Let’s see your tune in 4 years lmao all you fuckwits who stayed home did was force everyone to live under the authoritarians right now. You sacrificed marginalized groups because of a complete lack of perspective and selfish bullshit.
You have four years every year to push for candidates you like. Local and state offices. So many opportunities to volunteer and donate. Then you all show up having done NOTHING during that time, strolling up in the general election endlessly complaining and moaning. I’m so fucking sick of it.
Change takes work and time. Sitting around whining online doing nothing for 3.5 years then showing up in the general is not putting in the work. It’s being entitled brats.
We’ve been living in an authoritarian right wing country for 25-50 years. Historically the tactic of “we must sacrifice [insert marginalized group here] or it’ll get worse for us all!!!” has been very effective.
I find it very hopeful that this was the year that people were finally very vocally opposed that tactic and think it’s a good sign going forward that things might actually get better. However, that is reliant on people like you waking up to the fact that no amount of time and effort put into reinforcing the sacrificial machine will ever change its fundamental nature and that what you view as “being entitled brats” is often simply refusing to participate in the death, enslavement and marginalization of others.
Is active resistance better? Yes! But token resistance while actively reinforcing the authoritarian right is worse than nothing. The vast majority of those “opportunities to volunteer and donate” are doing just that; a $5 donation to “lesser evil INC.” is still actively funding evil.
Your frustration and anxiety for the future is perfectly valid, and I appreciate that you are at least a little mad about the state of things. But I would ask that you step back, reevaluate, and redirect that rage and start punching up instead of looking for who to punch down at.
Trump is not the person to learn this lesson with. Romney, McCain, all of those would’ve been fine. Trump is an incredibly unique threat.
Yeah, the longer it takes the worse it gets. That’s one of the points the parent meme is getting across. But that response tells me you missed what I was saying.
Reread and try again.
Don’t patronize me asshole
Not the intention. How would you prefer I had responded?
Out of interest, what do you do to push for progressive reform? Because if it’s phone banking for right-wingers, I’m not sure that counts.
I currently volunteer with and donate to the EFF and CSE, and I worked both of Bernie’s campaign. If your goal is to flip the script on me you’ll need to find another approach. Or you could try actually engaging the points.
Yes it was overly angry and ranty but I am tired of repeating it and this election was frustrating as fuck.
It was genuine curiosity. There are people like you was my point. Perhaps not enough, but not everyone has the resources to be an activist. And it should hardly be surprising that people stayed home this time, considering what was on offer.
Yes it’s a privilege to be able to do what I do. But I guarantee you almost every person who goes online writing comment after comments about how “there are simply no good candidates” could’ve donated a few dollars or phone banked at least once for someone. If you ask them who they would have wanted instead they can’t even answer that because they don’t know. They just get mad at the establishment during the final hours then disappear for a few years and never try to do anything about it.
Again though, I really can’t blame people for being disillusioned with the democratic system in general, right? We’ve just been through a generational moment where any viable left opposition in the West got shit-housed into oblivion, and AOC is giving us a great lesson in what succeeding through the proper channels means in practice. And what has been the response from the political class more generally? To move even further right!
It’s a miserable situation ofc, and I don’t blame you at all for venting. But neither do I blame people for venting despite doing nothing else. Sanders raised a lot of money, and a lot of volunteer hours, and what did it yield? And the fallout from Corbynism has been as bad if not worse. Many people got blacklisted over it, and several door knockers ended up in hospital — why would anyone want to put themselves on the line like that again, especially when the potential gains are so meager?
Dgmw, I too wish that people would channel their anger through effective organizing, but imho it’s become a lot less clear in recent years what that would mean.
There are a myriad of fantastic organizations doing great work and if 5% of the disillusioned crowd got involved they’d make huge gains. They just want a single President to magic wand everything they want into existence, if they can even define what they want half the time.
I get what you’re saying I really do but we do this same song and dance every 4 years since 2012
also known as
this is stupid.
a system where you get served only two options to vote for but are held responsible for the outcome instead of those who limited the available options in the first place?
eh yes, you are right, this is stupid.
as a completely unrelated sidenote:
“winner takes it all” is the actual opposite of democracy, no matter how the voting was done, and this fact can already be read 1:1 within those 4 simple words 😉
this is stupid too. Democracy is mathematically impossible. Condorcet’s paradox and all that.
Democracy is mathematically impossible.
if democracy was not possible, how does it come that the greek did democracy and it is said they were once overrun in a war because of beeing democratic? if something was a cause for a turn of a war, i pretty much believe it to really exist, no matter what some kind of half baked formulars “predicted” once.
if democracy existed and your math says thats not possible, i’ld guess your math might simply be ‘slightly’ wrong about it or was created with (un-)intentional biases in mind ;-)
just to note:
in the history of human predictions based on thought through and wordly/mathmatically described rules, the most common thing afterwards was, that those rules and also their predictions were just fundamentally wrong and biased.
*Long term effects of a broken 2 party voting system…
FTFY
This is a lie. People just spread this to trick you into not voting so the Republicans win.
This is a lie spread by corporate elites that want to make sure both parties align with their interests instead of having Democrats create a popular platform and win on that basis.
Did you learn nothing from hanging on to Biden until even the billionaire donors got scared by his dementia?
or voting third party in a backwards outdated voting system like that of the US
The effect shown isn’t untrue, but the conclusion doesn’t follow from that.
Do you mean that democrats are not centrists?
In most other countries your 2 parties would be classified right wing and extreme right wing.
Thank you!
Every time someone says this they exaggerate the positions further and further to the right, and it becomes less and less true.
You think I did that?
I’m Danish and here your 2 parties would absolutely fit the categories I described. No exaggeration what so ever.
Incidentally that’s also the effect of not voting for the lesser evil, you can just cut out the two steps in the middle then.
So if you don’t vote for the lesser evil it gets salty and joins the evil? Yeah i am not voting for that psycho manipulating abusive shit.
So if you don’t vote for the lesser evil it gets salty and joins the evil?
Not quite. If you don’t vote for the lesser evil, it loses influence, which means the greater evil has it easier to shift things over in their direction and control the narrative. They’ve won after all, so clearly that’s what the voters want. The lesser evil will take cues from this.
(It should also be said that this whole meme only really applies to shitty 2-party systems. In a proper parliamentary democracy, you have more realististic choices than “greater evil” and “lesser evil” and don’t have to play this stupid game at all.)
The two party System is more a consequence of first past the post than the system they are voted into.
If you look at Canada as an example in the last 30 years the parties on the right have amalgamated and have been rewarded for it as the vote splitting on the left is what gets them elected. It’s just a matter of time until the left follow suit and then 🎉 two party system.
Yeah, I agree. FPTP is a horrible system that will inevitably lead to this kind of situation.
The same shit happens in systems with more than two parties. You also have the problem to think about rallying behind the main party on the left or right side vs. one that is closer to your ideals but probably wont become part of the government coalition. In Germany, where i am from, we had 12 out of 16 years under Merkel with a “big coalition” of the conservative CDU and the social democrat SPD. All that happened was the SPD moving more and more to the right. Now we had a coalition that was supposedly progressive but collapsed hard as well as the Green party and liberal party FDP also moving strongly to the right. We now in 2024 have policies among the supposed center/center-left that used to be fringe far right by German standards. This is why voting “tactically” or for “the lesser evil” fails. It gives a false sense of what is demanded by the people.
Also for the narrative control just take the win of Biden in 2020 as a counter example. Despite Trump holding office the Dems managed to win.
I’m also from Germany and I don’t think it’s a similar situation at all. In our system, it’s absolutely possible and doable for a new party to arise and gain influence. You don’t have to vote for the lesser evil, you can find a party that actually suits you and there is a realistic shot of getting it elected if enough people want it to happen. We’ve gotten 2 new parties in parliament over the last decade (I don’t like either of them, but that’s beside the point). And yes, we have a general shift to the right in Germany as well, but that’s more due to the actual attitudes of the population, a generally weak left and things like Russian influence. Contrary to the US, voters can absolutely reverse that trend though.
In a system like the US, that’s almost impossible. Let’s say the democrats split up into left-wing democrats and right-wing democrats. Half of the voter base goes to either party, so 25% of the population votes for each. However, elections are “first past the post”, so even if the left gained a lot of voters and reached, say, 35%, it will be a total victory for the Republican party. Any party that can’t get an absolute majority of votes is powerless. The momentum for a new party to get to power would have to be insane.
Also for the narrative control just take the win of Biden in 2020 as a counter example. Despite Trump holding office the Dems managed to win.
Well, yes, but pretty much exclusively by running on a lesser evil “We’re not Trump” platform. Had the Trump presidency never happened, it could have been way more about actual policy.
Then they don’t need to worry about your vote and are stuck competing for the remaining voters
Well, they would get my vote if they changed their policies and behaviour. If you vote them no matter what they dont have to fight for it. (Note i am not a US citizen but the same principles apply. I have similar dissapointment with the formerly progressive parties in my country moving to the right)
And we can also observe this empirically with the current election. The Dems were so tone deaf that they thought to compete over Reps not too happy with Trump, fielding people like Dick fucking Cheney as their advocates. Meanwhile they lost a lot of votes they expected to just have secure because they expected the voters to be blindly loyal hence irrelevant to their strategy.
Or we can go directly to the bottom frame like we’re gonna do - but go ahead and keep rationalizing why your moral pedestal was too lofty to vote for Kamala.
Only fascists can be accurately represented by Kamala Harris.
So you really think we’re better off with Bonespurs? Cuz realistically he was the only other viable choice, and reality trumps moral purity pedestals.
Too many commenters here do not understand anything about how any of it works, especially how first past the post voting works. Progressives do not seem to understand that the system has not rejected them, but the voters have.
It is mostly relentless propaganda for the oligarchs that has captured the country. That’s the problem, and it is not fixed by any of the suggestions here.
No.
Look at how the system actually works. There are two choices. Both candidates have to compete for all the people who vote. If you sit out the election that doesn’t mean either candidate will try to get your vote; they’ll ignore you and go after the people who do vote.
Someone else came up with this analogy. It’s like the trolley problem except the there’s a third option. The third choice is to throw the switch to “Neither,” but “Neither” isn’t connected and the trolley kills someone anyway.
My friend, what you wrote totally ignores the passage of time. Everything you wrote is true if we only look at one election, and none of it is true if we consider the passage of time and how pressure operates. If the political party is not getting votes, if all of their candidates are losing, either they will disband or they will find different policies to push.
Actually I paid attention to history. The pendulum swung the other way a few years back; arch Conservative Ronald Reagan courted the Left by picking the first woman on the Supreme Court and making Colin Powell his Number One guy.
Or as Rush put it, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”
George Carlin did a great job blowing this nonsense apart
If George was alive today he’d be begging people to vote against Trump.
No he wouldn’t, and the video I linked explains clearly why. Maybe watch it and try to comprehend what he’s saying there.
Let me explain something you may not be aware of.
The man was an entertainer. His job was to make people laugh. I can cherry pick his work and come up with all kinds of absurd ideas he put into his act.
If the only argument you can make is based on a comedy routine, then we have nothing more to discuss.
Let me explain something you may not be aware of. Entertainers often say serious things that cannot be said in other mediums. If you don’t understand that Carlin was doing political commentary, and appreciate his insights then you’re a very dim individual indeed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_George_Carlin_Show
George did a TV show on the FOX network.
I love his stuff, but that doesn’t blind me to the fact that he was primarily an entertainer.
The fact that you thought this was a good argument shows how utterly intellectually impoverished you are.
Yeah bro, the anti war hippie who was challenging the FCC in the 70s would have totally been team corporatocracy. Carlin had several interviews where he talked about how the two party system in America is an illusion of choice and ragged on Bill Clinton for being phony, and that’s the farthest left liberal candidate in like 30 years, a fucking neoliberal.
Yall sound exactly like the conservatives claiming MLK.
Like I said, if you can’t come up with anything except a comedy act, we have nothing to discuss.
Here’s a clip from his early days, proof that he couldn’t possibly have ever changed his thoughts about anything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKO8qMJtbng this is from the 90s through the early 2000s, but I imagine you’ll find another reason to dismiss his words to pretend you know what was in his heart was different tho.
For the record, I don’t agree with his defeatist outlook, I think there’s comedians with better takes on American politics, but to pretend Carlin would be blue MAGA just because you wish him to be is ridiculous.
If 5% of the general election popular vote for POTUS, knowing that the candidate cannot win, still voted for the Green Party platform then what effect would that have upon the Democratic Party platform?
On a five point difficulty scale this is a two. The test gets way harder than this.
If my grandmother had wheels she’d be a tea trolley.
Right now the reality is the Donald Trump is going to take office because a lot of people didn’t vote for the alternative.
All the ‘what if…?’ games in the world isn’t going to change that.
Thank you for the opportunity to teach.
If my grandmother had wheels she’d be a tea trolley.
Minimization.
Right now the reality is the Donald Trump is going to take office because a lot of people didn’t vote for the alternative.
Red herring.
All the ‘what if…?’ games in the world isn’t going to change that.
Minimization.
This is a bit better than typical nonsense because there’s two tactics in a sandwich. Next is usually ad hominem. But, this one may have another trick up their sleeve.
Simply naming fallacies isn’t teaching. The point of learning fallacies isn’t so that you can just name them and feel like you’ve made a point.
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I asked a question. I received a fallacy sandwich in return. There’s no point in investing further.
Simply naming fallacies isn’t teaching.
unsupported
The point of learning fallacies isn’t so that you can just name them and feel like you’ve made a point.
strawman
The point of teaching is sharing knowledge, not just poking holes in whatever argument you can (intentional hyperbole, not strawman)
The point of learning fallacies isn’t so that you can just name them and feel like you’ve made a point.
strawman
Instead of just “strawman, therefore you’re wrong” and leaving it at that, how about you explain what was incorrect in that statement. That way you become more understood, and everyone understands you more.
This isn’t a courtroom debate. This isn’t a debate you “win” or “lose”. This is a debate where everyone should be trying to understand each other, so that everyone ends up better off by the end. This sort of debate is a cooperative thing, not competitive.
The audience I wish to reach doesn’t need their hand held as a child.
None of your assertions have been supported
unsupported
How do you not choke on your irony?
With well-reasoned and nuanced principles supported by vast experience.
Right now the reality is the Donald Trump is going to take office because a lot of people didn’t vote for the alternative.
Red herring.
You’re going to have to explain that in detail. Trump got more votes. He won. How is that anything except a cold, hard fact?
Everything you said.
Pompous.
Make your 3rd party an arm of the dems. A coalition of sorts
If you’re saying that the Left should vote for the Dems I agree.
I’d love to have Bernie as President, but our side dropped the ball twice and failed to get him nominated.
You understand how things work! Ignore the apathy trolls. They are trying to silence your vote. Here’s what actually happens if you vote for the lesser of two evils. You’re rights are protected and next time use the primary process to pick someone even better.
You’re rights are protected and next time use the primary process to pick someone even better.
Oh, Like how we voted for the lesser evil in 2020 and didn’t have a fucking primary in 2024. Don’t tell us to do something that your party makes sure doesn’t happen.
Lol. What planet do you live on?
You’re rights are protected
Like how Roe V. Wade was protected when Biden got into office? Like our right to protest the atrocities which our taxes are paying for in Gaza?
Do yourself a favor and read the novels of Ross Thomas. He was a Washington reporter turned crime novelist. All his books have a strong political basis. Two of his best; “The Fools In Town Are On Our Side,” an ex-CIA hot shot is hired to clean up a small Southern city by making it so corrupt even the pimps will vote for reform; “The Porkchoppers,” a nuts and bolts look at a Union election with characters ranging from White House aides and Washington power mongers to factory line workers.
Ah yes, so the best option is to not vote and let them succeed unimpeded.
I’m all for voting for a better candidate, but we have a broken 2 party system, and it very much is if you don’t vote for one of the two main parties, you are pretty much just not voting at all.
I don’t vote for this person. I’m voting against that person.
Dems have been nothing but a doormat for the last 30 years, the party of complicity. I’m absolutely positive they’ve been playing the dupe and moving the US further to the right all the while playing the victim.
Could have fixed the electoral college but didn’t. Could have codified abortion into the constitution but didn’t. Could have filled RBGs supreme court seat without Senate confirmation regardless of the pearl clutching, but didn’t. Could have put pressure on the justice department to get their investigation done with to get the trial for Trump for treason at least started…but fuck me, they didn’t… seriously- they couldn’t put a case together in 3 years???
Could have, should have, would have. Fucking useless.
I agree, but also stand by my point. In a horrible 2 party system, they’re simply “not conservative”, and so I’m forced to vote for them. That being said, Bernie should have won.
Bernie got railroaded.
They are conservative though.
Ah yes, so the best option is to not vote and let them succeed unimpeded.
The best option is to scream at anyone who isn’t fucking delighted that your side of the party has moved so far to the right that they’re supporting genocide.
No one can gripe about your shit wing of the party.
That’s exactly the voter attitude, that gets the broken 2 party system. Politicians know this kind of thinking and use it to their advantage.
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The short term effect of voting for the “greater evil” (or not voting at all): straight to the far, far right.
The time to vote for someone good is the primaries, which set what the dichotomy of the actual election is going to be like. In the November dichotomy, voting for the lesser evil is kinda the only option unless you want Big Evil to win.
Yes, it would be better to “merge” the main election and primaries into a ranked-choice vote but that’s not happening anytime soon.
The time to vote for someone good is the primaries
“The time to vote against evil is in the bullshit private competition that the party can and does rig, ignore, or not bother with at all.”
Yes, which is why voting is not enough: you have to campaign for the candidates you want to see. The ranked-choice system would fix this but that’s off-limits for now.
How does “campaigning” for the candidates you want to see make a difference if you’re not going to vote for them?
I didn’t say voting is pointless. You should go vote too. But if I go vote in the US I’ll be arrested.
Did you reply to the wrong comment?
IMO the only way around this problem in the USA is to either (A) get a third party to the point of legitimacy where people will take them seriously be winning seats in the house and senate, and eventually running for the presidency, or (B) win a primary in one of the two major parties. By election day there is nothing to do but vote for the least worst option.
Gotta switch to Approval Voting for single-seat elections and the proportional variant for legislatures.
That would help
Funny that a lot of people see this shit and immediately go but Dem and Rep, this shit applied for a lot of countries that have more than 2 parties. When the more popular parties are all shit people go with “lesser evil”.
Fixed
Not sure this makes sense. I think the window shifts right as people continue to vote right.
From the Wikipedia article about the Overton window:
The most common misconception is that lawmakers themselves are in the business of shifting the Overton window. That is absolutely false. Lawmakers are actually in the business of detecting where the window is, and then moving to be in accordance with it.
