i’m assuming you are in the united states. if that is not correct then forgive my presumption.
if your primary desire is to piss and moan about the unfairness of the system that doesn’t give you the choices you wish you had then by all means carry on and vote for third party candidates all you want. it is certainly within your rights to do so.
that said, if you are actually interested in changing things within the system then you are going to have to do what i have done and many other people have done which is to get into the fight and get your “hands dirty” along the way. i recognized when i was in my early 20s that the u.s. electoral system was rigged heavily in favor of the two current parties. at that time i recognized that the party that i had the most in common with was the democratic party. at that time i began participating in the county level party and have worked to elect democratic candidates and have been able to help shape the politics of the local and state level towards more progressive candidates and platforms by getting in there and working with and through the party to make progress.
have i gotten everything i want, no. have i made a contribution towards pushing the texas democratic party to the left, yes, yes i have. but that is not possible without making the effort to work through the party system as it exists.
my reading of the overall history of the u.s. party system tells me that the only time a new political party has a chance to start being taken seriously are during periods when a previous political party has so failed to represent their voters’ interests that the party collapses allowing for a realignment towards a new party. the collapse of the whig party and the realignment of pro-slavery elements going into the democratic party of the 1850s and the rest initially splitting into the free-soil party and the nativist american or know-nothing party. within a couple of years there had been a merging of free-soil, american, and northern anti-slavery democrats into the then new republican party.
the most likely change i see coming over the next 20 years or so will be a collapse of the republican party and the completion of its transformation into a fascist party with moderate elements moving into the democratic party pulling that farther to the right but opening up a space for a true center-left party as a counter to the far-right republican party. regardless of whether i live to see that, it won’t happen if progressives abandon the field and allow the republican party to dominate all levels of government.
this really isn’t true. the electoral college guarentees that in some states, for some people, their vote will not count.
i voted for nader in the 2004 election and, in the state i lived, the sum of nader votes + gore votes was not anywhere near the votes bush got – and that was obvious from the get go.
the electoral college is completely demoralizing to voters. that said it also gives some voters cover to choose whomever they want because in some places people know their individual vote matters squat.
[ eta: back on topic, one thing that these polls do show is that in many states, for this particular election, individual votes are going to be more important. while there are still a few “safe” states, there are not nearly as many as normal. ]
Remind me how the Republicans do their incremental change by negotiation and compromise. They are full Will to Power and take. And it works. That whole “change has to be slow and stepwise reversible” lie is pure DNC/Pelosispeak for “We are conservatives but want to dangle the hope in front of Progressives that we might think of doing something for them someday.” It’s an excuse for doing nothing.
So you’re part of the problem then? Congratulations.
Given rampant voter suppression and the slim margins that Trump won some states by, third party “protest” votes could have swung the election very differently if they went to a viable candidate instead.
The two party winner-takes-all system used in national elections sucks, and is not at all representative of most voters. I think this is something we can all agree on. But until that system changes, thinking a vote for a third party in a national election is anything other than a proxy vote for Republicans is completely delusional thinking.
If you prefer, it’s a consequence of pushing forward against utter intransigence that is determined to roll back everything you have gained, so any progress looks like a slow series of “compromises” that are the maximum achievable at any one time, plus a lot of defending what has already been won.
We can vote for whomever we want, for whatever reason we want. Announcing our vote on a public forum is a different thing. When we choose to “brag” about voting third party in what is essentially a runoff, what do we think people are going to say in response?
Not buying it. Not one little bit. But that’s a very nice bit of dishonesty. Schumer and Pelosi would be proud.
When Democrats have power they announce loudly that they aren’t going to do anything. Carter’s new way for the Party, Pelosi saying “We are a Center-Right country”, Obama’s “I’m not your guy”, the Clinton’s embracing of homophobia, de-industrialization, the final nails in Labor’s coffin, and mass incarceration of Black people, so on and so forth. It isn’t fighting back against intransigence to always start off by giving the Republicans what they want and then “negotiating” from there. It’s revealing that there isn’t a hell of a lot of difference between the two when it comes to policy and fundamental orientation.
Defenders will screech “Gay rights! Women’s Rights! Working families!” It’s all horseshit. The Supercongress? Obama. Automatic Austerity? Pelosi. Making the Bush tax cuts permanent? Obama. Getting rid of bankruptcy protection for you and me? Joe “The Senator from Mastercard” Biden. DADT and the DOMA? Clinton. Refusing to consider a final push for the ERA? Carter, Clinton, Obama. Refusing to even consider parental leave? All of them. Twisting arms to prevent even the possibility of a Public Option for healthcare? Obama. Praising Reaganomics and defending the derivatives traders? Obama, Pelosi, and Biden. Oh, once they see there’s a parade they’ll jump to the head of it, but it isn’t important to them except for branding. What they really do is go in hard for whatever the Republicans were doing ten years earlier. That’s why we got Dolecare.
Give the “moderate centrist” Democrats five or six more years and they’ll be all-in Trumpists.
Yeah, that’s not going to happen. No matter how much you like to think every Democrat is a Republican in disguise, just waiting for the chance to turn on the leftists for no reason except Pure Evil.
I agree Trump is probably Barron’s biological father, but by all appearances the old man’s interest in that relationship was confined to banging Melania. Even that interest waned when pregnancy made her gross and fat and it was time to move on to other, younger nude models and porn stars.
I’m obviously really not getting my point across here. I’ll try once again. The original post was all about how you’ve got to aim big and keep pushing against entrenched opposition to make any progress, so you absolutely shouldn’t pre-compromise and limit yourself to only fighting for half of what you want because you probably won’t get all of what you’re fighting for at once.
Please stop lying. It’s not a good look on you. I never said that all Democrats were like that. But the Party as a whole and its leadership is. By the standards of the rest of the developed world it is a right wing Party. Far to the Right of, say, the British Tories.
Look at their trajectory. On every single major policy issue they have tracked the Republican Party by about a decade and have moved steadily to the Right. A few years ago we had Biden and Obama praising Reaganomics. And that was around the time they upped the influence of superdelegates specifically and explicitly to remove even the possibility that a Progressive could be nominated. And when they did it they removed Progressives and replaced them, literally, with corporate lobbyists. Their “no primary challenges to sitting Democrats” policy only applies to conservative Dems, not ones like AOC who had to fight off a DLC-funded right wing challenge.
The Democratic Party is Republican Lite and has been heading that way for close to fifty years with no stops along the way. That whole time they have sold themselves as the lesser evil with “triangulation” and “no air space on the Right.”
that is the one thing you have said in your comment above which i can whole-heartedly agree with. the rest of it, not so much. the trajectory of the democratic party over the past 20 years or so has been a gradual but steady move to the left. al gore ran on positions to the left of clinton’s enormously popular program. kerry was pushed by circumstances to run to the left of gore. obama ran on a platform that was decried by many southern democrats as too far to the left and attempted to govern farther to the left of that. his failure to do so was primarily the responsibility of the republican party which nakedly fought to impede him and thereby make him a “one term president” and when he won reelection he attempted to govern from the left as much as republican intransigence allowed. hilary clinton ran on a platform to the left of obama’s and biden’s approach, while not pushing to the left as far as i think would be currently feasible, is still more progressive than any democrat’s approach since mcgovern.
the only way you are going to see more progressive governance is to take part and encourage others of your opinions to take part, much as i outlined in my comment above which started out . . .
saying trump “Stands up for what he believes in” is not necessarily positive considering he believes in terrible things. I know its cliche to go straight to hitler, but hitler stood up for what he believed in too, it just so happened that he believed white Christian germans were the master race who should rule Europe. i feel the same way when a poll asks if Trump fulfilled his promises… like thats not a positive thing when his promises were basically closing the border, making america more isolationist and vilifying minorities and immigrants, building a dumb wall etc.
Barron, if you’re reading this, whether or not you’re good at the cyber, you’ll always find a spot here so long as you’re respectful to multiple viewpoints.
Again, while it pains me to defend them, the most significant advancement in the quality of Americans’ lives in the past 40 years has been the Affordable Care Act. It has saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Full Stop.
Representative government is tough for people to handle, I get that, when you are in the solid minority of political ideals. You are though. The average Democrat isn’t any farther Left than Biden. Why expect the party to be if it represents them?
The Democratic Party is Republican Lite and has been heading that way for close to fifty years with no stops along the way.
You really think the Democratic Party is farther right than it was when Hillary was calling young Black men “superpredators”? Do you really think Bill Clinton would have won using Obama’s campaign platform?
In order to win the Georgia Governor primary, Jimmy Carter… JIMMY CARTER had to campaign condemning his opponent for supporting Martin Luther King Jr. He pivoted after he won, sure, but he wouldn’t have won had he not.
I dunno where people get the idea that the US is this seething mass of Leftists barely bridled by a minority of Right wing authoritarians. It isn’t. The 40-something% of non-voters don’t stay home because they are all socialists without a candidate. If 10% of them fit that category I would be shocked. The vast majority stay home because they don’t care.
