As said by a wise man, a silent majority does not exist in policy.
Before you reply to me directly please understand:
- The US overthrew democracy in the country I am from
- The US installed a fascist king with secret police that terrorized my family
- Once kicked out the US supported a dictator in the neighboring country where the other half of my family lived
- The US funded both sides of a war between my country and the neighboring one that led to mass civilian deaths, one side directly by giving a dictator weapons and cash and the other side clandestinely thru laundering money by selling drugs in Latin America
- Once they lost that war turned on the dictator in the neighboring country and invented reasons to illegally invade. Twice
- Toppled the regime and left a power vacuum that consumed all my family that lived there for literally hundreds of years.
- Created material conditions in the country my family is from that forced them to leave or die
You Americans are not the good guys, your country and government is evil to its core.
That’s right, everybody knows that the left and the right are perfectly equally bad, and the act of voting to stop the bleeding and starting a revolution are mutually exclusive /s
And then after years of this nonsense, people wonder how the poor voter turnout that got the fascist elected happened.
Here is the education that you need to take over the Democratic Party:
David Hogg, the new Vice Chair of the DNC, has allocated $20M to primary out the old appeasers, and replace them with youthful progressives to create a true opposition party.
Democratic primaries only see ~20% turnout in congressional elections. 30/50 states have partisan primaries, meaning you must be registered as a Democrat to vote in the Democratic primary. This was a contributing factor in Bernie’s 2016 loss.
Rather than progressives and leftists fracturing over third-parties, we need to all block vote progressives into the Democratic Party through primaries and replace the deadwood centrists that have been content with the status quo.
Check your state’s primary type here: https://ballotpedia.org/Primary_election_types_by_state
You cannot take over the Democratic Party. It will just change its own rules before you get the chance. The people running it are all feeding from the same donor trough, either as politicians or consultants. You think they will let you just take the trough away? Friend they make the party rules! They will just change them! They already did this against Bernie, an imperialist socdem, someone who isn’t even a real threat to capital (just the insurance industry) and they thwarted that even when it had momentum and kids allowed themselves hope for healthcare without poverty. This is the basic nature of capitalist parties: they are beholden to capital, not the people, and certainly not you or I.
By the time the Democratic Partu is “taken over” by anything, it will be because it has found a way to make capital happy by adopting a policy that costs them nothing. Which means we win nothing of serious value and the spiral of capitalist degrading conditions continues.
In the meantime, what role do these reformers actually serve? If they can’t change what needs yo change, what other effects do they have?
Well, they mostly just convince people to have false hope for the party, delaying its need to crash and burn and be replaced, ideally with something more effective than a bourgeois electoral party.
Lol, and this was the establishment Democrat response:
Hilarious that Carville claimed progressives have purity tests in the same breath
Yup. Carville wants to preserve the “schism” between progressives and liberals. That’s how you know it’s the right move. We need to shift back the Overton window.
This was a contributing factor in Bernie’s 2016 loss.
I am from the Bronx. I was a registered democrat my entire life. Somehow when my wife and I went to vote in 2016, after making sure we were registered, we were turned away from the polls because “we weren’t registered”
2 years later I started receiving the letters and was suddenly registered again.
The reason Bernie lost in 2016 is your fucking party threw us off the rolls because of who we are and where we lived. Your fucking party stole that election. You are full of shit and it is you that is a fascist enabler by making an excuse for corruption.
It’s not my party. I’ve been left of the Democrats since the 90s. It’s the party that more closely aligns with my values between the only two that can win a US Presidential Election.
I believe you, and I’m sure you’re not the only one with that problem. I didn’t say it was the reason Bernie lost, because I’m fully aware of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Hillary’s collusion, but it was a contributing factor.
I volunteered to direct foot traffic for the general election, and chatted up several other volunteers about the disappointing results of the primary. They told me that they couldn’t believe how many registered independents and no party affiliation voters they had to turn away. Apparently partisan primary requirements aren’t common knowledge, so I’m sharing this information to prevent other people from having the same experience.
It’s not my party
It’s enough your party that you’re willing to do genocide denial for them
What you described is a big issue. I feel it shows just how much there needs to be a push for change nationally and within each of the states to lobby the Democratic Party for change. Some states have open primaries, some have closed, and others have semi-open primaries. It makes no sense for states to not just be semi-open or fully open for primaries, as closed primaries just further alienates the party from potential voters.
As someone that voted Bernie in 2016, we didn’t have the votes in 2016 for Bernie to make it through the primary. The country itself was not as progressive in 2016 as it is now imo, especially so for the Democratic base.
For Bernie to have even had a chance to win the primary, the election format would have needed to not be First Past the Post. He was a victim of vote splitting found in First Past the Post and then establishment Dems allocated their voters votes to go towards Hillary. I don’t think it was fair what happened to Bernie especially with the DNC, but I realize now it was a flaw of the system itself that makes it extremely difficult for a progressive to win a Democratic presidential primary. I think it makes zero sense why people can’t pick their favorite candidate(s) first and then pick backup ‘safe’ candidates for elections. Also there is the issue of some states excluding people not registered with a party from voting in the primary. I feel it is a bad move to prevent these voters at the primary level since non-affiliated voters are usually the ones that ultimately decide the elections and they can give input ahead of time if they would vote for that candidate in the general election.
Having ranked robin voting, STAR voting, or score voting would help prevent a popular candidate like Bernie from losing by default to a ‘safe’ establishment pick.
David Hogg
Be unarmed if you wish, but don’t choose for other people how they defend themselves.
The Democrats will not defend us, the justice system will not defend us. We are on our own.
You had a choice OP
- Vote to maintain a bad status quo
- Vote to make things a billion times worse via fascism
- Start a revolution
Instead you chose secret option d. Make ‘both sides equally bad’ memes to justify the acceptance of fascism.
Always vote against the fascist. Or revolt.
I mean… I’m not in love with the idea of “blocking movement to the left”, but I sure as fuck would take that over the freespin to the right we are on for now. Like, I get that Dem’s need to step their game way the fuck up because you don’t win elections by being the “second worst choice”… but still. If we didn’t want accelerated fascism…
Up until the moment we have enough confirmed support for a progressive movement, status quo is a hell of a lot better than accelerated fascism; if only to buy more time to build the aforementioned progressive support. I’m all for actual leftward movement, but gambling on unconfirmed support is stupid. Even the liberals understand that, in their sports-team monkey brain.
The left has no plan sufficient to deal with this. I hear vague rumblings about strikes and revolutions and the power of the working class united, but the working class isn’t united yet. There is no organized, validated plan to effect that revolution. There’s no leftist Project 2025. That’s a natural consequence of the commendable independence of leftists, but it has the unfortunate consequence of being tactically untenable. The right uniform under the banner of their dictator, the left squabbles about trivialities.
It’s not that I wish it to be so; I would vastly prefer the left to have a functional plan to secure power. But it is the reality; I see neither such a plan, nor the necessary organization to implement such a plan. That’s why we vote lesser evil. We strive for the stationary phase of the ratchet to avoid the freewheeling phase, because we don’t yet have the organized strength to break the pawl from its housing.
Once we have that organized strength, and not sooner, we can break the pawl. Sooner, and the ratchet spins freely to the right.
And how’s that working out for you?
A bunch of shortsighted cosplayers with no sense of praxis or political literacy protested the do-nothing Dems and we got the freewheeling fascism MAGAs. How’s that working out for you? How’s the glorious revolution coming?
So it’s not working then?
But I assume you’re going to keep doing it anyway. All while continuing to accuse other people of being short sited with no sense of praxis.
Flagrant hypocrisy! This was your plan, not mine. How’s it working? Did a third party win? Did we end the genocide in Gaza yet? Don’t equate your plan’s failure with our recognition that it failed. You gambled, and this is what we get. Own it, maybe learn something about implementation.
Yup, looks like I was correct; you are going to keep doing it anyway, while desperately projecting your own failure onto others.
Keep up the “I’m rubber you’re glue” act buddy, it’s age appropriate. I wanted Trump to lose, you wanted Harris to lose. You got your wish, this is on you. Or keep blaming everyone else who tried to warn you that it was a stupid idea, how dare they point out the glaring flaws in your strategy. Let’s see if that makes a leftist plan materialize.
Blocking movement to the left is why you’re left with a rightward trend. Not just because the right itself “moves right” but because Dems’ political nature breeds false consciousness and confused disillusionment. Dems promise basic things like a student debt jubilee and then do a little weak attempt at it. So then people leave them behind. Even worse, Dems help create the degrading conditions that provokes an anti-liberal backlash (liberalism being the dominant ideology of capitalism, not just US Dems), and then Dems work their hardest to fight the associated leftward shift. But not the right: their radicals are useful for crushing that new left, as the left is anticapitalist.
Most importantly, the bourgeoisie electoral system provides an illusion of control. You don’t actually choose the lesset evil. You just throw in a vote for candidates preselected for you by capital and the party (a party in which you have no say) who will never actually be able to fight the right or adopt anticapitalist positions, and will therefore never be left. You, and the people, are not in control in this scenario. This scenario just provides consent for what capital wanted anyways, just with two different flavors: genocidal fascism with a good PR team for the theoretically empathetic and genocidal fascism with an okay PR team for braying hogs.
You didn’t have a choice, the economic system in the US concentrates power in the hand of people with money and they are fascists. If it wasn’t 2024 it would be 2028 after 4 years of congressional stalling. The path the US is on is predetermined, they don’t have to fix every election to the vote, they fix a percentage of them over the course of decades to push the policy to the right.
You’re not wrong. But if I had cancer, and a doctor gave me a way to delay the inevitable, I would take it. Maybe it can’t be fixed, maybe it’s totally fubar. But I don’t have it in me to just give up and willingly let people suffer without a fight.
But I don’t have it in me to just give up and willingly let people suffer without a fight.
Unless those people are Palestinian, then fuck 'em.
I get why you are pissed off, and have every right to be. How both parties of the American government have treated the Palestinian genocide is beyond reprehensible, immoral, inhumane, and frankly disgusting. And that is only a small slice of the harm caused by the US across the globe. All of which I condemn wholeheartedly.
But Trump is actively making it harder for anyone to help slow, stop, or otherwise prevent additional unnecessary death and suffering. So while yes, the genocide would have continued under the Dems, there may yet have been innocent lives that could have been saved that will now be lost. When faced with saving 1 out of a 100, or 0, I believe that 1 life is worth saving. I even have the audacity to hope we could have saved more than just 1 out of 100.
I don’t intend to give up on anyone, but I also have to accept that my power is limited. So doing what I can to prevent the genocide from accelerating, in the hopes that it gives even one more child a chance to escape, is worth it to me. Maybe it isn’t the best strategy, but it is the best I could do with my time and ability to affect change to the best of my knowledge. I certainly would have preferred if the US electorate had united to solve these problems long ago, and we could have used our collective force for unambiguous good, but when even my parents won’t listen to me on the changes I think the country needs to make, steering the entire country in the right direction is beyond me at this point. Despite that fact, I still can’t just bury my head in the sand and say “sorry Palestinian child, I could have done everything in my power, kicking and screaming, to give you a snowballs chance in hell. But instead I felt it was more important to give up to the feelings of despair”.
I get that a lot of folks, yourself included I assume(?), believe that abstaining from voting or voting 3rd party would send a strong message that we will not be complicit in the countries support of a genocidal regime. And I can see why that would be your strategy, maybe in 100+ years that kind of strategy would actually amount to more saved lives, I can’t say for sure. But what I do know is that in the short term, our collective inability to keep Trump out of office has made many things worse for many people, minority groups most of all, and has made sure that the Palestinian genocide has only accelerated with the enthusiastic support of the US government under the Trump administration.
But with all that said, I hope that you haven’t given up either, and are with me in doing the best you can to help anyone you can to the best of your abilities.
and has made sure that the Palestinian genocide has only accelerated with the enthusiastic support of the US government under the Trump administration.
No, he hasn’t. The genocide was every bit as “accelerated” and the supporting of the US government every bit as enthusiastic under the Democrats, and you only think otherwise because liberals were engaging in mass genocide denial and apologia when it was their team doing it. In this sense, Trump has been better for Palestine, because at least now liberals are actually acknowledging what’s happening.
This also torpedoes the “lesser evil” argument for me, because how can I trust people to vote lesser evil when they won’t be honest with themselves about the evil the democrats were doing?
Sounds a lot like the “both sides are the same” argument with more steps. If people voted left wing then the politicians would go left wing.
This is why revolution and working class organization is necessary.
Also funny when people complain about Leftists critiquing the Dems. Pre-election you said to wait, now it’s post election and the same complaints arise.
Blue MAGA: Its always never the time for criticism.
"First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”
Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection." - mlk jr
Bought a lot of European stock during the trump crash so…
THANK YOU COMMUNISTS FOR NOT VOTING 😁😁😁😁
6% total increase in a mooooooooooonth lalalallalala
Ahhhhhhh bonjour mademoiselle… mon chérie… Ma femme pour toujours 🌝
You can always count on @hamid@vegantheoryclub.org to get most rabbid libs stirred up and face their own contradictions (without taking away any insights from the posts themselves anyway lol)…
Literally every post that just puts the quiet part loud upsets them, lol. Please keep it up, love to see it.
Oh look, yet another post where traitors and cowards try to convince people not to vote
Removed by mod
I would still take blocking progress to the left over concentration camps every time
So yeah, if you think bith sides are the same, then I guess it doesnt matter who won. We probably would be here with tarrifs and camps and a dictatorship, but just with Harris.
check out our latest product: Avatalk Digital Business Card
gotta say, I’m extremely glad .world defederated from Hexbear. viewing this thread over here is night and day from looking at it on .ml and seeing The Smartest People in The Room say "ahh, so you just support trump then, got it
"I’ll never understand why those people quit reddit. What could their problem be with it?
Reddits just not their favorite flavor of boot anymore. They want federated boots.
They just have to infect every corner of everything with neoliberal garbage. Good thing they’re losing the war
not the only war they’re losing lmao
LOL I’m thinking the same thing, I looked at it logged on out .ml and its chock full of fantasy thinking
if I can’t criticize Dems before the election (that just ends up supporting trump) and I can’t criticize Dems after the election (that just ends up supporting trump), when CAN I criticize them? it seems like they just don’t want me criticizing them at all!!
Here’s the neat part, we’re not allowed any criticism to the Dems! As it’s always election season or post election season.
So there’s no time, just blindly accept who the DNC put forward without listening to the people they say they like!
What I learned from the memes I posted is that liberals just want a single party state
But not in a way that they would weild power and do any good for anyone. They want the American project to go on unimpeded but also for everyone to shut up about it.
That would be an improvement. They want to take breaks from power by having a fascist party to tag team with
Remember when everyone was terrified of ron desantis because he was “as evil as trump but a lot smarter”?
It’s a great way to plan for when Trump dies and libs need to scold people all over again.
