Well unlike you suggest, I don’t vote blue no matter who, I vote blue because the other choice is demonstrably worse.
I’m sure the party cares deeply about this justification, since that seems to be all they’re running on these days.
I remember back in 1984 when such a strategy was considered comical:
<span style="color:#323232;"> It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> "You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> "No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> "Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> "I did," said Ford. "It is."
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> "So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> "It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> "You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> "Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> "But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> "Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">-Douglas Adams, "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish" (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #4)
</span>
You wax eloquent about how things need to change and so you choose to do nothing
Says the guy who thinks that repeatedly voting in a game that was rigged from the start isn’t “doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result”.
what happens when you recruit enough lefties to your side that the right is able to establish the equivalent of a dictatorship via voter suppression, coups, etc?
Non-fascists will be forced to accept that working within a system that’s designed to disenfranchise them can never produce a democratic government and join with the anti-fascists. The dictatorship is subsequently overthrown by popular action at the cost of many lives (which likely includes my own as a nonbinary person with left-wing politics). This creates space for a second constitutional convention to fundamentally reform the law of the land.
At that point you are 100% fucked.
We’ve been 100% fucked for longer than you’ve been alive, the only question is whether or not you’re comfortable with the current rate of fuckery and what you’re willing to risk to change it.
Are you one of these idiots who actively want a civil war?
Lol, of course not. I have merely accepted that nothing short of a second American Revolution could overthrow the two-party system and that things will definitely get worse before they can get better.
Hell, I predicted this way back in November 2016. Trump’s win would galvanize the Democrats in 2020, and the subsequent lack of meaningful change depresses the vote enough that 2022 and 2024 go to the republicans. Trump then punishes his percieved enemies while the Democrats continue to chase Republican voters to the right, further fracturing their own left-wing base.
Let me know when the 2 party stranglehold allows you to vote it out.
You’re the one insisting I don’t have a choice here. Why should anyone bother helping reinforce a system designed to disenfranchise them? To keep the “wrong people” from taking power, as if that wasn’t already the case?
If that sounds like Accelerationism to you, then you’re reading me correctly. Preservation of the intolerable status quo only delays and inflames the inevitable upheaval.
Meanwhile, completely oblivious that you and people like you are exactly the reason why we don’t have enough voting power to enact real change.
Oblivious?
No, I’m counting on it. The Democrats won’t change unless they have to, and people like me are the ones they need to change for. People like you, who “vote blue no matter who”, can be safely ignored by party leadership since they know you’ll vote for them anyway.
Neither party represents my interests and, as you’ve seen, the “lesser evil” argument doesn’t motivate me in the slightest. If you want me to vote for Dems then you’ll have to make them worth voting for and stop acting like they can coast to victory on fear of the Republicans alone.
I’m aware of FPTP and its mathematical implications, our country is designed to provide only the appearance of democracy while actually limiting choice to those candidates the parties deem inoffensive to their campaign financiers. And we’re stuck with them unless you can convince the two-party state to abolish the leverage it has over third parties, so stop acting like they’ll let you vote your way out of this situafion.
Real change would require a political revolution, and I’ve long since lost my faith that Americans would build something less fascist given the chance.
Exactly. There is no alternative. This is a hostage situation.
And when the guy holding you hostage asks you to pick which of your kids he should murder first, the right move isn’t to vote for the “lesser” evil, but to spit in his eye.
Please inform me of the method by which one can vote for “SOME Democrats” without also implicitly consenting to be represented by the rest of the party.
And also, why you think your time is better spent trying to convince a hypothetical single-issue voter to capitulate than calling the Dems and demanding they do better.
My only note here is that canned beverages have a layer of non-recyclable plastic on the inside to prevent chemical interactions between the contents and the metal. Glass bottles are fine though as (aside from plastic labels) they’re fully recyclable.
Money and power are equivalent, hence my identification of the problem as Capitalism. Billionaire-owners who can afford to run a propaganda machine as a loss-leader are also to be abolished.
“A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on.”
One-on-one might be effective, but it can’t scale. There’s no hope for the most heavily propagandized country on Earth that doesn’t start with an end to the incentive to lie for profit, I.E. Capitalism.