FAQ
Q: why not organize and stop treating the bus as a legitimate entity? why aren’t you working to stop the bus?
A: do both. cut the fuel line. break windows. put oatmeal in the gas tank. but maybe your efforts don’t succeed this election cycle. and if so don’t fucking throw away your vote if it can help your neighbors fucking survive. “harm reduction” is not a political strategy for action. it is a last minute, end of the line decision to save lives, after all other resources have been exhausted.
political power is when you assure your leaders that there is nothing they could do to lose your vote short of fucking your mom and even then you would have to consider whether the other guy would fuck your mom worse
I’d vote to fuck your mom…
Typing that out felt like a physical pang of regression, but I don’t take it back
I also choose this guy’s mom.
you mean whether the other guy would fuck mother nature worse?
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This isn’t about the world. It’s about a specific conflict. Conflicts are us vs. them by definition. The takeover of the American gov’t by increasingly corporatist and fascist leaders is absolutely them vs. the American people, but also affects everyone in the world.
There are two ways to win this conflict. 1) Violent revolution by disorganized leftists against the most powerful military the world has ever seen, 2) voting to prevent full-on fascism and limit corporatism while building class consciousness and organizing better. The second scenario is obviously more likely to succeed, given the current state of the American left.
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It’s ok, this is Biden’s alt account and we’re aware of the situation
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Problem. Harm reduction voting requires at least one good faith candidate.
Right now we have choice between the scenic route to go off the cliff and the express route. Electoral boycotts are effective once they reach critical mass. Telling everyone they need to vote harm reduction without a good faith candidate is just suppressing the natural tendency of a democracy to flush a bad set of leaders.
We could also use a general strike but they’ll just order us back to work and call it a union victory.
This is a long established problem with FPTP voting (FPTP = First Past The Post: One voter = one vote). You don’t really get to vote for your choice candidate, rather you vote against the worst of the two popular candidates by voting for the other guy.
Now there are plenty of election reform solutions, but in the US, both parties are weakened by the people having more choice, so neither party is willing to back amendments to the Constitution of the United States that would install a more public serving voting system.
This also means, according to CIA analysts who have studied nations on the brink and how they can avoid civil war, the US is very likely to see a civil war in its near future (next decade). But then we’re also likely to see elections neutered anyway, so that the Republican party controls all elected positions (and appointed ones after that). And then local genocides can get underway.
So yes, if you’re voting to make a point (other than you want the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 to play out or want to delay it for a while) the point won’t be heard. In fact, the Republicans and their foreign national propaganda machine supporters are probably very glad you’re willing to withhold blue votes to make a point. It won’t make that point, but they’re glad for you for trying.
What is your source for the CIA analysts/brink of civil war claim?
A PBS interview of retired analysts who’d spent their life studying regions of civil unrest and the conditions that lead to civil war. It was since the Biden administration began so it shouldn’t be too hard to hunt down.
As for the neutered elections, this had been part of the Republican project REDMAP, but is laid out in the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 as well.
i don’t disagree but this is also a long established problem with people not showing up to vote, so jot that down.
Taking a wild guess here, I suspect people not voting comes from a number of addressable causes. Here in the States, we are far more enamored with capitalism than Democracy, and the way we regard our civic duties (e.g. trying to get out of jury duty, mostly due to the hardship it would cause by skipping work without pay). We work our labor class so hard they are too exhausted to parent, cook or engage in health activities, much less engage in civics. It doesn’t help that this is exactly how our plutocratic masters want it.
After we address allowing people the time to think about what they want from government, and voting accordingly, then we can start looking into giving the people actual agency in their destinies, toward which election reform is only one front.
But all this is to say the United States doesn’t really try very hard to get the people to engage in civics. Rather, it would really prefer that we lie down and let ourselves be ruled by the wealthy according to their ideals and business interests. That, of course, brings us back to the same problems feudalism has: one Joffrey or Caligula or John of England / Richard II can bring to ruin all that a dozen prior generations have built up. Even Charles III is living up to the traditional standards of monarchy, and the UK has a parliament and a constitution with which to keep his shenanigans in check. (Parliament is up to its own shenanigans to turn the UK hardline fascist, but that’s another discussion.)
In elementary school government and western civilization class, we learn that we vote so that the government does what we want it to. But we quickly learn (sometimes as soon as intermediate or high-school) that our agency in selecting our government is very, very limited, and historian careers have been built on the corruption of government into an oligarchy with trivial democratic features.
Except right now, those trivial democratic features are the last line of defense between the two party state and a one-party autocracy. It’s a state of affairs that shows not only did we take a wrong turn, but we’re on a fast train to somewhere we never should have gone. Curiously, the never-Trump conservatives have been pouring billions into the proverbial railroad that lead us to Trump and the next line of Musolinni-wannabe strongman dictators. They didn’t just buy the ticket, but laid the rails.
And RCV (ranked choice voting) isn’t really that much better. It has potential to be better if everyone voted honestly, but voting is a game.
STAR (score then automatic runoff) is the best we can feasibly achieve. It’s easy to teach and our current voting systems can account for this with little to no update (unlike RCV). Please look into star and push for this locally, then we can get this on a state by state basis.
Wrong. Democrats consistently support & pass RCV, while Republicans repeal & ban it. If you want RCV, you need to support Dems in the meantime.
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As much as you really fucking hate to hear it: Biden won both his primaries handedly. The only way Bernie had a shot is if they clowncarred it too long like the Republican nomination that led to Trump. The DNC did not drop the ball, the American voters chose Biden.
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The Democratic Party chose Biden, what was a tactical choice. The DNC uses FPTP for its primary as well (then has a list of 2000 principal party members whose votes are given additional weight. The DNC is a far right coalition party that still is guided by the interests of its monied contributors. But since the 1980s we’ve only been allowed to choose between them and the Christian Nationalist monsters.
Even after Occasio-Cortez won her primary, the DNC and DCCC changed their policy to prevent young upstarts like her from pushing aside establishment Democrat candidates. (Some of those policy changes were reversed due to pressure, but still the Democratic party is not interested in serving the public.)
How do we get a public-serving government? Dunno. Some say supporting our community mutual-aid organizations will help. (It will, actually) but in more contentious states law enforcement are looking for ways to harass and arrest mutual aid organizations, even for doing benign things like feeding the homeless. Civil war will lose the plot quickly, and will end up (typically) in a string of dictatorships, each overthrown by the next until everyone is related to casualties of war and are just plum tired of fighting, and we might get a democratic election out of it if we can fend off all the foreign influencers trying to pressure their puppets into power.
There are a few active anarcho-communist coalitions out there doing their thing, but they are continuously attacked by plutocrat financed militants and mischief-makers looking to make an example of them much like FBI’s assassination campaign on the Black Panthers. We humans may just be too easily tempted by corruption to create a functional public-serving government that doesn’t depend on a labor caste. (But do please keep working on it!)
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This analogy is so absurd. Like if you have a vote on driving off a cliff, the answer is not to treat the vote as legitimate. The answer is to attempt to stop the bus by any means necessary. Pry open the engine panel and chuck a wrench in the gears, cut the fuel line, break the shifter lever, anything, just get off the fucking bus. Neither driver should be trusted.
EDIT: I am sick of hearing “WHY WON’T YOU VOTE THO”
First of all, I already said this:
The only reason to vote for the less-immediate cliff driver is to give you more time to stop the bus.
That’s the other problem with this post: the non-voter is a strawman. Most people with real critiques of the bus vote too because they understand this. Voting barely matters for the most part but you may as well do it. Most people yelling about “don’t vote it’s pointless” are like 15 years old doing baby’s first radical politics.
I just don’t understand why every time we criticise the bus we have to deal with loads of people yelling about why we don’t take the voting more seriously, as if who we vote for is the bigger issue than the fact that we’re stuck on a careening death machine with a bunch of people calmly debating how fast we should all die.
Wouldn’t cutting the brake lines of a moving bus be really dangerous? Why not vote for ice cream, then sabotage the bus while it’s parked? At least the ice cream place has food, shelter, and a bathroom.
*brake
Also:
cut the fuel line
You might want to brush up on your mechanics knowledge. Cutting a fuel line will kill an engine fast.
And I never said not to vote. This idea that anyone trying to criticise the system is saying not to vote is a strawman. I literally said:
The only reason to vote for the less-immediate cliff driver is to give you more time to stop the bus.
My logic is what about vote and pry the bus apart? If you have the option to might as well go for it as part of the ‘any means necessary’, a tool is a tool.
I don’t know why everytime I try to say that we should stop this bus half the passengers jump up and yell “BUT WHY WOULDN’T YOU VOTE”.
I never said that. I said the vote is illegitimate and we need to stop the bus. I still vote.
stop the bus != don’t vote
In Australia we only have two options in the lower house. One of them is pretty close to driving off a cliff.
Things could always be better (I personally find with their recent car emissions legislation a bit weak) but our current government is doing OK.
Our current government is mediocre as shit and does nothing to fix anything. We take 5 steps towards the edge of the cliff each time Liberal get in and two steps forward and half a step back when Labor do. The end result is we’re going over the cliff, just in slow motion.
Same as the centre-left options all over the world. They are little more than controlled opposition designed to give the illusion of choice, but never actually challenge the status quo.
Alright, so what do you do to overthrow the system then? Nothing, that’s right. Screw you.
Oh okay, sorry, I had a whole political activist strategy that takes local action and builds on that to make people’s lives better and eventually put serious pressure on the overarching system, but since you said “nothing”, I guess the answer is “nothing”.
I mean you’re wrong, but you don’t sound like you want to hear the real answer.
The thing is, doing that is a great way to lose credibility. You’re basically sinking to the same level as the fascists.
Oh because of the violence? Driving off a cliff is also violent behaviour, and with the bus as it is the cliff is inevitable, because the cliff drivers will always get back in. Also, the other guy isn’t the icecream guy. He’s the guy who promised to stop for icecream but doesn’t want to tell you if or how fast he plans to drive off the cliff. He’s open to debate on the issue, but he has a lot cliff driving friends and they often cast the deciding vote in cliff driving matters.
They’re both getting us off the cliff, just one is being more coy and circumspect than the other.
The only reason to vote for the less-immediate cliff driver is to give you more time to stop the bus.
Let me know when you start the violence. It’s easy as fuck to sit behind your iphone calling others to die.
Coooool comeback.
Even easier to sit behind your iPhone telling people to vote even though it will never solve our problems.
And my theory of change is not actually violent - you’ll notice I didn’t advocate hurting anyone, just dismantling the machinery of violence. The other person called it equal to fascism, which I assume they equate to the cliff driver, so I took their assumption of violence as given, which I shouldn’t have. Stopping the bus is infinitely preferrable to driving it off the cliff.
Except, it’s not an attempt to end democracy, as fascism is.
disagree
Extremism is how you start a civil war…
Anti fascist sabotage is bad because violence, hmm 🧐
As long as you don’t physically harm people, sabotage all the fascists you want. Just remember to vote.
I was very careful to avoid actual violence in my language. You were the one that equated it to fascism, which I assume you mean is the cliff driver.
Of course stopping the bus isn’t violent, and is not at all equivalent to the cliff driver.
So you’re saying that you would condemn the killing of Donald Trump if he gets into power and enacts his dictature?
I’m the smash the bus person, and I actually would. The truth is he’s only marginally worse than Joe in most of the ways that matter, and assassinations always lead to much worse reactions. Trump isn’t the problem, the apparatus that enables him is.
The solution is to build alternatives that remove people’s dependence on the state and capital, so the president matters less. That’s what I mean by smashing the bus. I never said to kill the driver, because his mates will kill you and stay in control.
I think the answer to this is: so, what are you doing to stop the bus from going over the cliff that’s better than voting? And can’t you do both of them?
Because usually people aren’t doing much else. Especially anything effective. They’re just not voting.
This comment is why you’re getting this spiel, because you need to understand something:
They’re just not voting.
The people who don’t vote are usually the most disenfranchised people, living paycheck to paycheck, stuck in survival mode, and they don’t care who’s in charge because they’ve noticed through hard lessons that they keep getting screwed no matter what. Also often they can’t vote because they can’t get off work. They’re not terminally online yelling at people not to vote, those are probably mostly kids doing baby’s first radical politics.
The sad reality is that electoral politics has a cold calculus to it where they’ve got the populace cut into rough thirds. About a third are susceptible to full on fascist propaganda and cannot currently be reached. Another third vote centre-left because they usually understand it’s their only reasonable vote. Very few of them are actively engaged because it is a deeply disempowering system. Another third are who I mentioned.
That’s not going to change just because you correctly debated with me about voting. I vote as far left as I meaningfully can, I just don’t think it really matters and I think both psychologically and practically the faster people learn that the better.
I think understanding reality is much more important, and I think the fact that this insane bus analogy gets accepted paints a grim picture of how fucked up the electoral system really is. I also think it’s wrong about the stakes - it’s not cliff or icecream. It’s cliff or slower cliff. Vote for the slower cliff, but don’t ever mistake the drivers for your friends. You are voting for your preferred enemy.
I don’t think the third are the ones who have power fantasies about them not voting but rather just people who don’t bother. So they’re not the ones I was talking about.
I’m talking about the ones who are so proud of their principled take of not voting and telling others how that doesn’t change the system and how the actual change happens through other means. And then the other means they are doing are maybe some complaints on social media, which is just lol.
I’m talking about the ones who are so proud of their principled take of not voting and telling others how that doesn’t change the system and how the actual change happens through other means. And then the other means they are doing are maybe some complaints on social media, which is just lol.
I mean, who are these people, though? I’ll take your word for it, but I haven’t really seen anyone IRL actually advocating for this as a strategy, and I haven’t seen anyone legitimately advocate for it in a meaningful way, like, in a way that actually matters. The most I’ve seen to that effect is like, protest votes from people in california, which, sure, whatever, doesn’t really end up mattering because their district is still going to overwhelmingly be blue. I haven’t seen anyone legitimately advocate for just like “nah I don’t wanna vote” as a legitimate strategy. The most solid stance I’ve seen people take is “I dunno if it matters, I would rather talk about local outreach” or whatever whatever.
I also don’t understand why the consistent instinct against voter apathy is just like. This, always, it’s always like, “oh you need to vote or else we’ll all get annihilated by freiza’s death ball” or like “you have to vote because not voting is for bitches” type stuff. I have very rarely seen the discussion go from like, this abstract talk to more concrete oh what has joe biden done positively, what might trump do very poorly, type of stuff, much less have I ever seen talk of actual interesting electoral politics about how people should vote, or who’s vote matters where, or whatever.
I dunno. It’s just annoying, I’ve seen this argument play in the abstract probably hundreds of time at this point, straight up, no joke, and also in real life. That’s only me counting this election season, too, and not the last 3-4 elections where basically the same set of conversations occurred.
I don’t know how you are on Lemmy without seeing the sort of people who advocate not voting and instead of doing something else to change the system. They’re everywhere. I’m betting even in this comment section.
You seem to be confusing those who genuinely don’t care to vote and those who aren’t voting because they’re totally changing the system some other way (lol). Two different groups. And I’m only talking about the second
Yeah, I mean, I don’t think the two groups are that dissimilar. I think both groups are also probably also fine with voting. I just haven’t seen anyone who actually thinks that voting is bad, I think at most I’ve seen people who think it’s a waste of time, or useless, maybe, but it’s kind of hard to make a convincing argument, generally, that taking say the, you know, at most like 7-8 hours to vote is a completely unjustifiable waste of time. That’d be a pretty extreme example and I don’t expect someone voting in that circumstance would realistically change anything, though, it’s more probable that someone could probably vote in like, just around an hour.
My point is more just that these people aren’t like, illogical ingrates, I guess. I dunno. I see both sides of this issue, I think people are mostly talking past each other and taking out mutual aggression because they don’t really have any other way to feel like they’re doing anything politically productive. Like in this thread the most disagreement I’ve seen is people who are like “Joe Biden isn’t ice cream!”. That’s not really a real disagreement with the core point being made, it’s like, a disagreement with the framing of the issue.
My other point, I guess, is that talking about these things in the abstract is a pretty quick way to get everyone pissed off. It sort of, “gets to the heart of the disagreement”, right, in terms of, oh, here’s where our worldviews diverge, but it doesn’t really do any of the work of convincing someone. I think in this case it’s a pretty narrow gap, to convince someone, it doesn’t seem like there’s that big of a divide. Anyone given to like, “Oh joe biden sucks I wish I could vote for someone more left wing” is probably going to mostly agree with everything else you might say.
Instead of like this argument in the abstract, it would probably have a higher success rate to argue about like, the NLRB not sucking right now, or the infrastructure bill and the amtrack stuff, or the student loan forgiveness, stuff like that, actual policies, and then I’d imagine people arguing the opposite would be like “oh well none of that stuff is really extreme at all or as extreme as we wanted”, or basically “too little too late”, and then, you know, I mean I’ve never seen anyone do this, but I think at that point you’d just have to like, give them the point of voting to maintain from a backslide, vs revolutionary action which helps actually make progress. Both are somewhat important and also somewhat contextual.
Like this whole thing is just a “dual power” problem, I guess. I dunno, I just find it really grating to like read through thread after thread of this same exact discourse happening when nobody’s goals are actually mutually exclusive, you know? It’s like neoliberal identity politics taken to the extreme, where everyone identifies as a revolutionary or as a reformist and everyone assumes and argues their own position instead of like just acknowledging their similarities and doing something about their common goals. It gives me serious COINTELPRO handbook vibes.
I think you are over prescribing power to a small handful of loud and proud voices because it’s an easier scapegoat to say they are the reason for the issues with voting.
I didn’t really define how big of a group they were or anything. I just find them annoying.
But maaaan, if we all, like, protest vote, they’ll have to change the system because they, like, knew what it meant when we chose to not participate in their broken system, man.
bro. do both.
cut the fuel line. break windows. put oatmeal in the gas tank.
but maybe your efforts don’t succeed this election cycle. and if so don’t fucking throw away your vote if it can help your neighbors fucking survive.
“harm reduction” is not a political strategy for action. it is a last minute, end of the line decision to save lives, after all other resources have been exhausted.
in response to your edit:
“the non-voter is a strawman.”
objectively false. in the 2020 election more eligible US voters turned out than any election in recent history, and still those who did not vote outnumbered those who voted for the winner. you are saying falsehoods.
The people who don’t vote are usually the most disenfranchised people, living paycheck to paycheck, stuck in survival mode, and they don’t care who’s in charge because they’ve noticed through hard lessons that they keep getting screwed no matter what. Also often they can’t vote because they can’t get off work. They’re not terminally online yelling at people not to vote, those are probably mostly kids doing baby’s first radical politics.
The sad reality is that electoral politics has a cold calculus to it where they’ve got the populace cut into rough thirds. About a third are susceptible to full on fascist propaganda and cannot currently be reached. Another third vote centre-left because they usually understand it’s their only reasonable vote. Very few of them are actively engaged because it is a deeply disempowering system. Another third are who I mentioned.
That’s not going to change just because you correctly debated with me about voting. I vote as far left as I meaningfully can, I just don’t think it really matters and I think both psychologically and practically the faster people learn that the better.
I think understanding reality is much more important, and I think the fact that this insane bus analogy gets accepted paints a grim picture of how fucked up the electoral system really is. I also think it’s wrong about the stakes - it’s not cliff or icecream. It’s cliff or slower cliff. Vote for the slower cliff, but don’t ever mistake the drivers for your friends. You are voting for your preferred enemy.
Yeah. I don’t envy nor blame those who vote for the biggest crash because they think their suffering will be over without having considered the suffering that will just be new.
People often just want change and those that don’t are just comfortable where they are. The slow route might be nicer for them but and even for others in the long run, but it doesn’t matter what they want change will have to come, they can just be proactive about it or let it be out of their control and in the hands of those that just want it to stop.
I think also people get frustrated by voting because it pretends to give them political power but what they get is almost no influence over their actual lives. I think it drives people a little bit crazy, because they actually believe this is the best they can do.
That’s why I tell people that they can vote but they need to understand that real change comes from direct action, so they shouldn’t put so much emotional energy into the vote. They should put their energy where it matters.
Bless you for this comment.
How many commenters here have even tried to figure out how ‘busses’ (the electoral process) work and find a way to get involved?
Spend 5 hours a week (yes, you can find the time, deduct it from your screen time!) and you could basically take over your local party committee. That alone won’t change the national trend, but you might just be able to influence a city council or school board race.
Local races hinge on a handful of votes very often. In our area, we managed to keep two anti-LGBTQ+ candidates off the school board last election. This impacts the lives of literally thousands of youth and their families and it hinged on about 80 votes. Vote, yes, but at least skim the Chilton manual for your bus in between elections. It really does matter
If it’s so easy have to actually tried giving time to a campaign and having it win and change your local policy?
Have you done what you preach?
I have tried. The super easy barely an effort easy win of showing up and supported by my picks… Didn’t work. Like at all. The DNC in fact even refused to acknowledge half my candidates even though they had more grassroots support, and then funded former Republicans. In a blue city, they still thought the conservative options were better candidates. And lost. We all lost. But sure we held back some morons from school board. But stopping a couple people from getting elected is way different than getting policy makers you want in.
I agree that people need to be doing things but thinking a few hours and shouting at people to vote blue will do anything against the bigger systemic issues and flaws of the operating class of the DNC being happy to be useless then you are far more comfortable in your life than people like me.
damn, people really can’t read, huh?
I think it’s selective misunderstanding. Dealing with the knowledge that voting won’t really achieve much is super uncomfortable, so they’d rather pretend that you said “don’t vote” so they don’t have to think about what you really said.
Another way is pretending that you don’t actually mean it. Stopping the bus seems impossible to them, so they assume you must not actually be doing anything about it, but that’s wrong too. It’s just most people think of revolution in terms of storming the Bastille or whatever, they don’t realise that most of the work is constant, basic, on the ground, building mutual aid networks, because in a world where people starve because they don’t have enough money, feeding people is a radical act.
No.
I will never vote for Joe Biden again and no painfully stretched metaphor is going to change that.
Yay, more evil!
Nine people= voting population of USA
Three vote to drive off cliff = MAGA plurality
Two vote for ice cream = Biden voters
Four abstain because it’s shitty ice cream = abstaining voters who presumably don’t want to die but also don’t want shitty ice cream
If that’s painfully stretched, I would like to see your definition of a straightforward metaphor…I guess “life is a rollercoaster” must take some PhD level analysis to understand.
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
characterizing present day america as “ice cream” is patently absurd. suggesting that a second trump term would be driving off a cliff when we all survived the first one despite a literal pandemic is even sillier.
but the real crazy part is suggesting that there’s a gulf as wide as “ice cream vs driving off a cliff” between the two candidates.
the numbers are trash but that’s neither here nor there.
His first term didnt have a project 2017 courtesy of the federalist society.
Yeah, I don’t think anyone knew the extent of the administrative state and to what extent it would stymie the efforts of an executive it opposed.
I kinda think if we hadn’t had Covid there wouldn’t be a project 2025. Trump would have just left office and assumed the country was too sclerotic to make any kind of changes, but instead there at the end he got to see what it was really capable of. For all the “it hurt itself in its confusion” moments, operation warpspeed (a trump joint!) showed what the state was capable of.
Now everyone with half a brain is thinking how they could take advantage of that. It’s surprising democrats don’t have their own plan to create a unitary executive…
Awesome! Are you going to vote third party?. I’m voting for either Dr West or Claudia La Cruz. I’d recommend either of them to you stranger 👈😎
Probably psl at the national level.
Liberalism is driving off a cliff and killing everyone because a third of people voted to do it.
There are 9 people on the bus. Five people vote to get shit burgers even though no one wants that, just because they think it will save them from the 3 people who vote to drive off the cliff. One person obstains. Two of the three people hijack the bus and drive off the cliff. Four of the five people blame the person who obstained as they drive off the cliff.
Fascists don’t care if they win or lose. Voting can’t save you once you’ve reached this point. You don’t have slightly high blood pressure that you can treat by eating right. You have cancer. You fight the cancer with everything you have or you die.
What kills me are the people whose preferred form of government is not currently the most popular form of government somehow think that after a revolution that their preferred form of government will win out. They’re delusional. In most cases the government gets worse, much worse, before it gets better.
It’s a false dilemma. --For the reasons people reduce it and argue that it is an exclusively binary decision would by the nature of those reasons implicitly argue against the concept of living under any form of a functional democracy itself.
Not voting is lazy in most circumstances for sure. What I hate is that people equate voting third party with not voting. I’m not voting blue. Y’all can’t guilt me into it. I’m voting for a third party socialist. 😏
i gently would encourage you to look into game theory and the far reaching implications of the spoiler effect under first past the post
i do applaud your commitment to morally tenable candidates, however many folks find there is a deeper opportunity for good in the voting process, at least in the current environment, and i generally concur
I appreciate you being nice. I understand the concern you have with the spoiler effect. But our country has been stuck in this lesser evil game for my whole life. That being said I also live in a very blue state. If my state were to go red it won’t be because of the few people like that vote third party.
You have to change the voting system if you want to change the game. I suggest volunteering with Election Science to switch your elections to Approval Voting, so you can vote for everyone you like, instead of just the person you hate least.
Yep I know. Sadly elected officials are needed to change the voting system so that’s largely unhelpful.
I’d love to have ranked choices voting. But like only the third party candidates would possibly do that. Candidates from team red or blue have nothing to gain by doing that and stand to lose everything by doing it.
They’re not needed in every jurisdiction. In some places you can change the voting method through referendum. It does suck when you can’t do that though. I still like approval voting over rcv, but anything is better than choose one.
The threat of the spoiler effect could be used to move the Democratic Party’s policy left. You’re not thinking strategically.
feel free to elaborate im not seeing your vision right now
- leftists don’t vote for Biden. big coalition voting for a socialist third party candidate.
- Democrats lose or get scared and run someone more left next election. Democrats stop trying to appease centrists and start trying to appease leftists who will demonstrably withhold votes
pretty straightforward
kind of already happening, if on a smaller scale.
to do it full scale as you suggest you’d need a infeasibly huge chunk of capital to run against an incumbent.
Yes exactly this movement!
I am not really suggesting that a third party candidate could win during this election, I agree about the capital. But you can pressure the Democrats to take on leftist policies as much as possible by refusing to vote for Democrats, and voting for a third party alternative.
I honestly don’t see another way that Democrats would be prompted to change their policies, as it is they have remained moderate (aka conservative on a global political context). But if Democrats saw that 10% of the vote went to a Socialist, and they lost because of that?? They would change.
Right now the Democrats are catering towards conservative moderates who think that a white nationalist candidate a potentially viable option.
yeah i totally concur and have been consistently in favor of the uncommitted movement. i also think folks voting third party in deep blue states, where the risk of spoiling for a fascist win is low, aren’t incredibly off the mark. i’m not smart enough to understand polster analysis so i can’t pretend to know if these pressures are working, but i do support them.
so i don’t really get where your accusations of me not thinking strategically are coming from lol.
And the difference between that and not-voting is what?
Not counting an air of smug superiority.
The most convincing argument I’ve heard for voting third party instead of for Genocide Joe is that liberals were more politically engaged and had more of an activist mentality under Trump.
Also, I’ve given consideration to the idea that “vote blue no matter who” types would likely vote for a more leftist Democrat than the ones currently being offered. In a long term strategy, if leftists refuse to vote for Democratic candidates who are too far right, then the Democrats would have to either try to appeal to the Trump demographic (which they do unfortunately do), or appeal to the leftist demographic until they get the leftist votes back.
This argument (to me at least) assumes that the other 4 non-voters would have all voted for ice cream which, by just using basic logic, is false. If 3 out of 5 have already voted to drive off a cliff, one has to assume that at least 2 of the remaining 4 would also vote to drive off a cliff. Now this argument is back to square one… How do we find a solution which doesn’t give ‘driving off a cliff’ as an option in the first place?
If I have to read one more both sides are terrible “take” that encourages voter apathy I’m going to lose my mind. Vote, people I don’t care who you vote for but you have to vote because apathy is how we get fascism.
Do something rather than just throwing a piss fit and encouraging others to do nothing.
Vote, people I don’t care who you vote for but you have to vote because apathy is how we get fascism.
Nervous German laughter
We will probably get fascism with our next federal state’s election, since AFD is projected to win by far more votes than any other party. Whelp.
I’ve met a young mom who, while not voting for AFD itself, does hope they will win the election because “then the voters will finally get heard and we also get to see what the party actually wants to implement, otherwise it’s just big talk but it’s interesting to see what they would do once they are in power.” …Can we not find out please? I hope it would just be big talk but I really don’t care to find out. I am superwhite but I don’t have a German passport and I don’t want to know.
But back to the actual topic, I absolutely agree with you and not voting is always, always a bad idea. Hell, not two weeks ago I went to Berlin, paid for a hotel and stood in a long line to vote for the rigged elections in Russia. I know my voice will not be heard and it still felt imperative. Please, please go vote if you’re in the USA ( - or anywhere where your voice will actually at least be counted). I hate to say it but our future also depends on what your country decides.
Oh yeah it’s not foolproof you absolutely still can have people vote against their interests but encouraging apathy doesn’t fix that
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Burn both parties to the ground and bar them all from holding office ever again.
At least this would be doing something, you have my support.
Both texts in screenshot are agruments against apathy
This was a response to the comments.
I guess it depends on the country, but here in France, our last two presidential elections were about choosing how fast fascism would come.
Not very versed in French politics but I imagine the fight to maintain democracy is difficult regardless of country. No matter how bad the choice gets though, not making it isn’t the answer.
D- does that mean youve still a mind? C-c- could we m-maybe sh-share?
Cuz I feel like itd come in handy when the foreign shills show up to tell me all about why the problem you just described is ackswallee not here on lemmy at all… i guess we just that special.
Good to see the sane comments up top, but still.
Voting IMO is more like choose between a cliff and a deep pit . A failure is guaranteed, try to minimize the fall.
good analysis, i concur
