claim 1: “voting doesn’t change anything”
Never forget the recent case of Kris Mayes, who refuses to uphold the Arizona supreme court’s sweeping ban of abortion.
Kris Mayes only won her 2022 election by 280 votes. Voting changes things.
claim 2: “but genocide joe”
Yep. Hold that fucker’s feet to the fire. He has blood on his hands
But trump has promised to be indisputably worse.
I won’t tell you how to vote. I just encourage you to vote. You’re not radical for ditching the only miniscule right the state has granted you to do some small aid for your neighbors.
others have taken a valid attack against this argument, but also worth noting that the Tea Party was backed by ultra wealthy and corporate interests. that sheer mass of capital has insane messaging power that the left either doesn’t have or is refusing to wield.
Yeah, it was a Koch brother’s project backed by big bank accounts – but that doesn’t mean the tactics aren’t valid. Left wing policies poll especially well with Americans, especially when they’re described clearly and without buzzwords. What we lack in funds, we potentially make up for in sheer numbers of people.
Obviously that requires a hell of a lot of coordination, but I think it’s achievable.
the key flaw to your position:
yes. coordination. coordination, which, like it or not, cannot be done without cash. the tea party was able to gain its astroturfed support by coordnation, messaging, which took think tanks, writers and publishers. not free.
you are getting it absolutely correct with the caveat “when they’re described clearly and without buzzwords.” and what does it take to generate that clear communication? research, analysis, understanding, writing, marketing, canvassing, publishing, broadcasting. all of those are job descriptions that can be done remarkably well, for the cost of hiring people to do it. you are counting on a supermassive bulk of labor to reach millions of Americans that can’t and won’t appear for free, as much as i wish it would.
the problem, of course, is the Democratic party. if it would just be better and stop being a neoliberal protoconservative capitalist genocide supporting clownshow, and put a bit of cash toward doing some actual leftist groundwork, we would be fine, but of course we cannot hope for things to magically be better, only to work with things as they actually are.
How is it supposed to Become Better without pressure? Organizations are like organisms; they minimize energy expenditure - whether in the form of cash, calories, or labor. As long as being the lesser of two evils is a successful strategy, the DNC will not change. There’s no pressure to change.
As it stands, it’s in the organization’s best interest to maintain the threat of Republican domestic policies. It’s why there was no legislative attempt to codify abortion rights in the national legislature - the party benefits from the continued uncertainty. If they had pushed a vote, then individual members would have to answer to the public for how they voted – worse still, it might have passed; then they’d have to find something new to campaign on.
I don’t disagree; you just bypass my main point.
There is no pressure without money. That’s literally all I am saying.
Right now, millions of Americans could skip the vote out of protest and go utterly unnoticed because there is no messaging backing them. They are indistinguishable from the majority of Americans that don’t vote anyway, and can be treated by Democrats as such.
Thus hilighting the key distinction between a leftist ditch-the-vote movement versus what the Tea Party was.
As soon as there is significant capital backing pro-Palestine views, my point will be moot. This has not happened yet though I pray it does.
Maybe if we were talking about a private business, sure. But a political party has pressure points outside of the financial - there is some minimum of voters required to keep the institution viable. If they can’t hold office, they can’t deliver to their donors.
Yes, that requires actually talking to people and organizing outside of the party structure itself. But that seems a damn sight more likely than an economy built around arms-manufacture and investment bubbles suddenly developing a conscious and deciding not to continue this very lucrative status quo.
Good thing boycotts, divestments and sanctions exist and are effective.
A lot of this discussion is overly voting centric, as you yourself know I’m sure. You’re asking the election to do everything, while I am simply asking the election to hold the overton window away from a total fascist government (look up Project 2025 if you haven’t).
There are other forms of activism than voting/abstaining. Voting is simply a last ditch measure to hold shit stable after everything else is said and done to the best of our ability. I just encourage you to understand that you are putting far too much emphasis on that one facet of democracy, in a way that puts much more risk on the shoulders of your neighbors.
I’m not sure fascism is a useful word here. We’re talking about a country with a global navel presence, military installations on every continent; a country that accounts for half of all incarcerated people in the world, that has for decades ignored unanimous motions in the UN, who’s economy and politics revolve around the central productive pole of weapons manufacture. The tipping point between “stable US” and “fascist US” seems like an arbitrary distinction at this moment in history.
I’m not asking elections to do everything, I’m asking people to stop treating federal elections like some bulwark against evil. It’s not a useful way to think about it. It’s a hoop to jump through. The electorate decides, mostly by incident and the collective sum of vague gut feelings, where the hoop is and how high is required to jump. What power exists there is the ability to say, too bad, not you! Beyond that, it’s a rubber stamp - about as significant to the running of things as the King of England is to Downing Street.
If you think I am treating voting as a bulwark against evil you misunderstand my position from the first place. Never my intention. Simply here to say that calling for a non-vote is misplacing risk onto the most vulnerable people groups when better avenues are available.