First, mind the community. Can’t help that it ended up in /all. Second, would that point have gotten across to you without the post? So it wasn’t really pointless.
Maybe it’s the over-the-top defensiveness that is the problem, rather than a post in an anarchist community presenting a point of view that made some people react in that way.
The United States has some of the longest election cycles, maybe in the world, but definitely among western liberal democracies.
So yes, the literal act itself takes a day. But everything surrounding that day is taken up by planning for the next election, enough robs people of other kinds of political engagement, by being such a massive time and energy sink.
Sorry that I’m angry that marginalized groups are going to die in the literal millions because you thought that spiritualist roleplay was more important than harm reduction.
I know, after all, that no anarchist has ever been in support of harm reduction through electoral participation. /s
Sorry that I’m angry that marginalized groups are going to die in the literal millions because you thought that spiritualist roleplay was more important than harm reduction.
Yes, it was me. I didn’t vote In the US elections and that’s why Trump is back in power.
I know, after all, that no anarchist has ever been in support of harm reduction through electoral participation.
Can we stop pretending like voting for the Democrats as they exist now stops the Republicans from winning? It only makes them win more slowly. It is literally why everyone is so disillusioned and why the Democrats were unable to sell their message to enough people. And can we also take for granted that me saying this doesn’t mean that I didn’t vote for Kamala Harris?
Yes. That’s how electoralist politics work. The power as a voter lies in the ability to withhold their vote or to vote for someone else. The moment your vote is being forced into compliance, you have thus lost all your political power under that system.
It’s kinda one of the major flaws of an electoralist system.
I feel like you’re not quite getting the point. The only sway you have over politicians, is your vote. If you guarantee your vote to a party no matter what they do, you have entirely given up all of your political power.
That’s the whole point of democracy. You withhold your vote from the candidates you do not believe in, or who have shown that they do not push for policies that would benefit you or yours. If a candidate does not have beliefs and policies that you believe in, you do not vote for them. And the rough idea is that this incentivizes politicians to adopt policies that people want. If you vote for a politician regardless of whether you believe in what they do, this incentive goes away. The politician will have your vote regardless of what they do, and so they are open to be incentivized in other ways, for example, donations from billionaires.
If a politician adopts wildly unpopular positions, such as just doing genocide, and doing nothing in favor of worker’s rights, or doing nothing in favor of universal health care, and so on, and so forth, and they then lose a race, then it’s their fault for not adopting policies that more people can get behind, and not that of the people who didn’t vote for them. Because again, the whole point of democracy is to incentivize politicians to adopt popular positions, and the politician failed to do so.
You’re confusing cause and effect; democrats need to promise policy that improves people’s material conditions if they want people to vote for them, and use every single power at their disposal to prevent further harm until then to prove they will do as they say if they win. Nobody is going to vote for a party that they dont believe will help them.
You cant win while telling your own base “eat shit, what are you gonna do, not vote?”
There is also the fact that democrats lost in 2024, and 2016, and the way the dems lost the house and senate in 2010 after bailing out the banks for stealing people’s houses and giving the health insurance companies subsidies instead of giving us healthcare. Turns out when you do the opposite of what your base wants, fewer people vote.
The only way the dems can win is if they implement overwhelmingly popular left policy such as free healthcare, and fight the republicans using every tool at their disposal.
The only time we have seen dems accede to popular demand is when Biden had a less than 5% chance at winning.
Do you see where I’m going with this? Voting blue no matter who lets the DNC delude themselves into thinking they can win while running on dogshit policy. If we tell the dems the only way we will vote for them is if they do the thing they need to do to win anyway, they might actually do the things they need to do to win.
“Please stop bombing children”, “How about we don’t back a genocide”, “Maybe illness shouldn’t put you into bankruptcy”, “Police shouldn’t be able to assault and murder innocent people”
I feel like these are reasonable requests, and quite different than “short of perfect”
Maybe if the Democrats fought for those values, instead of against them, then they would gain leftist support.
The centrist voter is a myth. There is not a human who will vote for “means-tested subsidies for a state-run employer-funded health insurance marketplace where you have no idea what it will cover or cost.” But wouldn’t vote for “free healthcare” when you move to the center by compromising your bills, you lose voters who suspect the policy won’t help them, you dont gain a bunch of “moderate Republicans” who want only half of immigrants subjected to inhumane conditions.
Except the person they were responding to phrased the situation poorly by leaving out important context.
In reality, the Democrats lost because they kept expecting leftists to vote against their working class interests in favor of right wing, pro corporate policies that only serve to maintain the capitalist system. You know, the very thing we are fundamentally against?
Maybe if the Democrats actually made strides for legitimate left wing policies, they would encourage more left wing individuals to throw their hat in with them.
Yet, time and time again, they have shown to throw the working class under the bus if it serves the whims of the capitalist market. Now, no one trusts them to uphold our interests when push comes to shove.
Funny of you to assume leftists want the neoliberal, capitalist establishment to win.
Maybe if they actually began to support left wing policy and ideology, instead of routinely throwing us under the bus to save the skin of those who exploit us, leftist would be willing to vote for them.
Also, FYI, there are more than just Democrats and Republicans to vote for. Saying people shouldn’t vote for Democrats isn’t the same thing as advocating against voting at all.
I definitely don’t have it all figured out, but I wanna know do you ever think about stuff like what it took for the civil rights movement of the 1960s to succeed? Do you think it was a matter of pandering to the interests of centrist liberals or do you think that a big part of it was criticizing status quo liberalism and refusing to settle? I really think that you should read theletter from Birmingham jail by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. because the archetype that he addresses in that work is replayed out every single time somebody ever deigns to criticize the Democrats for their political strategy.
The fuck are you talking about? They did show up for Gore. He won the popular vote. The only reason Bush won was due to the electoral college flipping the vote. Gore’s election was stolen from him.
Democrats have not been moving left. They have consistently been moving further and further right since post-WW2 and McCarthyism completely demolished any legitimate left wing politics in this country. Meanwhile the voting population became more and more disenfranchised by the fucked up system we live under.
You’re not exactly wrong, but it’s even more fundamental than that. If leftists were a more reliable voting bloc, then Democrats couldn’t exist as they do today. They would be primaried by more leftist candidates. And then, if hard left policies were more popular with the general electorate, they would win.
The nightmare we’re all living in right now is proof. I don’t believe for an instant that The Powers That Be wanted Donald Trump to be president. Even by fascist standards he’s kind of a disaster. They wanted fucking Jeb! But Trump’s implicit message of “I’m going to fuck shit up and the establishment doesn’t want me” resonated with a lot of people. It just got the extra boost from being tied with fucked up racism, sexism, and ignorance, all of which are tied to pretty solid groups of voters.
Are the choosing democrats in the room with us? Because last time I checked they can only watch as Republicans cut social security, medical, and education while raising taxes and setting up concentration camps.
I’m sure you’re okay with all of that so long as you can send a message.
Oh yea, i can see them only watching. Can’t have your members go against the
mandate of the people
I mean who can ask for more from them? that stern letter they sent only after trumps points fell to 40. I am sure that hit home to that one staffer he has that can read. Oh and at the same time democrats were sitting at a 27 so you know, too busy watching and censuring their own to ensure there is no impediments to republicans directed fee fall into tyranny, no time for self reflection!
When democrats won it was all the minority parties fault we can’t get anything done. But you see, decorum is far more important than fighting tyrants.
Ill vote in the primary, but 2020 showed us, if our guy doesn’t win, voting for a conservative in the general is still handing power to the Republicans
Voting for the conservative in 2020 gave us Trump in 2024.
The only way we could have avoided Trump in 2024 is if a conservative didn’t win the primary in 2020, and the only way that would have happened is if the DNC knew a conservative didn’t have a shot in hell.
If the DNC believes we will vote for whatever they give us, we will get no concessions. Our mistake in 2020 was compromising and voting for Biden in the hope we could get some concessions after the election.
You forgot a step. Short term vs long term planning.
The problem with voting with your method is you only get to vote once. Every vote you need to make the decision:
I should vote based on the optimal outcome of this election.
I should vote based on the optimal outcome over many elections.
It’s important that you first ask yourself this question. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. And often by voting for (1) you’re hurting (2).
For example, everyone to the left of Republicans would have been better off if Trump had won in 2020. The primary process was rigged to keep progressive Democrats divided while forcing Biden through as the centrist compromise. People on the left tried to vote for progressive candidates, but the DNC rigged it so that all the centrists EXCEPT Biden dropped out early, while the progressive candidates had their vote divided. The DNC organized for Biden to win the primary. And then, in the general, everyone on the left held their nose and voted for him. They followed your advice to the letter, and everyone to the left of Republicans was massive harmed as the result of following your exact advice.
Those on the left followed your instructions exactly, but they ended up with an inferior option than if they had voted third party.
Biden winning in 2020 guaranteed a MAGA win in 2024. Biden was never going to make the changes needed to prevent MAGA from returning to power. This was predicted by many on the left before he was even sworn in.
Trump in 2020 would have been far less dangerous than a Trump in 2024. He wouldn’t have had 4 years to regroup and plan out his whole Project 2025. He would have been a lame duck from day one, and he wouldn’t have had the political capital he came in with in 2024.
Centrists, liberals, leftists, all of them did themselves a disservice by voting for Biden in 2020. Objectively, everyone EXCEPT Republicans would have had a better long-term outcome if Trump had won in 2020. But in your strategy, we’re not allowed to consider the long term effects of our decisions. We’re just supposed to myopically focus on this and only this election.
Trump winning in 2020 being better is a BIG assumption that fails to consider just how bad things could have gone.
Off the top of my head, would things be better right now if we’d had Turkey’s levels of inflation? How bad would poverty have gotten? How many people would’ve died from suicides and extra Covid deaths? Would he immediately have gone into revenge for BLM mode?
There is a level of death and destruction that you are failing to consider.
Also, really consider how this conspiracy to stop Bernie in 2020 is just the centrists making a strategic decision not to split the vote. In the French parliamentary elections, like 200 left-wing and centrist candidates withdrew from the second-round run-off races to avoid splitting the anti-far-right vote —Do you consider what they did to be unethical and a subversion of democracy?
That’s the kind of moron speak we get from these people though. They pretend to care about stopping fascism but would gladly usher it in to tEaCh DeMoCrAtS a LeSsOn
Right, we’ve seen the train coming for decades as 2 right wing parties exploit a country and drain its people of wellbeing and as expected it enabled the rise of fascism.
Pretty stupid to stay on the track instead of hopping off and not supporting them.
A bunch of you self destructive lunatics/frauds didn’t vote. I want to change that. Stop pretending you can hide behind bullshit. Your actions => elect republicans, full stop.
Not voting means the party has to start offering policies to entice you back.
Blindly supporting means the party can start offering policies to entice those who don’t vote for them (conservatives).
That’s true in a democratic system, sure. But what I think the electoral entryists lose sight of is the real incentive of a politician isn’t necessarily to win election. The real incentive of a politician is to build political capital within the party/government in order to pursue an objective. And that objective isn’t necessarily going to be a popular one.
Case in point, look at the UK Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour Right very deliberately and explicitly tanked their own chances to win in 2019, because they didn’t want the policies that Corbyn was championing. The fact that Corbyn had brought in an enormous number of new, enthusiastic left-liberal voters was considered a problem to solve not a benefit of his campaign strategy.
Consequently, when Corbyn lost to Johnson, New Labour spent the next years systematically weeding out all of the new left-liberals introduced to the party in the prior cycle. They consolidated support around Starmer by shrinking participation not by expanding it.
The modern Democratic Party is engaged in a similar project. The goal is not to entice anyone into the party. It is to establish the Dem Party as the only viable alternative to Trump and demand voters approach the liberal(ish) party on its own terms. The Dems exist to cater to the donors first and then to the corporate media and then to the celebrity class.
Tell me again which moves the overton window?
The only thing that moves the Overton Window is consolidation of control over the local media.
Leftists quite literally need to get control of the airwaves and democratize the engines of journalism and information commerce. Anything else is a fool’s errand.
You aren’t going to beat FOX News at a propaganda contest by being a Silent Majority. All you’re going to get is BlueMAGA blaming you when they lose, while MSNBC calls you a bunch of Putin Bots and TikTok degenerates.
Leftists have been doing this strategy for a couple decades now
OBJECTION!
What actual evidence do you have of this claim?
This gets thrown around all the time as “conventional wisdom,” but it’s never actually backed up by anything. In fact, the Libertarian Party typically gets roughly three times the number of votes as the Green Party, and the last major third party candidate, Ross Perot, split the Republican vote leading to Clinton’s election.
More recently, the 2016 election had two major “outsider” candidates. Of them, Trump refused to rule out a third party run, while Sanders went all out campaigning for Clinton, despite all the shenanigans with superdelegates.
Only in 2024 can I see a credible case that some of the left has begun using the stubborn, “my way or the highway” tactics that the right has been employing for decades - with a high degree of success, I might add! The Republican Party has shifted further and further right to accommodate the demands of their base, because they know that if they’re soft on things like guns or abortion, significant portions of their base will denounce them as RINOs and sit out or vote third party. The Democratic Party, by contrast, knows that they can always count on the left to flinch, to be “reasonable,” to accept the “lesser evil,” and so they have moved further right as well, taking those votes for granted.
Again, every piece of actual evidence contradicts this “conventional wisdom,” which only exists in the first place because liberals are so preoccupied with the idea that someone, somewhere, might choose to stand on principle rather than fall in line. Meanwhile, people on the right are constantly choosing to die on the dumbest, most petty hills imaginable.
And also I’m correct, every election is like groundhogs day, like being trapped in a time loop, where leftists go:
“The lesser of two evils is still evil, I’m going to keep my hands clean”.
“Voting doesn’t work, because you can’t fix an inherently flawed system from within the system.”
“Voting is just part of the system of oppression by keeping people complacent from making real changes.”
In my memory this anti-voting/vote boycotting goes back at least to 2000 Bush/Gore.
Now let’s say I’m completely wrong, let’s say I’m crazy and I just made that all up in my head. Let’s say that leftists have always been enthusiastic participators in American democracy, and 2024 was the first ever leftist election boycott.
Now from 2025 to 2028, is the overton window moving left, or right? Will the 2028 election be to the left of 2024, or will 2028 be to the right of 2024?
I’m dead serious willing to bet $500 that 2028 will be to the right of 2024. The overton window is still moving right.
So did my original statement even matter? Either way leftist election boycotts are moving the overton window right, whether it started in 2000, or 2024.
The only question is, how many election boycotts have to fail at doing what leftists want until leftists suddenly become aware they are poking the stick in their own bicycle wheel?
Yes… and you have decided to blame leftists for this instead of the political racketeers who invented and maintains this cyclical pseudo-democratic spectacle itself.
How liberal of you… you, a (supposed) “anti-capitalist.”
You can’t be a liberal and an anti-capitalist, Clyde - you have to decide which you’re going to be.
“Voting doesn’t work, because you can’t fix an inherently flawed system from within the system.”
And they are correct.
“Voting is just part of the system of oppression by keeping people complacent from making real changes.”
And they are still correct.
In my memory this anti-voting/vote boycotting goes back at least to 2000 Bush/Gore.
Nope. It was a thing long before the Russian Revolution, genius - it’s only you liberals that are now finding out how utterly hollow your “liberal democracy” truly is and always have been. Leftists have known that before Marx or Bakunin even went through puberty.
And those right wingers have gotten momentum and a lot of what they have asked for. Dems are not as left as we want, but that is where the little progressive politics we have lives. Not voting for it or working to grow is is hurting us.
Voting blue no matter who seems to have done the US wonders huh?
You can’t have it both ways. Either the progressives not voting had no change on the outcome on of the election thus their strategy has no merit, OR progressives not voting cost democrats the election and the democrat party were at fault for abandoning their base. Oh what’s that? The apathetic vote is not to blame for either scenario? No shit.
If you combine Sanders and Warren into one they still would have lost to Biden by a pretty wide margin.
Warren is to the right of Bernie anyway, and Bernie is barely left enough for many leftists; I can’t imagine it was leftists that Warren was splitting away.
Probably be more successful if you stopped being rightists and joined them?
And I think you’ll find that blindly supporting blue no matter who has been done far more often for a couple of decades now. How successful has this been at moving the Overton window left?
What planet are you living on where either of those strategies are actually what’s being employed?
The right turns out because they’re getting what they want. Would they still turn out of the candidate was a RINO who was soft on things like guns, abortion, or immigration? Probably not! The party has been disciplined by the base for deviating on those issues often enough that they have kept moving to more extreme right positions and the right no longer has any reason to defect.
Meanwhile, there are tons of people on (what passes for) the left who will readily agree that Biden and Harris were complicit in genocide, in some of the worst crimes imaginable, and yet, we should still fall in line behind them. Right wingers will be like, “Sure, this guy has an impeccable record on most of the issues I care about, but he accepted free federal Medicare expansion, which is socialism, so fuck that RINO piece of shit commie traitor I’m voting Libertarian!” And so the Libertarian Party is triple the size of the Greens. And yet, somehow, libs are constantly obsessed with this idea that somewhere out there, someone might be standing on leftist principles, and that’s the worst thing ever and they must immediately be lectured and shamed for it.
Try to pull that shit in some of their circles and you’re liable to get shot. I mean, can you imagine? “Look, I’m as upset as anybody that the only realistic candidates are anti-gun, but you just have to accept that guns are not on the ballot this time around, you’re going to have to vote for someone who wants to take your guns away, and if you don’t, it means you’re a bad person and I’ll constantly lecture you about it. Hey, where are pointing that- OK, OK, I’LL LEAVE”
As Lonergan and Blyth put it in Angrynomics, the right has better tribal enforcement along the boundaries they care about. Like a football team with more fired up and cohesive fans.
The democratic party has two major problems;
Their leadership is technocratic and alienated along class lines from the voter base they’re trying to reach. Nobody trusts them to do anything more than run on focus group issues, then turn around the moment they get into power and fail to act on them. This is not isolated to American politics - France’s emmanuel macron is another really good example. The working-class voting base, more than any other group, has been burned too many times on this since clinton1 to get enthusiastic about a democrat candidate. They are almost immediately viewed - and rightly so - as being fundamentally untrustworthy. The DNC’s subsequent games with the 2016 primaries lost an entire generation of potential voters who now view themselves as disenfrachised party outsiders. Now that the senile party leadership is literally dropping dead in office, there is nobody left to replace them who have the blessing of those same aging party elites. From their perspective, they are under siege from without vs. the republicans, and within from the newbies. They well and truly did it to themselves by resisting the emerging organic self-interest of their replacements. Kronus ate his children.
Funding sources come from billionaires and the top .01%. Normal people no longer have the disposable income, even at >$250kpa, to make significant enough contributions to run effective election campaigns. This is a form of capture by the ultra-wealthy, and therefore it makes it very difficult to run a campaign on small donations. The political process is entirely captured by the owner class, because nobody else has the $$$$$$ to own anything at all, and now gets charged rents to keep them in usury. Corporate donors can’t be relied upon because they are simple organisms who act in their own best interest of making more money. This needed to be corrected in the 2000’s, and the opportunity was lost. Instead we used QE to prop up a zombie economic system which did not provide appropriate investment in the next generation of the population, nor did it appropriately invest in infrastructure. So instead of flying taxis, vibrant broadband-enabled online fora, high speed trains, electric vehicles, stable rural communities and walkable cities, we got NFT’s, crypto scams, decaying suburbs harboring increasing deaths of despair, ludicrously oversized and inefficient vehicles and auto-enshittifying privacy-destroying cloud capital phone apps. It’s a paper tiger that is now falling to pieces vs. other emerging global competitors because it has extracted every drop of value from its feeder resource pools and is now well into the process of self-cannabalizing. It is a pest economy in the final stages of ecosystem collapse.
Basically, the triangulation game is already played out, the dam has disintegrated and there’s no longer any useful opposition to the rightwards move, because in order to even be an oppositional force, it would require selfless multi-billionaire unicorns (hah!) to effectively sacrifice their family fortunes in order to fund and animate such a movement- whilst somehow political candidates capable of rebuilding five decades of broken promises and tonedeaf social positions regards to the working class come out of the woodwork as a fully-formed well-oiled political machine that both offers and delivers enough Good Things to budge the needle. The technocratic so-called “Abundance Agenda” currently being circulated amongst DNC circles fails to do this - in typical democrat fashion - by attempting to lobotomize the working class out of the picture and reducing them to a mute “consumer of ideas”.
I guess stranger things have happened, but I’m pessimistic on the outlook at this point, because they’d have to win against an entrenched radical political insurgency, with full control of the government, and near unanimous support of the owner class, that legitimately doesn’t want democracy to succeed anymore.
As long as the democratic party elite fail to engage in good faith, they will continue to lose. Even if they do, they’ll also have an uphill battle until they have demonstrated in terms of lived experience to a chronically abused electorate that they have the will and capability to deliver on their promises.
I agree with most what you’re saying but I think you’re minconstruing the abundance book. Ezra has been clear and very vocal about wanting to execute the goals of the left. He’s just calling for a more fluid mechanism that doesn’t put up dozens of roadblocks throughout the process. No one ever addresses the elephant in the room: the upper echelon progressive home owner class. This group alone is blocking every progressive movement indirectly while also spouting the usual progressive rhetoric.
The Tea Party, they obliterated the old GOP by not voting them and voting for their people instead. The DNC has kept their party under lock and key to avoid any of that happening.
The Tea Party pushed more conservative candidates in primaries, but in general elections Tea Party voters never sat out in protest - instead, they either supported the GOP candidate or, in a few cases, backed third-party or independent runs, but there were never large-scale abstention.
Not voting means the party has to start offering policies to entice you back.
Blindly supporting means the party can start offering policies to entice those who don’t vote for them (conservatives).
Tell me again which moves the overton window?
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Focusing on nothing but voting enables neoliberalism in promoting fascism.
Well I’m right behind you bud. I’ll vote AND you let me know what you wanna do.
Vote if you want. But don’t waste too much time doing so and join a political org.
Good news for you, voting only takes one day.
But that’s not counting this time we’re spending on it right now.
Wow, good point. Maybe posts like this that pointlessly create drama by attacking people who vote are part of the problem.
First, mind the community. Can’t help that it ended up in /all. Second, would that point have gotten across to you without the post? So it wasn’t really pointless.
Maybe it’s the over-the-top defensiveness that is the problem, rather than a post in an anarchist community presenting a point of view that made some people react in that way.
The United States has some of the longest election cycles, maybe in the world, but definitely among western liberal democracies.
So yes, the literal act itself takes a day. But everything surrounding that day is taken up by planning for the next election, enough robs people of other kinds of political engagement, by being such a massive time and energy sink.
It’s your choice whether you want to campaign for a candidate.
They want to kill anybody who disagrees with installing an autocrat who promises to redistribute wealth via execution.
Veryeanarchist stance /s
We can only ever have one message. Classic and so true /s
Electoralism doesn’t change shit and binds resources.
The amount of simping for electoralist politics in an anarchist sub is truly depressing.
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Jesus fucking Christ.
Look, it’s PugJesus being angry at the anarchists in the anarchist com! Go figure. /s
Sorry that I’m angry that marginalized groups are going to die in the literal millions because you thought that spiritualist roleplay was more important than harm reduction.
I know, after all, that no anarchist has ever been in support of harm reduction through electoral participation. /s
Yes, it was me. I didn’t vote In the US elections and that’s why Trump is back in power.
Strawman much? I said electoralism.
voting is not harm reduction
Voting changes things. See: every election that wasn’t rigged. Maybe some that were.
Ok, my bad: it doesn’t change shit in your favour.
You assume everyone is like you and wanted trump to win, apparently
Can we stop pretending like voting for the Democrats as they exist now stops the Republicans from winning? It only makes them win more slowly. It is literally why everyone is so disillusioned and why the Democrats were unable to sell their message to enough people. And can we also take for granted that me saying this doesn’t mean that I didn’t vote for Kamala Harris?
Maybe we could stop pretending that the shitty Democrats that have never learned their lesson suddenly will if Republicans win one more time
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Yes. That’s how electoralist politics work. The power as a voter lies in the ability to withhold their vote or to vote for someone else. The moment your vote is being forced into compliance, you have thus lost all your political power under that system.
It’s kinda one of the major flaws of an electoralist system.
Congratulations for reaching the point.
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I feel like you’re not quite getting the point. The only sway you have over politicians, is your vote. If you guarantee your vote to a party no matter what they do, you have entirely given up all of your political power.
That’s the whole point of democracy. You withhold your vote from the candidates you do not believe in, or who have shown that they do not push for policies that would benefit you or yours. If a candidate does not have beliefs and policies that you believe in, you do not vote for them. And the rough idea is that this incentivizes politicians to adopt policies that people want. If you vote for a politician regardless of whether you believe in what they do, this incentive goes away. The politician will have your vote regardless of what they do, and so they are open to be incentivized in other ways, for example, donations from billionaires.
If a politician adopts wildly unpopular positions, such as just doing genocide, and doing nothing in favor of worker’s rights, or doing nothing in favor of universal health care, and so on, and so forth, and they then lose a race, then it’s their fault for not adopting policies that more people can get behind, and not that of the people who didn’t vote for them. Because again, the whole point of democracy is to incentivize politicians to adopt popular positions, and the politician failed to do so.
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“some of my colleagues lost. I shall now begin the transformation to a totally new human”
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You’re confusing cause and effect; democrats need to promise policy that improves people’s material conditions if they want people to vote for them, and use every single power at their disposal to prevent further harm until then to prove they will do as they say if they win. Nobody is going to vote for a party that they dont believe will help them.
You cant win while telling your own base “eat shit, what are you gonna do, not vote?”
The only thing that tells you that is a common sense analysis of the situation
There is also the fact that democrats lost in 2024, and 2016, and the way the dems lost the house and senate in 2010 after bailing out the banks for stealing people’s houses and giving the health insurance companies subsidies instead of giving us healthcare. Turns out when you do the opposite of what your base wants, fewer people vote.
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The only way the dems can win is if they implement overwhelmingly popular left policy such as free healthcare, and fight the republicans using every tool at their disposal.
The only time we have seen dems accede to popular demand is when Biden had a less than 5% chance at winning.
Do you see where I’m going with this? Voting blue no matter who lets the DNC delude themselves into thinking they can win while running on dogshit policy. If we tell the dems the only way we will vote for them is if they do the thing they need to do to win anyway, they might actually do the things they need to do to win.
that didn’t happen.
So you know they won’t learn, but want people to vote for them anyway? Fucking idiot you are
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“Please stop bombing children”, “How about we don’t back a genocide”, “Maybe illness shouldn’t put you into bankruptcy”, “Police shouldn’t be able to assault and murder innocent people”
I feel like these are reasonable requests, and quite different than “short of perfect”
Maybe if the Democrats fought for those values, instead of against them, then they would gain leftist support.
your response is a perfect example of why they are focusing on centrists and right wingers
Yes it is, but not in the way you think.
Because I want them to stop bombing children? Yeah, I know. They’d rather keep doing that, than try to appeal to me as a voter.
this is a lie
The Democrats exist as they do now because they can’t rely on the left to vote. So they have to pander to the center.
The centrist voter is a myth. There is not a human who will vote for “means-tested subsidies for a state-run employer-funded health insurance marketplace where you have no idea what it will cover or cost.” But wouldn’t vote for “free healthcare” when you move to the center by compromising your bills, you lose voters who suspect the policy won’t help them, you dont gain a bunch of “moderate Republicans” who want only half of immigrants subjected to inhumane conditions.
Take a marketing class. If you think that politics is about pandering and not about convincing people, then you’ve lost the game already
Yes, we already lost last election because of the exact reasons stated by the person you’re responding to
Except the person they were responding to phrased the situation poorly by leaving out important context.
In reality, the Democrats lost because they kept expecting leftists to vote against their working class interests in favor of right wing, pro corporate policies that only serve to maintain the capitalist system. You know, the very thing we are fundamentally against?
Maybe if the Democrats actually made strides for legitimate left wing policies, they would encourage more left wing individuals to throw their hat in with them.
Yet, time and time again, they have shown to throw the working class under the bus if it serves the whims of the capitalist market. Now, no one trusts them to uphold our interests when push comes to shove.
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Funny of you to assume leftists want the neoliberal, capitalist establishment to win.
Maybe if they actually began to support left wing policy and ideology, instead of routinely throwing us under the bus to save the skin of those who exploit us, leftist would be willing to vote for them.
Also, FYI, there are more than just Democrats and Republicans to vote for. Saying people shouldn’t vote for Democrats isn’t the same thing as advocating against voting at all.
Ah I understand now. You took Marketing 101 and have it all figured out.
I definitely don’t have it all figured out, but I wanna know do you ever think about stuff like what it took for the civil rights movement of the 1960s to succeed? Do you think it was a matter of pandering to the interests of centrist liberals or do you think that a big part of it was criticizing status quo liberalism and refusing to settle? I really think that you should read theletter from Birmingham jail by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. because the archetype that he addresses in that work is replayed out every single time somebody ever deigns to criticize the Democrats for their political strategy.
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The fuck are you talking about? They did show up for Gore. He won the popular vote. The only reason Bush won was due to the electoral college flipping the vote. Gore’s election was stolen from him.
Democrats have not been moving left. They have consistently been moving further and further right since post-WW2 and McCarthyism completely demolished any legitimate left wing politics in this country. Meanwhile the voting population became more and more disenfranchised by the fucked up system we live under.
You’re not exactly wrong, but it’s even more fundamental than that. If leftists were a more reliable voting bloc, then Democrats couldn’t exist as they do today. They would be primaried by more leftist candidates. And then, if hard left policies were more popular with the general electorate, they would win.
The nightmare we’re all living in right now is proof. I don’t believe for an instant that The Powers That Be wanted Donald Trump to be president. Even by fascist standards he’s kind of a disaster. They wanted fucking Jeb! But Trump’s implicit message of “I’m going to fuck shit up and the establishment doesn’t want me” resonated with a lot of people. It just got the extra boost from being tied with fucked up racism, sexism, and ignorance, all of which are tied to pretty solid groups of voters.
That’s for the democrats to choose
Uh riiight
Are the choosing democrats in the room with us? Because last time I checked they can only watch as Republicans cut social security, medical, and education while raising taxes and setting up concentration camps.
I’m sure you’re okay with all of that so long as you can send a message.
Oh yea, i can see them only watching. Can’t have your members go against the
I mean who can ask for more from them? that stern letter they sent only after trumps points fell to 40. I am sure that hit home to that one staffer he has that can read. Oh and at the same time democrats were sitting at a 27 so you know, too busy watching and censuring their own to ensure there is no impediments to republicans directed fee fall into tyranny, no time for self reflection!
When democrats won it was all the minority parties fault we can’t get anything done. But you see, decorum is far more important than fighting tyrants.
Embarrassing
There haven’t been more DNC than GOP senators in over 10 years. You want them to do stuff? Volunteer for them in the midterms.
In hindsight, everyone on the left side of the spectrum would have been better off not voting in the 2020 presidential presidential election.
… Uh ok
Blindly voting means the Right win.
Vote for the furthest left-wing candidate in the primary.
Vote the for furthest left-wong candidate in the general.
It’s not difficult.
Ill vote in the primary, but 2020 showed us, if our guy doesn’t win, voting for a conservative in the general is still handing power to the Republicans
I would say not voting for the “conservative” in 2024 more directly handed power to the Republicans, no?
Voting for the conservative in 2020 gave us Trump in 2024.
The only way we could have avoided Trump in 2024 is if a conservative didn’t win the primary in 2020, and the only way that would have happened is if the DNC knew a conservative didn’t have a shot in hell.
If the DNC believes we will vote for whatever they give us, we will get no concessions. Our mistake in 2020 was compromising and voting for Biden in the hope we could get some concessions after the election.
So vote for no one?
no one cares
no one will work for your interests
no one will overthrow the oppressive systems
no one has never taken a bribe
You forgot a step. Short term vs long term planning.
The problem with voting with your method is you only get to vote once. Every vote you need to make the decision:
I should vote based on the optimal outcome of this election.
I should vote based on the optimal outcome over many elections.
It’s important that you first ask yourself this question. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. And often by voting for (1) you’re hurting (2).
For example, everyone to the left of Republicans would have been better off if Trump had won in 2020. The primary process was rigged to keep progressive Democrats divided while forcing Biden through as the centrist compromise. People on the left tried to vote for progressive candidates, but the DNC rigged it so that all the centrists EXCEPT Biden dropped out early, while the progressive candidates had their vote divided. The DNC organized for Biden to win the primary. And then, in the general, everyone on the left held their nose and voted for him. They followed your advice to the letter, and everyone to the left of Republicans was massive harmed as the result of following your exact advice.
Those on the left followed your instructions exactly, but they ended up with an inferior option than if they had voted third party.
Biden winning in 2020 guaranteed a MAGA win in 2024. Biden was never going to make the changes needed to prevent MAGA from returning to power. This was predicted by many on the left before he was even sworn in.
Trump in 2020 would have been far less dangerous than a Trump in 2024. He wouldn’t have had 4 years to regroup and plan out his whole Project 2025. He would have been a lame duck from day one, and he wouldn’t have had the political capital he came in with in 2024.
Centrists, liberals, leftists, all of them did themselves a disservice by voting for Biden in 2020. Objectively, everyone EXCEPT Republicans would have had a better long-term outcome if Trump had won in 2020. But in your strategy, we’re not allowed to consider the long term effects of our decisions. We’re just supposed to myopically focus on this and only this election.
Trump winning in 2020 being better is a BIG assumption that fails to consider just how bad things could have gone.
Off the top of my head, would things be better right now if we’d had Turkey’s levels of inflation? How bad would poverty have gotten? How many people would’ve died from suicides and extra Covid deaths? Would he immediately have gone into revenge for BLM mode?
There is a level of death and destruction that you are failing to consider.
Also, really consider how this conspiracy to stop Bernie in 2020 is just the centrists making a strategic decision not to split the vote. In the French parliamentary elections, like 200 left-wing and centrist candidates withdrew from the second-round run-off races to avoid splitting the anti-far-right vote —Do you consider what they did to be unethical and a subversion of democracy?
You claim to worry about long term planning when you don’t even have the hindsight of all the horrible shit happening we could have avoided.
That’s the kind of moron speak we get from these people though. They pretend to care about stopping fascism but would gladly usher it in to tEaCh DeMoCrAtS a LeSsOn
Blindly? I think it’s pretty fucking blind personally to see clearly that a train is coming but to stay the fuck on the tracks
Right, we’ve seen the train coming for decades as 2 right wing parties exploit a country and drain its people of wellbeing and as expected it enabled the rise of fascism.
Pretty stupid to stay on the track instead of hopping off and not supporting them.
You love that fucking track so goddamned much
You’re the one not wanting to change?
A bunch of you self destructive lunatics/frauds didn’t vote. I want to change that. Stop pretending you can hide behind bullshit. Your actions => elect republicans, full stop.
A bunch of you libshits voted for fascists and proto-fascists. I want you to stop that.
No, it doesn’t. The pseudo-democratic spectacle liberals call “democracy” is completely immune to abstinence or boycotts.
The libs don’t lose when the fascists win. There’s a good reason they keep fascists around.
That’s true in a democratic system, sure. But what I think the electoral entryists lose sight of is the real incentive of a politician isn’t necessarily to win election. The real incentive of a politician is to build political capital within the party/government in order to pursue an objective. And that objective isn’t necessarily going to be a popular one.
Case in point, look at the UK Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. The Labour Right very deliberately and explicitly tanked their own chances to win in 2019, because they didn’t want the policies that Corbyn was championing. The fact that Corbyn had brought in an enormous number of new, enthusiastic left-liberal voters was considered a problem to solve not a benefit of his campaign strategy.
Consequently, when Corbyn lost to Johnson, New Labour spent the next years systematically weeding out all of the new left-liberals introduced to the party in the prior cycle. They consolidated support around Starmer by shrinking participation not by expanding it.
The modern Democratic Party is engaged in a similar project. The goal is not to entice anyone into the party. It is to establish the Dem Party as the only viable alternative to Trump and demand voters approach the liberal(ish) party on its own terms. The Dems exist to cater to the donors first and then to the corporate media and then to the celebrity class.
The only thing that moves the Overton Window is consolidation of control over the local media.
Leftists quite literally need to get control of the airwaves and democratize the engines of journalism and information commerce. Anything else is a fool’s errand.
You aren’t going to beat FOX News at a propaganda contest by being a Silent Majority. All you’re going to get is BlueMAGA blaming you when they lose, while MSNBC calls you a bunch of Putin Bots and TikTok degenerates.
You fucking lawn dart. No it doesn’t and this is the dumbest, most short sighted, most fucking idiotic opinion I have seen on the subject.
You and others like you not voting just pushed the Overton window in the direction opposite of what you want.
Okay centrist.
Choosing not to vote doesn’t make you not a centrist.
No that comes from not voting for centrists.
Okay centrist.
Jesus fuck me, you are a moron.
Okay centrist.
That’s an assumption. Another assumption is that they try to win over the voters who reliable show up and ignore the ones who don’t as unreachable.
How do you ensure the outcome you’re looking for happens? Hope is not a strategy.
Leftists have been doing this strategy for a couple decades now. How successful has this been at moving the Overton window left?
OBJECTION!
What actual
evidencedo you have of this claim?This gets thrown around all the time as “conventional wisdom,” but it’s never actually backed up by anything. In fact, the Libertarian Party typically gets roughly three times the number of votes as the Green Party, and the last major third party candidate, Ross Perot, split the Republican vote leading to Clinton’s election.
More recently, the 2016 election had two major “outsider” candidates. Of them, Trump refused to rule out a third party run, while Sanders went all out campaigning for Clinton, despite all the shenanigans with superdelegates.
Only in 2024 can I see a credible case that some of the left has begun using the stubborn, “my way or the highway” tactics that the right has been employing for decades - with a high degree of success, I might add! The Republican Party has shifted further and further right to accommodate the demands of their base, because they know that if they’re soft on things like guns or abortion, significant portions of their base will denounce them as RINOs and sit out or vote third party. The Democratic Party, by contrast, knows that they can always count on the left to flinch, to be “reasonable,” to accept the “lesser evil,” and so they have moved further right as well, taking those votes for granted.
Again, every piece of actual evidence contradicts this “conventional wisdom,” which only exists in the first place because liberals are so preoccupied with the idea that someone, somewhere, might choose to stand on principle rather than fall in line. Meanwhile, people on the right are constantly choosing to die on the dumbest, most petty hills imaginable.
No. The left hasn’t.
Yes it has. Voting turnout in the US is dreadful. Who do you think does reliably get out to vote? I’ll give you a hint: it’s right wingers.
No, it hasn’t. That is, unless you want to claim that liberals lying themselves into a corner is (somehow) “leftist strategy.”
What? What does that mean in the context of this conversation?
This you?
I could have sworn that was you.
I could be wrong, but I get the sense there are a lot of young people on this platform and maybe this is your first experience with election cycles?
I don’t know… how many election cycles has there been since Bush Snr. invaded Panama?
I’m not a liberal, I’m anti-capitalist.
And also I’m correct, every election is like groundhogs day, like being trapped in a time loop, where leftists go:
“The lesser of two evils is still evil, I’m going to keep my hands clean”.
“Voting doesn’t work, because you can’t fix an inherently flawed system from within the system.”
“Voting is just part of the system of oppression by keeping people complacent from making real changes.”
In my memory this anti-voting/vote boycotting goes back at least to 2000 Bush/Gore.
Now let’s say I’m completely wrong, let’s say I’m crazy and I just made that all up in my head. Let’s say that leftists have always been enthusiastic participators in American democracy, and 2024 was the first ever leftist election boycott.
Now from 2025 to 2028, is the overton window moving left, or right? Will the 2028 election be to the left of 2024, or will 2028 be to the right of 2024?
I’m dead serious willing to bet $500 that 2028 will be to the right of 2024. The overton window is still moving right.
So did my original statement even matter? Either way leftist election boycotts are moving the overton window right, whether it started in 2000, or 2024.
The only question is, how many election boycotts have to fail at doing what leftists want until leftists suddenly become aware they are poking the stick in their own bicycle wheel?
Yes… and you have decided to blame leftists for this instead of the political racketeers who invented and maintains this cyclical pseudo-democratic spectacle itself.
How liberal of you… you, a (supposed) “anti-capitalist.”
You can’t be a liberal and an anti-capitalist, Clyde - you have to decide which you’re going to be.
And they are correct.
And they are still correct.
Nope. It was a thing long before the Russian Revolution, genius - it’s only you liberals that are now finding out how utterly hollow your “liberal democracy” truly is and always have been. Leftists have known that before Marx or Bakunin even went through puberty.
Yes. Let’s.
And those right wingers have gotten momentum and a lot of what they have asked for. Dems are not as left as we want, but that is where the little progressive politics we have lives. Not voting for it or working to grow is is hurting us.
Voting blue no matter who seems to have done the US wonders huh?
You can’t have it both ways. Either the progressives not voting had no change on the outcome on of the election thus their strategy has no merit, OR progressives not voting cost democrats the election and the democrat party were at fault for abandoning their base. Oh what’s that? The apathetic vote is not to blame for either scenario? No shit.
You’re getting confused because it doesn’t have anything to do with the outcome of the last election.
Leftists don’t vote, therefore no one caters to them, therefore the overton window moves right.
Wait, what? No they haven’t. They’ve been turning out in droves in both primaries and general elections.
If leftists are turning out in droves in the primary how are we getting Joe Biden?
Warren split the vote.
If you combine Sanders and Warren into one they still would have lost to Biden by a pretty wide margin.
Warren is to the right of Bernie anyway, and Bernie is barely left enough for many leftists; I can’t imagine it was leftists that Warren was splitting away.
That’s incorrect
Warren and Sanders combined only had 34% of the popular vote in the 2020 primary.
Not on Super Tuesday, the week before Warren dropped out.
Probably be more successful if you stopped being rightists and joined them?
And I think you’ll find that blindly supporting blue no matter who has been done far more often for a couple of decades now. How successful has this been at moving the Overton window left?
Let’s compare leftist strategies of never turning out with the evangelical strategy of driving massive turnouts.
Who has had better success shifting their party?
What planet are you living on where either of those strategies are actually what’s being employed?
The right turns out because they’re getting what they want. Would they still turn out of the candidate was a RINO who was soft on things like guns, abortion, or immigration? Probably not! The party has been disciplined by the base for deviating on those issues often enough that they have kept moving to more extreme right positions and the right no longer has any reason to defect.
Meanwhile, there are tons of people on (what passes for) the left who will readily agree that Biden and Harris were complicit in genocide, in some of the worst crimes imaginable, and yet, we should still fall in line behind them. Right wingers will be like, “Sure, this guy has an impeccable record on most of the issues I care about, but he accepted free federal Medicare expansion, which is socialism, so fuck that RINO piece of shit commie traitor I’m voting Libertarian!” And so the Libertarian Party is triple the size of the Greens. And yet, somehow, libs are constantly obsessed with this idea that somewhere out there, someone might be standing on leftist principles, and that’s the worst thing ever and they must immediately be lectured and shamed for it.
Try to pull that shit in some of their circles and you’re liable to get shot. I mean, can you imagine? “Look, I’m as upset as anybody that the only realistic candidates are anti-gun, but you just have to accept that guns are not on the ballot this time around, you’re going to have to vote for someone who wants to take your guns away, and if you don’t, it means you’re a bad person and I’ll constantly lecture you about it. Hey, where are pointing that- OK, OK, I’LL LEAVE”
As Lonergan and Blyth put it in Angrynomics, the right has better tribal enforcement along the boundaries they care about. Like a football team with more fired up and cohesive fans.
The democratic party has two major problems;
Their leadership is technocratic and alienated along class lines from the voter base they’re trying to reach. Nobody trusts them to do anything more than run on focus group issues, then turn around the moment they get into power and fail to act on them. This is not isolated to American politics - France’s emmanuel macron is another really good example. The working-class voting base, more than any other group, has been burned too many times on this since clinton1 to get enthusiastic about a democrat candidate. They are almost immediately viewed - and rightly so - as being fundamentally untrustworthy. The DNC’s subsequent games with the 2016 primaries lost an entire generation of potential voters who now view themselves as disenfrachised party outsiders. Now that the senile party leadership is literally dropping dead in office, there is nobody left to replace them who have the blessing of those same aging party elites. From their perspective, they are under siege from without vs. the republicans, and within from the newbies. They well and truly did it to themselves by resisting the emerging organic self-interest of their replacements. Kronus ate his children.
Funding sources come from billionaires and the top .01%. Normal people no longer have the disposable income, even at >$250kpa, to make significant enough contributions to run effective election campaigns. This is a form of capture by the ultra-wealthy, and therefore it makes it very difficult to run a campaign on small donations. The political process is entirely captured by the owner class, because nobody else has the $$$$$$ to own anything at all, and now gets charged rents to keep them in usury. Corporate donors can’t be relied upon because they are simple organisms who act in their own best interest of making more money. This needed to be corrected in the 2000’s, and the opportunity was lost. Instead we used QE to prop up a zombie economic system which did not provide appropriate investment in the next generation of the population, nor did it appropriately invest in infrastructure. So instead of flying taxis, vibrant broadband-enabled online fora, high speed trains, electric vehicles, stable rural communities and walkable cities, we got NFT’s, crypto scams, decaying suburbs harboring increasing deaths of despair, ludicrously oversized and inefficient vehicles and auto-enshittifying privacy-destroying cloud capital phone apps. It’s a paper tiger that is now falling to pieces vs. other emerging global competitors because it has extracted every drop of value from its feeder resource pools and is now well into the process of self-cannabalizing. It is a pest economy in the final stages of ecosystem collapse.
Basically, the triangulation game is already played out, the dam has disintegrated and there’s no longer any useful opposition to the rightwards move, because in order to even be an oppositional force, it would require selfless multi-billionaire unicorns (hah!) to effectively sacrifice their family fortunes in order to fund and animate such a movement- whilst somehow political candidates capable of rebuilding five decades of broken promises and tonedeaf social positions regards to the working class come out of the woodwork as a fully-formed well-oiled political machine that both offers and delivers enough Good Things to budge the needle. The technocratic so-called “Abundance Agenda” currently being circulated amongst DNC circles fails to do this - in typical democrat fashion - by attempting to lobotomize the working class out of the picture and reducing them to a mute “consumer of ideas”.
I guess stranger things have happened, but I’m pessimistic on the outlook at this point, because they’d have to win against an entrenched radical political insurgency, with full control of the government, and near unanimous support of the owner class, that legitimately doesn’t want democracy to succeed anymore.
As long as the democratic party elite fail to engage in good faith, they will continue to lose. Even if they do, they’ll also have an uphill battle until they have demonstrated in terms of lived experience to a chronically abused electorate that they have the will and capability to deliver on their promises.
I agree with most what you’re saying but I think you’re minconstruing the abundance book. Ezra has been clear and very vocal about wanting to execute the goals of the left. He’s just calling for a more fluid mechanism that doesn’t put up dozens of roadblocks throughout the process. No one ever addresses the elephant in the room: the upper echelon progressive home owner class. This group alone is blocking every progressive movement indirectly while also spouting the usual progressive rhetoric.
The Tea Party, they obliterated the old GOP by not voting them and voting for their people instead. The DNC has kept their party under lock and key to avoid any of that happening.
You’re misremembering.
The Tea Party pushed more conservative candidates in primaries, but in general elections Tea Party voters never sat out in protest - instead, they either supported the GOP candidate or, in a few cases, backed third-party or independent runs, but there were never large-scale abstention.