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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, voting Dem didn’t do anything to prevent it either, is my point.
My annoyance also isn’t with people voting Dem. Vote how you want. My annoyance is with dems attacking third party. With people blaming third party. My real annoyance is people refusing to criticise the DNC. This defensive voting blue no matter who shit is what got us here. When you refuse to criticise someone because they’re marginally better than the opposition, we get into the position of literal Hitler, or “at least I’m not LITERALLY Hitler do you HAVE to vote for me.” Which… bad.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 2016 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And you’ve decided the best way you can contribute to the situation is tell Leftists the same thing they’ve been hearing for 40+ years? That strategy is no longer effective. It has lost to Donald Trump twice now. When do you finally decide to appeal to Liberal voters and tell them it’s time to make real concessions with Leftists in the Democratic primaries if they want to win elections?
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.
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.
deleted by creator
finally, a real fucking take.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
She said she’d do the exact same amount of genocide in Gaza. She would absolutely let Israel start a war with Iran.
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.
I mean, voting Dem didn’t do anything to prevent it either, is my point.
My annoyance also isn’t with people voting Dem. Vote how you want. My annoyance is with dems attacking third party. With people blaming third party. My real annoyance is people refusing to criticise the DNC. This defensive voting blue no matter who shit is what got us here. When you refuse to criticise someone because they’re marginally better than the opposition, we get into the position of literal Hitler, or “at least I’m not LITERALLY Hitler do you HAVE to vote for me.” Which… bad.
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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.
“John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, they literally can’t. Kamala chose to lose rather than change the dems stance on Israel. They chose genocide over winning.
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.
Oh wow. Such a victory.
Give me a fucking break.
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 2016 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.
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.
Since you just repeated yourself I’m just going to repeat myself.
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.
Women’s rights were rolled back nationwide, but a few counties had some minor police reform!
Incremental progress! /s
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.
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 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?
And you’ve decided the best way you can contribute to the situation is tell Leftists the same thing they’ve been hearing for 40+ years? That strategy is no longer effective. It has lost to Donald Trump twice now. When do you finally decide to appeal to Liberal voters and tell them it’s time to make real concessions with Leftists in the Democratic primaries if they want to win elections?
Maybe you prefer MAGA to Leftists.
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.
Then directly demolish it. Ensure it never exist.
Blue Nazis are still Nazis.