I supposed to feel okay with a party who’s establishment thinks my rights are optional? Are brown people supposed to feel safe when out government is engaged in active ethnic cleansing and the opposition is dog whistling about how much they love strong borders? Are people of middle eastern descent supposed to feel okay when the opposition party supports a genocide?
Are we supposed to be convinced that a political party is willing to pay attention to protests and act on them, when they can’t even be bothered to be transparent about and learn from a postmortem that told them actual fucking genocide is a line in the sand that enough people are unwilling to cross that it’d cost them one of the most consequential fucking elections of century?!
Voting blue is a tool, but how is doing it no matter who going to be meaningful when the Democrats won’t learn from their mistakes, will double down on their harms, will throw their own candidates under the bus for being too far left, and will continuously shift rightward?
I’m all for not letting the perfect get in the way of the good, and I have absolutely followed through on the “picking your opponent” mindset, but you actually have to have good on the board.
Push for systemic change and fight the Democratic establishment 364 days a year.
Not voting for dems is how you signal that they need to change. If they keep getting elected no matter what they actually do, then why on earth would they listen to the people telling them to change?
Based AF
EDIT: Perhaps I should clarify my view a bit. Any vote preventing the worst candidate from taking office is a good one. Especially in our First-Past-the-Post system.
Disclaimer: This strategy takes decades or centuries to have any effect.
to have any effect if it has any effect at all.
ftfy…
And in protest, you’ve let the other guy win. Now you have your very own Stasi in the streets and your tax dollars are being spent on bombing schools and celebratory UFC fights. You… sure showed them, haven’t you.
Ahh the neoliberal “its the voters who are the problem” fever dream, where Democrats can never fail, they can only be failed by voters.
A fever dream which has resulted in the Democratic party having a lower approval rating than Trump. Surely defending Democrats as an institution and blaming voters will gather more people to your coalition and help stop Trump.
You gotta get it through your head homie. You blaming voters for the failures of the Democrats: Its why Trump won in both 16 and 24. You’re the problem if you take issue with how voters vote.
“VOTING IS SO IMPORTANT”
“So you have to vote how I tell you.”
“Also everything is your fault, we’ve done nothing wrong.”
Fuckin dems lol.
Whatever soothes your conscience.
We needed a coalition of voters to stop Trump. Excusing Dems and blaming voters destroys our ability to build that coalition. People who do that are wreckers. So stop being a wrecker. If you have this opinion and want to blame voters, fine, but keep it entirely to yourself.
You do know that it’s possible to do both, right? Putting the blame on third party voters does not absolve the Democratic party, and it’s weird that people keep presenting it that way.
Putting the blame on third party voters does not absolve the Democratic party
Except that’s exactly what it ends up doing.
Kinda wild to suggest some random nobody on lemmy has any reason to feel guilty. Do you think Biden feels any guilt for going around congress twice to ship weapons to Israel? I doubt it.
I’ve never shipped a single bomb in my life. Hell I’ve never even slapped somebody.
If Joe Biden can sleep at night then I sure as hell can.
Imagine basing your system of morality on whether or not some other person might feel guilty about a thing.
Wow, dude, talk about ideals.
Who was talking about my entire system of morality?
I just don’t feel guilty when I don’t vote for genocide supporters. Pretty simple stuff.
The effect of an individual vote is indistinguishable from it not having any effect at all.
The infinitesimal power of the vote.
It’s only part of a strategy, but yes, it takes time. I think we might see what happens when general discontent of the public becomes severe enough that they develop class consciousness. Well, those of us who survive the misery will get to see it.
Best i can do is hand the election to the worst option by abstaining to vote because there is no perfect option.
Do you mean no good option?
For the purpose of my comment the distinction is irrelevant.
I spose.
You got what you wanted as soon as there was no anti-genocide candidate.
blocked lol
Centrists can’t stand to hear people who don’t love genocide and nothing else.
Add a 3rd option for “neither” and if that one wins the two other candidates get executed.
Just don’t fill your ballot out, at least not completely. That’s what I do. I only voted for one person in the primary.
