anarchiddy

But he won because the “not into politics” voters don’t go to local elections - as far as they’re concerned, voting day only happens once every 4 years

Mamdani won because a record number of those people came out and voted for him, dumbass.

You think that democrats will change if we just stop voting for them

I don't know how many times I have to repeat this point for you to wrap your head around it:

the problem isn't the choice of voting in-itself, it's the choice of placing rhetorical weight on it at all

Democrats will continue losing on their own as conditions for millions of Americans continue getting worse and the democrats continue obstructing popular efforts to fix it. That isn't me organizing against them or boycotting elections - that's a very simple statement of fact. Millions of Americans will lose enthusiasm for the democrats if they do nothing. They will continue doing nothing if they think they can still win their elections by appealing to the center. If the people who are screaming at the democrats to take drastic action proudly keep proclaiming that they will dutifully keep voting for them anyway, there's a very good likelyhood that they will both lose due to voter attrition and mis-diagnose the problem as having not appealed to the center enough. They assume (because the left keeps telling them so) that they aren't losing support from the left, so they must just be unsuccessfully appealing to the center right.

Clarity of message is everything. Democrats have rock-bottom approval because they continue to obstruct systemic change. Full stop. They will continue losing votes to voter apathy if they continue undermining the popular momentum in the base. Full stop. There is no amount of 'lesser-evil' proclamations that will reverse that trend, but it will absolutely mislead liberals into conflating a lack of enthusiasm for democrats for an abundance of appetite for reactionary policy.

You are making that mistake right now. "You're just republican lite" is the same type of damaging conflation as when Zionists accuse anti-zionists of being antisemitic.

It's so strange to hear this self-defeating propaganda not more than a week after a demsoc was elected mayor of the financial capital of the fucking world after a record-setting billionare spending spree against him.

At the risk of repeating myself, i'll try restating the point- the problem isn't the choice of voting in-itself, it's the choice of placing rhetorical weight on it at all in a system that is designed to diffuse the political power of the working class to begin with.

The overwhelming majority of liberals will do nothing more than whinge about how unfortunate it is that we live in such a broken system so-long as they remain secure in their personal status within that system. It isn't just about 'overthrowing the government' - it's about stirring the masses into action by raising the issue to such a volume that they can no longer ignore it. That means making it quite clear that democrats writ large risk becoming victims of the fascist movement they helped to create if they continue 'biding their time' until a more convenient moment. It isn't even about boycotting general elections - it's about making it perfectly clear that they cannot count on voters holding their noses indefinitely, and that they do not have a winning coalition without the working class. That will eventually be true no matter what we say as leftists - under late stage capitalism conditions will continue getting worse until eventually enough people will have lost all faith in democracy itself that the only people voting are various factions of the capitalist class and the petty-bourgeois (if we aren't there already, frankly).

Democrats believe that voters may not like the way they govern, but they'll still vote for them anyway to avoid a hostile opposition party. Any popular movement for radical change will be predicated on the notion that nothing short of drastic action will avert that inevitability

The fundamental problem with liberalism is that it makes well-meaning people believe that justice will eventually arrive simply on its own merit, when liberal democracy itself is designed to ensure that popular reform can never happen without organized resistance.

I’m not advocating for people to accept the lesser evil, I’m asking them to understand that their vote is no longer a form of acceptance

This is a fun rhetorical trick, but I'm not interested in playing a semantic game over the definition of 'acceptance'. This:

A vote in the presidential election currently only holds the power to slightly shift the current power between bad and worse

is absolutely advocating for the lesser evil. Fine if you don't want to call that 'acceptance', but what I'm pointing to is not the choice itself, it's the act of advocating for it to begin with. Spending any amount of energy trying to convey the importance of voting for the moderate wing of fascism is a distraction from the message that both parties pose an existential threat to the working class. If your goal is to build support for radical systemic change, then there should be no ambiguity about what actions are necessary to achieve it. To use your bullshit trolly problem analogy- the 'two tracks' forced choice is a distraction from the fact that we need to stop the fucking trolly. Even if we end up pulling that lever in the end, you will never get enough people to get off to help derail it if you keep ensuring them that the worst will be averted even if they chose not to.

You can't build a popular movement against the democratic coalition while openly admitting that you have no choice but to support them no matter how aligned they are with the fascists. Liberals will continue happily existing in the status quo until it's made clear to them that their privileged position within it is threatened along with everyone else's if they choose not to act.

It doesnt matter if they're democrat or independent - what matters is that they aren't a class traitor.

Do whatever you want but I sure as fuck wouldnt vote for a democrat who is going to sell me out as soon as acting in my interest is politically inconvenient.

You cant build popular support for dismantling the system as it is while you're actively advocating for people to accept the lesser evil.

Imagine if Sanders got up on the senate floor and said "i believe we cannot compromise on ACA subsidies and let millions of americans lose health coverage, be forced to ration their insulin or die because they cant afford a doctor, but I'll be voting to reopen the government without them anyway because i have no choice".

Democrats rely on the inherent violence of a 2 party system. Playing into it isnt pragmatic, it's denial. Either we're in this together or we aren't, and democrats have made it perfectly clear that they aren't.

Why do people keep sharing this as if it's an achievement?

Newsom and his tech donors can go get fucked.

So much focus on the lever that nobody is trying to derail or cut power to the trolly

I fucking loathe Newsome - but this is hard to complain about

Jesus, that man has an incredible amount of message discipline

Listening to her interview on NPR was kind of wild

She had nothing but praise for Trump and defended the decision to bomb the boats in the Caribbean. Then she made a bunch of proclamations about accepting US intervention for enforcing regime change, and then advocated for doing the same in Cuba and Nicaragua

Once Maduro goes and we liberate our country, the Cuban regime will follow, the Nicaraguan regime will follow.

And for the first time in history, for the first time in history, we will have the Americas free of communism and narco dictatorships

Ive heard a few people ask if she's a CIA asset, amd while I don't think it's appropriate to speculate, I can see why the question is asked. The American State Department has been trying to install western-backed regimes in central and south America since the cold war.

Part of the reason we even have narco states in the south is because of the decades long proxy battle happening there.

The Nobel prize has a weird amount of legitimacy for how often it backs western regime change