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The Ratchet Effect
DEMOCRATS BLOCK MOVEMENT BACK TO THE LEFT / REPUBLICANS TURN EVERYTHING TO THE RIGHT
Many of us are demanding to arrest or at least abolish all of ICE.
You can see posts that say "arrest ICE" or simply "fuck ICE" with very positive reddit vote scores in many cases.
What about arresting ICE in real life?
What if the next Presidential election arrives, and instead of voting Republican or Democrat, I'm going around supporting a candidate who focuses on driving awareness of all the ICE crimes caught on video?
Because when I say "fuck ICE," I don't mean it as shorthand for "fuck Trump." More like shorthand for "fuck all the authorities that abuse their power" or "fuck the military industrial complex " or "fuck the parallels between my country and the Nazi Germany we supposedly defeated."
Or just "fuck having a country where I can be robbed, beaten, or killed by the authorities any day, without consequences."
Parts of this post, placed anywhere with reddit-style votes, might reveal not many Americans are really with me on this.
Forget a President, I wonder if any major city can even elect 1 mayor, that goes 1 day, without making a choice that helps someone in uniform get away with robbing, beating, or killing someone else.
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whoever loves Digit
Every time I see an argument in the comments about whether people not voting Blue (but also not voting Red, obviously) are "handing the election" to the opponents, I feel like the people arguing such haven't re-assessed their understanding of our political landscape since 2016.
The reality is that you cannot cajole thousands or even millions of people into voting the way you want them to. There's no social or technical framework to do it. It's literally an impossibility. You have to entice them.
I understand that the DNC deluded themselves into thinking they could, despite Obama's nomination over the DNC-preferred Hillary in 2008, but we've had 3 election cycles since Obama, and Democrats have lost 2, and severely underperformed in the other, all because of weak candidates who refused to shift their platform towards the votes they were missing. And their strategy was merely to cajole people with "better than Republicans/Trump".
If it worked, I'd hate it but at least I'd respect the utility of it for harm prevention. But it literally doesn't work.
The fact that every discussion of changing the DNC sees the VoteBlueNoMatterWho brigade arrive to deploy this rhetoric clearly shows that they know the DNC won't change, but rather than blame the group whose explicit job is to attract voters with their platform for being intractable to voter demands, they instead rush to ensure this argument is stated and visible.
At this point it's not actually voter engagement or strengthening of the Blue base, it's just preemptively attempting to construct a scapegoat for when the strategy continues not to work.
"Don't you remember all those times when we explicitly told people online they had to vote for us? And then they didn't? So that's their fault, see? Yes, even though we knew what would get their votes, but refused to do anything different."