While Education and Organizing is building the parts for a new engine the rest of the year.
My private and professional perspective as a trans woman and political scientist if there is low voter turnout this next election:
I feel your pain. The ability to disengage and not engage with the political process is the height of privilege, especially when the right wants to do as much harm to trans folk as possible.
US: “Vote for the lesser evil.”
Europe: “Vote for the party you want and have them still be represented either as a coalition majority or during crucial votes where every party matters.”
US is more like “vote against the guy you don’t want in charge”
Copying and pasting my own comment from another thread:
If you want leftists to vote for dems, despite dems pissing on leftists at every possible chance and yelling at leftists to fall in line, I’ll show you how.
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Point out that voting will never, ever, ever move the democrat party to the left. You cannot vote the party harder to the left.
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Point out that Republicans are going to remain fascists.
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Point out that voting third party is a spoiler vote and will result in fascists winning.
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Point out that the actual way to move to the left is to unionize and organize at the grassroots level, to apply bottom-up pressure on the top.
The answer is not to pretend that Biden is anything other than a Neoliberal Capitalist. Leftists will correctly point out that Biden is still a lukewarm neoliberal maintaining the status quo, and feel further alienated by being told they should love him anyways. That just encourages voter apathy.
It would also help to acknowledge the people who voted for Biden in the 2020 primaries are selfish pieces of shit who intentionally voted against progressive and leftist efforts. Attempting to gaslight us into thinking “we’re on the same side” when in fact these people intentionally fuck us over is ridiculous.
It’s certainly entitled, and I think a lot of it comes from liberals not understanding that both fascists and liberals have candidates that represent their views, but leftists do not. They lack the experience of having to settle for a lukewarm Capitalist and actually having to touch grass to attempt to fix things, while both Liberals and Fascists just have to vote for their respective parties.
I don’t expect a lot of understanding from the kind of people who voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 primaries. But my view is if the same people who have all this energy to try to shame us into voting for Biden in the general applied that to shitty decisions in the primaries it might start to have an effect. Right now people proudly say they voted for Biden in the primaries because the alternatives were “too radical” or whatever. If every time they admitted that they got shamed for being selfish pieces of shit it might actually make a difference.
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Leftists were absolutely not the problem unless Hilary lost most states. Independents, people in the middle, are usually the ones that are the important voters to win over. The rest of the info is correct. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot that 1 important day, because the candidate isn’t perfect.
It’s already been said, but if there had been a Left candidate, I wouldn’t have staid home. There was no real Left option. Trump wasn’t my fault. It was Hilary’s.
if Leftists had voted for Hillary in 2016 abortion would still be legal.
So, this really isn’t true in any meaningful way. People like to make a big deal out of the 12% of Bernie voters who went for Trump, but the majority of them identified as conservatives or centrists, while only 18% identified as liberal or left-leaning. Likewise, a lack of turnout doesn’t seem to be the issue; black voter turnout dropped, but not by an unexpected margin, and young voters (who tend to be more left-leaning) had very strong turnout. Finally, you could try to blame leftists who voted third-party, but analysis shows that even if every single Jill Stien voter had gone to Clinton, she still would have needed to win over 50% of Gary Johnson’s voters (who were obviously unlikely to consider themselves leftists).
You might be able to get the numbers to work if you say that if every leftist who stayed home OR voted third-party OR went to Trump voted for Clinton she’d have won, but that’s incredibly hard to prove and probably relies on some specious assumptions (for example, that every Green Party voter was a disgruntled Democrat). At that point, you’re pulling so many different groups together under a single banner that it’s basically meaningless. You might as well say if women had voted for Hillary abortion would be legal.
I voted for Stein in 2016. My state still went to Clinton by 16 points. If I’d lived in a state that was even remotely competitive, I would have held my nose and voted for Clinton.
It was very brave of you to admit that you voted for Jill Stein, I mean even if she had no chance to win, she’s still a pseudoscience promoter who believes we can use crystals as an alternative to heatlhcare and that vaccines cause autism.
Now do Hillary. When you live in a glass house…
I didn’t vote FOR Hilary, I voted AGAINST Trump, a third party vote doesn’t do that
I don’t back a third party strategy, but a third party vote is almost always a vote against the two parties.
I would rather have a candidate everyone knows is bad than continue to slip into a worse and worse state
Vote local, vote often, and try to help people be able to do the same. We’ll get better candidates if and when we start voting them into smaller positions first. Republicans are generally more likely to vote locally, and this allows them to gerrymander the voting districts and control stuff from the local level up. Change your town and state officials to be more progressive, and they’ll support more progressive policies and politicians at higher levels of government.
Anyone I like enough to vote for would be someone I like too much to subject them to what being in government is like.
OP, you HAD to know that wasn’t going to go over well here.
Just wanted to remind everyone of the consequences when we let the greater evil win. Downvotes mean nothing to me.
That’s what Hillary said too.
How many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote FOR something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?
Hunter S. Thompson, 1972.
50 years.
If Democrats had ever done anything to fight fascism instead of just enabling it literally for generations, we wouldn’t need to defend abortion.
Edit: also, of course a liberal uses a car analogy. How much more accurate could you get than to relate the democratic party to a thing most Americans are forced to use against their will, that kills their children and destroys their future… With an incredibly racist history and only slightly less racist present.
I am genuinely interested, how were cars brought about through a racist history?
Is it strictly through the creation of interstates that cut through major cities (mostly colored neighborhoods)? Or are there more nefarious reasons?
That’s one big part of it, though there are other examples. The deliberate building of overpasses too low for buses to go under, stopping poor black people from getting to the beach by bus, is another well-known example.
Yup https://www.aclu.org/news/racial-justice/racism-by-design-the-building-of-interstate-81 https://www.kqed.org/news/11943263/americas-highway-system-is-a-monument-to-environmental-racism-and-a-history-of-inequity https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/11/10/robert-moses-saga-racist-parkway-bridges/
There’s a whole two Behind the Bastards episodes on Robert Moses.
And none of this talks about how highways allowed building suburbia, and how that’s ultimately just an extension of manifest destiny.
Bernie would’ve won.
I get the sentiment, but I don’t owe anyone a vote. Voting for the lesser of two evils is one thing when it’s someone useless like Obama, but the “good” option is balls deep in a genocide and destabilizing the world in his allegiance to another country. Not voting for the senile genocide guy is the least I can do.
I’ll be the first to say it sucks. Despite busting the railway unions his NLRB was doing good shit. It really really sucks.
Okay, but not voting for Biden is effectively a vote for Don Cheeto, and I guarantee you his Israel policy will make Biden look like a saint.
And if it makes you feel any better rumor has it that Biden is getting near the end of his rope trying to work with Israel. Last I heard he hasn’t talked to Netenyahu in over a month now after a particularly nasty phone call. Wouldn’t be surprised if his tune changes before the election and he starts attaching some pretty heavy strings to any further Israel aid.
In 2020, after Bernie was kneecapped by the dems, one of the state dems got on our organizing discord and said something to the effect of “sorry guys, but don’t forget to vote dems”. I voted Biden and got this. I got a party that refused to govern, who let a single rogue dem stop trillions of dollars worth of programs for what was it, a year?
I respectfully reject the framing that a non-vote for Biden is a vote for Trump. At literally any point, the dems could have chosen a different way. Hell, they could’ve just NOT eliminated the primary in all but name, but no. They’ve chosen the undemocratic, unproductive, detremental path we’re on. They refuse to own their fuckups, blaming them on conspiracy theories and an American populace that doesn’t understand the great things they’re doing. They don’t deserve votes and, I’m sorry, but I don’t owe them shit for what little they’ve done. We don’t know what comes of this in the end. Maybe Trump does win, maybe it’s so grotesque that it snaps people in the other direction (cope).
If they lose, it isn’t my just fault. It’s also theirs, mostly theirs. They’ve worked long and hard to repress the left. So I’ll be here, comfy in my bed on election day, completely repressed.
(And yeah, they are leaking that Biden is an old annoyed boy with Netanyahu. But that’s just because they know Biden’s committed path is so unbelievably unpopular, but also they don’t want to do anything about it, so they “leak” that our senile boy is thinking reeeeeally hard about all this. The US hold ALL the cards here, and every day this goes on is a day Biden is choosing not to do anything about it. So I don’t think him not talking to Bibi for a month while still offering unwavering support is a sign of progress)
Okay, I could write an essay response to that but I’ll keep it simple:
Is Biden better than Trump? Which leader will we be more likely to make positive changes under?
If you think they’re the same, you are a fool. If you think Biden is better but don’t vote for him, you are voting against your own interests. The spoiler effect basically means elections are more about which guy you don’t want to win rather than which guy you do.
I get it, I don’t like picking between bad and worse either. Doesn’t mean I’m not going to get out there and do my part to make sure worse doesn’t win.
nicely done
It would also still be legal if the Democrats had pursued any of the early obvious corruption, especially the Mueller report, instead of waiting for an election to replace an obviously corrupt man.
Eventually voting against corruption is not a sufficient check on corrupt power.
