My disenchantment is based on how differently the current administration reacts to 2 conflicts: Ukraine-Russia and Gaza-Israel, in the latter supporting Israel’s indiscriminate war against Palestinian civilians with the excuse to exterminate Hamas. This post summarizes my disappointment after finally accepting that the US is not the benevolent hegemon I thought it was and how even the supposed American liberals, the democrats, while publicly calling the Israeli government to restrain itself, keep sending them every weapon they ask for and protect them at the UN with our veto. I’m now politically orphan.
I always thought America stood against bullies, America was the great nation, a country where we help others protect their human rights, fight authoritarianism of any kind, be it left, right, religious… the way we did with Ukraine against Russia. Ukraine fits here because authoritarian Putin decided he couldn’t accept an independent Ukraine anymore: I’m all for sending Ukraine the means they need to defend themselves to deny authoritarian Russia a successful occupation. The Ukrainian war is not a morally gray one like the ones in Iraq or Afghanistan, this one is black and white. Putin has to be stopped. America is here on the right side of history supporting Ukraine.
However, in Gaza, America doesn’t act like the benign hegemon I thought we were, but like a external power supporting a client state: Our government supports the indiscriminate bombing of Palestinian civilians in the name of fighting terrorism and calls everybody that questions the narrative that Israel is fighting against terrorists an antisemite, yet ignoring that Gaza has been an open air prison for 20 years and that these conditions make it ideal for fanatics and hate to thrive.
No, I’m not an Islamist (I don’t care about any religion) and no, I don’t want Israel to be wiped off the planet and no, I don’t have anything against Jews or Israelis, and no, I don’t deny the holocaust and the 6 millions of Jews who were murdered. It’s ridiculous to have to say this before even criticizing Israel.
America loves to support Israel’s right to defend itself, yet this same right in practice means carte blanche to kill Palestinian civilians as well, destroying their hospitals and their capability to function as a normal society. The Israeli army and government are not behaving any better than the Hamas fanatics that invaded Israel and killed 1300 Israeli civilians, the Israeli army has killed far more Palestinian civilians than Hamas did when they invaded Israel, yet simply saying what I did, simply comparing both sides like I did or calling for a cease fire gets you labeled an antisemite, hoping that simply uttering those words will make everybody rally against you and justify killing Palestinians.
A life is a life everywhere. All lives matter.
No, not every Palestinian is a terrorist, yet the media and the Israeli and American right insist in no making distinctions, make no effort to create a separate Palestinian state and keep not questioning the conditions of deprivation that will make another violent reaction against Israel in 20 years possible, when the current Palestinian children, now bombed and homeless, grow up and reach maturity, accusing Hamas of hiding behind civilians, ignoring that the policies of the Israeli right created them.
And our government does nothing to stop that. Worse, keeps arming and protecting the other side, the more powerful side.
Where do I go now?
There are two things you do when voting in a two-party system:
- Vote to keep out the candidates that would do real damage
- Vote to communicate your preferences for candidates with platforms that match your priorities
I know it seems like a third party is the only solution to your current situation, but it’s not. The solution is to keep the idiots out by voting Democrat in general elections, and then to vote in primaries or with your campaign contribution dollars for Democrats who match your views on Israel/Palestine.
You might also support candidates who are in favor of voting reform, including things like ranked choice voting, which also happen to be people who currently run as Democrats.
Protest, write your officials, work on primary campaigns. Make it clear how you feel and then vote for the candidate that will do the least harm actually.
So yes for local races or races that are competitive third party sure. My supervisor is a socialist he’s great.
For federal elections harm reduction and accountability is still the answer
A third party vote for president gives us a fascist dictator which is easily the worst possible option
I’m with you on this feeling sick of this war and the endless apologia but the tide of opinion and our policy is shifting. There is a huge generational divide on this issue that cuts across party lines
There is no problem so bad it cannot be made worse. Look at more than one issue, and vote carefully.
This rule hasn’t changed.
You have no choice.
The US political system is utterly rigged in many, many ways to prevent the emergence of a third party.
In order to change this, the American public would have to somehow pressure both parties to agree to pass many laws, at the federal and state and county and city levels to /effectively/ alter the system.
They are of course never going to do this.
The only possible way to throw off this deathgrip is to somehow get an ‘extreme’ member of either party to become that party’s nominee.
This has been attempted twice in my life time:
Ron Paul was ‘the internet candidate’ of many young people who focused on his opposition to the Iraq War, Libertarian Economic and Social policies, either overlooking or being unaware of his ties to the rather unsavory John Birch Society, and the extremely ideologically fervent but ultimately delusional Mises Institute. Started on 4chan, hundreds of young Americans photobombed any random live newscast anywhere they could find with Ron Paul signs, raised millions for Paul’s campaign, functionally acting as his PR department as he barely had one and it was terrible, and they even raised enough money to rent a blimp, plaster it with Ron Paul banners and fly it around the country.
It didn’t work.
Later, Bernie Sanders emerged as a candidate in the Democratic primaries with a chance to shake up the Dem/Rep balance. The Democratic Party basically did everything they possibly could to sideline Bernie, handing the nomination to Hillary Clinton.
She of course lost to Trump.
Anyway, voting for a third party in America will statistically nearly never work on the Federal level. Even most Congresspersons and Senators in the past 20 years that have not been an R or D have been an ‘Independent’, nearly always being somewhere in the middle of R and D. You might have some third party candidate actually win on the State and Local level, but this is very, very rare.
Functionally all the voting for a third party does is remove votes from a more popular candidate with more moderate views.
Anyway, none of this matters: It was about a decade ago when a study revealed that Congress people of all kinds nearly never advance legislation that is highly popular among their constituents. They nearly always do advance legislation that will materially benefit their donors.
We do not like in a functional democracy or democratic republic.
We live in a functional corporate oligarchy, where hot button cultural issues are used to wedge voters, and massive PR and advertising campaigns are everywhere to convince the public that policies and legislation that helps businesses and hurts voters has a function deathgrip on the mind of the average American.
My honest to god suggestion to you is to either hunker down and form a local group of capable individuals to provide mutual aide to your local community as income disparity continues to rise, more and more become homeless, infrastructure continues to collalse, etc., or to get out of this nuclear armed banana republic with more guns than people, where somewhere between 1/4 to 1/3 of voters are so incredibly delusional and successfully propagandized that they believe a large amount of the Q Anon / MAGA insano-version of real life.
75 million voters think a 91-count indicted, authoritarian, future-convicted felon with Nazi-istic rhetoric is better than anyone else running. And make no mistake, he would have done the same bullshit, or worse, with respect to Israel, or Ukraine, or whatever.
I don’t care how disenchanted anyone is with the Democratic Party. If that moron is still allowed on the ballot, then the US is facing an existential crisis in the 2024 election. It’s time to put this Trump nonsense to bed. And the only way to do that is to elect people who are against Trump and are for free and fair elections.
It’s absolutely mind boggling that the bar for election is “supports a free and fair election”, and we’ve reached that stage in such a short time.
The death spiral is a steep one.
The problem is we have a First Past the Post system. This essentially means that you get to vote for one or the other, and refusal to vote means the one you like even less gets more voting power.
To complicate matters, this particular upcoming vote is actual Nazi-style fascists (down to quoting Hitler) who would fund the Israel/Hamas war vs Dems (and Republicans) who are funding the Israel/Hamas war. Basically, it’s a really bad time to push for a third party when FPTP is still the main hurdle.
So I would encourage you to look at your local races and your state races to change things from the bottom up. These local candidates are often not beholden to the whims of the DNC. I’m not a fan of Dems, either, but I am also under no illusions that if I don’t help them win in 2024, we’ll wind up with a fascist dictator and lose our ability to meaningfully vote at all.
I believe we can dump both the Dems/DNC and the Fascists/RNC, but we have to vote strategically to get there in several cycles; it’s not going to happen overnight, and the sad reality is a lot of people are going to die in Gaza no matter which option we choose.
ETA: As someone smarter said, “Your vote is a chess move, not a love letter.”
I want to just agree with what many have said and reiterate - if there is a party that is actively trying to remove people’s ability to vote, surely not voting would play directly into that?
That aside, I hear you. We’re in a tough place right now
You’re naive.
Ukraine wasn’t attacking Russia before they invaded. It’s a completely different situation.
Gaza has been attacking Israel for it’s entire existence, and far worse since Hamas took over 15 years ago. The Gaza strip was literally created by an invasion from Egypt (and four other countries) when they invaded Israel the day after Israel declared independence.
You call Gaza an open air prison, but it has a wall to another country (Egypt) who doesn’t want to help these people either because they realize that this isn’t actually a Palestinian vs Israeli war.
As with most things, you just need to follow the money. This war isn’t being funded by Palestinians on that side, they’re far too poor for that. So who’s bankrolling them, and what do they want? It’s Iran.
Iran sure as hell doesn’t give a shit about Palestinians independence. I’ll tell you that for free.
The reason why western governments support Israel is for that exact reason, they’re fighting a proxy war against Iran.
You don’t fix this situation by backing off support for Israel though, all that would result in is the mass killing of Israelis, and you’d be complaining the government isn’t doing enough to keep Israeli’s safe.
Gaza has been attacking Israel for it’s entire existence, and far worse since Hamas took over 15 years ago.
Israel has been attacking Gaza for about the same period of time too. Occupations are an act of war.
Congratulations, you’ve now figured out it’s a war.
In your opinion, should Israel or Palestine surrender? Because if one side doesn’t surrender, the other option to end a war is literally just killing everyone on the other side.
Uh… Neither? Usually peace is preferable in cases like this. So from that perspective it’s Israel and its far-right government that has sworn against a Palestinian state multiple times that should back down, but nobody needs to surrender to anyone.
Peace treaties are just a nicer name for one side surrendering. Go look up the Paris Peace Treaties (Germany surrendering), or the Treaty of San Francisco (Japan surrendering), hell even the Paris Peace Accords were just the US surrendering in Vietnam. Go read the terms of these agreements, it’s pretty obvious they’re surrenders.
Are you really that naive?
Peace treaties are just a nicer name for one side surrendering.
You’re either being willfully obtuse or have zero knowledge of history. Either way you’re using a very convenient definition of surrendering. If you interpret the aggressor pulling out as surrendering then yeah a lot of wars will end in one surrender or another, but that’s not how that works.
What about the winter war?
I’d like a citation on the funding from Iran. Iran is mostly Shi’ite, and doesn’t generally get involved in Arab or Sunni affairs. And this article from 2021 (prior to the current conflict) points out that the bulk of Hamas funding comes from Qatar and Turkey, respectively.
This Wikipedia article that’s been around for more than a decade covers a lot of info and has references.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–Israel_proxy_conflict?wprov=sfla1
Fix the political system by supporting IRV. Until then vote for the best offered that can win. Be involved in the party process too so the best is better then it is…
Keep in mind that both the Palestinians and Iran and Russia enabled Hamas and are enabling similar entities in Lebanon and Syria. Hamas is the government of the Gaza Strip. They are heavily armed and well entrenched with something like 40000 solders on their side. Until the Palestinian death numbers reach 40000 the Hamas sourced numbers really could be all combatants as they are not broken out nor are they third party numbers so who knows. They also do not care about the rules of war… they will murder anyone. The war would not have stared without Hamas, Palastinians, and their supporters making it so. So hold all of these parties to the same standards you hold Israel.
That said yes. Seems like Israel is over the top. Then again look at what the US did after 9/11 and about 3000 killed. How do we justify that. Consider if 30000 were killed in 9/11. This is roughly proportionally what Israel experienced. What would you have them do instead.
Only responding to the IRV portion of your comment, and repeating myself from elsewhere in this thread:
Instant runoff voting is terrible and more complicated than people think, and I will never support it. It’s a false improvement whose adoption will discourage meaningful change.
If it’s a single winner election and you want a simple improvement, use approval voting. If you want to take on a little complexity for some further improvement, use delegable yes/no voting. I have one idea for further improvement, if anyone is really interested in voting methods.
I think you can choose almost any system and be better then what we have.
We have IRV for some offices. I love it. Biggest problem ranking 6 or 7 candidates takes some time and looks complicated.
Frankly open to other systems. Proportion representation seems interesting for example in some cases.
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I’ve actively spoken against the democratic party since I was in middle school. I voted for Obama, Hillary, and Biden. I am disgusted with all of thwm, but the only way to get the best person is to always support the least awful one. When the GOP is no longer viable, the power Vaccum will be filled.
By not voting for the lesser evil, you’re helping the greater evil. Badee badee badeep, that’s democracy!
I’m truly in the same boat as you.
“You need to push this button that kills innocent people, to counteract the people pushing the button that kills more innocent people.” really seems to be the only argument anyone can muster for why I should vote at all in this system.
Participating in a system that only aspires to offer different numbers of murdered Innocents isn’t a very morally compelling stance, and because there is no vote on individual stances of a candidate, any vote is a blanket endorsement of ALL of the candidate’s stances.
Fuck this country.
You’re not pressing the button yourself, you’re voting for which one gets pressed. By not voting, you’re basically saying “I don’t care which button gets pressed, even if one of them is objectively worse”.
It’s a shitty situation to be in but unfortunately there are lots of people in your country who are rabid about pushing that worse button.
Yeah. You can protest against the candidate you voted for and it is fine to vote for someone in a general election you voted against in the primary.
And it is important to participate because the loss of a vote may affect other elections down the ticket who are better representing you.
You are literally pushing a button on a voting machine that says, “put this person in charge of the weapons, who says they’re going to use the weapons to kill people”.
Just because both buttons you can choose result in dead people doesn’t make the dead caused by one more okay than the dead caused by the other.
Get involved with the DSA
Get used to it. As a progressive you will never be happy with the democrats but you have to vote for them because the alternative is even worse.
I suggest you learn useful skills like foraging and first aid and wait for it to collapse under its own weight.
But the main thing is to give up on being satisfied with the government.
