claim 1: “voting doesn’t change anything”
Never forget the recent case of Kris Mayes, who refuses to uphold the Arizona supreme court’s sweeping ban of abortion.
Kris Mayes only won her 2022 election by 280 votes. Voting changes things.
claim 2: “but genocide joe”
Yep. Hold that fucker’s feet to the fire. He has blood on his hands
But trump has promised to be indisputably worse. I won’t tell you how to vote. I just encourage you to vote. You’re not radical for ditching the only miniscule right the state has granted you to do some small aid for your neighbors.
the key flaw to your position:
yes. coordination. coordination, which, like it or not, cannot be done without cash. the tea party was able to gain its astroturfed support by coordnation, messaging, which took think tanks, writers and publishers. not free.
you are getting it absolutely correct with the caveat “when they’re described clearly and without buzzwords.” and what does it take to generate that clear communication? research, analysis, understanding, writing, marketing, canvassing, publishing, broadcasting. all of those are job descriptions that can be done remarkably well, for the cost of hiring people to do it. you are counting on a supermassive bulk of labor to reach millions of Americans that can’t and won’t appear for free, as much as i wish it would.
the problem, of course, is the Democratic party. if it would just be better and stop being a neoliberal protoconservative capitalist genocide supporting clownshow, and put a bit of cash toward doing some actual leftist groundwork, we would be fine, but of course we cannot hope for things to magically be better, only to work with things as they actually are.
How is it supposed to Become Better without pressure? Organizations are like organisms; they minimize energy expenditure - whether in the form of cash, calories, or labor. As long as being the lesser of two evils is a successful strategy, the DNC will not change. There's no pressure to change.
As it stands, it's in the organization's best interest to maintain the threat of Republican domestic policies. It's why there was no legislative attempt to codify abortion rights in the national legislature - the party benefits from the continued uncertainty. If they had pushed a vote, then individual members would have to answer to the public for how they voted -- worse still, it might have passed; then they'd have to find something new to campaign on.
I don’t disagree; you just bypass my main point.
There is no pressure without money. That’s literally all I am saying.
Right now, millions of Americans could skip the vote out of protest and go utterly unnoticed because there is no messaging backing them. They are indistinguishable from the majority of Americans that don’t vote anyway, and can be treated by Democrats as such.
Thus hilighting the key distinction between a leftist ditch-the-vote movement versus what the Tea Party was.
As soon as there is significant capital backing pro-Palestine views, my point will be moot. This has not happened yet though I pray it does.
Maybe if we were talking about a private business, sure. But a political party has pressure points outside of the financial - there is some minimum of voters required to keep the institution viable. If they can't hold office, they can't deliver to their donors.
Yes, that requires actually talking to people and organizing outside of the party structure itself. But that seems a damn sight more likely than an economy built around arms-manufacture and investment bubbles suddenly developing a conscious and deciding not to continue this very lucrative status quo.
Good thing boycotts, divestments and sanctions exist and are effective.
A lot of this discussion is overly voting centric, as you yourself know I’m sure. You’re asking the election to do everything, while I am simply asking the election to hold the overton window away from a total fascist government (look up Project 2025 if you haven’t).
There are other forms of activism than voting/abstaining. Voting is simply a last ditch measure to hold shit stable after everything else is said and done to the best of our ability. I just encourage you to understand that you are putting far too much emphasis on that one facet of democracy, in a way that puts much more risk on the shoulders of your neighbors.
I'm not sure fascism is a useful word here. We're talking about a country with a global navel presence, military installations on every continent; a country that accounts for half of all incarcerated people in the world, that has for decades ignored unanimous motions in the UN, who's economy and politics revolve around the central productive pole of weapons manufacture. The tipping point between "stable US" and "fascist US" seems like an arbitrary distinction at this moment in history.
I'm not asking elections to do everything, I'm asking people to stop treating federal elections like some bulwark against evil. It's not a useful way to think about it. It's a hoop to jump through. The electorate decides, mostly by incident and the collective sum of vague gut feelings, where the hoop is and how high is required to jump. What power exists there is the ability to say, too bad, not you! Beyond that, it's a rubber stamp - about as significant to the running of things as the King of England is to Downing Street.
If you think I am treating voting as a bulwark against evil you misunderstand my position from the first place. Never my intention. Simply here to say that calling for a non-vote is misplacing risk onto the most vulnerable people groups when better avenues are available.
oh, uh, if i didn't make it clear, I'm just talking at the federal level here. Local elections are far and away more important for keeping regional laws and policies somewhat in check.
Makes no difference. Calling for a non-vote without a viable alternative or backing at any level, local, state or federal, is placing undue risk on the backs of the most vulnerable.
Let me put it this way: Biden is not going to win the electoral collage. That's forgone at this point. He did not win by a particularly large margin last election, and that was with the added pressures of both Covid and everyone being sick and tired of hearing about Trump on the news.
Now, people are either angry about the price of groceries, the genocide in Palestine, or both. The democrats do not have the will to flip enough swing states to secure the presidency. Unpopular candidate, unhappy electorate. 2016 all over again. They will loose.
...so, why not use that inevitable failure to make demands of the party? The DNC has done more to put vulnerable people in danger than anyone -- they've floundered the two years when they had both the legislature and the presidency. Are you going to let this party hide behind our vulnerable populations, like human shields? Or are you going to hold them accountable in the only way that they will listen?