this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
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What is sad is that the US political establishment are still pushing the Democrats as an alternative and Americans are too fucking stupid to do anything about it and self police even on alternative platforms like Lemmy
No...what's actually sad, is that even when there are better alternatives, leftists don't bother showing up to vote. That's how we got here. Whenever there's a chance for us to pull things back to the left...half of us just sit down and whine about how pointless it is to pull.
It is so funny when delusional Americans believe they live in a democracy and not a dictatorship of capital. It isn't that people didn't "vote" it is that the government there is structured to make sure that you never threaten capital. Alexis de Toqueville figured this out in the Eighteenth century that the US government is inherently despotic and relies on social norms. The fundamental structure of the constitution is broken and you will never have a "leftist" come to power there, it is literally impossible since voting is fixed during the redistricting phase.
DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA By Alexis De Tocqueville
The frozen republic : how the Constitution is paralyzing democracy by Daniel Lazare
Which leftist alternative did you show up to vote for?
Name the better alternative
Well, there was Bernie Sanders in 2020. But like I said...no one bothered to show up and vote...so we got Biden. And then we got Trump again. Every time there's a chance to pull things left, we drop the rope.
That's not even close to what happened.
The DNC Leadership chose Biden specifically to stop Bernie.
That's why when Biden was in sixth place going in to Super Tuesday every establishment candidate ahead of him bowed out on the same night and gave him their delegates, pushing him from sixth to first, and Warren stayed in to split the progressive vote and push the "Bernie Bros are sexist creeps" narrative.
The US is not a Democracy, it's an Oligarchy.
Democrats Now Openly Admit They Pushed Biden to Block Bernie https://share.google/zcegH1ZFBvtMJdShZ
The U.S. is an Oligarchy? The Research, Explained | RepresentUs https://share.google/WHeE7b3nhnAxZ8sSE
Ok. And how did that stop young people from voting? Unless you're suggesting that those are the reasons they gave themselves for not voting, then none of that should have actually stopped them.
not running a pro-genocide candidate to run against another pro-genocide candidate would be a great start.
Are you really suggesting that there isn't a chilling effect on people who want to improve the status quo when they see the party nakedly manipulating the outcome? With this being exactly four years after the DNC nakedly manipulated the system in ways that had since been exhaustively documented, I'd say it massively suppressed the progressive vote, and Warren staying in far too long and splitting that vote before endorsing Biden sealed the deal.
Three election cycles in a row the party has nakedly and unashamedly manipulated things to ensure a donor-friendly candidate. In 2024 there wasn't even a primary, despite everyone knowing Biden couldn't handle another campaign.
At this point anyone who finds the status quo unacceptable and still votes for the Democrats is obviously a graduate of the Charlie Brown School of Field Goal Kicks.
The establishment overall doesn't care if people vote, because they already pre-select the candidates. Capitalists control the state because capitalists control the commanding heights of industry and finance, they have political power, and therefore even if a leftist was elected they would not be able to actually command the state to follow along and establish socialism.
No, I'm suggesting that those people are (correctly) realizing that the game is rigged and refusing to play. Your narrative that progressives could win if they showed up has been repeatedly proven to be a lie, fewer people believe it each election cycle, you cannot change the status quo by doing what the people who profit from the status quo want you to do. The Democrats are not the opposition to the GOP, they are the compliment to them. They exist to make the Wall St agenda palatable by comparison. Their only purpose is to ensure the gullible retain enough faith in the system to prevent any meaningful revolt.
The best alternative liberal Zionist Bernie Sanders who even if he had received all the votes you wanted would have just been undermined and sabotaged again by the DNC establishment like in 2016. You can't vote the fascism away. The ruling class is not going to politely expropriate themselves. You should read Luxemburg's "reform or revolution".
Bernie isn't a liberal, dude. And I can't imagine what you would consider "good enough", if you don't think that even trying to drag the window back to the left is worth it.
In 2016, we got a taste. It was a surprise for everyone, just how close we actually came to overturning the status quo. But, you're right...they had the game rigged. Except by 2020, there were no more super-delegates. And we had four years to get our shit together. All we had to do, was convince even more people to show up.
And we failed. Not only did we not get more to show up...we had way less people show up. The left quit. They sat down and pouted about 2016, instead of standing the fuck up and fighting back.
You can blame it all on "the system" if you want to. You can sit there and cry about how they control everything, and we're all powerless to do anything about it. If you want to give up, then give up. But you're forgetting that no matter how much money they can spend on this...votes are still the only thing that matters. If enough people vote the same way, it doesn't matter how much money they have...we will still win.
But if you let them convince you that your vote doesn't matter, and that you should just give up and stay home...then they will win. Every. Fucking. Time. And that's how we got here. They keep winning because we keep giving up.
Bernie is absolutely a liberal. Calling him anything else ignores what he actually proposes. He wants to regulate capital, not expropriate it. He wants to blunt capitalism's worst edges at home while leaving the imperial core intact. That is social democracy at best, a liberal ideology. His own platform accepts the basic framework of private ownership of the means of production. He seeks to manage the crisis, not resolve its root cause. That is precisely the reformism Luxemburg critiqued a century ago in the work I already recommended. You really should read it.
Electoralism under liberal democracy is not a path to socialism. It is a containment strategy. The ballot box is designed to channel dissent into harmless rituals that leave property relations untouched. You think stacking votes can overcome capital's structural power. But capital does not rule through votes. It rules through ownership of production, control of credit, domination of media, and monopoly on organised violence. When the vote threatens those foundations, the mask comes off. The courts block, the capital strikes, the media smears, the state represses. This is not conspiracy. It is the normal functioning of the bourgeois state. Expecting otherwise is like expecting a wolf to vote itself vegetarian.
Your entire argument rests on idealist assumptions. You treat consciousness as primary and material conditions as secondary. You think changing minds at the ballot box changes the balance of class forces. That is backwards. Social being determines social consciousness, not the other way around. You mistake the form of democracy for its content. You ignore that the two-party system is a mechanism to limit political competition to factions of capital, not to enable working-class rule. You cite 2016 and 2020 as if they were isolated failures of strategy, not expressions of a system that structurally excludes anti-capitalist politics. You blame the left for "quitting" instead of asking why the electoral arena absorbs and neutralises radical energy every single time. This is not analysis. It is moralising.
I am Chinese, not American. We had our revolution. We broke the bourgeois state and built a system where the vote actually means something because it is embedded in democratic centralism and whole-process people's democracy, not trapped in a ballot box ritual that changes nothing. These electoralist squabbles about which faction of capital should manage the American empire are none of my concern outside of the theoretical interest I take in educating and engaging in dialogue with comrades in a much different situation.
I know it sounds cliché to say "read theory," but genuinely, every idealist assumption you are recycling has been academically addressed and refuted for decades.
These smug dipshits may not take your explanations to heart, but know that I am.
Thank you always happy to hear when people enjoy and/or find my comments insightful.
Ummm, yeah. I think you're getting "social democracy" confused with "democratic socialism". A lot.
Wanting to retain private ownership as the principal aspect of the economy makes Bernie a social democrat, not a demsoc. Maduro is closer to a demsoc in action.
this is my first time hearing this.
do you know of other sources i can look up to know the difference?
Social Democrats are liberals that want expanded social safety nets while retaining bourgeois rule, the "class harmony" people. Democratic socialists are reformist socialists, socialists that wish to establish a socialist economy via electoral means. Allende in Chile is a famous example of one that almost worked. Venezuela right now has elements of revolutionary heritage from the Bolivarian revolution, but is still quite electoralist.
No
Go back to reddit
Why did nobody bother to show up and vote?
Because of stupid shit lile this post. We are literally in a war that would not have happened if people would have voted for the person in the meme. But oh no gaza. So now because of gaza a bunch of iranians (and americans but i know none of you give a fuck about that ever) now have to die.
Those dead iranian school childrens blood is on all the hands that sat back and let or even helped trump into the office. Including memes and posters like this.
The democrats are also war-hawk imperialists, though. Why do you say they wouldn't have supported bombing Iran? Further, saying "oh no gaza" to brush a genocide under the rug like it's nothing while you cape for the party that fully supported killing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians is monstrous.
The fact you can say this about a genocide and people not supporting it's enablers really shows how despicable you are.
"But oh no Auschwitz🙄"
This means that the blood of every dead Gazan is on the hands of everyone who directly voted to enable their slaughter
That ven diagram is a circle
Well, vivid didn't help. But, I'm assuming also because people just gave up. They threw in the towel, as soon as it looked like Biden was going to consolidate the centrist vote. Polling leading up to super Tuesday, all showed Bernie having strong support among younger voters, and especially students. But none of it actually materialized at the polls themselves.
Why did people give up?
The DNC is a private corporation and would have chosen Biden anyways
If they did that, Trump would have won the general...just like he did against Hillary. But, they didn't have to. They managed to successfully convince enough progressives that they could, that people just sat down and stopped fighting.
Weird way to say got all but the other progressive candidate to drop out, get behind Biden and have the remaining progressive candidate start attacking Bernie
Go back to reddit
Not really. Dnc could pull another trick like the Iowa app fuck up. Or as others have pointed out they don't even need to follow how voters in the primary or cacuses pick.
I'm confused are you arguing the dnc doesn't control who they put on the ticket or that it's the voters fault for how presidential primaries go when it may not even matter by the time they get the opportunity to vote?