this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2024
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Time is not on our side. In four years, no matter who wins, the rich will be richer, the poor will be poorer, the climate crisis will be worse, and more and more money will be funneled into the military. "Buying time" is not a valid goal, especially not when it comes at the expense of efforts to actually build an alternative. In four years, anyone looking to build an alternative is going to face the exact same criticisms you're using now, it will again be "the most important election of our lives" and there's a good chance that the republican candidate will be worse than Trump, and more people will have turned to the right out of dissatisfaction with deteriorating conditions. Why on earth should we put off building an alternative when future conditions will just make it worse and harder without removing any of the issues that make you say that right now is "an inconvenient time?" When will it be the right time to start building a third party?
Of course not, because they haven't been built yet. That's like saying that there's no evidence that liberalism could ever work when monarchy was all people knew. What we do know is that the people in power are fundamentally unwilling or unable to address the problems that are leading to the rise of fascism, and therefore must be replaced.
Stable enough to gamble with fascism? No, it's the opposite. It's precarious enough that I insist on taking a strategy that has a nonzero chance of actually stopping fascism rather than accepting it as an inevitability.
Correct!
That logic does not follow. Buying time is an imperative intermediate goal.
Yes, that's the meme. The time to be talking about third parties is not 2 weeks before the election, it's the day after the election, and consistently for the next 3 years. Anyone trying to build an alternative in 4 years deserves the criticism they get. Build the alternative the whole time.
No one said to put off building alternatives. The current alternatives aren't viable, and voting for them not only doesn't help, it hurts. Again, as per the meme, the right time is any time except right before an election without any viable third parties. Buy time in 2024, build in 2025-2027, buy time in 2028, build in 2029-2031, repeat until we have a candidate with Governor/Senator experience and enough of Congress to get past gridlock.
Incorrect unfortunately, your strategy's chance of stopping fascism is much closer to zero than mine. In fact, the strategy you insist on taking actually has a much higher chance of enabling fascism than stopping it.
I didn't start supporting a third party candidate 2 weeks before the election. If you spend the next three years building a third party and then ditch them at the last minute, then what was the point? That makes absolutely zero sense, it's even less coherent than just unconditionally and uncritically supporting the democrats forever. Why would I tell other people to vote for a third party for three years and then suddenly change my messaging and vote for the democrats and then switch back to telling people to vote third party right after? If you actually think through that at all, what you're saying is incoherent.
Incorrect, my strategy has a low, but nonzero chance of stopping fascism, while yours is zero.
To get a candidate 3 years closer to being viable, you know you don't have to start over every 4 years. It's going to take several election cycles before we have a qualified third party candidate.
That's a silly thing to do, and not something I recommended. Don't do that. Do promote third parties in local races they can actually win, as well as state elections in solid states where they can actually win. Once you have enough of those to have presidential candidates with actual experience, then, with sufficiently positive polling data, start pushing for a popular third party candidate.
That's going to be at least 3 election cycles though, and if you fill around like this every 4 years it may well be a moot point. What good is a third party if the fascists end elections? Any other strategy is incoherent. Unless of course your goal is to split the vote for the benefit of the fascists, then promoting a spoiler candidate is exactly aligned with your goal.
My strategy is to buy time while we build a functional and electable third party that has the means to change the status quo. Your strategy is to throw away views on a non-functional candidate, and in the process accelerating the fascist takeover.
I'm not gonna nuh-uh-yuh-huh with someone who doesn't understand elections, or the trolley problem.
Voting isn't analogous to the trolley problem. That's a thought experiment with a huge number of unrealistic simplifying assumptions that makes it only rarely at all applicable to the real world. To make the trolley problem actually reflect the situation of voting, you'd have to add in so many variables that it wouldn't actually help explain anything.
First off, the comparison isn't valid because it treats the parties as unflinching machines that have no agency. In reality, the electoral process is a negotiation in which the parties attempt to build coalitions, and in a negotiation, accepting the other side's position as ironclad and unmovable is a choice and often a bad one. If the other party is committed to being reasonable, then you can offer them a terrible deal that is only slightly better than what they would get otherwise - it is a position of weakness.
You, as well as the democratic party, want to put people like me into that position of weakness where our decisions are the ones that are most scrutinized and up for critique, but it ought to be the opposite. Democracy is about the will of the voters being exercised on the political process, not the will of a party being pushed onto the voters. If you wanted the trolley problem to reflect this, then you'd have to put someone in the problem who is standing by the alternate track who put the person there on the tracks and is fully able to release them at any time, but chooses not to, while also trying to persuade you to switch tracks, which would also put them in a position of power. Negotiating with that person and demanding they release their victim is a reasonable thing to do which complicates the problem.
The hypothetical also isn't valid because it ignores any alternatives. The reality is that there's more than two tracks that the lever can switch to, and some of them don't have any people on them at all. However, there's not just your lever, but 300 million levers involved. And also, it's not just one trolley problem, but repeated ones over and over, and the results of one trolley problem are used to inform the next one. As I said, when you add in all the meaningful differences between the hypothetical and reality, it becomes just as complicated as reality and fails to be useful.
As for just focusing on local elections - the fact of the matter is that local elections don't get nearly the same level of attention as presidential elections. Promoting third parties in the presidential race is conducive to helping them win local elections because it helps publicize them, and it makes up the vast majority of what people actually talk about. Ignoring the presidential race would mean sitting on the sidelines and ignoring virtually every political conversation, which is not an effective means of advancing a political cause.
Tbh, I'm very skeptical that you actually want anything like the same things that I want. There's this pervasive trend among the democratic party and their surrogates to simply accept whatever values or goals a constituent wants, and to simply focus on how voting democrat will help accomplish that goal - to be everything to everyone, in other words. In this case, what I want is for the democratic party to be unseated and replaced, and you're going along with that while trying to argue that the most effective means of accomplishing that is to vote democrat. I find that pretty absurd. No, the most effective way of advancing the goal of a third party replacing them is to vote for that third party, and that should be extremely obvious to anyone.