You vote for the lesser evil because that’s the limit of what you can achieve in the voting booth. But voting isn’t the only thing you can do to change society, obviously. I think these kinds of posts are missing the bigger picture
I agree. The long game is to form a grassroots party that reflects your values and gains enough traction to be relevant. But the short game remains the lesser of two evils, lest you never have the chance to play the long game
By supporting the people that are gonna kill your grassroots movement using their constituents as the weapon?
Is the greater of two evils going to do any more to support your movement? One of the two is getting elected, whether anyone likes it or not
Only getting elected because liberals have no preverbial balls to do what’s right and refuse to support fascism. We don’t need or want the support of evil, the goal is to eliminate the evil
If you honestly think absetention is more useful than engagement then by all mean abstain. The rest of us will make the decisions.
Your vote has zero impact on politicians or policy. You’ve trained them they don’t have to listen to you and you will keep coming back.
Voters get what they want, rarely, but it does happen sometimes.
Non voters have to take much riskier and more costly actions to be acknowledged.
Funny thing is most Americans can do both. Direct action rarely leads to losing voting rights, and voting certainly doesn’t prevent organizing or direct action.
Your lesser evil has gone from no death camps to 50 in this scenario.
Then we’ll have to bully them into abolishing one less death camp
…but you don’t live in a world where one party is building 50 and the other 51. That’s just a strawman to avoid taking responsibility for having to choose between the actual options, not the options you wish you had.
The Dems have gleefully supported deportation policies that also put families in cages just like under Trump, they have supported Israel’s genocide before Trump and during Trump. The lesser evil is still evil.
The lesser evil is still evil.
Yeah no shit otherwise we wouldn’t call it “lesser evil”
This made me laugh for some reason, happy Saturday to both of y’all.
“The Dems” don’t share opinions on any of those issues, so how the fuck are you going to pretend to slander an entire political party over your ignorance of that reality?
The Democrats range from the far left to the moderate right. You couldn’t get five of them to agree on a restaurant, but you’re gonna pretend we’re all down with genocide and ICE camps? GTFO here and don’t come back til you’re sober and serious. This is a serious topic and it deserves better than sophomoric, Fox-News-Worthy takes on the Democratic Party.
Obama deported 3 million people when he was in office. Trump hasn’t even come close to that. Obama also repatriated 2m at the border. Obama ALSO created the legal, bureaucratic, and operational structure that allowed ICE and BORTAC to be deployed inside US cities. The Republicans are just using what the Democrats handed them and they’re not even as prolific as the Democrats were. You are voting for a delusion that doesn’t exist. Re-engage with reality.
‘Slander’ lmfao.
Yeah the DNC, who else lol wtf are you talking about
It’s not my fault you can’t fucking read.
Lmfao
That’s not the point. The point is to move toward a better party. On every vote you move towards a better outcome.
The options at the moment are bad or total destruction. Let’s vote for bad so we have some chance to go for something better.
All this argument you have does is make less people vote for so we move towards total destruction faster.
Reform is a failed experiment that’s been tried for decades. The result, the Overton window now has the DNC barely to the left of policies and people like Trump.
On every vote you move towards a better outcome.
This is so fundamentally untrue I don’t understand how you can possibly believe it. The entire system is designed to ensure that only mass voting matters. If you move to a deep blue district and vote red, literally nothing changes. And if you move to a deep red district and vote blue, again, literally nothing changes
The reason people don’t vote is because they are disillusioned with the options. They understand that voting has gotten them nowhere in the past and it won’t get them anywhere in the future.
Your response here makes little sense to me. You open with the claim that “On every vote you move towards a better outcome” is “fundamentally untrue.” But then your response continues on without addressing this point at all. I was waiting for you to explain why you believe it’s untrue, but you never did.
Instead you raised two different concerns:
- Voters who are in an extreme minority in their area have little ability to affect change.
- People don’t vote because they don’t like any of their options.
I don’t see how either of those two claims relate to one another or how they support your claim that the comment upthread is untrue.
You don’t understand my point that every time you vote, it is not a foregone conclusion that change will occur? You literally said that every time you vote things change a little bit for the better and I demonstrated that this is not the case in the most obvious of circumstances. But we can keep extrapolating the mechanics of those circumstances to things like the electoral college, the structure of the Senate, and the FPTP system. Fundamentally, every time you vote, there is a very little chance that anything changes at all, let alone for the better
You don’t understand my point that every time you vote, it is not a foregone conclusion that change will occur?
You’ve replied with an uncharitable and inaccurate summarization of my comment. I understand this claim perfectly well, I was just surprised that your comment in general is just a word cloud and doesn’t actually elevate your claim into a “point” by supporting it or expanding on the thought. Your contributions to this thread continue to be an incoherent gish gallop mess.
I’m still waiting for you to engage the rest of us on the subject. Find a point and try to make it. Be responsive to the other people in the conversation. Right now your behavior makes me think you’re not discussing this in good faith and your intent is malicious not collegial.
engage the rest of us on the subject.
you’re not owed engagement on any topic. their claim stands on its own merits on its face.
Right now your behavior makes me think you’re not discussing this in good faith and your intent is malicious not collegial.
That’s because the only outcome you will ever accept is lesser evil voting. You imagine that anyone who is against lesser evil voting is either misinformed or malicious.
Just because you don’t want to face the possibility that your voting strategy doesn’t work doesn’t mean that people who point it out are bad faith actors.
You’ve replied with an uncharitable and inaccurate summarization of my comment
That wasn’t my intent. My intent was to take your words and show you a very common situation in which your words did not accurately reflect reality. Gerrymandering is a thing specifically because it is not true that every time you vote you move things towards a better outcome. I didn’t take your words uncharitably, I took them as your wrote them and then applied them to the realities of voting in the US.
I was just surprised that your comment in general is just a word cloud and doesn’t actually elevate your claim into a “point” by supporting it or expanding on the thought. Your contributions to this thread continue to be an incoherent gish gallop mess.
I disagree, but I’ll see what I can do.
Voting, in general, is powerless to change the power structure in the United States of America. It was designed this way by the founders for the explicit purpose of preventing the masses from having influence over the power structure of the country. This is why the founders debated so much. They needed the support of the masses, so they had to create a system that gave them legitimacy, but they refused to allow the masses to actually determine the direction of the country. Madison, 5th president, is most famous for writing and speeches on this position. The Senate, the Electoral College, the Supreme Court, and many other structures were designed explicitly to remove the risk of voting changing anything that really mattered. This is the legacy of our country.
Today, that legacy has only been enhanced. Because the masses have never been in charge, and never gotten power, they have never been able to undo the deliberate disempowerment from the founding. Instead, the power elite have been in charge the entire time, and every time the masses have approached more power, it has been the power elite in position to either appease or dominate and then immediately act to remove whatever mechanism the masses were able to use to gain power.
We see this with the Civil Rights movement, where the expansion of Civil Rights was won by black people and white people getting together and rioting in the streets. The response was the War on Drugs, targeting both the drugs used by white people most likely to collaborate with black people, and targeting the drugs use by black people. Both D and R have participated in the drug war, maintained the disenfranchisement, maintained the mass incarceration from it, and maintained the justification of police violence and constant police expansion.
Voting hasn’t done a single thing about it. Civil rights was won by violence in the streets and voting hasn’t stopped any of the elite processes used to erode what was won.
We see the same thing with labor rights. It was unionization and Marxism that won us weekends, 8-hour work days, unemployment insurance, social security, and so many other things. Is it any wonder that immediately after these things we see Red Scares, purges, and union busting? Is it any wonder that both parties did these things collaboratively and continued them across many administrations? Labor didn’t win by voting, they won by fighting. And then all of the mechanisms they used to win were stripped away by both parties.
Do you understand what I’m saying? The point is that voting is designed to aesthetically give the appearance of being an avenue for change for the governed, but it is designed mechanically to explicitly not be an avenue of change for the governed. The point is that the administration of the country is shared between the two parties who have shared interests against the masses, and the elite have always had this unbroken shared interest since the founding of the country. They have always collaborated to stop the masses from expressing their power. The evidence for this is that every single expression of power done by the masses historically resulted in appeasement followed immediately by bipartisan collaboration to dismantle every mechanism used by the masses during that expression of power.
Still bad faith and malice?
If I did something to prevent the fifty first death camp and you did nothing, I will sleep soundly.
Show me a path to 0 death camps and I will work towards it.
If you act alone, all you can ever do is wait for the next election to vote for 50 death camps to stop 51 death camps.
Protesters in Minnesota didn’t wait around for the next election to get ICE off their streets. They fought back, and ICE was forced to retreat. They didn’t vote Bovino out, they forced him out. The fight isn’t over, but waiting until an election that might never come is not how you stop the death camps. Don’t sleep soundly between every election, wake the fuck up.
I think there’s a miscommunication here. Electoralism isn’t mutually exclusive with direct action, so minimizing harm when elections come about while fighting the system on between is the best outcome right?
In practice, people protest hardest against candidates they didn’t support in the election.
You can walk and chew gum. Voting is low effort. The heroes in Minnesota can vote too.
Can’t stay awake without a good night’s rest.
Voting for 50 death camps is a lot more effort than you’re acknowledging; voting for the “lesser evil” is extremely demoralizing when the lesser evil wins. People in Minnesota would stay home if Harris was president, even if she implemented exactly the same immigration policies as Trump, because they voted for her. Voting is what gives governments their legitimacy.
I voted for the lesser evil in 2020 and then the lesser evil went on to start a genocide. That’s not low effort.
Sounds like you didn’t vote in 24. How did that work out?
For the love of Christ. If it comes down to 50 death camps vs 51 death camps and you couldn’t muster up enough loud vocal grass roots support for ‘no death camps’ to make it feel like there is even an outside chance of winning enough that people don’t feel that they have to vote for the lesser 50, then maybe you should examine why that is. I’m tired of this stupid fucking argument.
Godless commie isn’t interested in improving America.
They come up with these tired ass cliche posts that only encourage voter apathy, which results in fascist victories.
They have no concept of pragmatic and realistic steps towards improvement and they think the magic third party fairy will swoop down and sprinkle magic dust that will allow a third party candidate to win, and they don’t give a shit if America gets worse while they believe in this fantasy.
Lol, imagine saying “godless commie” like it’s an insult. Couldn’t be me.
We are currently looking at the results of decades of your supposed “pragmatic and realistic steps”. Fat lot of good it has done other than to enable the owning class to achieve fascism with minimal and negligible resistance.
Incrementalism doesn’t work when the rest of the system is actively undermining what little progress you make faster than you achieve it.
That’s literally his username, genius. I’m an atheist who doesn’t hate communism; I hate the dictatorship/totalitarianism/imperialism that always seems to be packaged with it. I’m also a realist who actually wants to see a better tomorrow for everyone (except fascists).
Would you like my take on what to do? Swallow that bitter pill of milquetoast democrats, get more progressive supreme court justices nominated, push towards ranked voting to make >2 party victories possible, get rid of citizens united, push out APAIC. NONE of that is going to happen with republicans, which is exactly what you’ll get by pushing your fantasy of voting for people who will never win.
Liberals create these fascist victories by allowing the 50 death camps to exist. ‘We are morally Superior because we allow less death camps than the other guys’ And then Republicans build the 52nd death camp Democrats will allow 51 to be built because it’s less
What is your suggestion to improve things that actually has a chance of happening? What you’re saying isn’t completely wrong, it’s just not very helpful without an objective.
It’s not us that are saying 50 death camps is lesser evil or lesser harm. We advocate for no death camps. You either support it or you don’t. What’s tiresome is liberal arrogance that theirs is the only correct path forward when history has shown time and time again that they are enabling fascism that led to the creation of those 50 death camps
First of all the 50 vs 51 death camps is a laughable exaggeration and inflation of the relative evils and you all fucking know it.
Second, you can advocate for no evil at all all you want. I, obviously, support that too. But A) evils are relative, sometimes, aren’t they. We won’t always agree about what is right and wrong. Pretending your perspective is objective and everyone else is an idiot for not agreeing with you isn’t working out very well for you, is it? B) Even if we agree completely that one system of goverment, economics, international relations, etc. are all correct, unless we can somehow form a sovereign state of two, we’re going to have to coordinate, compromise and agree with others. A lot of others. Come election day under first past the post voting, even if there is a party or candidate that represents every single one of my deeply held ideals, if they don’t have competitive levels of support to even have a chance of winning I would probably not vote for them. Because I’m not a moron who cares more about virtue signaling or keeping my perfect principles untarnished than actual outcomes.
Third, again, you need to examine why your alternatives aren’t viable. The answer cannot be external. Blaming everyone else for being stupid, brainwashed, etc. is defeatism. You can’t control others perspectives, only your own. If the choice is between fascism, fascist enablement and anti-fascism, you gotta figure out why anti-fascism isn’t the obvious choice for most people. Then you can start to figure out how to make it the better AND SAFER choice to make.
We know why anti-fascism isn’t the default choice - propaganda. So we have these fights with liberals specifically because it creates the opportunities to counter the propaganda. The number of people in this comment section that don’t realize that Obama deported far more people than Trump has, and probably ever will, is staggering. The number of people who think that women got the right to vote by voting is staggering.
We know what the problem is, and it’s super obvious what the problem is when we say we won’t vote for a genocidaire and the liberals all pull out the daggers and screaming that lesser evil voting is literally the only path forward. The problem is fundamentally what people believe about the world and the gap between those beliefs and reality. The process of challenging those beliefs looks a lot like this.
This is how you know someone only cares about their own moral superiority complex and is the type of person that loves handing out arbitrary purity tests.
People like you are actually just at harmful to left wing goals as any fascist or neoliberal. You are the rot from within.
Ah the irony. A post telling voters to think about more than a single election day, in plain English, and you still can’t imagine doing so.
It’s a strange world we live in… And I get it, you’re too busy to care about politics. You want that one vote to absolve you of responsibility for everything before and after it. Meh.
Nope, I’m active in bringing about change in other ways, through supporting my community, going to protests, organising actual resistance networks, community lobbying, boycotting, direct action and
violencewhere needed.But it’s just none of that stops me from all voting in every possible election I can, as it’s still one of the most impactful things you can do as an individual to enact change.
This post doesn’t say not to vote. It says not to vote for genocidaires.
In the flawed system of the US democracy not voting for one of the two main candidates is functionally the same as not voting.
It does literally nothing help the Palestinian people at all.
The US is not a flawed system of democracy. It’s a genocidal empire designed by the founders to prevent the masses from having any influence over the power of the landed elite. Voting doesn’t do anything for the Palestinians. If you want to help the Palestinians, you have to do something other than voting.
It is both a flawed democracy and a genocidal empire, those 2 things are not mutually exclusive.
Yes it does. Like you must know the trolley problem right? If voting for the other side stops even 1 death, stops 1 single bomb, then it’s better than not voting.
The Trolley Problem is a thought experiment to illuminate moral reasoning. It is not a model of the world. In fact, it is the exact opposite of a model of the world. It is a deliberately forced break from reality in order to isolate the moral reasoning.
We don’t have a trolley problem here in the US. We have a single genocidal empire with a veneer of democracy for the masses that was never intended, and never has, represented the will of the masses. It was design, from the beginning, to be a conflict resolution mechanism for the elite merchant class and establish legitimacy for their rule. For each mechanism that would have allowed the masses a say in politics, the founders designed a system to prevent it from having an effect. That’s not a flawed democracy. That’s a shell game.
In The Trolley Problem, you have perfect information about the future, so you can say definitively that making a choice has a specific outcome. You don’t have that in politics. Your claim is that things are better under Ds than Rs. My claim is that Ds and Rs are a continuity of harm that reinforce each other.
Case in point - the deployment of ICE into major cities. People like to claim that Trump did this and Harris would not have. But no one seems to want to engage with the fact that it would have been impossible for either of them to do so without Obama. Obama created the mechanisms that allowed ICE and BORTAC to be deployed to major US cities. He expanded them immensely. And he literally appointed Tom Homan, the same person Trump has relied on for this stuff. Without voting in Obama, we wouldn’t have had Trump deploying these units to the cities.
But even more evidence that there aren’t 2 tracks, only one - We all watched Trump deploy ICE and BORTAC to major US cities during his first term. The mechanisms he used to do that were created by Obama. Biden took office and in four years never did anything to reverse or structurally limit the features Trump used. We all watched Trump do it in Term 1. Biden campaigned on reclaiming the country’s soul. Then, instead of doing anything, he simply chose to change the priorities of ICE and BORTAC, knowing full well that any future president could just go right back to doing what Trump had done. And that’s exactly what happened.
So think about this, right. You and your partner are raising a kid. You and your partner agree that the kid shouldn’t be allowed to mess up the house. Then your partner decides to get into finger painting as an art form. OK… Weird, but fine. And then the kid gets into the finger paints and ruins the house. And you tell your partner that they better stop this, so they clean the walls, but they leave the finger paints in the same place. And the kid gets them again. Are you blaming the kid this time? No. Clearly negligence is a thing. Now, in this family drama, we can pretend your partner is just absent minded after the first time, but if it happens for a decade and every time you try to get rid of the finger paints they stop you and demand you help them clean up the walls and that if you don’t you’re just helping the child destroy the house further, at what point do you stop and realize that your partner is actively obstructing you?
There aren’t two tracks. There’s one. Bush 2 planned 7 wars after Afghanistan: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran. Obama attacked 4 of them. Biden/Harris attacked 3 of them. It’s one track. It’s just genocidal global domination with a blue tie on or a red tie on. The two “tracks” are just PR firms. They know you have a particularly psychology so they pander to you. They say “we’re the only ones worthy of your vote” and then they collaborate to go and kill the same people with the same guns from the same money. They say “we’re the only ones with the potential for a better future, those other people are going to ruin the country and then nothing can be salvaged” and then collaborate to maintain the largest prison and parole system in the history of the world, complete with prison slavery, racialized murder and torture, and the worst outcomes in the world.
You’re literally watching a sport, with two teams on the field, and telling me “we have to root for one of them” when the sport is literally two teams of white people competing to see who can lynch more dark skinned children.
I love how you think concentration camps and genocide are “arbitrary purity tests” instead of fully disqualifying positions to hold.
People who do lesser evil voting are, on the whole, far more invested in the morality and virtue signaling and far less invested in the material analysis of what’s actually happening and how to change it.
The problem is, not voting doesn’t push the Overton window in your direction. When you choose to simply abstain, rather than voting against the greatest evil, you give up ground to your opponents without getting anything in return.
Voting is a critical part of making lasting change. It might be useless on its own, but that doesn’t make it any less necessary.
You’re mistaken. No one is saying not to vote. They are saying that your vote actually doesn’t matter. It is not true that voting pushes the Overton window. Look at the Maine Senate race. We just had a huge campaign between an entrenched war mongering Democrat and literal US military mercenary with a Tottenkopf tattoo (removed recently) who is a petite bourgeois luxury food farmer who organized his neighbors to fight for his private property economic interests against a large capitalist enterprise. The overton window is so far right it’s not even funny.
If voting made critical lasting change, it would be outlawed. The founders made sure that the masses could not change the system by voting. That’s why 70% percent of the Senate represents only 30% of the population. You can’t fix that with voting. The wars planned under Bush 2, which absolutely were influenced by the Bush 1 circle, were carried out by Bush 2, and then by Obama, and then by Trump. The Senate doesn’t respond to votes. The president doesn’t respond to votes. And the House has over 100 Democrats supporting ICE.
What is it going to take for you to realize this? Go. Vote. But pretending it does anything is delusion. Every single improvement of rights came through violence, from labor rights to civil rights to gay rights. It took riots, it took bloodshed. The system is designed to force this to be true.
Reading comprehension.
I’m not saying concentration camps are the purity test. I’m saying people like you are the kind of people that do arbitrary purity tests.
What’s the purity test then? Are we not calling out dems for supporting genocide?
Biden admitted he didn’t want the DOJ to go after Trump for sedition in a hope for bipartsianship. He could have released the Epstein files then unredacted but didn’t. He has a history of voting for federal increases to police budgets, he was the sponsor on the bill making it nearly impossible to discharge federal student loans in bankruptcy. And that’s just Biden.
What to know what’s most damning about the Democrats? In the build up to this situation, through it all, when they had enough power to do something they didn’t do it. Obama could of put in changes to federal student loans but didn’t, they were a problem way before then. They had decades to codify Roe vs Wade into law instead of a supreme court ruling.
At best they’re inactive and inattentive.
At best! And that’s extremely generous.
this is a bullshit argument
one side in US politics is pretty ANTI death camp while the other is very much PRO death camp. lesser evil voting in this case is ANTI death camp
you putz
no side in us politics is anti death camps
Except if you consider that one side committed a genocide and then the other side committed even more genocide.
And refusing to side with the better options actively works the worse option in the hand.
No these “better options” choosing to do genocide lead to a worse option. You can’t fault someone for not voting for genocide. When the option is a turd sandwich or a shit stew don’t be surprised when people choose neither.
And now the whole fucking restaurant is literally made out of shit. Great job not voting there.
lol I did vote, I just understand that when people don’t vote for someone its the politician’s fault for not running better policies and being more likeable and not someone who didn’t like them so they didn’t vote for them. If you would hold your leaders more accountable for being shitty then we wouldn’t be in this mess but yeah yell at me a stranger on the internet with zero power.
Literally all Kamala had to do was say she was against the genocide, she made that choice not me.
More “both sides” bullshit. Dumbasses like you are part of the reason Trump got into to power.
Oh yeah its my fault the democrats decided to support a genocide and cost themselves the election. You would rather blame me someone with zero power than the leaders who have failed you, pathetic.
Yes, actually. A politicians first job is to get elected. It doesn’t matter how good their policies are if they just never get elected.
So if the anti-genocidenvoting block was actually a thing that voted reliably, then politicians could cater to those people instead of the pro Israel crowd.
And even ignoring that, when the choices are the guy that was somewhat pushing back on Netanyahu and making some effort to help Palestine, Vs the guy who is enthusiastic to go all in with Netanyahu, and cleanse the entire region so he build property their and make money and gave Israel the go ahead to start several all new wars. And we get one of those two options no matter what, then not voting is implicit support for the second, much worse option.
Bro you don’t even know who was running why are you talking? it was Kamala vs Trump not two men. Biden also did not push back against Israel most of the death and destruction of Gaza happened under Biden. He let them do a genocide what push back could there have been? He had all the power to stop it and did nothing.
All I am saying is when the options are two shitty candidates don’t be surprised when people stay home instead. You need someone who can inspire people to come out in vote and if they can’t do that they will lose. You keep talking about people that didn’t vote when you should ask yourself why was Kamala so fucking terrible that she lost to a child rapist? That is on her and no one else. You don’t blame the fucking fans when a sports team loses, they aren’t the ones playing the game. It was her job to win not anyone else’s and she failed miserably.
Listen, the time for doing something about the problem about two shitty options is NOT at the literal last second, when you have no other options BUT those two shitty ones. At that point, and ONLY at that point, it becomes about choosing the lesser of two evils. If you don’t, you get the worse of two evils, it’s as simple as that. You want things to change, or maybe more than just two evils? Make the effort to change shit BEFORE things get locked to two shitty choices. Every year more people are riled up about this, so how about organizing to do shit BEFORE the only play left is to fumble and give the ball to the fascists? Because this moral grandstanding literally fucks everyone, and I’m speaking as a non-American, being fucked by stupid American choices such as not voting for Kamala because she was “pro-genocide” (while Trump is watering at the mouth thinking about building hotels atop the ashes of Palestinian lands).
We’ve been saying the same thing since at least before 2020. And somehow it wasn’t the right time ever since then.
There wasn’t a chance to have something different, the democrats didn’t have a primary… They selected who they wanted to move forward without a single vote cast.
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I did vote dumbass, its not my fault Kamala wasn’t popular that is on her for her stupid positions.
an abstention from voting COUNTS AS A VOTE FOR TRUMP
no, it doesn’t. only votes for trump count as votes for trump.
Except here, in the real world world, one side built the death camps while the other side is filling them up.
How many death camps did Biden build?
And don’t start about some other country where they don’t have control over.
I can start with Gaza because it was US money and weapons that enabled it. In addition to an enormous ICE and immigrant detention center expansion. There are 69 cops cities around the US with cops being trained by IDF because of Biden.
And what good did not voting do for you? Do you think the people in Gaza or Iran are greatful you didn’t vote for Biden?
When people are getting slaughtered when their entire civilization is getting leveled, they’re not concerned about the political party of the person doing it. They’re not over there chanting death to Biden or death to Trump. They’re chanting death to America.
And the only abstention of my vote was for a Democrat or Republican that does not imply that I did not vote
And you do you feel good about yourself now that thousands of people are dead that would otherwise be alive if Trump didn’t win the election?
Because few dozen thousand dead poor brown people is just the piece to pay for you to feel morally superior about how you didn’t vote for Biden/Harris.
You talking the same ones that would still be dead if Biden got reelected? Are you living in this fantasy land that Biden would have stopped bombing and paying for their genocide, which he refused to acknowledge was happening, if he got elected?
This is a false premise. Instead of choosing which evil we want to accept, we can choose which evil we prefer to resist.
The electoral system also gives that lesser evil legitimacy, insert robot voice:
"they were voted for democratically, these protesters all just hate democracy and {country.capitalized()}!".In all seriousness, what you are putting forward requires actual resistance, not just marching in the streets like is too common nowadays, but actual efforts to make it hell for people in power, and it actually makes it harder if the people in power can make you look unreasonable because you voted for them.
But even if you don’t vote, someone else will, and they will still get to play that “democracy” card.
No one is saying don’t vote. They are saying that your vote is impotent.
Your vote is very important, its just most people either don’t use it, or only vote at the highest level. Votes for low level local positions can be very impactful and can be decided by dozens of votes. And if more people did that it would have knock on effects down the line all the way up to national government.
That’s a god of the gaps argument.
If only people would vote they would have more power
No. People don’t vote because their vote doesn’t matter. Public opinion doesn’t matter. Public support doesn’t matter. Gay rights came after violent riots. Civil rights came after violent riots. Labor rights came after violent riots. Because the voting wasn’t working.
You have it all backwards. People aren’t powerless because they don’t vote. People don’t vote because they’re powerless.
That’s a completely reductive and simplistic view on politics.
It’s a combination of the 2. Yes civil rights came after violent riots, but only because Kennedy/Johnson were in power at the time. If the republicans were in power in 63, then civil rights wouldn’t have been passed.
Gay rights only went through, firstly in states with Dem governments, then nationally because of dem appointed supreme court judges.
This isn’t a case of you can only do one or the other, you can and should do both. Because that’s the only way you actually get change.
You’re describing an actual strategic framing which is voting for the person you would like to be your opponent in the actual conflict that is needed. Vote for Ds not because they’ll fix things but because when you decide to finally riot you’d rather have a D in office than an R. That’s a valid strategy, but voting doesn’t change things. Voting just makes it easier for you to change things.
I do want to point out that corporate profits are higher under D administrations, that it was the D President Truman that oversaw Operation Paperclip to save 10k Nazis from standing trial and that committed genocidal aggression against Korea, that it was the D President Obama that destroyed Libya while it was the most successful and prosperous country in all of Africa, and that it was D President Clinton who saw nothing wrong with having black house slaves in the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion when he and Hillary lived there.
You’re right that the D’s public relations strategy doesn’t afford them the operating room to crack down hard on protestors and riots. However, it should also be noted that after Atwater articulated the Southern Strategy and essentially beat the Ds for a decade, the Ds decided that they needed to be more like the Rs and adopt their own version of the Southern strategy, hence Biden’s Crime Bill and Clinton’s war against welfare. Because the Ds weren’t up for the fight, they triangulated in order to win, and by triangulated we mean that they literally took up far-right positions on purpose in order to win. And look what happened? Everything got worse and now the Ds won’t even entertain addressing it.
You are wrong.
Good to know
Resist by giving them legitimacy
That’s a very silly take that isnt true at all. How can you say that by not voting you’re taking away their legitimacy? This is the kinda shit that makes people think you’re anti leftist voting psy op to keep the conservatives in power.
The US does it all the fucking time when they claim such and such a leader is illegitimate because they didn’t get enough votes. Not having people vote for you delegitimizes you. How do you not see that?
Because you’re making a false equivalence. They absolutely have NOT done that for an actual US/presidential election. Keep trying to get people to throw their vote away, im sure keeping the republicans in power will help leftist causes. Get real.
True, and I agree, but we do actually have to resist for that to be the case. Not just with the signs and angry letters we’ve been using to try to convince the corrupt to simply not be corrupt anymore, but with actions that actually prevent them from making things worse, up to and including their death, if necessary. Until then we really are just voting for the lesser evil and letting them do whatever they want.
Resist all of them
Problem solved! We’ll all just go…not vote?
Hmmm…that doesn’t seem right. Doesn’t that let all the people who really want to vote for the 51 death camps decide who’s in charge then?
Either way you get death camps, get off the trolley and discover there’s a no death camp option
What is the no death camp option in the United States? I would genuinely like to know.
The only option I’m aware of is voting more, not less. Vote in every primary and every local election. Make yourself part of the process.
By electing the same people that got us into this mess?
You didn’t answer the question. What’s the no death camp option?
What’s the no death camp option?
You have to create it, it wont be handed to you on a silver platter. You can start by not kissing the dems arses and yelling at them to do better or fold up shop. While showing the republicans the back of your hand too, obviously. They are playing you and using your vote like its a foregone conclusion, and you are letting them. Why not stand up for yourself? Or do you have any morals at all? American selfishness is another issue and it disguises itself as learned helplessness.
That’s one of the major problems, Democrats claim to support the no death camp issue, but they want someone else to do all the work so they can come in afterwards, jump on our bandwagon as if they supported it the whole time
And how does not voting help that?
What is it with liberals when someone says you don’t have to support the oligarchy they translate that to don’t vote
It would be the option for expressing power outside of voting…
And how has that gone for you? How many concentration camps has it stopped?
I mean it’s not going well, but I having trouble thinking of a time where a country voted its way out of having concentration camps either.
You know what stops pipelines? Physical altercations. You know what stops cop cities? Physical altercations. Voting has only ever increased the military, increased the police, and increased the prisons. Voting one way or the other literally has no impact. The only way to stop this stuff is to fight.
It isn’t there. Vote for whoever you want, but acknowledging that you were not given choices at all is important.
But you are. The thing is systems of governance for hundreds of millions of people, all with different wants, morals and desires across very different circumstances and locales is going to be extremely complex. Mix into that the shitty power dynamics of capitalism and you system with a lot of political inertia that eventually boils down to 2 pretty similar positions at the highest level. And trying to move that political lever at the very furthers end is difficult.
If you want your position given more weight, then you have to act at every level of governance, not just the very top with the presidential election.
That’s certainly a theory. But it doesn’t really hold up. The reason we have 2 similar positions at the highest level is because they are one position, it’s the position the dominant ruling class and it always has been. You think that somehow the desire of native Americans to be free mixed with the desire for black Americans for reparations mixed with poor immigrants to be safe mixed with poor white people to be healthy leads to Palestinian genocide?
Naw. Come on! You can’t think that’s how this works, can you?
You didn’t answer the question.
don’t be petulant.
Keep going please…Tell me how that would work in the US system of First Past The Post elections.
Or if First Past The Post elections is the problem, tell me how you would get rid of that system.
You don’t need to get rid of that system. All you do is need to vote for candidates that do not support the oligarchy. But liberals are not concerned about long-term success, their concern about the short-term win
I mean…yes. Exactly. That’s what the primaries are for. Primary out the neoliberals.
The Republicans primary out anyone who isn’t hard right enough for them. They vote, then they vote again, then they vote some more.
And now all branches of government are controlled by the hard right. Because they voted. A lot.
Incorrect.
In the 21st century alone, Democratic presidential candidates have accumulated tens of millions more raw votes than their Republican counterparts, heavily bolstered by high-population states like California and New York. For instance, in 2008 and 2020, Democratic candidates won the popular vote by margins of roughly 9.5 million and 7 million votes respectively.
Democratic primaries routinely draw higher raw voter turnout than Republican primaries.
When evaluating the “national house vote” (the cumulative number of votes cast nationwide for all members of the U.S. House of Representatives) the Democratic Party frequently captures a higher raw vote total. High-turnout midterm wave elections, such as the 2006 and 2018 midterms, saw immense raw vote advantages for Democrats.
Local election turnouts are heavily dominated by major metropolitan areas. America’s most populous cities (such as New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago) feature massive electorates that vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates in local municipal races.
So your theory of is not supported by the evidence. Please try to explain why things are the way they are again, but this time include the fact that Democrats have consistently voted more at every single level than Republics for almost 30 years.
It would require not using elections to express power
Keep going please…Tell me how that would work in the US system …
Well first I want you to imagine having a sense of decency, an ability to feel shame, and identify what morality you have, if any. Let me know when you get to that point and we’ll talk next steps. Whats worth you acting on? Not someone else, you.
Sigh…
So you don’t actually have a real solution for getting rid of the conservatives and neoliberals in office.
You just want everyone to know that you’re too cool to be a Republican or a Democrat. 👍
It’s not like you can’t do both. Vote the lesser evil, get off the trolley.
So the solution is get off the trolley but keep supporting the people that are creating the trolley situation?
They don’t require your support to hold elections. What would “not supporting” elections by not voting do, exactly?
Who said anything about not voting? Liberals have locked themselves into a binary system of oppression that they claim to oppose
I said ‘vote the lesser evil’ you opposed. So I’d say you said that.
Ok, are you proposing to vote? For whom?
Literally whomever isn’t a genocidaire
Basically, don’t expect significant change from Democrats until we can get rid of the neo-liberals. Until then, you’re just voting harm that’s getting steadily worse.
Idk, if given the choice between 50 death camps or 51 death camps, it would be pretty fucked up to choose 51.
If you’re stuck in a system that only gives you the options of 50 death camps or 51 and you don’t work towards building an alternative system. Then you’re just evil lite.
Precisely. That’s why you need to think more broadly. So you don’t become evil and pretend it’s OK.
Nobody is pretending it is okay.
But pretending like refusing to vote is morally superior than actively preventing the extra death camp is not.
No one is advocating refusing to vote. The post is explicitly stating that voting isn’t helping. It’s time to try something new
There are absolutely lots of people advocating refusing to vote. You can argue that OP isn’t one of those people, but there are entire instances filled with people saying exactly that.
There are, but they have a very specific reason. And that reason is to discipline the party. That theory of action is pretty solid, but it’s not what is being said here what’s being said is that voting is impotent. You can vote all you want. You’re pissing in the wind.
Nah, that theory of action is dogshit. A smattering of indignant leftists isn’t going to discipline the party. Especially when the mechanism of action is… not doing something. That course of action is, in a disciplinary sense, indistinguishable from just being lazy or apathetic. It’s not praxis, and it doesn’t encourage praxis. 0/5 stars, terrible political action.
Voting isn’t impotent. It’s very weak, but it isn’t impotent. It nudges things slightly, which isn’t nothing.
It clearly doesn’t, as the Overton window has been sliding right for decades.
As for disciplining the party, you clearly think that if the Republicans lost they would be moved. Why do you think that if the Democrats win on a right-wing platform they’ll be nudged to the left instead of learning the lesson that they win more if they slide to the right?
You could not be more wrong. Factually, morally, tactically, strategically, you are wrong along every axis in every dimension of existence.
We can work together by standing together and voting our common interests or we can lose the country.
We should be supporting primary challengers for every Republican. Those moderate, DNC types? We should fund one in every goddamn red district in America.
There are more of us than there are of them. Instead of bitching about voting not mattering, make it fucking matter. Take over the Republican Party. Your local party has a couple thousand voters behind them. That’s it. You can’t find a couple thousand neighbors who think corruption is bad and kid-fucking is deplorable?
TRY HARDER FOR FUCK’S SAKE. STOP WHINING AND START WINNING.
Oh man if only we got organized and raised a ton of money and got a whole bunch of people connected via a whole communication and logistics and education capability suite. We could even celebrate together when we did it. We could throw a party. Hey. That’s what we’ll call it, we’ll call it a party.
And since it’s about voting, and saving democracy, we can call it, The Democratic Party!
This is great. It obviously won’t happen overnight, but if we organize our new party, The Democratic Party, we could take that strategy you have and start winning. The leaders of the party will need to be people who understand this, but I mean, of course they would understand it, who wouldn’t understand that we have to save democracy or lose it, and that it’s not hard we just need to get a few thousand people in each district to overwhelm our opponents with votes.
No, this is great. I love this idea. Let’s build…
Wait, there’s already something called The Democratic Party? They already oppose the fascist Republicans? They already have a huge operation that’s been around for a century? And they have a shit ton of money flowing into them constantly?
So then What the fuck is going on? Why are we in this situation? Are they just that bad at their jobs? Well then we should stop putting our effort behind them and start a new party! Wait, what? That just means the fascists will win? But you just said the Democrats have been around this whole time and the fascists are winning… Oh it’s our fault for not voting correctly?
There are people in this very thread, and other parts of the fediverse, who are only here to attack those that point out it’s not okay while they actively pretend it’s okay.
Tell me, what’s the alternative?
I don’t see one. You’re just fucking grandstanding.
So, I’m what, supposed to not vote at all?
Then the actual evil will win
Americans seem to think they are due some sort of fair and equitable civil society without having to fight for it. Actual evil will win anyway unless you fight the evil people and take a stand, constantly-- not occasionally when its only relevant to you. The problem is that americans are too spoiled and are lazy with their politics and morals. They just lay there like baby birds waiting to be fed, so the evils take advantage of that lethargy and here we are.
I’m a Euro and I am constantly pissed at American politics. And it’s blearing in our ears all day.
I couldn’t tell you who is the mayor of London, but everyone knows who the mayor of NYC is.
The only solution liberals are capable of seeing are ones that involve their failed party and their failed ideology
And the solutions you offer are?
My point is you’re just saying things and doing nothing.
Watch the idiot walk, watch the idiot talk, watch the idiot write up their name on the blackboard. Watch the robot walk, watch the robot talk, watch the robot write up their vote on the ballot.
It’s a lose-lose situation, there is no win condition, there’s just be heard, or be not heard
both are actual evil.
A: we have to get rid of vaccines, get rid of healthcare and go to war
B: we have to keep vaccines, keep healthcare and go to war
You: woah! They’re exactly the same!
Yes, both of those are, and I quote, “actual evil”.
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That both of your examples are, in fact, evil. They may not be the same, or equal, but both are, obviously, evil. Which was the argument.
As the kids say, you are doing the thing in the meme.
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What alternative? You chose the options. I’m just pointing out that, as the user above said, they’re both evil.
It’s up to you and your community to create the alternative. No one is going to give it to you on a silver platter.
that’s not what I said but that’s not going to stop the bad faith takes
It’s exactly what you said
if that were true could link me saying that instead of typing something that I didn’t type.
both are actual evil.
There’s no other way to interpret this mate
there is but not if you refuse to operate in good faith
bOtH sIdEs
I fucking hate that we keep getting this “both sides bad” ideology, now “both sides deathcamp” ffs, right during Trump’s reign where we are seeing concentration camps and illegal wars right after a boring Biden presidency.
It’s coming up to election season, so all the sabateuor bots are spinning up again to try and convince people like you not to vote.
That’s why it’s the same 10 accounts in every fucking group. Same dudes, over and over, making the same illogical bad-faith arguments.
The boring Biden presidency where kids we still being put in cages, where children were put in solitary confinement, where racialized mass incarceration in the US is still the worst in the world and including parole and supervision is triple the volume of any other country on the planet and with some of the worst recidivism and the only country charging prisoners hundreds of dollars a day? Boring like protecting Trump and the rest from DOJ prosecution over the Epstein situation? Boring like 1100 killed by police? Boring like bombing the Nord Stream 2 and bombing Yemen, Syria, and Iraq?
This is what we mean. You are so far into harm reduction that you are literally incapable of understanding that Biden’s term was not boring but mass murderously tragic.
Boring? There was and still is literally a genocide going on.
But thanks for proving the meme right.
Removed by mod
Since you asked, Biden increased police, ICE, and detention center funding to their highest levels. Because of Biden’s 69 cop cities across the country local police and ICE are being trained by IDF, the same people that trained Derek Chauvin when he murdered James Floyd. Before he left office he requested an additional 42k detention center beds be created.
Biden was enabling, paying for, and funding that genocide then denying there was one. Harris wanted the world most lethal military while reiterating Israel has a right to exist and rh is will protect their interests.
My friend, read a bit of history, your whole society is based on genocide and exploitation.
I am not defending trump nor biden because the whole country should be treated as the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
How many were active during biden’s campaign, how many did he not shut down?
Why was nothing done about abortion rights?
Why did he support (and not just “not being vocal” about) the israeli state during an active genocide?
Your “blue team” is just as complicit.
I don’t think the person you’re replying to is defending Biden. It isn’t a defense of Biden’s failure to act to say that Trump is, quite obviously, worse in every aspect. It is insane to think otherwise because the genocide got WORSE under Trump.
The point is that dipshits/losers/morons/accelerationists sit here and say both sides are bad, when one side is actively worse and they do not care that the one obviously worse side is killing multiple-folds more people while they pretend to smugly assert how good it must be to choose no evil while everyone else struggles to work with the hand they’ve been forcibly dealt.
You let me know when you step up and assassinate a billionaire, alright, bud? I’ll respect your stance then.
Want to hear something interesting though? Trump is actually not worse than Obama in every way.
Trump has deported 1.5 million people across all of his years in office so far. Want to guess how many Obama deported?
3 million.
So actually Trump is the lesser evil when it comes to deportations if you take this approach.
The reality is that they’re both horrible but for different reasons.
I think that is a really gross thing to say from someone who didn’t pay attention to the ongoing rapes of children in ICE concentration camps. I think that’s a gross thing to say to the militarized presence of ICE kidnapping people as they left their court hearings to be here. I think that’s a gross thing to say to the people attacked by ICE for protecting their neighbors. I think that’s a gross thing to say to the people who got married and had to pick up their partner’s green card because they were arresting them and shipping them all over the country.
To say that it’s a smaller number is insane because it treats immigrants not as people that are still suffering right now (I have neighbors that still can’t fucking go to work because ICE is still here), but as numbers and this one is smaller. That is such a dumb and pathetic argument that it shows you as hopelessly heartless or desperately dumb, and I don’t thing it matters which is worse.
We don’t care about your respect, we don’t respect anything liberals do while defending empire and their shade of fascism
“Everyone is a liberal that disagrees with me” is a great lie to tell yourself at night.
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We need a revolution 🇦🇱✊🏼nothing will improve until the pedophile class lives in fear
Vote local, vote to end FPTP.
