So, in that case, backing genocide was completely fucking idiotic to toy with.
Harm reduction arguments stop working when the harm reduction side STILL fucking backs genocide.
If that is the best we can do, and you expect me to be complicit with genocide by voting for someone who could stop it with one phone call but hasn’t, then maybe the system needs to break.
If you want to preserve it this system through genocide and ethnic cleansing, then that says something about your moral code, or lack thereof.
Trump governed like a milquetoast Republican and Democrats haven’t even tried to undo any of his legislative victories. They even committed more money to completing Trump’s stupid wall.
The difference is that he didn’t accept the peaceful transition of power at all. And they’re at it again with their new Project 2025, they’re aiming for fascism.
Electing Biden in 2020 didn’t stop them. We’re closer to fascist dictatorship than ever. What will electing Biden this time around do to stop them, so that we’re not on the precipice again in 2028, if not earlier?
I mean, it is. Democracies can do genocides without being fascist. It’s not great, but it’s true. The alternative is Trump, who probably wouldn’t even be making lip service to a ceasefire or mentioning the West Bank settlements like Biden has.
Here’s the thing: We had to hold our noses and vote for Biden in 2020 to stop the fascists, yet they have advanced anyway. So we hold our noses and vote Biden again in 2024, and…
…what? The fascists decide it’s taken too long, and give up? Or does their movement continue to fester, and make gains in statehouses. It feels like the choice is between an autocratic President in 2025, or an autocratic President in 2029 when democratic norms are weaker.
Project 2025 is a new iteration of something latent in your political system, Reagan was the first to explicitly reference unitary executive theory in signing statements which Bush Jr. also did.
Ultimately your founders didn’t define what the office of the president really means, and presidents have explored and pushed this position to the limits it exists as today. Trump maybe will succeed in finally exposing the critical faults that lie in the country’s founding notions.
My whole life since Reagan Democrats have been appealing to the idea that “this is the last chance” for democracy in the US in order to double-down on the consenting arrangement that has only spiraled further to the right, resulting in the current situation. Maybe it’s been true this whole time, but this “just vote Dem so we can fix it later” thing is clearly just making it worse, else you wouldn’t be in this situation.
Until Dems unite behind ranked choice voting and well-designed non-partisan redistricting, DESPITE the fact that they might lose seats to rando third party candidates, nothing will change. I wish the American populous of all political stripes knew about these necessary reforms and were willing to loudly fight for them. It would change the USA as we know it.
Have you read those executive orders? They’re basically all cultural war pandering from Trump. Undoing legislation takes political action not just signing executive orders away. What do you think about Biden explicitly supporting Trump’s legislation that does have a major impact like the Trump Tariffs?
It’s too late for Dems to field an alternative that doesn’t just play spoiler and get Trump elected. And barring some massive turn of events, the spell Trump has on the GOP isn’t going to break. Americans need to game it out long term and think strategically about who will be more likely to lead to the kind of change you’d like to see. Even if you think Biden won’t do any of the things you want to see happen, at least there will be room to talk about it under him. A second Trump presidency will again smother outside opinions under a cloud of chaos and cruelty and incompetence. If you like the abiity to protest - remember how it was dealt with under Trump. Which means for anyone with a shred of humanity - plug your nose if you have to and vote Biden.
Good take–hate on Americans while ignoring the Americans correctly explaining to you how the American electoral system is broken. Spend more time telling Americans that want viable third parties that they need to also support ranked-choice voting, and less time casting shade. If there’s any truth in your words, its simply that people need to know that having viable third parties REQUIRES ranked choice voting. I’m terrified that the US “No Labels” party will hand the election to Trump, because under the current system, ANY third party is an election spoiler.
There isn’t only 2 options. It’s insane that you keep voting for the same 2 corrupt useless parties when you have several others to choose from. And if everyone keeps saying “but they’ll never make it” they actually won’t. Only if you start voting for them the 2 party system can be abolished.
As a staunch Bernie supporter, I’ve accepted that America is currently too broken to consider alternatives. We are on the brink of full collapse of our entire democratic system and have already been through an insurrection that a large percentage of the population is perfectly okay with. We’re heading toward full blow autocracy with another greedy Putin / Xi at the helm which will threaten the entire world so cut us some slack if we need to be pragmatic for the time being.
My only hope in the US right now as a socialist, is that the current neoliberal death spiral between the two consenting parties will eventually lead to people saying enough is enough in a meaningful political way, that combined with labor organizing. Every use of the word “realistic” to bolster the current arrangement of the parties is evidence they’re still comfortable with it in some manner and believe in it, that they still consent to this “reality.” The continued erosion of the social contract will change this over time, then they’ll either turn their dissatisfaction towards an internalized “other,” or they will choose the solidarity option and throw the bosses of their backs.
Accepting things are bad and displaying how this affects you to others is the bare minimum to even begin to organize against this system. Any time a Democrat supporter tries to do the “realistic” or “clearly better but not good” thing they’re rationalizing and regulating what should be a display of revulsion.
It is insane, but again, we have to be realistic about how things work. The system is literally slanted to emphasize two parties. If we had something like ranked choice voting then at least we could start to support third options. But the way it works now, unfortunately, a vote for a third party is as good as a vote for the candidate you hate the most.
To win the presidential election, you need to win a majority of the vote in enough states to win a majority of electoral college votes.
If no-one gets 270 electoral votes, then the House of Representatives meets. Each state delegation gets 1 vote. Right now, that means that the Republican wins, due to e.g. Wyoming and Alaska getting just as much of a vote as NY and California, and Republican gerrymandering of swing states.
There’s literally no way for third party candidates to be elected president. The best that a third party has ever done was in 1860, a 4 way race between a Democrat, Republican, Southern Democrat, and Constitutional Unionist.
Lincoln, the Republican, got 39.8% of the vote but won 18 states and 180 electoral votes. The Democrat, Douglass, got 29.5% of the vote but only won a single state. Breckenridge got only 18.1% of the vote but carried most of the southern states. And Bell got 12.6% of the vote and carried 3 states - Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.
So Douglas ended up with more than twice as many actual votes as Bell, but got over 3x the electoral vote. And Breckenridge only got less than half as many electoral college votes that he’d need to win, and could realistically have only picked up Bell’s.
The last time a third party candidate won a single electoral college vote was in 1968, when George Wallace won Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana. He was the former governor of Alabama, and had left the Democratic party after the 1964 civil rights law and 1965 voting rights law were passed by Johnson.
The Democrats are also more of a big tent than most parties in counties using party list PR would be. In Italy, AOC and Manchin wouldn’t be in the same party, while in the US they basically have to be to win.
The two party system exists for structural reasons. Plurality only works well in two candidate elections; third parties only do well in districts where they functionally replace a major party. Getting rid of the two party system is possible by changing the structure - switching to e.g. STAR voting in the senate and presidency and using e.g. MMP or STV in the House. But burying your head in the sand to pretend the structural issues don’t exist just doesn’t work.
That’s the consensus reality you’ve accepted yes, it’s also what got you to this situation and what will keep you on this downward spiral, until the social contract erodes to the point enough people lose faith in this consensus reality.
Oh I wouldn’t bet a dollar on being able to convince Americans they have other options, despite them having a system where basically anyone can run for office. They’re completely enraptured with the consensus reality you express here and the political system is designed to keep them engaged in it. Only when you lose faith in this reality will anything change, the material conditions of your life will convince you.
I think a rather large portion of the population has lost faith in the system, the fact that we all feel like the only thing we’re voting for is “not the handmaid’s tale” as opposed to voting for something speaks volumes. A vote for Democrats today is simply a vote for “Not the Republicans.” We have nothing to vote for and not an insignificant number of us realize that.
We don’t have real options because even though there are other parties we have an entire society built to prevent that, everything from the political parties themselves to the media that keeps the population mislead/underinformed. Our entire society is built to protect the status quo for the wealthy.
I wish all it took was being jaded, we’re well ahead on that one. I think it’s why Trump even exists as a political entity at all, the Republican voters have also given up on the system. I think the problem shows the difference in how we choose to “solve” the issue. “Conservatives,” completely going against their name, want to burn it all to the ground via Trump and start “new.” Democrats seem to believe in some aspects of the system and want to rebuild from within the current structure. The political structures of RNC & DNC obviously want nothing but the status quo.
This all makes a lot of sense. I view the Republicans and Democrats as different aesthetics of the consenting neoliberal economic arrangement, and agree with a notion of post-politics to describe this situation, where politics becomes increasingly engaged in cultural issues since your arrangement in the political economy is no longer up for debate. The neoliberal system is what’s in crisis and is basically running on fumes at this point, no longer sincerely believed in by determining actors within it. As the systemic stresses of degrading neoliberal capitalism turn inward it manifests in different ways politically. Trump doesn’t happen from nothing, there are real systemic anxieties underlying that, the problem for Democrats is any serious acceptance and solution of those anxieties is in conflict with the forces that keep them legitimate. The Republicans accept the brutality of the system as necessary and the Democrats try and put a good brand on it.
To suggest options exist without laying them out suggests your ignorance of reality might be greater than the Americans. How would a people trapped in an externally imposed set of political constraints be able to recognize their alternatives without some more perspective being shared.
The alternatives have been explored from the American perspective. If there is a path we have missed, please enlighten us.
I told you the option, losing faith in this consensus reality, nobody is doing that for you because your faith in it is contingent on the conditions of your life.
Alternatives have been denied by this consensus reality. The Populists of the 19th century had another vision and were promptly dealt with through imposed segregation, a racial and economic order imposed to divide them. Eugene Debs’ vision was dealt with by capital and military interests and internal divisions. Taft-Hartley act denied the power of labor. The red scare eroded class consciousness so you don’t even organize or identify around your economic reality anymore. The neoliberal consensus of the last 50 years between the major parties, the military industrial complex driving your country’s geopolitics, have brought you to the current moment of the social contract eroding.
The thing is, we do typically have 4-7 choices on the presidential ballot. Unfortunately our voting system strongly discourages voting for other parties if you want to actually affect the results.
Suggesting there’s a better option breaks American’s brains.
Well except the part where we’re on the brink of fascism and not voting will get Trump elected, which is completely idiotic to toy with
So, in that case, backing genocide was completely fucking idiotic to toy with.
Harm reduction arguments stop working when the harm reduction side STILL fucking backs genocide.
If that is the best we can do, and you expect me to be complicit with genocide by voting for someone who could stop it with one phone call but hasn’t, then maybe the system needs to break.
If you want to preserve it this system through genocide and ethnic cleansing, then that says something about your moral code, or lack thereof.
Trump governed like a milquetoast Republican and Democrats haven’t even tried to undo any of his legislative victories. They even committed more money to completing Trump’s stupid wall.
The difference is that he didn’t accept the peaceful transition of power at all. And they’re at it again with their new Project 2025, they’re aiming for fascism.
Electing Biden in 2020 didn’t stop them. We’re closer to fascist dictatorship than ever. What will electing Biden this time around do to stop them, so that we’re not on the precipice again in 2028, if not earlier?
It at least delays it. And the alternative is voting for Trump.
Similar to leaping out of the window of a burning building, I guess, a chance to figure out a way to survive on the way down instead of burning up?
Delayed fascism that requires voting for someone who could stop genocide and ethnic cleansing with one phone call but doesn’t isn’t delayed fascism.
I mean, it is. Democracies can do genocides without being fascist. It’s not great, but it’s true. The alternative is Trump, who probably wouldn’t even be making lip service to a ceasefire or mentioning the West Bank settlements like Biden has.
Who do you want to elect then? A third party that can’t mathematically get elected?
Here’s the thing: We had to hold our noses and vote for Biden in 2020 to stop the fascists, yet they have advanced anyway. So we hold our noses and vote Biden again in 2024, and…
…what? The fascists decide it’s taken too long, and give up? Or does their movement continue to fester, and make gains in statehouses. It feels like the choice is between an autocratic President in 2025, or an autocratic President in 2029 when democratic norms are weaker.
And no, I don’t have a solution.
Project 2025 is a new iteration of something latent in your political system, Reagan was the first to explicitly reference unitary executive theory in signing statements which Bush Jr. also did.
Ultimately your founders didn’t define what the office of the president really means, and presidents have explored and pushed this position to the limits it exists as today. Trump maybe will succeed in finally exposing the critical faults that lie in the country’s founding notions.
My whole life since Reagan Democrats have been appealing to the idea that “this is the last chance” for democracy in the US in order to double-down on the consenting arrangement that has only spiraled further to the right, resulting in the current situation. Maybe it’s been true this whole time, but this “just vote Dem so we can fix it later” thing is clearly just making it worse, else you wouldn’t be in this situation.
Until Dems unite behind ranked choice voting and well-designed non-partisan redistricting, DESPITE the fact that they might lose seats to rando third party candidates, nothing will change. I wish the American populous of all political stripes knew about these necessary reforms and were willing to loudly fight for them. It would change the USA as we know it.
Except they have, did and are doing.
Lie. They stopped completing the stupid wall. (But they didn’t break contracts which were already done and paid for).
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/06/us/border-wall-biden.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67015137
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/10/biden-administration-waives-26-laws-for-border-wall-construction
I’m some cases they’re even doubling down on Trump’s policies. The Trump Tariffs, which the WTO ruled against in 2022, Biden condemned the WTO in response: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/09/wto-ruling-trump-tariffs-violate-rules-00073282
[Here’s some of what Biden has reversed](https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/05/14/executive-order-on-the-revocation-of-certain-presidential-actions-and-technical-amendment/#:~:text=The following Presidential actions are,3%2C 2020 (Building and Rebuilding)
Have you read those executive orders? They’re basically all cultural war pandering from Trump. Undoing legislation takes political action not just signing executive orders away. What do you think about Biden explicitly supporting Trump’s legislation that does have a major impact like the Trump Tariffs?
Because that’s not how it works.
It’s too late for Dems to field an alternative that doesn’t just play spoiler and get Trump elected. And barring some massive turn of events, the spell Trump has on the GOP isn’t going to break. Americans need to game it out long term and think strategically about who will be more likely to lead to the kind of change you’d like to see. Even if you think Biden won’t do any of the things you want to see happen, at least there will be room to talk about it under him. A second Trump presidency will again smother outside opinions under a cloud of chaos and cruelty and incompetence. If you like the abiity to protest - remember how it was dealt with under Trump. Which means for anyone with a shred of humanity - plug your nose if you have to and vote Biden.
It’s only too late because Americans’ brains are broken.
Good take–hate on Americans while ignoring the Americans correctly explaining to you how the American electoral system is broken. Spend more time telling Americans that want viable third parties that they need to also support ranked-choice voting, and less time casting shade. If there’s any truth in your words, its simply that people need to know that having viable third parties REQUIRES ranked choice voting. I’m terrified that the US “No Labels” party will hand the election to Trump, because under the current system, ANY third party is an election spoiler.
There isn’t only 2 options. It’s insane that you keep voting for the same 2 corrupt useless parties when you have several others to choose from. And if everyone keeps saying “but they’ll never make it” they actually won’t. Only if you start voting for them the 2 party system can be abolished.
As a staunch Bernie supporter, I’ve accepted that America is currently too broken to consider alternatives. We are on the brink of full collapse of our entire democratic system and have already been through an insurrection that a large percentage of the population is perfectly okay with. We’re heading toward full blow autocracy with another greedy Putin / Xi at the helm which will threaten the entire world so cut us some slack if we need to be pragmatic for the time being.
My only hope in the US right now as a socialist, is that the current neoliberal death spiral between the two consenting parties will eventually lead to people saying enough is enough in a meaningful political way, that combined with labor organizing. Every use of the word “realistic” to bolster the current arrangement of the parties is evidence they’re still comfortable with it in some manner and believe in it, that they still consent to this “reality.” The continued erosion of the social contract will change this over time, then they’ll either turn their dissatisfaction towards an internalized “other,” or they will choose the solidarity option and throw the bosses of their backs.
Accepting things are bad and displaying how this affects you to others is the bare minimum to even begin to organize against this system. Any time a Democrat supporter tries to do the “realistic” or “clearly better but not good” thing they’re rationalizing and regulating what should be a display of revulsion.
It is insane, but again, we have to be realistic about how things work. The system is literally slanted to emphasize two parties. If we had something like ranked choice voting then at least we could start to support third options. But the way it works now, unfortunately, a vote for a third party is as good as a vote for the candidate you hate the most.
The problem is mathematical.
To win the presidential election, you need to win a majority of the vote in enough states to win a majority of electoral college votes.
If no-one gets 270 electoral votes, then the House of Representatives meets. Each state delegation gets 1 vote. Right now, that means that the Republican wins, due to e.g. Wyoming and Alaska getting just as much of a vote as NY and California, and Republican gerrymandering of swing states.
There’s literally no way for third party candidates to be elected president. The best that a third party has ever done was in 1860, a 4 way race between a Democrat, Republican, Southern Democrat, and Constitutional Unionist.
Lincoln, the Republican, got 39.8% of the vote but won 18 states and 180 electoral votes. The Democrat, Douglass, got 29.5% of the vote but only won a single state. Breckenridge got only 18.1% of the vote but carried most of the southern states. And Bell got 12.6% of the vote and carried 3 states - Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.
So Douglas ended up with more than twice as many actual votes as Bell, but got over 3x the electoral vote. And Breckenridge only got less than half as many electoral college votes that he’d need to win, and could realistically have only picked up Bell’s.
The last time a third party candidate won a single electoral college vote was in 1968, when George Wallace won Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana. He was the former governor of Alabama, and had left the Democratic party after the 1964 civil rights law and 1965 voting rights law were passed by Johnson.
The Democrats are also more of a big tent than most parties in counties using party list PR would be. In Italy, AOC and Manchin wouldn’t be in the same party, while in the US they basically have to be to win.
The two party system exists for structural reasons. Plurality only works well in two candidate elections; third parties only do well in districts where they functionally replace a major party. Getting rid of the two party system is possible by changing the structure - switching to e.g. STAR voting in the senate and presidency and using e.g. MMP or STV in the House. But burying your head in the sand to pretend the structural issues don’t exist just doesn’t work.
Thanks for taking the time to write this comment. It is a pleasure to read informed and educational comments.
There isn’t right now, unfortunately.
That’s the consensus reality you’ve accepted yes, it’s also what got you to this situation and what will keep you on this downward spiral, until the social contract erodes to the point enough people lose faith in this consensus reality.
So tell us, who’s the better option that actually exists and is running and will have the dnc allow them to run?
You’re not convincing the entire country to suddenly vote 3rd party in under a year…
Oh I wouldn’t bet a dollar on being able to convince Americans they have other options, despite them having a system where basically anyone can run for office. They’re completely enraptured with the consensus reality you express here and the political system is designed to keep them engaged in it. Only when you lose faith in this reality will anything change, the material conditions of your life will convince you.
I think a rather large portion of the population has lost faith in the system, the fact that we all feel like the only thing we’re voting for is “not the handmaid’s tale” as opposed to voting for something speaks volumes. A vote for Democrats today is simply a vote for “Not the Republicans.” We have nothing to vote for and not an insignificant number of us realize that.
We don’t have real options because even though there are other parties we have an entire society built to prevent that, everything from the political parties themselves to the media that keeps the population mislead/underinformed. Our entire society is built to protect the status quo for the wealthy.
I wish all it took was being jaded, we’re well ahead on that one. I think it’s why Trump even exists as a political entity at all, the Republican voters have also given up on the system. I think the problem shows the difference in how we choose to “solve” the issue. “Conservatives,” completely going against their name, want to burn it all to the ground via Trump and start “new.” Democrats seem to believe in some aspects of the system and want to rebuild from within the current structure. The political structures of RNC & DNC obviously want nothing but the status quo.
This all makes a lot of sense. I view the Republicans and Democrats as different aesthetics of the consenting neoliberal economic arrangement, and agree with a notion of post-politics to describe this situation, where politics becomes increasingly engaged in cultural issues since your arrangement in the political economy is no longer up for debate. The neoliberal system is what’s in crisis and is basically running on fumes at this point, no longer sincerely believed in by determining actors within it. As the systemic stresses of degrading neoliberal capitalism turn inward it manifests in different ways politically. Trump doesn’t happen from nothing, there are real systemic anxieties underlying that, the problem for Democrats is any serious acceptance and solution of those anxieties is in conflict with the forces that keep them legitimate. The Republicans accept the brutality of the system as necessary and the Democrats try and put a good brand on it.
To suggest options exist without laying them out suggests your ignorance of reality might be greater than the Americans. How would a people trapped in an externally imposed set of political constraints be able to recognize their alternatives without some more perspective being shared.
The alternatives have been explored from the American perspective. If there is a path we have missed, please enlighten us.
I told you the option, losing faith in this consensus reality, nobody is doing that for you because your faith in it is contingent on the conditions of your life.
Alternatives have been denied by this consensus reality. The Populists of the 19th century had another vision and were promptly dealt with through imposed segregation, a racial and economic order imposed to divide them. Eugene Debs’ vision was dealt with by capital and military interests and internal divisions. Taft-Hartley act denied the power of labor. The red scare eroded class consciousness so you don’t even organize or identify around your economic reality anymore. The neoliberal consensus of the last 50 years between the major parties, the military industrial complex driving your country’s geopolitics, have brought you to the current moment of the social contract eroding.
The main candidates will sue your for running for president. People register for it every year and get sued out of a campaign.
deleted by creator
Its not the existence of a better option, no, the possibility of third option freaks them out.
The thing is, we do typically have 4-7 choices on the presidential ballot. Unfortunately our voting system strongly discourages voting for other parties if you want to actually affect the results.
More like voting for a third party is currently pointless with the way our voting system works…
That’s more accurate way to say it, because they use “better” as a justification for not entertaining a third option that is actually good.