So why not do it through a pac, another party, etc? This is what I don’t get about it. Why not? If some one like Yang can get that off the ground then what’s so bad about that? I mean I doubt he’s going to do much more than get an occasional headline tbh. But that’s something at least 
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If Yang somehow manages to turn this new party into a political movement that creates tangible positive change at the state and local level then more power to him. If it turns out to be a gimmick just to get his name on some ballots for the next Presidential election then I’m going to dismiss it as a vanity project.
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Would we have been better off with a Republican in the White House and Republican majorities in the House and Senate?
Academic science. Check out how long it took to confirm the Higgs boson. Look how long we’ve known that the Universe is mostly dark matter but don’t know anything more about it.
Look at how long it’s taken to get a malaria vaccine, or one for HIV. Are you suggesting that we should have ditched both projects?
There is no easy way to do a hard thing, and Green Lantern is fantasy.
Also, don’t dis rearguard actions, they buy time. I have a bone-marrow cancer that, without frequent blood transfusions, would have already killed me. The drugs used to limit it won’t work forever, but who knows? Research is ongoing and in the meanwhile my grandchildren may actually remember me.
And only have 50 out of 100 votes, which means that every single one of them has a total veto of legislation. As Sinema has shown, some of them campaigned on very popular platforms (drug price reduction) that they are now blocking.
That kind of liberum veto didn’t work in Poland and was ultimately deadly to the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. However, as long as there are only 50 Democrats in the Senate it’s what we have to work with. Writing off the Democratic Party because there aren’t enough of them in office seems … suboptimal.
Would someone please tell Keir Starmer this? (Yeah, I know he’s not the third party but he needs to get with the third, fourth, fifth and all the rest if we are not to have fascists in power here for a long time.)
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Basically, you’re saying that people who are in direct danger from fascists need to just wait and things will improve? How long have we been saying that shit? Maybe it’s time that those of us who aren’t having our lives directly threatened do more than just aim platitudes at those who end up being on the front line of fascist violence.
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And now we are back to the shit sandwich and bowl of diarrhea.
Are you saying there is a widescale habit of sabotage in academic research?
Maybe, but Rojava is not. I really am at that point, and it’s time that the liberals realised that they have failed the left wing so badly that they are considered traitors.
But let’s stop with blaming the people who lost out because of third way politics. If they want my vote then what I am looking for is Fully Automated Luxury Anarcho-Communism and Solarpunk (I could get into specifics, but this comment would turn into a wall of text). It’s up to them to persuade me that I shouldn’t walk away, and what they offer would lead to that. No excuses, no talk of how it is unrealistic, all that shows me that they have no interest in my vote and just want someone to blame when things go wrong.
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Just the opposite. With all the foresight in the world, they couldn’t have prevented the NAZIs from taking over and an appeal to voting would be worse than useless because GTFO, crappy as it was, was their best option. And please bear in mind that we’re talking about people I knew and that I know what they went through both getting away and surviving when they didn’t. There were no good solutions for them. That’s one reason that I have very little patience with people who dismiss “lesser evil” options. My current medical condition is just a reminder of an old lesson.
I must have written that very badly. You asked “What kind of job lets an employee do that?” WRT 20 years without results. I gave two examples of programs that didn’t pay off for much longer times.
Well, that ain’t happening in the USA for sure, regardless. Because the Senate is stacked in favor of Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Idaho, Wyoming, etc. So what’s your plan B? Holding your breath until you turn blue? Leaving for a country that meets your exacting standards (I don’t know of any offhand, but you might.)
As distinct from 1932, like one family I knew – who left family behind to die, which was better than all of them staying behind to die. They ended up in Mexico and have done quite well since. Along with refugee Japanese-Americans who left two generations of family in concentration camps and their California farms behind. They also have done well since.
Sometimes the best you can do is cut your losses, however horrible that choice might be. Loss aversion is a very real human response and it is not a good guide to decisions.
You just lost my vote. I said no excuses!
Try negotiating again. Convince me that the Democratic big tent isn’t a small tent for third way liberals and their corporate sponsors, while everyone else stands outside in the rain.
ETA: Also try convincing me that this statement is wrong from a socialist perspective.
Meet me in the middle, says the Third Way Democrat. You take a step toward him. He takes a step back. Meet me in the middle, says the Third Way Democrat.
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We have to understand that fascists and their enablers are very adept at finding the loopholes in and undermining the foundations of any given liberal democracy. Rarely do right-wing extremists win landslide victories in fair elections. In the highly flawed U.S. duopoly system, a pseudo-centrist* candidate like Yang only provides the sado-populists with an opening, and that’s before you take the various GOP cheats into account.
[* in reality he stands somewhere between what others would regard as the right-centrist Third Way Dem establishment and the “free”-market fundie GOP establishment]
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I think that having Joe Lieberman on the 2000 ticket did more harm than Nader did. I had to hold my nose voting that year and I liked Gore.
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No, we would have been better off with a progressive in the White House. I think you’re better than that kind of false equivalence.
I’m not writing them off - I’ve been a progressive Dem my whole life. I’m saying they will continue to fail to achieve the representation proportional to their support in the electorate as long as they court money instead of people.. The 1% will never love Democrats as much as they love Republicans. It’s long past time to realize that.
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I totally agree but by the time voting came around that wasn’t on offer.
I leave the question of whether we could have done better than Al Gore for climate aside. There’s a whole different subject regarding dishonest primary candidates, BTW; recall that Sinema’s first run for office was with the Green Party, and she got elected with drug price reduction as her main plank. Yang, getting back to the original topic, reminds me too much of her.
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Yet your comment was that they didn’t have foresight. I’m arguing that some, if not many did, and attempted to get out and sound the alarm.
No one here said they did. It was down to non-Jewish Germans either accepting or actively supporting the nazis.
Keep in mind that many Germans BELIEVED they were voting for the “lesser evil.” The communists were seen as the greater evil by enough middle class Germans to put the nazis in a position to eventually take over the government.
Because the people who actively oppose fascism in those states don’t count, especially the ones who are on the front lines of this? Can we for ONCE stop blaming ALL of us down here for the state of the world.
I suspect that @anon73430903 will do what they’ve been doing for a long time now, which is to actively fight for what is right for all of us. Few people here have been on the front lines of this like them.
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That’s very true. It is also true of the right. It may be true of all (party) politicians. But those in non-first-past-the-post electoral systems are sometimes forced not to step back. It’s not much but it is something. But first we need to get rid of first-past-the-post elections.
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I think this is major problem. People MUST realise that in a first-past-the-post system you almost never get to vote FOR who you want. But you MUST use your vote if the fascists are not to win in the long run.
These types of elections are about who you vote AGAINST. The sooner all the vote withholders realise this and stop withholding their votes, the better. If a voter has to hold their nose, just hold it and vote against the more harmful!
ETA @anon52120741, I realise you did vote that year. Edited my original drafting to make my meaning clearer.
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Well, this cleared up whether Yang ever really wanted to actually achieve anything meaningful in politics.
Starting his own third party means: “Ha ha ha no.”
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And your suggestion for how to fix that is to…? We keep getting told by Democratic leaders and think tanks that we “need” people like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema so that Democrats can have a majority, and that those are the only Democrats who can get elected in places like WV and NV. So when we give the Democrats their majority, these members of their own party can block an overwhelmingly popular legislative agenda and still be considered “moderates” who are playing on the same side as everyone else in their party.
And they win. They get to shit in the pool and everyone else just sort of tries to swim around it without talking about it. There’s no pushback from leadership, no calls for them to get in line with the president who is a member of their own god damned party, no White House phone calls or strong-arming. Because you’re wrong, the Democratic Party does not (and actively refuses to) encompass any position that’s to the left of Richard Fucking Nixon in any way that would even remotely give it support and power. They’re terrified that if they do anything that might make the people who elected Joe Manchin angry, they’ll lose everything forever when in fact the exact opposite is true (and Joe Manchin isn’t even representing his constituents’ interests, he’s looking out for his own, because the Democratic Party is nearly as corrupt as the Republicans, they’re just better at hiding it.)
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My comment (admin stricken for reasons not given) was that “… Jews didn’t have particularly good foresight.” Not that anyone did; ref. Lipstadt[1] and the refusal of people, Jews included, to accept what was going on even after the fact. It was prefatory to the observation that even if they had they didn’t have the votes to head off the coup, leaving rather few alternatives and none of them good.
So, to the original topic: A vanity vote for Yang (or the Greens, etc.) does not appear to have discernable prospects for heading off a fascist USA. Others are far from guaranteed, but have better odds than Yangism.
[1] If you get a chance to attend one of her seminars, do. Enlightening no end and lots of unpublished content.
Often no solution was available at all. The attitude toward Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in liberal democracies at the time boiled down to Canada’s “none is too many”, transit papers that allowed emigration were in short supply even in the minority cases where one had enough financial and/or social capital to get one (you might recall a classic film where this is a major plot driver), and then there was the last bit of robbery on on the way out that promised that the life one escaped with would be miserable. That’s before you take into account the heartbreaking – and for many people unthinkable – dilemma of leaving beloved family members to die.
But sure, let’s victim-blame the Jews of Europe on the premise that they weren’t being reasonable and logical and for somehow not having the “foresight” to recognise that the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 would affect any of them living in a Nazi-ruled country (something I doubt that Deborah Lipstadt would argue).
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