this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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Agree with the philosophy, but stupid that she's running for president. Until/unless we change FPTP voting the only the Democrat and Republican running even matter and if you don't explicitly vote for the one then your are implicitly voting for the other.
I don't begrudge her campaign. Making noise on the national level is a good way to elevate the message and slowly undo the demonization of socialism. It's her supporters acting like Harris is the same as Trump that chap my ass.
The problem with that is "the media" treats anyone other than D, R, and occasionally Jill Stein as non existent. She isn't making noise on the national level because that requires the media to "amplify" you and all we hear from them about her right now is
I didn't forget to finish the sentence.
Lenin argued that communists should take part in bourgeois elections because this will get them tribune to loudly proclaim their program, though this should be the least they do, not the most and the main effort should be outside of electorial politics and on organising working class.
Now thing is, when Lenin wrote this, he meant the tsarist duma, which was even fakier democracy than the current American one, with 3 tiers of electors, censuses, workers and peasants barely getting few % of representation and rest going to landowners and their pets, okhrana secret police arresting socialists and peasant activists and closing their newspapers (there was a case where huge participation of workers put iirc 15 worker representatives in duma, and tsar just fucking imprisoned them). But they were still heard.
Now, nearly 120 years later, bourgeosie don't even have to be so heavy handed, they just drown the communist message in a media flood, and even cases like removing third party candidate from ballot and deplatforming them cause no big response from the so called "liberty" advocates.
@Asafum @themeatbridge I think they do that as they might as well be non-existant considering the current winner take all method of assigning Electoral College votes in over forty states. Frankly, you might as well not bother to vote if'n you're going to vote third party. Frankly I won't take any third party seriously until they start caring about down ballot elections where they can make a difference, show people why they should be elected, and change the laws that keep them from being elected.
Advertising your party platform, signaling strength, and delegitimizing the electoral system are valid reasons to vote third party.
This is ridiculous. Third parties are not allowed to work within the electoral system, the DNC and GOP collude against that. The electoral system isn't some fantasy where a bunch of parties try to prove their worth, it's dominated by Capitalist donors and establishment parties, hence the necessity for delegitimizing it.
Consider it from the point of view of the millions of under educated working poor.
they live in a state of precarity and they are being told trump is bad apparently because of ‘project 2025’ or some other nebulous concept.
Thats not gonna land with them. They don’t have the luxury of considering the dangers of “dismantling the administration “ under trump. They need to pay the rent and buy groceries and care for their sick, before they can weigh the relative morality of the candidates.
They wake up, they see rich people getting richer and their life getting harder 24/7/365 and they see no one doing anything about it .
This is why the Dems never get it .
Working people are too hard up to worry about a power struggle between the super rich and the ultra wealthy.
I mean aren't these also the people who say free healthcare is communism and less taxes for corporations and lower minimal wage is better because then companies can employ more people
Hot take but no. I've seen no convincing polling on basically any topic that says that the average voter, or, under-educated working class schmuck, is some hardline neoliberal, or free market libertarian. The average tends to skew populist, for pretty obvious reasons.
There's also a multibillion dollar propaganda apparatus spinning at all times which is created to convince people that climate change isn't real, natural gas cookware is good, their lives are actually great, they can work themselves out of the hole and into the dwindling middle class, and government austerity measures are good because the meritocratic private sector will just altruistically innovate and make everything more economically efficient, and if anyone's getting hurt, then it's the real poor who aren't like them at all, because those people are lazy and can't be changed. So what little anti-populist sentiment we see in the population, I would argue that's something that's been pretty deliberately manufactured.
Respectfully, Trump didn't just appear this year. There are endless CONCRETE examples of his garbage character and policy ideas. Plenty of people in precarious situations are not so stupid as to somehow believe that Trump is only a danger recently because of project 2025. You would literally have to have just regained consciousness from a 10 year coma to not have been exposed to his shittiness at this point. Anyone who supports him or is undecided about him is wholly ignorant of reality.
And yet he was elected to highest office in the land and went very close again 4 years later and will likely go close again.
So there are plenty of “stupid” people who are “ignorant of reality” and they have vote same as you.
Why do you think Trump became influential? Why did this happen, and how do we not repeat it?
Too many people left behind in hardship in a time of abundance and conspicuous wealth. Easy for Trump to gains support with populist sentiment. Republicans saw their chance, and held their nose a made him leader.
The answer is capitalist decay. Fascism isn't going away even if Trump goes away.
I recently saw someone in the comment section on another social media site (video of Jan 6th) legitimately have their mind blown that January 6th was not peaceful. They had multiple comments of them coming to the realization that it was anything other than peaceful. I think we often underestimate how uninformed (or willfully ignorant) the general public is.
It’s very difficult to view things from another perspective, although it’s phrase we throw around a lot .
I never imagined fast food delivery would take off, because restaurants have drive throughs. My bias is that of a car owner and I was wildly wrong.
As you point out, there is a ton of hard evidence about people’s limited political understanding.
That's democracy. She's allowed to run for POTUS.
Nobody ever said she couldn't. Do you go outside and yell at the clouds?
RCV is starting to get some traction in places. What we have to do is continue supporting that and not let the detractors shit on it.
Even if it passes, i wouldn't be very hopeful. Look at Europe, all those countries have better and more democratic election system than USA, but there are fascists on the rise in each of them and shit like in France and Poland happen more and more. Also what's the use of having more parties if they still all represent the same influence groups (for example in Poland we currently have 17 parties and 42 independents on 460 seats in sejm, but you won't find anyone outside of neoliberal status quo).
FPTP Britain says Good Morning 👋
Yeah i'm pretty torn on how democratic is UK, not only they do have FPTP but it's also A FUCKING MONARCHY.
Way out is realisation that they spent last centuries or at least decades on trying to stop being Europe in every sense. If they could they would probably do it even geographically, rowing their island to physically join USA.
Right!
You can't just focus on the bad and ignore everything that's good about these countries. Give us universal healthcare; give us socialized higher education; give us universal basic income; do away with for profit prisons and replace them with a system focused on rehabilitation.
So yeah, right wing idealism is on the rise but that's a global trend. These countries, in general, are light years ahead of the US.
You can't just pray that into existence. In Europe, social safety nets are eroding, because they originated as concessions to prevent revolution.
?????????? Universal healthcare in all European countries is in the process of being dismantled, UBI is existing only in your fantasies, for profit prisons are talked here and there and if you think current ones are rehabilitating anyone you need to look closer.
Also where did i even say they are exactly the same or worse as USA (maybe in the same place where you seen implemented UBI?), and why you derail topic from specifically electoral system into general "badness"?
It's also been outlawed in certain states. Many of those same states have outlawed voter led initiatives, meaning they have no recourse to change to rcv without changing the majority of their states legislators with people that support it and will pass it. You're talking over a lifetime of change necessary to undo that damage. That still is hoping that dems will actually vote against their own best interests once in majority control....
Still more likely than a socialist being elected though :(
The socialist threat forces Democrats to support RCV.
Like all meaningful change, you have to convince enough people to get involved and to do so more often and consistently than every four years at the Presidential general election. It's this belief that the change is going to come from the parties that is the core problem. Everyone complains about having to vote for the lesser of two evils, but then they do it and go back to sleep for another four years. At best, they just gripe about the government never acknowledging that they are responsible.
Ah, one big prayer will get us RCV now? That's a new one. If the parties don't want it, you're not getting it.
It's also not like local or even state level RCV would realistically be sufficient for these whole sets of overarching problems that the US struggles with. You're not locally voting for RCV and then gaining the ability to vote for a party that will actually give you healthcare, will connect your city with others via rail to help rework infrastructure, will solve your housing problems and your homelessness, and they probably won't be solving unemployment. You can maybe vaguely hope that the existence of such a party would put pressure on the federal government to ask "why can't you do this", but that would only happen at the state level with one of the states that actually matter, like california or new york or texas, and good luck getting any of those places to go in for RCV considering how strangleheld they are.
The most you could hope RCV to improve is maybe to make it so you can get someone that's willing to make your ISP give you free shit, or establish a free ISP, and also maybe to give your town a bunch of roundabouts, and maybe approve some missing middle housing which will probably skyrocket housing prices in the surrounding areas since it won't really be doing anything to solve the problem at a national level. Which isn't nothing, right, but that's kinda boof.
No one is saying rcv is a silver bullet. It's malignant that you would suggest it even is. It's the first step in a long list of reforms that need to happen, tool.
Then we vote them out
Why?
Other countries with FPTP have fringe candidates that almost definitely won't win elections, but influence politics considerably.
Arguably, Nigel Farage is the most influential politician in the last decade of the UK for his role in pushing Brexit, all while being in no less than three different political parties. He only recently won election as a MP on his seventh attempt, but media backing and taking disenfranchised votes from idiots basically allowed him to dictate internal policy for both main parties.
There are 650 MPs in the UK, and unlike ind the US it isn't winner-takes-all; if you win one of the 650 seats you get to be an MP
In the US presidential election, there are 50 states for a bigger population and even then winning one while losing the others achieves nothing
In the senate and house elections, which are more analogous to the UK, independent candidates are viable, right? There's at least a few. But it's not comparable to the Presidential elections
FPTP is fucked, but it's only one element of why the USA is deadlocked into the two major parties being the only contenders. The electoral college, the winner-takes-all nature... all sorts
That's all well and good, but it doesn't answer the primary point. An unelected politician was able to drive change without even being elected as an MP because he had public and media support. Tell me why that isn't possible in the United States, even if it means as a fringe candidate in a primary party?
I see your point but again I'd say it's because of the US's winner-take-all system, as well as 50 states vs 650 seats
Farage posed enough of a perceived risk to the Tories that they moved in his direction to avoid losing votes to UKIP. UKIP never would have won more than a handful of seats, let alone a majority, but by splitting the right vote Labour could have beat the Tories in swing seats
And yes, that could be broadly true of a 'spoiler' candidate in the US presidential election, except that:
Only 50 states, and therefore a tiny amount of swing seats compared to the UK
more population per state than per British seat. By a whole huge margin. So its not enough to potentially appeal to 8,000 people to 'spoil' a seat
The above leads to funding issues. Not only is there more money generally in the US elections, but because you have to flip a big state not a small constituency, you have to spend way way more to make an impact. You can't focus a small budget on one tiny area and win a seat
Winner-takes-all means that as long as a campaign thinks it will win a state, and then a presidency, who cares if some counties went to a spoiler candidate?
I'd love to be wrong, and I do think that there's probably also a cultural/historical element to the US's two party dominance. But that said, its just a different system, different processes, different outcomes, different challenges than in the UK
Unless, and hear me out here, it is possible to change.
I'm certain the dems and Republicans will vote to end their strangle hold on us politics in just 1 more election cycle!!! Our maybe the next.... or maybe the next.....
End of the day we are the dems. We are the repubs. Get out these and vote.