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Unfortunately our democracy uses a first-past-the-post voting system which trends toward a two-party system. This makes the Republicans and Democrats the only game in town.
Minority Rule: First Past the Post Voting
We need to leverage power to reduce the harm done to the minority groups fascists in the Republican party want to hurt. So rather than attempting to achieve a moral victory over Democrats, people on the left should do the most useful thing they can during elections for minorities and vote for Democrats.
The Alt-Right Playbook: The Cost of Doing Business
Why must one of those parties be the Democrats? I don't see no fucking Whigs around, do you?
Democrats won't reduce any harm. They'll just send out fundraising emails, like they did when Roe was overturned. During this last cycle, they threw the undocumented under the bus and Democratic candidates were parroting Republican "boys in girls' sports" hatred.
any chance you are one of the bright consultants who get paid millions by dnc to come up with the brilliant strategies to be so dogsit that they loose to orange buffoon ?
No. They only hire people who say what they want to hear, which is "move to the right at all costs."
Because unlike the Wigs, the Democrats are not divide over slavery. They can just move to the right on contemporary issues as Chris Murphy details here.
Hi, I'm a trans person. I'm not the most at risk trans person since I'm pre-transition, but it's definitely a case of they would if they could. I would not like to be murdered in a death camp please. Like if Democrats can't get trans messaging right, because they suck at winning, fine. At least they aren't trying to completely ostracize me from society and make me dig my own grave. I hope that gives a different perspective on this.
Democrats have no concept of solidarity. None. They just haven't thrown you under the bus yet, but they've let you know that they will. Their candidates have been using the Republican "boys in girls' sports" hatred in their campaign ads.
The undocumented? Under the bus. Muslims? Under the bus. Rail workers? Under the bus. If you expect solidarity from Democrats, prepare to tuck and roll.
Democrats have only recently been openly favorable to gay people within the last decade. Minorities have been using the Democrats to shift things to the left in this country for decades before that.
I'm aware of the messaging. That's still not the same as a ban on gender affirming care, removal of employment protections, and the rounding up of homeless people.
Biden actually helped rail workers. He should have stuck with them from the start and done more, but it's better than nothing.
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/10/1155763336/freight-rail-workers-union-paid-sick-leave-bernie-sanders-csx
The people who I would have expected solidarity from is the left. But instead I am constantly confronted by people who want moral victory over the Democrats. In this arrangement, I am the ball. Instead of kicking me, how about we leverage power to help people.
Vote for Democrats in elections not because they will fix our problems, stand with us, or even do what we want, but because it is how we demonstrate power to the fascists. It's how we protect the people that Republicans want to harm and kill. It's how we buy time to get a populist movement to co-opt the Democratic Party.
A big issue with this approach: The United States is not a law of nature; it doesn't have to exist. The system may only allow two options, but it does not guarantee that either one of those options will keep the system viable. Reduced harm is still harm, and at some point we needed to stop doing it.
This rhetoric is what is known as accelerationism. It's the idea that things have to get worse in order for them to get better. The United States not existing would mean the collapse of a society that supports about 340 million people. Letting the US burn to the ground is not useful, because it doesn't help any of the people living here.
The truth is that things get better when people learn from their mistakes and the bad things that happen to them. They then use that knowledge to make things better. There's no bottom to how bad things can get. Things can always get worse. And they will get worse unless we work to make them better.
Anyone can be tempted by the idea that they can make things better by letting them burn. But letting everything burn is how to harm the most people possible. In order to help anyone, we need to start leveraging power for each other. That means giving up on moral victories and analyzing strategies using utility instead of moral reasoning. edit: typo