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The Ratchet Effect
DEMOCRATS BLOCK MOVEMENT BACK TO THE LEFT / REPUBLICANS TURN EVERYTHING TO THE RIGHT
Many of us are demanding to arrest or at least abolish all of ICE.
You can see posts that say “arrest ICE” or simply “fuck ICE” with very positive reddit vote scores in many cases.
What about arresting ICE in real life?
What if the next Presidential election arrives, and instead of voting Republican or Democrat, I’m going around supporting a candidate who focuses on driving awareness of all the ICE crimes caught on video?
Because when I say “fuck ICE,” I don’t mean it as shorthand for “fuck Trump.” More like shorthand for “fuck all the authorities that abuse their power” or "fuck the military industrial complex " or “fuck the parallels between my country and the Nazi Germany we supposedly defeated.”
Or just “fuck having a country where I can be robbed, beaten, or killed by the authorities any day, without consequences.”
Parts of this post, placed anywhere with reddit-style votes, might reveal not many Americans are really with me on this.
Forget a President, I wonder if any major city can even elect 1 mayor, that goes 1 day, without making a choice that helps someone in uniform get away with robbing, beating, or killing someone else.
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whoever loves Digit
Single issue voters and third party candidates because “both sides bad” is what got us into our current predicament.
Don’t be a single issue voter for third party candidates because “both sides bad”. Feel free to vote that way in the primaries, get out and campaign for the candidate you think is best, but when they don’t make it to round 2, don’t throw away your vote - that does nothing for US elections.
Also, fuck ICE, but “my opinion gets lots of upvotes on Reddit” is not a basis of government.
People like you keep calling everyone with concerns single issue voters. We’re supposed to abandon the economy, queer rights, abortion, freedom, holding tyrants accountable, making the system more stable, standing up to fascists, and every single other issue for what?
In exchange for abandoning everything what do we get? Another four years of nothing? More rot added to the neoliberal decay?
I’d take four years of nothing over everything happening today in a heartbeat.
But its not nothing, its the system silently rotting from its own inherent contradictions. There are always people suffering incredibly during these periods of quiet and then theres those privileged enough to not see that.
I absolutely see suffering everywhere. None of this is lost on me.
But I see that suffering amplified under the current administration in a way that it wouldn’t be under another leader.
Progress takes time and ignorance of this fact is what conservatives feed on. Dividing people is their specialty. They want you to feel hopeless, to give up, to waste your voice on infighting so they can further secure power even though they are in the minority.
Republicans cheer for every vote for Jill Stein. Every person who believes each candidate is somehow equally repugnant and chooses not to vote. These things help them cling to power and they have 0 incentive to change the system.
What about a farcical aquatic ceremony?
This is great to say in theory, but merely telling people this in a Beehaw post doesn’t actually make anyone vote differently.
If you actually want to win and not just have someone to scapegoat, you have to actually entice people, and if your candidates aren’t enticing people, the only actual, actionable leverage you have is changing the candidates.
Changing candidates is a great thing to push for during the primaries, but in US elections there is a point where candidates are locked in and only 2 people have a chance to win and everyone has to choose between those two no matter how imperfect they are.
And because the DNC puts its finger on the scale earlier on, they end up with bad candidates in the General, and then lose. The Democratic Party has been seeing a lot of good bottom-up shifts leftwards to meet voters, but it’s much slower at the national level, and unfortunately the President is the person who most needs to match voters.
Point is, “vote blue no matter who” as a tactic does not win elections. If you just accept that a bad candidate is locked in, you’re just accepting that you’re going to lose.
and everyone has to choose between those two no matter how imperfect they are
No, they don’t. That’s the point. You keep claiming this, and then losing, because in fact there are other choices, and people make them. If this were true, Harris and Hillary wouldn’t have lost.
It doesn’t matter whether you wish everyone had to choose one or the other, you need to deal with reality as it is, and in reality people can vote third party or sit out. If you pretend otherwise, you’re gonna keep losing.
Point is, “vote blue no matter who” as a tactic does not win elections
Unlike “vote for the single issue you care about” - that works real well right? How’s president Stein doing? Has she ended the wars? Solved childhood hunger? Fixed the education system?
Like it or not democracy means compromise, and the US flavor of democracy means compromise between just two candidates. Despite our opinions we agree that the majority (or, fucked up constutional congress majority) sets the rules. Throwing away your vote on other candidates does not change this. As much as I wish I could pretend it signals social preference to the people in charge, it doesn’t.
A vote for 3rd parties may have told Kamela to go fuck herself, but now we get trump as the consequence.
Unlike “vote for the single issue you care about” - that works real well right?
No, and I’m not trying to strategize how to win as a non-Democrat, I’m trying to strategize how to get Democrats to actually win…
And the answer is kick out the centrist assholes who keep enabling Republicans, and never ever telegraph to the DNC that if they can just get their preferred candidates far enough, you’ll just roll over and do what they want.
Like it or not democracy means compromise
Wrong. Democracy means voting to make decisions. Some people compromise, some don’t. It’s not required, and you just telling people that it is is deluding yourself.
the US flavor of democracy means compromise between just two candidates.
Wrong. There are in fact more candidates (and non-participation), and people are not persuaded by being told they’re being railroaded towards ones they dislike. If we want to win in 2028, we need a new strategy, that doesn’t solely revolve around winning the primaries. We need pressure campaigns and protests if we get some corporatist piece of shit like Newsom, for example.
Throwing away your vote on other candidates does not change this.
I never said it’s smart for people to do, I said people will do it, and you need to understand and accept that, otherwise you can’t strategize around it.
As much as I wish I could pretend it signals social preference to the people in charge, it doesn’t.
Agreed; people vote according to their own interests, and the actual way to get them to vote for you is to convince them that you best serve those interests. Not to tell them “no one serves it, but we’re not as bad as the other guys”. If their interest is a single-issue, and they as a bloc are large enough to tank your win, you have to shift, or you will lose. That’s just math, and the reality of democracy.
A vote for 3rd parties may have told Kamela to go fuck herself, but now we get trump as the consequence.
Which is why Democrats should have absolutely rioted when Biden first announced he was running again for 2024, rather than letting him wait until 3 months before the election to kick it to another candidate, who had no time to prepare, and who was never selected by the public in the first place. Biden fucked us and Harris.
And it’s “Kamala”.
Why do you start from the position that a Democratic candidate would not adopt a position held by 80% of Democrats. And that expecting them to do so would be a purity test?
Amazing how you can shift blame from perpetrators to people who focus their lives on stopping the perpetrators of the shit you’re blaming them for
I blame the people who enable the perpetrators. While the US is still a democracy, that includes people who voted for the perpetrators, as well as those who threw away their vote allowing the perpetrators to win.
The blame doesn’t stop there, I also blame the DNC’s bungled handling of the election, but regardless, I have zero doubt in my mind that there would be fewer government kidnappings under Harris regardless of how shitty the circumstances of her nomination were.
In what way did voting for 3rd party candidates last election stop perpetrators? In what way will voting for third party candidates stop perpetrators in future elections? By all means campaign for them, raise awareness, but if they can’t make it past the post your votes are wasted.
Until US moves away from FPTP system, you have to work with the system we’ve been dealt, while pushing for reform. Just wishing it was different doesn’t help anyone but the worst candidates.
Working to stop the perpetrators isn’t enabling them. You’re getting things completely mixed up.
My state has ranked choice voting btw
That’s great. Most don’t. Plenty of us remember the hateful dogpiling of privileged bluestaters. Anytime someone begged others to just vote. Not for a specific candidate, but just to vote against the Republicans. Yes It didn’t matter if you voted because your state was already going that way. But that wasn’t the case for most other states.
Or when others begged people to vote strategically for candidates that stood a chance of beating the Republicans. Yes, it didn’t matter if you did or didn’t because your state was already going that way. Good for you. That wasn’t the case for most people. The fact that so many loud obnoxious oblivious blue-staters managed to convince Palestinians in swing states to vote for Trump. Chefs kiss, hilarious. With allies like that who needs enemies.
People voting third party in states without ranked choice voting are arguably even more impactful 🔥
Agreed! They helped elect Trump - look at the impact he’s had! They should be proud!
RFK Jr dropped out so he couldn’t really have any voters, and Democrats and Republicans aren’t third parties. Not sure who you’re thinking of. I was talking about people like Jill Stein who tried to stop anyone genocidal from getting elected
Absolutely, Republicans love it.
no it is not.
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Unfortunately, abolition is one of those things that people poo-pah no matter what agency is involved, because we’ve allowed the Right to successfully frame its changes as “realistic” and “practical”, and Democrat changes as “idealism”. People will act as though it’s completely impossible to not have ICE or DHS… despite the fact they are both younger than most of us.
Every time I see an argument in the comments about whether people not voting Blue (but also not voting Red, obviously) are “handing the election” to the opponents, I feel like the people arguing such haven’t re-assessed their understanding of our political landscape since 2016.
The reality is that you cannot cajole thousands or even millions of people into voting the way you want them to. There’s no social or technical framework to do it. It’s literally an impossibility. You have to entice them.
I understand that the DNC deluded themselves into thinking they could, despite Obama’s nomination over the DNC-preferred Hillary in 2008, but we’ve had 3 election cycles since Obama, and Democrats have lost 2, and severely underperformed in the other, all because of weak candidates who refused to shift their platform towards the votes they were missing. And their strategy was merely to cajole people with “better than Republicans/Trump”.
If it worked, I’d hate it but at least I’d respect the utility of it for harm prevention. But it literally doesn’t work.
The fact that every discussion of changing the DNC sees the VoteBlueNoMatterWho brigade arrive to deploy this rhetoric clearly shows that they know the DNC won’t change, but rather than blame the group whose explicit job is to attract voters with their platform for being intractable to voter demands, they instead rush to ensure this argument is stated and visible.
At this point it’s not actually voter engagement or strengthening of the Blue base, it’s just preemptively attempting to construct a scapegoat for when the strategy continues not to work.
“Don’t you remember all those times when we explicitly told people online they had to vote for us? And then they didn’t? So that’s their fault, see? Yes, even though we knew what would get their votes, but refused to do anything different.”
It’s more than just making a good choice while voting unfortunately, when tax dollars support these types of institutions
Redditors also get mad at me for saying I don’t file taxes, and meanwhile I still can’t avoid sales taxes and inflation paying for this stuff anyway
so republican then. unless its fairy land were the third party gets over 30% of the vote and the rest is evenly split. if republicans can hold office it won’t work. we have to have republicans lose every time. something is allowing them to win elections consistantly without a majority. it is partly the system but partly people choosing the greater of two evils directly or by staying out of it. republican supporters do not vote third party if their canidate has even a slim chance of winning.
the soviets defeated the nazis. not the usians.
i’d bet the us would let nazis fester if they were subtler about it.
nazis were inspired by us segregation laws, and the current us regime was inspired by nazis.
i’d bet the us would let nazis fester if they were subtler about it.
You don’t have to bet, that’s literally what has happened for the last 80 years
