If you are a white leftist and you talk “both parties are the same they are both capitalist” you will loose most of your black audience. I think it ought to be obvious that this isn’t because blackfolks love Democrats (in most cases, there is always someone being simple in any group) —no. it’s because the difference between the parties is material and obvious and these are unstable times.
When I hear such talk I wonder if the speaker is working on voter suppression.
Voting brings me no joy — but I never miss an election out of a kind of stubborn spite. I’ve never heard anyone explain how having all the marginalized and left leaning people not vote would be more annoying to the Democrats and Republicans than if we all do vote— and for the Democrats especially in the primaries.
I also don’t think voting is real political engagement, but it’s kind of the bare minimum. Even if you do a write-in for every office.
Typically, the threat of withholding a vote is the one scrap of leverage a person has over their own party.
I really don't like the notion that Democrats deserve my vote because they aren't as bad as the other guys.
If they want my vote, they have to earn it, otherwise they will never move leftward. All we have done is bred a culture of taking progressives for granted.
I would argue the Democratic party is already complicit in the rise of Trumpism.
They would rather lose to Trumpism than deliver progressive policies that would earn over constituencies.
The blame is always placed on progressives, and never on Democrats. Its not hard to poll for nationally popular positions (marijuana legalization, universal Healthcare, taxing the rich) and run on them.
You would argue that, but none of it is true. The Democratic Party is literally the only thing that stands between us and fascism. Anything other than supporting the DNC enables fascism.
Of course, there are far-left accelerations like Susan Sarandon who echo the words of Hitler-enabler Ernst Thälmann, infamous for saying “After Hitler, our turn!”
After Hitler, Ernst got a bullet in the back of the head on Hitler’s orders and many of his commie followers died in the camps, along with those who did not deserve to die.
Anyone who votes for the leopards-eating-faces party and gets their faces eaten just got what they deserved.
You might have but people like you did not. The numbers don’t lie: a quarter of Berners went bust, half of those by voting for Trump. And they did it in the places where it mattered.
Your people failed us. Berner’s busters gave us Trump. They gave us Dobbs. And they continue to enable fascism, including your whining about why the DNC won’t play “hardball” when it’s been doing nothing but that.
@PopOfAfrica@futurebird It seems unclear what more you want them to do if you acknowledge they are not as bad as the other guys. That's usually how party democracy works, you never get everything you want.
The movement doesn't happen on election day, it happens in your community, in primaries, in petition. Yes its not a show up once every two years, actual work is being done.
The enemy spend a lot of money trying to get you not to vote and you give it to them for free.
To be clear, I begrudgingly vote every cycle for Democrats.
I would prefer if they played hard ball once in a while. The fight for Universal Medical Care and Environmental Change Mitigation, for example, should be the highest priority, but it usually never is.
When Democrats give the change we need, I'll finally be able to cast my vote with joy, instead of throwing up a bit in my mouth.
They always just fellate the "moderates" instead of doing what needs to be done.
@PopOfAfrica@futurebird I think getting to the primaries to make sure your preferred candidates are chosen. Voting Dem is often not enough as Manchin and Sinema voters found out.
Voting with your feet is also effective, people had the opportunity with Reddit and Twitter - alas they didn't really take it, those did have more power than before.
Voting with your money is effective. It is the best vote you have.
Last primary cycle I watched as Chuck Todd and Chris Matthews compared Bernie Sanders and his movement to Fidel Castro and Brown Shirts. The supposed left wing channel that is MSNBC.
This is what I'm talking about. The system will not allow someone who is economically left leaning. Again, I will continue to vote Democrats in for fear of the authoritarian right.
@PopOfAfrica@nf3xn you don’t need to vote for a democrat if it’s that upsetting— and maybe you don’t even live in a place where it matters much. my point is more basic: don’t skip voting. Vote for every office. You can write “deez nuts” if you like. Because here is the thing: if you don’t show up it’s not really withholding a vote.
I’d hope though you might be moved to cast a more conventional ballot in a close race- or not. do you.
It's quite simple really. You have to earn a vote. The way I see it, is that Democrats willingly, enthusiastically leave votes on the table by not capitulating to disaffected would be voters.
It has taken a combination of Republican bigotry and Democratic corporate bootlicking to kill the voters appetite.
Its not a hard equation. Pitch good policy, win voters, win elections. Dems can't see to do that. You tell them to change their policy by withholding.
@nf3xn@futurebird I think about it as “are you doing anything different than Republican strategists would want?” Their best case is a vote for their guy but convincing other people not to vote for the opposition is a close second.
@futurebird 100% with you there. Better to vote against what you definitely don't want versus not voting at all. It's just a tragedy of politics in the UK (which would also apply in the US if I lived there) that this is all I've ever been able to do in all the decades of my life so far.
One day. One day I'll be able to vote for the politics I want instead.
@futurebird
So frustrating watching Americans and Poms talk like a two party duopoly is the only possible form of government. It doesn't have to be that way: if you had ranked choice voting (AKA, democracy) you could vote for minor parties first and the least objectionable major party second—without splitting the vote.
@stib That would be interesting. But it would also mean we’d inevitably have an openly fascist “america first” party — Then there would be the coalitions needed to get anything done. I used to think breaking up the two party system would help but I no longer really think it would be any better and in some ways it would be worse.
If we really did universal suffrage we could get pretty far. And make up the difference in local politics.
@futurebird@stib effectively we already have coalitions. Each of the major parties is a coalition. The actual policy preferences within each one vary wildly.
Most democracies do have proportional voting where the amount of power comes from the amount of votes. In most of them this works fine. Not perfect but fine.
I am not American, but from what I understand you already have coalitions in the US system, they are just hidden in back room meetings, in groups like the "freedom caucus"?
Having a proportional voting system means this kind of coalition building is all in the open, where people can see it and scrutinise it, and where they can choose which faction their vote goes to.
@futurebird@stib Pay people to vote. Enter the polling place, leave with a fresh $100 bill. Even if you write-in "deez nuts". Amount chosen to be significant to folks for whom voting should make a difference to their lives, irrelevant to those for whom it won't.
@dalias
We have the inverse of that: you get fined if you don't vote, or to be more precise, you get fined if you don't turn up to a polling place and get your name ticked off. @futurebird
@dalias@futurebird yeah, but is it though? Conservatives hate compulsory voting with a passion, because it ensures all the working class turn out to vote—they're the ones who can least afford a fine.
Most of the time I'm dead against fines for anything (fines=legal for the rich), but this one I'm happy to live with—if the rich want to stay home, it's all good.
That's what everyone should get when they vote. Even if you just go in the booth and write "yer mum" on every line. And heck, it'd be "good for the economy" too.
@futurebird@stib@dalias You wouldn’t even have to do that. Just have polling stations where people live so that the longest line is only 20 minutes. Paying the extra staff would also help the economy. In Canada, large condos get their own polling stations. I voted in my bathrobe. Plus there are enough staff that you can do the counting quickly with paper and a scanner. Of course, we don’t vote for dog catchers and judges, here, so that helps.
@dan613@futurebird@stib No, that does not achieve anywhere near the same thing. To think it does you'd have to be stupid or just lying because you don't actually want everyone to vote. Making something easy enough not to be discouraging is not the same as making it have a concrete material benefit to the participant even if they don't get their desired electoral outcome.
Bad guy won, but at least I'm $100 ahead to protect myself from fallout, and nobody will judge me for having gone out to get it. I'm not labelled "political".
I got the outcome I wanted, and cash! Even if my vote wasn't "needed" I'm still happy I got the cash.
@dan613@futurebird@stib Either mandate paid time off to vote, allow early/mail-in, or make the $100 larger to cover a day's wages. Even better if it covers a day's wages for laboring class but not for ruling class.
@dalias
I'm kinda gobsmacked that a country with the resources of the US can't organise elections where you don't have to stand in line all day.
In Australia people are outraged if they have to wait 30 minutes at the booth. Polling booths are usually at local schools an community halls throughout the country and there is roughly one booth for every 3000 voters. @dan613@futurebird
@futurebird@stib Which is what we simply don’t get here in Australia. Elections are run by an independent authority. Everything is done to make it easy for people to vote, given that it’s compulsory. The corruption of the American system is what’s gobsmacking.
@futurebird@stib@dalias Here in Australia you get fined a crisp, stiff hunna dolla bill (and then some) if you don’t vote. It’s mandatory to vote in national, state and even local government elections.
Once you’re inside the polling station, you can obviously write whatever you want.
It can be a nuisance to have to go and vote when you have no interest in a particular election, but it’s good that everyone shares responsibility for the outcomes.
@stib 30% of Americans are kinda racist— about half of this number don’t think of themselves as racist and don’t really want to be racist if they bothered to think about it (which they don’t) that leaves about 15% who would be electing literal KKK guys— not seeing how having 10% behind Nadar makes that any less awful.
@futurebird@stib
I hope that there are about as many of the far-leftists that are not voting in our two-party system that it would out-vote the KKK-faction on the right which is one big reason why I've supported Ranked Choice Voting in order to hopefully increase voter turnout.
I'm convinced that more leftists don't take part in our two-party system than rightists, but convincing data on that is hard to find because it doesn't seem well-studied or easily found via search engines.
@futurebird
It sounds like getting out the vote is a struggle. It's that because it's hard to convince people that it's worth voting for a rich white guy? Wouldn't it be easier if you could vote for people who more accurately represent you first, then the centrist lesser of two evils next?
The good thing about ranked choice is that you can put say, Huey Newton first, even if you don't think they can win, then Frederick Douglass who might have more of a chance, then Jesse Jackson, Barack Obama and finally Joe Biden, knowing that at worst your vote will go to Biden.
@futurebird@stib that’s a great observation about ranked choice, and one I’d never heard expressed before. RE: the two part system. It bears remembering that the extreme “evangelical” right very successfully accomplished their goal of taking over the GOP. No reason the Democratic Party couldn’t be evolved in a similar way by progressives.
@futurebird Not voting the entire ticket is what helped Trump squeak out a narrow win in Michigan. 10K votes was the margin, but there was a record 80K undervote -- people voted the rest of the ballot but not the top of the ticket.
Even if you have concerns, hold your nose and pick the lesser of two evils. In this case it was the difference between keeping or losing reproductive rights because Trump picked two SCOTUS jurists who voted to end Roe. Women will die because of those non-voters.
Even with the limited choice of policies between Democrats and Republicans, it's still important to vote, because otherwise democracy (such as it is) dies.
People who don't vote have no right to complain about the state of the country.
When I hear such talk, I imagine a person for whom the outcome of the election doesn't have a real effect, so they can vote (and talk) however they want. I definitely don't care for the influence such talk might have on others.
Given how thin the margins of some elections are, I have definite opinions of votes for third-party/write-in candidates.
@futurebird I think part of it is an overreaction to the insistence that no social action but voting is tolerable. And I'm wondering if that's a particularly white thing.
@futurebird I have a few competent friends who are my standard write-in candidates when an incumbent has no challenger. One of them actually ended up running for county council & getting elected!
@futurebird While the parties have similarities, they have stark differences that make it easy for me to vote blue, every time.
I wish that it made a huge difference in the state I live in. It makes some difference in local and statehouse races, but as I've said many times before, there is no national strategy to reduce or eliminate the reinforcing impact of right wing media, and nowhere is that more painfully obvious than in any of the center red states in the continental U.S.
@futurebird I agree with this, but how do we force the Democrats to improve if at the end of the day there's nothing they can do to lose our vote because the Republicans are even worse? We can primary them, but there are very powerful groups (which include Republicans among their ranks!) pouring a lot of resources into preventing Democrats from getting primaried.
The problem isn't that the parties are the same. The problem is that the wealthy have rigged the system so that no matter which party wins THEY win. They look at the game on a completely different set of axes than we do. For them the enemy in 2016 was Bernie, and I think they didn't really want Trump either because he was so unpredictable, but they made do.
I think a lot of white anarchists see the problem as Black people failing to understand that it's about class and not about race. But I see the problem as the reverse: white anarchists need to see that the liberation of the working class depends on the liberation of the worst off among us. It's great that UPS drivers are going to get a better contract, but it's prisoners and the unhoused and Black kids getting shot who really matter.
Labor needs to own the fact that they excluded Black workers in the early days because Black workers were used as scabs. They need to internalize the REASON Black workers were used as scabs, which was that organizing efforts completely ignored the fact that they weren't getting hired. Labor is far more diverse today, but I don't know how much of that is due to their own efforts as opposed to white people moving to non-union jobs.
What am I doing about this? Not much, yet. I just kind of realized this stuff typing this reply, so thank you for posting this and letting me ramble in your mentions.
I don’t have every answer. (And I certainly can’t force any democrat to do anything.) The one thing that has worked is building local networks. If there are homeless people in your area get to know them, work with your neighbors to help them with food, (or in my case using my mailbox) find out who the worst cop at the nearest precinct is and help file complaints. Show up at school board meetings and co-op board meetings— talk to who isn’t being talked to amplifying what they say.
Become a photo negative image of the busy body karen who has been sic’ing the cops on the kids at the playground for years. This is easier when one has time and or money and some experience dealing with the many layers of social organization that all exist to keep things as they are. Show up and say “why don’t we just stop locking that pedestrian bridge at night?” or “Who knows someone in sanitation? we need a second garbage bin in the park.”
@futurebird I don't wonder. The differences between the two parties are so enormous on climate change, reproductive rights, tax equity, minority representation, and so much else anybody saying they are the same is pushing some dishonest agenda.
@futurebird That’s a great point! Thanks for sharing this perspective, I would not have considered it on my own. But you are right. I always hear about Republicans making it hard for black people to vote and gerrymandering. I never hear about Democrats doing this stuff.
@futurebird I’m never going to be an apologist for democrats who keep failing the needs of the people but they’re also not the party that wants to erase me from existence or eradicate those that don’t look like them.
@futurebird quite possibly. The old Moscow to CPUSA pipeline is not quite dead, even though the USSR is. Personally, I find the treatment of Marx's writings as sacred texts quite wrong headed.
@futurebird Your hypothetical white leftist quote... it just goes too far.
The parties are not the same. But capitalism taken too far is at the root of a lot of our problems. Particularly the notion that a corporation's only responsibility is to its shareholders -- not to employees, community or country.
The Democratic Party is far less focused on this problem than it used to be, and yeah, on that key point, it has become more lake the GOP.
@futurebird To paraphrase Frederick Douglass (by turning his original quote on its head: "the Democratic Party is the ship. All else is the sea around us."
@futurebird You know, if there were a legal cap on the number of seats any party could hold in the legislature--say 30%--Blacks in America (~13%) could form a truly decisive block, instead of token symbols.
Blacks might become as much as 25% of a new liberal party, as compared to the 11% they currently represent as a portion of the Dems. Even if they can't achieve an absolute majority, their interests would be represented more clearly, and Dems could achieve NOTHING without them.
I do believe there are a significant number of "leftists" that legitimately want to see the fascists gain power. Like Jimmy Dore and Glenn "Tucker Carlson is a socialist" Greenwald.
Literally no trans person I know loves the Democrats, but all of us are voting for them because the alternative is much worse.
Pre-emptive note to the liberals out there: this is absolutely not an endorsement of "Vote Dem and all your problems will go away".
@futurebird but they are both capitalists. So they aren't wrong.
I think your point is that by extension the conclusion is that folks shouldn't vote. Not sure that is always the only intended takeaway.
Some leftist believe that electoral politicians will not solve our problems. Isn't the solution. So ya, those folks are arguing that you need to spend your time organizing, instead of thinking that showing up to vote will fix everything.
@futurebird In my experience it seems to be that so many people my age and younger think that incremental change is pointless and so write off anyone who isn't openly socialist. My feeling is that their goals are great but we can't just do nothing until our savior arrives. However imperfect, the Democrats seem to want the right things, they just can't get past the whole capitalism hump
@futurebird I believe the intent is to call attention to the fact that every politician will have corporate backers that will want to be rewarded. It's important to know what those sponsors are, and what their intentions are. Like if a politician is supported by the medical insurance industry, they aren't going to try to pushuch in the way of socialized medical care.
This is kinda obvious, CGP Grey did a video called "The rules for rulers" that goes over how power structures at that level function.
@futurebird
I'm white, Jewish, and I've been an active liberal/progressive Democrat since I was about 3 (our parents were very active liberals, & we had many friends & relatives who were victims of Joe McCarthy & the House UnAmerican Committee). My parents hid many of our books & record albums, even though they were just folk music & calypso. I was 13 when MLK gave his speech-we watched it on our B&W tv. I can't imagine saying something so tone deaf.
@futurebird this is also true for trans people, as well as other minorities. Many trans people are fleeing their states or making plans to because of the discriminatory laws being passed. I completely agree that saying voting doesn't matter only serves to disenfranchise leftists.
@futurebird “both parties are the same” is awful doomerism. Neither party is acceptable, but one is a saving throw against fascism while the other is an active descent into it.
I’ve definitely known folks who wholeheartedly embraced the nihilism of “both parties are the same” out of some misguided belief that The Revolution™️ can’t be accomplished by incrementalism, so any incremental action is tantamount to delaying or denying The Revolution™️. They are exhausting.
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