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- JcbAzPx@lemmy.worldEnglish16 hours
To anti-quote Carlin, if voting didn’t do anything, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to stop us from doing it.
- Cyanova@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish16 hours
The big issue with electoralism is the tendency to reduce people down to believing in fairy tales about just needing the right rulers and everything will be fixed. Expecting a group of people, who keep threatening you with an increasingly right wing opposition rather than listening to their electorate, to actually serve your interests seems mindblowingly naive, especially given all the evidence to the contrary we have to hand by now.
It is possible to responsibly advocate for voting (obviously alongside taking more effective measures to put power back in people’s hands directly where possible), but this is incredibly rarely seen. Instead the voting becomes the be all and end all, and things keep sliding further and further.
22 hoursBut if they talk really hard maybe the green party gets 5% which would do checks notes absolutely nothing in a first-past-the-post system
- JargonWagon@lemmy.worldEnglish22 hours
Wrong! 5% of votes in green party means checks notes Democrats get 5% less votes, which secures a victory for Republicans!
It also pressures dems to lean more left. A thing we should be doing in blue states.
- CriticalThought@lemmy.worldEnglish19 hours
This seems true on the face of it, and it is definitely worth trying to get further left democrat candidates, but it seems to me that they have to believe that trying to capture said 5% won’t cause them to lose more in the process, especially if they can never “earn my vote” for much of said 5% no matter what they do.
- JargonWagon@lemmy.worldEnglish17 hours
First and foremost, we need to spread the implementation of ranked voting in more cities. Once enough cities have ranked voting and it’s proven successful and popular, then more cities will adopt, then states, and once enough states have adopted ranked voting, we’ll have a real chance for anyone to be elected despite what party they’re aligned with. Two states use it for federal elections, and many other states have cities that use it for local elections. All states that have it banned need to have it bills constantly in circulation to get it unbanned until it finally is, then bills to constantly have it implemented.
There are a lot of issues that need fixing, but I think starting here will open the floodgates for fixing a lot of the other issues.
- Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish22 hours
It’s not about keeping the action secret, it’s just about preventing the powers that be from finding out who took the actions.
If you can fire bomb a Walmart and have them not find out about it, that’s actually pretty impressive, or it was a really small fire.
- eneff@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish22 hours
at least none that could be directly related to action. which is exactly what OP was complaining about…
There are discrete opportunities to firebomb walmarts and I support each instance
The whole “everyone is 12” extends to things like this btw, if voting meant nothing, why is there a constant concerted effort of making voting particularly difficult? Are the politicians bored? Or is there something to a vote we’re not seeing that they do? Of course you don’t think those things you’re 12.
- Yuccagnocchiyaki@lemmy.worldEnglish24 hours
Illusion of choice and controlled opposition.
They have delivered NOTHING since the neoliberals infected the party. They are leadership and no one will replace them. I won’t keep listing all the ways that the leadership has stated and shown how they aren’t going to fix any of this. They will just make the “Jack Smith” rematch and “that will get trump this time”!
We will watch trump (if he is still alive) either never show up or pleas the fifth. We will watch the clips and get excited for a year and a half and then, election time!
It will be narrow margins, we CAN’T have another maga in there, better keep voting blue and NOT progressives because they are “unelectable”. Better keep appealing to the right, THAT WILL DELIVER FOR THE WORKING CLASS SOMEDAY
Experts already agree that we are in fascism. Please look into how many people vote out of fascism
When in the 40 years of this will be enough for people to see?
- Yuccagnocchiyaki@lemmy.worldEnglish20 hours
Revolution of course. How that is accomplished is debatable and would be best if it was something like a massive general strike.
We are in a horrible place. DOGE compromised every aspect of our federal government’s information security and data infrastructure. They invaded it, infected it with their AIs, and copied it onto servers. There is no getting that back.
State governments are still effective and people can still have a voice there. Wherever we go from here, it can’t be the status quo. We are in Thomas Paine and pre-revolution times right now.
There are concentration camps right now, treason, and we are dismantling the ICC.
Incremental voting while shifting right has been as effective as believing in trickle down economics.
We need a party that shares the same basic principle as the New Deal Democrats. Neoliberals CANT be that because they abandoned the whole idea of pre distribution policies (shaping the labor market itself through minimum wages, union rights, public works, protective tariffs, and financial regulation. The neoliberal turn replaced that with “redistribution” — letting the market run its course and then compensating the losers via tax-and-transfer tools like the Earned Income Tax Credit)
That’s the principle that can get us stuff incrementally
- 20 hours
I’m not sure what their opinion is, but:
Warfare against the private property owning class that rapes children and funds genocidal imperialist wars.
- 20 hours
The people talking about doing illegal shit won’t brag about doing said illegal shit, unless they’re stupid.
- agent_nycto@lemmy.worldEnglish1 day
The revolution is just leftist rapture. It’ll have fire and punish the ones who deserve it and it’ll happen any day now and when it’s done it’ll be a utopia and even though people have said it’ll happen for hundreds of years it’ll happen this lifetime for sure and we can do some things to push for it but just wait it’ll happen any day now
- kestrel7_7@lemmy.worldEnglish21 hours
Okay but this analogy falls apart because there have been many actual revolutions and never even a single rapture.
The contemporary USA, China, France, and many other countries’ governments were created by revolutions, it’s not even like they’re particularly rare in human history.
- agent_nycto@lemmy.worldEnglish22 hours
Ok fair, at least there’s been revolutions.
I’m just saying that’s how people are treating it. Why bother working for it when it’s inevitable? “It’ll come save us all” while ignoring the hard work and problems. Ignoring that long term permanent change is more of a result of boring, slow work.
- 20 hours
Voting doesn’t change anything, though, it contributes to the nothing changing if you think voting does anything. The gradual change you’re talking about is organizing and building alternative systems of power so that in the future there can exist the basis of a revolution.
The imperial core will be the last to revolt properly. Its inhabitants are too comfortable and chauvinistic to want the actual change that global equality would need. As long as the new system doesn’t radically change their view on exploitation the western left will at best achieve national socialism. The western hegemonial structures need to be crushed first if the capital R Revolution is to come. Western leftists at large have neither the power nor the intention to tear down these systems as that would mean that their own living standards would deteriorate in the short term.
- 1 day
Honestly for all my bloodthist, ya ain’t wrong. Fact of the matter is most leftists are either too chickenshit or too insular to do jack for shit. Or they get into petty and stupid squabbles effectively preventing any attempts at outreach, seriously id happily join a group of leftists who can stop fighting about theory for five fucking seconds and do something.
I’m a Redneck who follows the old ways of being an anti corporate asshole, I really don’t care about your Soviet larp let’s just set up a communal food pantry you fuckwits. I’ve never felt more rage than when some yuppie ass twig tried fucking purity testing me via quize.
- agent_nycto@lemmy.worldEnglish22 hours
For being so focused on inclusion, we have an issue with purity testing for sure. Maybe people need to accept less perfect allies.
- Yuccagnocchiyaki@lemmy.worldEnglish24 hours
So to you, maintain the status quo and keep the masters happy so they don’t release their “retribution” on us again.
Be quiet slaves?
- nickiwest@lemmy.worldEnglish23 hours
Do you not understand that incremental change is possible without revolution? There’s a middle ground between “maintain the status quo” and “overthrow the government.”
If you were born in this century, you haven’t ever seen evidence that Congress can actually pass legislation that makes our lives better. It used to happen, and I believe it can happen again if we can elect people who aren’t corporate shills.
There was a time when people like Mamdani weren’t the exception and political figures actively tried to make life better for all of their constituents. That should be our expectation, and anyone who doesn’t deliver should lose re-election.
Although I’m sure we can vote better politicians, I’m also highly doubtful that we will vote better politicians. People are uncultured, uneducated, propagandized to their eyeballs and wholly unwilling to learn.
- nickiwest@lemmy.worldEnglish22 hours
This is a real problem. US politics has turned into a team sport where “our side” and “their side” are supposed to be enemies fighting for dominance instead of working together for the common good. Voter loyalty to the political team is prized regardless of the real-life result that the team achieves. Critical thinking is actively discouraged and propaganda dictates the perception of reality.
The challenge is how we break that propaganda bubble and get people to hold their politicians to a minimum standard of actually improving the lives of their constituents.
A lot of people say they have deprogrammed their family members through a long process of good-faith discussions and targeted debunking of conspiracy theories or false reporting. Some have used chatbots to educate their loved ones or even manipulated algorithms to show fewer partisan conspiracies and more factual information.
Cults famously fall apart when their leaders die, and the leader of America’s most dangerous political cult is no spring chicken. It’s possible that the blinders will fall away pretty quickly after he’s gone. But that doesn’t mean we can’t – or shouldn’t – attempt to make progress where we can in the meantime.
- Yuccagnocchiyaki@lemmy.worldEnglish23 hours
This is impossible with the current leadership and they don’t change.
People aren’t going for the stupid “blue no matter who”. Mamdani and Al-Sayad have even shown that “blue no matter who” isn’t even a thing that the DNC believes in. Why do you think that is? When the DNC had a leader who wanted change and younger reps, they canned him IMMEDIATELY AIPAC funds %60 of the Dems and the Dems will ALWAYS fund Republicans to defeat progressives in elections so they can win by you blue magas
You cannot vote out of fascism it has NEVER happened and we have been couped
I am not against voting. I am against voting for Democrats (the status quo) they cannot be removed until the DNC gets rid of support for Israel and neoliberals are kicked out of the party and sent to the right where they belong.
You cannot compromise with pedophiles. You do not incrementally reduce concentration camps. You don’t incrementally make progress with fascists that are killing DNC reps in MN (when have they brought that up), threatening and intimidating ilhan Omar (of which SCHUMER HAS SADI NOTHING) .
THEY ARE NOT ON OUR SIDE
- nickiwest@lemmy.worldEnglish21 hours
Politicians in AIPAC’s pocket count as “corporate shills” in my book.
Many of the top Democrats are bought and paid for, they don’t make people’s lives better, and people should stop voting for them.
But the place for your protest vote is in the primaries, where you actually have a better choice. In a general election where your choices are Corporate Democrat or Fascist Republican, the two are simply not interchangeable.
People who make that false equivalence and discourage voting because “both sides are the same” have exacerbated the general apathy that has enabled the Republican party to push American political discourse farther and farther to the right for the past 30 years.
- Yuccagnocchiyaki@lemmy.worldEnglish21 hours
“People who make that false equivalence and discourage voting because “both sides are the same” have exacerbated the general apathy that has enabled the Republican party to push American political discourse farther and farther to the right for the past 30 years.”
That’s the biggest lie of all. You centrists have been shitting on the left and APPEASING the monsters that got us here now. THAT is why political discourse and policy has shifted farther and farther right.
- agent_nycto@lemmy.worldEnglish22 hours
No? Why would you assume that’s what I’m about? What a weird leap.
- 2 days
It’s also funny how they pretend that the two actions are mutually exclusive, as if the rules of the universe won’t allow you to firebomb Walmarts the minute you cast a vote. It’s almost like discouraging people from voting is the actual purpose.
- pirc_lover@feddit.ukEnglish2 days
This is it. You can do harm reduction in voting for the least-worst feasible candidate, while organising/protesting on issues you disagree with them on.
E.g. In the UK, Labour is often poor on queer rights issues, but comparatively massively better than the tories/reform would be, not to mention economic and welfare policies. So I vote Labour, and attend pro-trans rights protests and criticise Labour and their stance on this issue.
- Passerby6497@lemmy.worldEnglish24 hours
Nothing is anything when you manipulate a definition to exclude what you don’t want to include.
Voting is a form of harm reduction, by reducing the damage done by a provably worse candidate. If you meant harm elimination, you’re right, but perfect is the enemy of better
Harm reduction voting in 2016 would have prevented the stacking of the courts that led to roe v wade being reversed, along with the naked destruction of our civil rights. Harm reduction voting in 2024 would have prevented the war with Iran, and would have lessened the support that the USA had behind Israel in Gaza. Anybody who says the Democrats would have been just as bad are at best stupid, and at worst, intentionally trying to accelerate a chaotic situation into a worse one in the naive hope that their preferred ideology will come out on top. And any leftist should be politically aware enough to know how that ends up…
- commie@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish24 hours
Harm reduction voting in 2016 would have prevented the stacking of the courts that led to roe v wade being reversed
counterfactuals can’t be proven, but you’re still misusing the term “harm reduction”
if people are threatened by the court system, harm reduction is finding the way those harms manifest and mitigating them specifically.
in this case, harm reduction is clandestine abortion access. that’s not something you can get by voting.
- 24 hours
Harm reduction is the reduction of harm, ignoring whatever other niche definitions you want to pretend are more important to suit your absurd point right now, which voting generally accomplishes in a vaguely democratic system.
- commie@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish24 hours
no harm was reduced by voting for Kamala
no harm was reduced by voting for Biden Trump still got a second term.
voting is not harm reduction.
- freagle@lemmy.mlEnglish2 days
You can do harm reduction in voting for the least-worst feasible candidate
The research does not support this thesis. Policy is largely independent of popularity.
- starik@lemmy.todayEnglish2 days
Yeah, things like the Democratic party supporting gay marriage after it gained critical mass in popularity are a total coincidence. The policies are just random. Same thing with the the Republican party morphing overnight into a white nationalist cult who doesn’t care about deficit spending anymore. You never know where the parties are headed, and it has nothing to do with the desires of the base and who they vote for.
the Republican party morphing overnight into a white nationalist cult who doesn’t care about deficit spending anymore.
I’m confused by the sarcasm. Do you think these are recent?
Edit: I’ll assume by the response that it’s “yes, I can forgive 2016 they didn’t know” types. Look up the deficit by administration, or incarceration rates.
No, politics is not random, politics is what economic elites want. That’s why Marxist would say it’s a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”.
Here a direct quote from the famous 2014 study by Martin Gilens & Benjamin Page:
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
Disclaimer: There are sources that say this study has some oversimplifications and claim that at least “limited leverage” is possible.
But we shouldn’t settle for just limited leverage as people. Unfortunately, neither voting nor individual arson attacks will change that.
Instead we should see voting and (the limited effect it has on politics) as our tool to make more and more people realize that big business ruling everything isn’t an error in the system, but its core function. It always existed to protect the interest of the economic elites. We need to understand that the system has to be replaced not fixed.
- Glide@piefed.caEnglish2 days
Okay, but that quote doesn’t support the conclusion that engaging in harm-reduction via voting is instead a bad thing. In fact, it doesn’t even argue that your vote doesn’t matter. The only thing it suggests - and I can’t even say “proves” here, as your own disclaimer brings the validity of this study’s conclusions into question - is that mass voting doesn’t result in policy change from the major parties.
Voting for the party that is going to bomb brown people, rather than the one that is going to bomb brown people, round up locals who look too brown, and de-legitimize LGBTQ+ peoples of all demographics, is harm reduction worth engaging in.
I eagerly await the total failure of capitalism as much as the next socialist, but I am not condemning local minorities just to win some form of imagined moral high ground.
- freagle@lemmy.mlEnglish2 days
I just don’t think the Ds actually do harm reduction. Biden and his DOJ had the Epstein files and they did literally nothing with them. And that’s just the clearest example of the enabling they do. Obama and Biden expanded ICE into what it is today and created the policy framework that Trump is using, but Biden did nothing to address it when he was president. He just opted not to use it, knowing full well what the Republicans would do because they were literally publishing treatises on what they would do. The Democrats are harm reduction like the Good Cop has your best interests at heart.
- starik@lemmy.todayEnglish21 hours
Electing the ones who opt not to use ICE the way Trump uses ICE is an example of harm reduction. It doesn’t mean Democrats solve all problems; that’s literally the reason the term “harm reduction” is used - to distinguish it from optimal solutions, while still acknowledging its superiority over the alternative.
- pirc_lover@feddit.ukEnglish2 days
I have had a read through that study, and I would consider the following points striking:
- it is entirely US-centric. Extrapolation to the entire world from this study would be pretty fruitless — in the extreme example, Switzerland is a democracy that uses referenda more than most (any?) other country, and so any policy decided by one of these by necessity follows the will of the voters (though not necessarily their interests, of course).
- it is focussed on a very specific period of time — between 1981 and 2002. What’s striking about that period is Reagan - Bush - Clinton - Bush – in general a rightward swing (3/4 republican, and Clinton was a ‘third way’ Democrat). Is it particularly surprising that these governments aligned with elite interests?
To give a counter example to this study: consider the exit to the gilded age. We have a period comparable to now, where political power was bought and sold; corruption reigned. However, the government of Teddy Roosevelt made a number of moves counter to corporate interests, breaking up monopolies, reserving vast swathes of national parks, legislation protecting food and drug adulteration (note: not an unequivocal fan of TR — I am not in favour of his gunboat diplomacy).
A more recent example: under the Biden administration, there was a significant uplift in antitrust efforts. Lina Khan was appointed to the FTC, and who knows what she could have accomplished given more time. In a UK-based example, we are (finally, thank fucking god) renationalising our public services. It is absurd to think this would have happened under the opposition.
TLDR: democratic socialism is possible; your study is a snapshot of conservative administrations in America and — no shit — they aligned with corporate interests.
- freagle@lemmy.mlEnglish2 days
TLDR: democratic socialism is possible
That is not at all the TLDR. Your entire argument is that outside the US voting can influence policy. No one is arguing against that, but that in no way supports the thesis that democratic socialism is possible. All of history shows that democratic socialism has never happened. There is no known path to democratic socialism at all.
- pinto@sh.itjust.worksEnglish1 day
You hate democratic socialism because it doesn’t kill enough people like Stalin’s National Socialism
- pirc_lover@feddit.ukEnglish2 days
I mean that’s ridiculous — Brexit for one is an example of a massive change to the British political landscape that doesn’t happen without the public voting for it.
- JustPlainDave@lemmy.zipEnglish2 days
Shut the fuck up. If you don’t want to vote, then don’t vote. But you have no reason to try and stop others from voting.
His reason is that he thinks anything that hurts the west is good. Because his simply brain can only understand black and white binary arguments one time when he was 14 he discovered the USA are the bad guys.
- NonconfrontationaI@lemmy.mlEnglish2 days
Do you think the 250 year old country founded on genocide and slavery that has only not been at war for 20 years of its history is the good guy?
Hey man I see you joined a week ago and literally all you do is argue with people.
This isnt a healthy way to spend your time. I recommend taking up a hobby like reading or knitting
- dalekcaan@feddit.nlEnglish2 days
Yuuup. Recently called out a post for discouraging voting, but the author was a mod so they removed my comment. Called them out on that and they removed that comment and banned me from the sub.
- aaa999@lemmy.worldEnglish2 days
gonna take a wild guess and say latestagecapitalism or progressivepolitics
- LeftReddit2@lemmy.worldEnglish2 days
If you think voting is useless, I gotta ask then why do so many politicians try to surpress it?
- 15 hours
As a black person, if voting is useless, then why did Jim Crow era South come up with millions of ways to stop Black people from voting? Why do d still have systems set in place to make voting for minorities harder, like laws about former felons not being able to vote?
If you’re a minority (race and gender, fuck even poor white men) your ancestors didn’t fight and die for voting rights just for you to sit here and go “oh it doesn’t really do anything”
Idealism is great, but you need to have some roots in what you can realistically effect. There are very left-wing people that can do both. I’m a liberal though.
Had a very long argument on here with some “leftist” several months back where they were trying to argue voting does nothing and makes you complicit with the genocide in Gaza, but during the argument they conceded that republicans had a much more extreme on Gaza as well as were doing worse things to citizens than any democrat, and that voting doesn’t stop you from doing any other kind of activists, but they still just doubled down on “voting bad”
Genuinely insane
They boil down to:
- Paid trolls
- Genuinely mentally ill people whose decision making centers are broken
Either way the solution is not to engage with them in anyway. You will not convince them to be reasonable and your energy is better spent elsewhere.
- crispbacon99@lemmy.zipEnglish1 day
Haha, the paid trolls are much more convincing and I’ve noticed a lot more sophisticated propaganda on the fediverse. Regular Bots are probably in higher abundance on meta and Reddit and other big tech social media platforms.
- SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish1 day
I knew a guy who daily stared into the sun for a few seconds.
He claimed to vote and tried to get me not to. I think he was either a secret Nazi or a secret superalcoholic or both.
- anewfox@lemmy.zipEnglish2 days
i regularly get flamed by asking my fellow so-called (internet) leftists one piercing question: “how?” i’ve been called a nazi, maga, etc. because i want people to actually consider how they would go about implementing their big ideas.
it’s great to have big endgame ideas, it’s important to have a direction. but if all you have are the big endgame ideas and nothing else, you are simply not a serious person and you have a lot of political literacy you need to work on. being terminally online and jockeying with nothing but ideas is not praxis, it’s not even theory. it’s just attention whoring for updoots and likes.
- prole@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish24 hours
They love to go on about the French Revolution, yet never acknowledge that it immediately led to dictatorship.
- kestrel7_7@lemmy.worldEnglish22 hours
Kinda seems like leftists spend a LOT of time thinking about how to avoid counter-revolutions but whatever
- CriticalThought@lemmy.worldEnglish19 hours
Kinda seems like leftists spend a LOT of time thinking
This part comes across very clearly… seems there’s no time for anything that would follow though.
- 2 days
Reading this reminded me of a quote. I unfortunately can’t remember for the life of me who said this, but it was something to the effect of: “I appreciate many leftist ideas. But, in my experience, if your only acceptable outcome is ‘utopia’, and your only acceptable timeline is ‘immediately’, then things aren’t likely to go your way.”
- GeneralEmergency@lemmy.worldEnglish2 days
People like that are on the same political level as that one Nickelback song.
- 2 days
It’s important to remember the famous song “everyone I don’t like is literally hitler” by rusty cage and that it applies to a shocking number of people online
- DoctorWhoDMC@lemmy.worldEnglish2 days
I was banned from a certain “leftist” sub for arguing it’s stupid to dismiss voting or dislike voting instead of whatever-else because election outcomes have very practical consequences for a lot of people in the here and now and you might need to start looking at Plan B’s in the event your systemic revolution that gets rid of the US government and allows you to rebuild– a messy process that you’ve not elaborated on– doesn’t happen.
Far as I’m concerned, it’s proof some leftists are just as dumb and easily mislead as ultra conservatives; your rhetoric is indistinguishable from anti-voting memes that came right out of a Russian bot farm.
There’s a certain leftist opposition to structure in general.
I had a comrade who was actively trying to get out of jury duty because he has fair objections to the legal system. Others in our organization were encouraging him to wear communist pins and whatnot so he doesn’t get selected.
But like… what if some reactionary takes your place on the jury? Is that preferable to you being selected and needing to briefly take part in a deeply flawed system that you believe should be overhauled? Shouldn’t people who have dedicated their life to fixing these systems make it a point to operate within them in some capacity?
It’s as if they are worried participating in the system in any way will somehow taint you.
Those subs are just propaganda tools for russian and chinese bots and propagandists - and the useful idiots. You cannot really tell any of them apart.
- ClownStatue@piefed.socialEnglish2 days
Agreed. Voters holding out for the perfect candidate infuriate me. The only “perfect” candidate is staring at you in the mirror. Outside of that, compromises are necessary.
