The Third Way Democrats are getting the same support as they gave me.
ETA:
This response is exactly the reason why I am walking away from electoral politics. No attempt to win me over, just “SHUT UP AND EAT YOUR SHIT SANDWICH, PROLE!”
You want my vote? Fucking well offer me something.
Exactly; if Yang was serious about effecting change he’d be starting there—running for local office, maybe even making a run as an outsider candidate in a gubernatorial race for one of the smaller states.
Even if he won the White House he wouldn’t be able to do anything worthwhile if he wasn’t able to forge effective relationships with people in the legislature. Running the country isn’t a one-man show.
Only the right-wing seems to understand that. They’ve built a farm-team talent-spotting structure that starts with the dog-catchers and the school boards.
I’m currently reading A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear, which is mostly about a decade-plus-long Libertarian effort to take over a New Hampshire town (and eventually the entire state) through such grassroots efforts. It was a shitshow of course, but that’s mostly because their idea of governance is an unworkable mess rather than any particular flaw in their approach to winning elected office.
Welp, progressive democrats can have an effect, and a relatively small number of votes in the grand scheme of things determines if they, or centrist democrats, get elected. With voter suppression being part of the Republican strategy, it matters tremendously who wins the state representative, state attorney general and governor’s office. Or, in the general, if democrats or republicans get elected. If you were involved in politics, yeah, it’s famously a stomach churning sausage factory that tears people up, and you can kill yourself working for a candidate who seemed really decent only turns out to be a Sinema or a Cuomo. I acknowledge that’s absolutely heartbreaking. Similarly, if you gave everything you had to get into office, and a complete bozo was elected instead, that’s absolutely heartbreaking. Politics is very often not a meritocracy, and that sucks.
If 57% or so, of congress, like the electorate, supported the Green New Deal, would that be better or worse than where we are now? If 57% were Bernie or AOC clones, would that be better or worse than where we are now? How will “burning it all down” improve lives or the planet?
I’m certainly not offering you anything beyond my opinion, but everything I’ve seen related to politics seems like we’re stuck between a disorganized mess of democrats who more or less want a better world, and republicans who want a better business environment. In both parties are some who are just power hungry or on the take. Republicans, on average, seem to have more selfish dicks in office. YMMV. We’ve had better or worse presidents, it seems clear to me that who we elect can make a big difference.
And I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if the Dems went hard on the huge number of issues they ignore from the left with massive support in order to chase the fraction of a percent of persauadable centrist voters. Vote harder stops being meaningful advice when the closer aligned of the two major parties ignores you until it is time to scold you for not voting hard enough.
I don’t think Nader’s run drove Dems farther to the left at all. If anything, the lesson the DNC took from 2000 was to swap out Gore (who had genuine credibility on things like environmental issues) with John Kerry (who had precious few qualities to distinguish himself from the Republican incumbent) in an ill-fated attempt to win over more “centrists.”
Israel also has proportional representation added to the mix. That works in some countries, but usually gives the political parties far too much power.
If you can’t find room and resonance for your beliefs in the Democratic Party, you are operating in another dimension entirely. Everything from right-of-center to anarcho-syndicalists are covered in the party.
One might think it might be Yang, not the party.
At this point I don’t even just want them to offer me something, I want to see them do literally anything with the power I’ve already given them.
Nobody likes the person who comes to work and spends the entire day gossiping, scheduling pointless meetings, and complaining about what an asshole their coworker is instead of, y’know, working. And yet, that’s all that Democrats have to show at their performance review next year. “Vote harder” is a fucking insulting response to people pointing out that they’ve refused to get anything accomplished with the votes they got.
Show me one anarcho-syndicalist representative in government who identifies as a Democrat and maybe I’ll believe you. “Democrat” does not exist as a catch-all for “not Republican”. This is the same party that has fought relentlessly against progressive candidates who support the green new deal, universal healthcare and UBI, and strived to redistrict them out of their already-safe districts whenever possible. The same party that thinks $15/hour is still just too much to ask for a minimum wage, despite the Fight for 15 movement having gone on long enough that $15 is also not actually a living wage in most places in the US anymore. The same party that spent then entire election cycle promising $2000 stimulus checks for COVID relief, only to turn around on November 5th and say “now now, what we promised was actually just to get you up to that $2000 by counting what the orange shitgibbon you just voted out provided. And by the way, we hope you never expect us to do anything else to help you through this crisis ever again, because we won’t. By please do keep giving us money so we can fight the good fight.”
But I mean you could always vote for the Trump party! That’s just fine of course. One party for death and dissolving the union. And the other for… well at least it isn’t that. So functional.
No argument here, and I don’t see Yang’s efforts doing anything to move the needle.
Sure do love living in a system where the only means of expressing disappointment with the party in power is to either vote for the party that’s even worse, or abstain and thereby still be considered complicit in the resulting destruction.
You got that backwards. The Democratic party have no room or resonance for my beliefs. Working with them is like working with the Borg, you know at some point they will try to assimilate you.
The Democratic party believe in organising workers into overthrowing and abolishing capitalism and all government? You think Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t be calling the FBI if you even hinted at having those beliefs?
No vote is ever a sure bet. Even when the candidate you want, and vote for, gets elected there’s no guarantee that they’ll be able to deliver the things they ran on but the odds of that goal are better than if their opponent is elected. That’s the fundamental reality of living in a society where you’re not the absolute ruler of all you survey: others get a say, too, and at best you get a reasonable chance of success.
With the first-past-the-post electoral system in the USA, a third party has essentially zero chance of actually getting elected to any national office [1]. Aside from vanity, the only thing a third party can do is threaten one of the majors by drawing enough of the votes that would otherwise go to one of them to throw a close election to the other party. Most of the time in a lopsided election third-party protest votes just act to scare the majors to adjust their platforms [2]. Sometimes, in a close election, they manage to throw the election in the exact opposite of what they claim [3]. In some cases (Perot in 1992, Nader in 2000, Stein n 2016) the spoilers came close to doing exactly that.
Not saying that they did, mind – we don’t know where their votes came from but there were enough that it’s possible that the vanity campaigns turned the outcome. There are no certainties. However, the tens of millions who voted for Democrats in 2000 and 2016 at least tried to turn the tide in the direction that you appear to favor. If they failed, at least they were trying instead of engaging in a hissy fit over the world not bowing to their moral superiority.
[1] Yeah, Sanders is nominally an independent. Apply the duck test, and he’s a Democrat.
[2] e.g. Libertarians in some Republican districts during the 80s
And so far it has been a losing bet for me. Yes, they have delivered the absolute bare minimum on a few things, after twenty years of fighting. Other things they haven’t made any move on, or worse, they have actively sabotaged any attempts to enact them.
What kind of job lets an employee do that? What kind of workplace lets a substandard worker get away with that, using the excuse that there was only one other applicant, and they were far worse? Why the fuck do people accept that?
I’m glad Beschizza avoided using the term “third party” … since we already have a third party and a fourth party and a fifth party and Yang’s would be more like thirteenth or twenty-third
Here’s the thing; the Dems as a party are pretty far right of the average voter. The average US voter supports single-payer, universal health care, high minimum wage and/or UBI, much higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, immediate action against climate change, drastic voter access and enfranchisement improvements, infrastructure investment, investment in pre-K and K-12 education, college debt forgiveness, free public university, etc. etc. etc.
People cite Sanders and AOC as being the left fringe of the Democratic Party, but they’d be centrist democrats in FDR’s time and mainstream progressive Republicans in Eisenhower’s time. Not so much in terms of social issues, but in terms of economics, the current mainstream Dems are regressive. If they were interested in winning votes based on policy, they would be far to the left of their current position. Instead, they think that they have to win votes through money and that the only way they can accomplish that is by catering to the oligarchs (somehow better than the GOP - good luck with that!).
nth party.
Not true. One can back primary challengers, stage street protests and town hall meetings, engage in fundraising and outreach campaigns, etc… there are a number of ways to engage in our political system that go beyond binary decisions at the voting booth on election day. It’s just that the other forms of engagement require a lot more effort.
