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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
This is great to say in theory, but merely telling people this in a Beehaw post doesn't actually make anyone vote differently.
If you actually want to win and not just have someone to scapegoat, you have to actually entice people, and if your candidates aren't enticing people, the only actual, actionable leverage you have is changing the candidates.
Changing candidates is a great thing to push for during the primaries, but in US elections there is a point where candidates are locked in and only 2 people have a chance to win and everyone has to choose between those two no matter how imperfect they are.
And because the DNC puts its finger on the scale earlier on, they end up with bad candidates in the General, and then lose. The Democratic Party has been seeing a lot of good bottom-up shifts leftwards to meet voters, but it's much slower at the national level, and unfortunately the President is the person who most needs to match voters.
Point is, "vote blue no matter who" as a tactic does not win elections. If you just accept that a bad candidate is locked in, you're just accepting that you're going to lose.
No, they don't. That's the point. You keep claiming this, and then losing, because in fact there are other choices, and people make them. If this were true, Harris and Hillary wouldn't have lost.
It doesn't matter whether you wish everyone had to choose one or the other, you need to deal with reality as it is, and in reality people can vote third party or sit out. If you pretend otherwise, you're gonna keep losing.
Unlike "vote for the single issue you care about" - that works real well right? How's president Stein doing? Has she ended the wars? Solved childhood hunger? Fixed the education system?
Like it or not democracy means compromise, and the US flavor of democracy means compromise between just two candidates. Despite our opinions we agree that the majority (or, fucked up constutional congress majority) sets the rules. Throwing away your vote on other candidates does not change this. As much as I wish I could pretend it signals social preference to the people in charge, it doesn't.
A vote for 3rd parties may have told Kamela to go fuck herself, but now we get trump as the consequence.
No, and I'm not trying to strategize how to win as a non-Democrat, I'm trying to strategize how to get Democrats to actually win...
And the answer is kick out the centrist assholes who keep enabling Republicans, and never ever telegraph to the DNC that if they can just get their preferred candidates far enough, you'll just roll over and do what they want.
Wrong. Democracy means voting to make decisions. Some people compromise, some don't. It's not required, and you just telling people that it is is deluding yourself.
Wrong. There are in fact more candidates (and non-participation), and people are not persuaded by being told they're being railroaded towards ones they dislike. If we want to win in 2028, we need a new strategy, that doesn't solely revolve around winning the primaries. We need pressure campaigns and protests if we get some corporatist piece of shit like Newsom, for example.
I never said it's smart for people to do, I said people will do it, and you need to understand and accept that, otherwise you can't strategize around it.
Agreed; people vote according to their own interests, and the actual way to get them to vote for you is to convince them that you best serve those interests. Not to tell them "no one serves it, but we're not as bad as the other guys". If their interest is a single-issue, and they as a bloc are large enough to tank your win, you have to shift, or you will lose. That's just math, and the reality of democracy.
Which is why Democrats should have absolutely rioted when Biden first announced he was running again for 2024, rather than letting him wait until 3 months before the election to kick it to another candidate, who had no time to prepare, and who was never selected by the public in the first place. Biden fucked us and Harris.
And it's "Kamala".