There’s no way to win political power in the United States without the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.
Socialists and progressives will always have an easier time infiltrating the neoliberal Democratic Party over the fascist Republican Party.
The longer the fascists are in power the harder it will be remove them from power because they will change the rules to maintain power.
The optimal strategy remains to vote for neoliberals when the alternative is fascists because that is how to create time for socialists and progressives to primary neoliberals in the Democratic Party and win general elections.
This meme is a continuation of the accelerationism we saw during the 2024 election. It supports the fascist cause by attempting to sabotage leftist’s best strategy and thus is pro-fascist. The user is prone to self-sabotage as they publicly admitted to not voting for Harris in 2024.
If a fascist drinks at your bar and you don’t throw them out it’s a fascist bar. If a fascist meme ends up in your community and you don’t throw it your a fascist community.
I am reporting this meme. And you all should too. I’m sick of self-described leftists backstabing me and every other minority group they pretend to care about because they’re mad about the 2016 election. I’m a trans, atheist, Jew. I’m close enough to the death camps for my liking thanks. You don’t have to like the Democrats, I don’t, but we do need to vote for them.
I refuse to go quietly. I refuse to tolerate memes that shrug at my right to exist and throw fuel to the fire in the hopes that the fascists kill everyone faster. That’s not a real political position. It’s black pilled bullshit and it can fuck off.
Hope that helps people stop tolerating this bullshit going forward.
Yes, we will have an easier time infiltrating the DNC, but we should never forget that they are not on our side and will fight against us getting in as much as they can. We should still try, but have our eyes open as well.
Yes, we definitely should practice harm reduction and vote for neoliberals when the alternative is fascists. The part we really need to focus on (short term) is actually getting people to pay attention to and care about the primaries. Too many of us feel hopeless and skip that step. It’s just as important as elections, if not more so. But again- we absolutely have to realize that our enemy when it comes to the primaries is the DNC, not the GOP. They have swore under oath that they believe they have the right to influence and manipulate primaries to get Neolibs on the ballot and keep progressives/leftists off, and the court agreed they had that right. It’s their policy to do so. We simply cannot rely on their help and need to come up with strategies to work around their meddling and interference.
This meme is a continuation of the accelerationism we saw during the 2024 election.
I don’t believe it is. You can still believe in and practice harm reduction, while having a realistic understanding of the situation at the same time. The DNC and GOP literally control the elections. and while it is possible we can sneak a few progressives and leftists past them, we will very likely never be able to take it over completely. They will NEVER vote to end the two party system, it makes them too powerful.
Our best hope is to get as many leftists into the DNC as we possibly can, while at the same time building momentum and support for a viable 3rd party coalition of everyone on the left. It’s also critical we focus on educating the public and combating the billionaire owned mainstream media. We also have to build a network of local mutual aid communities that can serve all of those goals, while showing people that an alternative is not only possible, but preferable to relying on the system.
Once a critical mass of support has been gained, all of the DNC infiltrators can exit for the Left party en masse, not only weakening the DNC, but truly highlighting the differences between the two. At that point the tables will have been turned and people who vote D will be taking away votes from the L’s and allowing the fascists to win.
I believe that is the only way to get an actual viable alternative to the DNC. Like the meme says we will not be able to reform it. Our only hope is to get asses in seats in Congress and force through election reform. IF we can manage to get rid of the first past the post style voting, and end the electoral college, then we would never again have to worry about voting for the lesser evil. That should be our number 1 long term goal.
I think going from recognizing that the Democrats will never be reformed to that means we won’t vote for them over fascists and even worse that makes us pro- fascist is a hell of a stretch- and reporting memes that point out the truth is madness.
people also ignore local elections, which is where the gop gets thier base of power from. once they take over things like school boards, and such they can work thier way into higher positions.
Thank you for putting that out there. I still cannot see making any other choice when it came time to vote. The too-close death camps you refer to were a very predictable consequence of this administration. I’m just a straight white guy but I really prefer to not add death camps to the world, or to disappear peaceful productive people from their communities, or to significantly harm the lives of millions of young, old, poor, or disabled people. That includes the ones starving overseas because of recent changes.
“But genocide!” we expect to hear in response. And if any dear readers are already thinking that, I want you to take this one fact away from my comment:
The deeply flawed US voting system — the one which forces the two party system on us — is damned near impossible to change via normal legislation and votes.
It’s THE thing. It is that mechanism that lets the red/blue capitalist american machine continue to vacuum up the vast majority of american votes. Go look up just how much agreement there has to be to amend the constitution. And we’re going to ask the people already in charge to get together and agree to kneecap their future political power. You see the issue.
Sure, the media is complicit and most voters are ignorant of the fact that there are better systems in place around the world. It’s true that a lot can be done outside of elected positions. But when it comes to the actual voting ballot, since the system self-corrects (in a bad way) for significant third parties, the expected consequences of each choice were something like:
Status quo, including any US resources being used for genocide and other shit.
Genocide Max plan, with 4 free years of Death Camp Prime
Flip a coin between 1 & 2 above (stay home or vote for a third party hoping it will get them recognition and funding)
Revolution and replace the system, like right now!
And I want to add a caveat that I’m not trying to blame the people who chose #3 above. Before the election I would disagree with that choice, but now in retrospect we know those people weren’t the reason Trump and Republicans won. I guess it remains to be seen how much of it was the genuine love for Trump the maniacs in this place have, and how much of it was election rigging and cheating BS.
Harris wanted to end the war. So option 1 is better than your argument has advertised. Harris was a huge improvement over Biden in that regard. But I digress.
Every vote counts. The tighter the margins the better. We need the Democrats to do better, as in run better candidates, in order to win, but if they ever do that, there better be a leftist voting block who helped them get into office. Otherwise the Democrats will not feel safe enough to shift left.
Leftists need to be voting in record numbers to shift the Democratic Party to the left. Part of the way we do that is to vote for Democrats consistently. This should be a mechanical choice of who to vote for in the general. It’s hard to do that when posts disparaging fixing the Democratic Party as impossible or so hard it’s not worth trying are going unchallenged on the internet, including Lemmy.
Fixing the Democratic Party and this country will take time and a lot of work. Part of that work involves voting for Democrats.
This should be a mechanical choice of who to vote for in the general.
This is a very easy point for others to attack, but I want to reiterate its importance and how it relates to what I already said.
GIVEN all the stuff I explained about how the nigh-impossible-to-change voting system enforces the two-party system especially at the federal level, the reasonable pragmatic conclusion is that you always vote blue in the general because it is the only way to vote against the actual far right nazi party, and you work to get progressives elected to local offices and in national Democratic primaries.
The optimal strategy remains to vote for neoliberals when the alternative is fascists because that is how to create time for socialists and progressives to primary neoliberals in the Democratic Party and win general elections.
With all due respect, that strategy got us fascism. The terminology has changed, but I could tell close to 30 years ago that this would be the result. Is three decades not enough time for socialists and progressives to “primary” neoliberals? Apparently not, because socialsts/progressives/leftists are lazy, good-for-nothings who are simultaneously powerful enough to swing elections, but too inconsequential to talk about their issues or court their votes.
In other words, maybe these vaunted “centrists”/liberals should’ve stepped up to stop fascism. (And, it’s not leftists who say that Harris “went too woke” and now want to throw trans people under the bus.)
With all due respect, that strategy got us fascism.
That argument is obviously false. We, people to the left of Republican voters, have been losing elections and Democrats since Clinton have been moving right as a result.
Apparently not, because socialsts/progressives/leftists are lazy, good-for-nothings who are simultaneously powerful enough to swing elections, but too inconsequential to talk about their issues or court their votes.
Of course we need more than just leftists to vote. We need to demonstrate a leftist voter block was part of what got Democratic candidates into office. So the Democrats feel they have voters to cover the ones on the right they think they could lose by shifting left.
In other words, maybe these vaunted “centrists”/liberals should’ve stepped up to stop fascism.
Yes. There can be more than one lesson to learn from an election. Democrats fucking up more than us doesn’t mean we don’t have a lesson to learn too. Obviously Democrats have to do better. But if they win without leftists when they do run a better candidate, they aren’t going to shift left. They’ll think they’ve hit the sweet spot and stay put on the political spectrum.
False? We employed that strategy, i.e. voted for Democrats multiple times over decades without demanding that they do better, and now we have fascism. That’s not to say that the strategy caused fascism, but self-evidently didn’t stop it.
The user who made this post made a point of proudly declaring they did not vote for president when the election rolled around last year. Because ‘voters in California don’t matter’. Except we do, because we contribute to the popular vote which Republicans love to use rhetorically to claim everyone else needs to shut up because they have the mandate.
Which they don’t have because Trump didn’t even get a majority of the voters, just the most out of any candidate. But it’s still a free win to them anyway.
Democrats lost elections and leftists weren’t the base consistently voting. Neoliberals and neocons and now fascists are the groups that vote regularly. Accelerationism is self-evidently getting us to fascism faster.
In the 70s, people were making this argument about voting for the lesser of two evils, but it was between two Keynesians rather than two neoliberals. That was 50 years ago. Nixon was to the left of every president in my lifetime. 50 years from now, just how right wing will the Democrat we have to vote for be?
The point is that they didn’t. It’s all well and good for those of use who choose to talk about politics in our free time to say that, yes, sometimes you have to vote for someone you don’t like in order to prevent a worse outcome. But that’s a conversation between individuals! As a campaign message, the kind of thing that needs broad appeal to millions of voters, that is a loosing message that only depresses turnout!
Good thing I’m not a campaign manager and you’re not the entire voting population. You and I are two individuals. And as you say, we should talk about strategic choices.
yayyy the same conversation we have every week on this websiteeeeeee shall we remind one another that 30 years ago there was a protest in tiananmen while we’re at it
I mean, the Democrats just ran a historically bad campaign. No primary, consistently bad polling, a candidate with one foot in the grave swapped out at the very last minuet for a VP who didn’t even survive Super Tuesday back in 2020.
That nearly a year later we keep rehashing the efficacy of “Vote Blue No Matter” lesser-evil strategic voting, kinda doesn’t bode well, does it? That even those of us plugged in and paying attention feel like the party isn’t gonna learn any lessons, so we better start preemptively defending their future fuck ups. You think the broader public of disinterested yankees is really gonna rally behind that?
Why are you backpedalling on your opinion? You said it’s “all well and good” for two individuals like us to talk about strategic voting. Were you lying when you said that?
yes, obviously vote for the least bad candidate when there’s nothing better. But fuck, it’s not even an election year and we’re still saying that rather than asking for better candidates
With Gavin Newsom, a Charlie Kirk podcast guest, the choice in 2028 might be two fascists.
We lost to Nixon and it got worse. We lost to Regan and it got worse. We lost to two different Bushes and it got worse. Now we’ve lost to Trump twice and it got worse.
The throughline is that we keep losing to the greater evil and suffering the consequences of things getting worse as a result. That includes worse choices next time as the Democrats move to the right to chase the people who vote for the greater evil. As opposed to going for people who don’t vote or throw away their vote to a third party.
The Democratic Party is going to be rightwing until people learn we have to vote in addition to everything else to get Democrats to move to the left. They will only think about moving left if they win elections. And they only move left when they think they have enough voters to win when they do move.
If we, leftists, want better choices in 50 years we have got to vote in records numbers, so if Democrats get their act together and get someone half-way decent they win. And when they do, they see a leftist voter block got them there.
So you’re saying even if we lose again and again, we have to keep trying and hold onto hope? No way, man! Giving up and leaving our friends for dead is the leftist choice. Actually trying is neoliberalism
Those wins are we how we got gay marriage. After decades of activism queer people won rights. It took time and effort and consistently turning out for elections. And a ton of shifting the culture through the media people consumed. But the voting is a mechanical necessity to bring that result about. There’s no way around it. We need to vote for the furthest left Democrats we can.
That’s what I’m saying, man! I must have turned off the oven when I was done cooking a hundred times. And the very first time I don’t turn the oven off, it starts a fire. So what good did turning the oven off do?
If you turn off the oven and it still catches on fire, that’s not a you problem, that’s a problem with the oven. No amount of turning the knob will make it safe.
Yeah, it’s a manufacturer defect. Yesterday I made lasagna and turned it off when I was done. But today I made brownies and didn’t turn off the oven, and now my house is charred rubble! I’m suing the oven manufacturer
There’s no way to win political power in the United States without the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.
Socialists and progressives will always have an easier time infiltrating the neoliberal Democratic Party over the fascist Republican Party.
The longer the fascists are in power the harder it will be remove them from power because they will change the rules to maintain power.
The optimal strategy remains to vote for neoliberals when the alternative is fascists because that is how to create time for socialists and progressives to primary neoliberals in the Democratic Party and win general elections.
This meme is a continuation of the accelerationism we saw during the 2024 election. It supports the fascist cause by attempting to sabotage leftist’s best strategy and thus is pro-fascist. The user is prone to self-sabotage as they publicly admitted to not voting for Harris in 2024.
If a fascist drinks at your bar and you don’t throw them out it’s a fascist bar. If a fascist meme ends up in your community and you don’t throw it your a fascist community.
I am reporting this meme. And you all should too. I’m sick of self-described leftists backstabing me and every other minority group they pretend to care about because they’re mad about the 2016 election. I’m a trans, atheist, Jew. I’m close enough to the death camps for my liking thanks. You don’t have to like the Democrats, I don’t, but we do need to vote for them.
I refuse to go quietly. I refuse to tolerate memes that shrug at my right to exist and throw fuel to the fire in the hopes that the fascists kill everyone faster. That’s not a real political position. It’s black pilled bullshit and it can fuck off.
Hope that helps people stop tolerating this bullshit going forward.
I agree and disagree.
Yes, we will have an easier time infiltrating the DNC, but we should never forget that they are not on our side and will fight against us getting in as much as they can. We should still try, but have our eyes open as well.
Yes, we definitely should practice harm reduction and vote for neoliberals when the alternative is fascists. The part we really need to focus on (short term) is actually getting people to pay attention to and care about the primaries. Too many of us feel hopeless and skip that step. It’s just as important as elections, if not more so. But again- we absolutely have to realize that our enemy when it comes to the primaries is the DNC, not the GOP. They have swore under oath that they believe they have the right to influence and manipulate primaries to get Neolibs on the ballot and keep progressives/leftists off, and the court agreed they had that right. It’s their policy to do so. We simply cannot rely on their help and need to come up with strategies to work around their meddling and interference.
I don’t believe it is. You can still believe in and practice harm reduction, while having a realistic understanding of the situation at the same time. The DNC and GOP literally control the elections. and while it is possible we can sneak a few progressives and leftists past them, we will very likely never be able to take it over completely. They will NEVER vote to end the two party system, it makes them too powerful.
Our best hope is to get as many leftists into the DNC as we possibly can, while at the same time building momentum and support for a viable 3rd party coalition of everyone on the left. It’s also critical we focus on educating the public and combating the billionaire owned mainstream media. We also have to build a network of local mutual aid communities that can serve all of those goals, while showing people that an alternative is not only possible, but preferable to relying on the system.
Once a critical mass of support has been gained, all of the DNC infiltrators can exit for the Left party en masse, not only weakening the DNC, but truly highlighting the differences between the two. At that point the tables will have been turned and people who vote D will be taking away votes from the L’s and allowing the fascists to win.
I believe that is the only way to get an actual viable alternative to the DNC. Like the meme says we will not be able to reform it. Our only hope is to get asses in seats in Congress and force through election reform. IF we can manage to get rid of the first past the post style voting, and end the electoral college, then we would never again have to worry about voting for the lesser evil. That should be our number 1 long term goal.
I think going from recognizing that the Democrats will never be reformed to that means we won’t vote for them over fascists and even worse that makes us pro- fascist is a hell of a stretch- and reporting memes that point out the truth is madness.
Part of this needs to include running for office. Many many many demcratic primary ballots around the country are mostly if not entirely empty
people also ignore local elections, which is where the gop gets thier base of power from. once they take over things like school boards, and such they can work thier way into higher positions.
You’re right, and I like your advice. I reported the post
Thank you!
Thank you for putting that out there. I still cannot see making any other choice when it came time to vote. The too-close death camps you refer to were a very predictable consequence of this administration. I’m just a straight white guy but I really prefer to not add death camps to the world, or to disappear peaceful productive people from their communities, or to significantly harm the lives of millions of young, old, poor, or disabled people. That includes the ones starving overseas because of recent changes.
“But genocide!” we expect to hear in response. And if any dear readers are already thinking that, I want you to take this one fact away from my comment:
The deeply flawed US voting system — the one which forces the two party system on us — is damned near impossible to change via normal legislation and votes.
It’s THE thing. It is that mechanism that lets the red/blue capitalist american machine continue to vacuum up the vast majority of american votes. Go look up just how much agreement there has to be to amend the constitution. And we’re going to ask the people already in charge to get together and agree to kneecap their future political power. You see the issue.
Sure, the media is complicit and most voters are ignorant of the fact that there are better systems in place around the world. It’s true that a lot can be done outside of elected positions. But when it comes to the actual voting ballot, since the system self-corrects (in a bad way) for significant third parties, the expected consequences of each choice were something like:
And I want to add a caveat that I’m not trying to blame the people who chose #3 above. Before the election I would disagree with that choice, but now in retrospect we know those people weren’t the reason Trump and Republicans won. I guess it remains to be seen how much of it was the genuine love for Trump the maniacs in this place have, and how much of it was election rigging and cheating BS.
Harris wanted to end the war. So option 1 is better than your argument has advertised. Harris was a huge improvement over Biden in that regard. But I digress.
Every vote counts. The tighter the margins the better. We need the Democrats to do better, as in run better candidates, in order to win, but if they ever do that, there better be a leftist voting block who helped them get into office. Otherwise the Democrats will not feel safe enough to shift left.
Leftists need to be voting in record numbers to shift the Democratic Party to the left. Part of the way we do that is to vote for Democrats consistently. This should be a mechanical choice of who to vote for in the general. It’s hard to do that when posts disparaging fixing the Democratic Party as impossible or so hard it’s not worth trying are going unchallenged on the internet, including Lemmy.
Fixing the Democratic Party and this country will take time and a lot of work. Part of that work involves voting for Democrats.
This is a very easy point for others to attack, but I want to reiterate its importance and how it relates to what I already said.
GIVEN all the stuff I explained about how the nigh-impossible-to-change voting system enforces the two-party system especially at the federal level, the reasonable pragmatic conclusion is that you always vote blue in the general because it is the only way to vote against the actual far right nazi party, and you work to get progressives elected to local offices and in national Democratic primaries.
With all due respect, that strategy got us fascism. The terminology has changed, but I could tell close to 30 years ago that this would be the result. Is three decades not enough time for socialists and progressives to “primary” neoliberals? Apparently not, because socialsts/progressives/leftists are lazy, good-for-nothings who are simultaneously powerful enough to swing elections, but too inconsequential to talk about their issues or court their votes.
In other words, maybe these vaunted “centrists”/liberals should’ve stepped up to stop fascism. (And, it’s not leftists who say that Harris “went too woke” and now want to throw trans people under the bus.)
That argument is obviously false. We, people to the left of Republican voters, have been losing elections and Democrats since Clinton have been moving right as a result.
Of course we need more than just leftists to vote. We need to demonstrate a leftist voter block was part of what got Democratic candidates into office. So the Democrats feel they have voters to cover the ones on the right they think they could lose by shifting left.
Yes. There can be more than one lesson to learn from an election. Democrats fucking up more than us doesn’t mean we don’t have a lesson to learn too. Obviously Democrats have to do better. But if they win without leftists when they do run a better candidate, they aren’t going to shift left. They’ll think they’ve hit the sweet spot and stay put on the political spectrum.
False? We employed that strategy, i.e. voted for Democrats multiple times over decades without demanding that they do better, and now we have fascism. That’s not to say that the strategy caused fascism, but self-evidently didn’t stop it.
The user who made this post made a point of proudly declaring they did not vote for president when the election rolled around last year. Because ‘voters in California don’t matter’. Except we do, because we contribute to the popular vote which Republicans love to use rhetorically to claim everyone else needs to shut up because they have the mandate.
Which they don’t have because Trump didn’t even get a majority of the voters, just the most out of any candidate. But it’s still a free win to them anyway.
Democrats lost elections and leftists weren’t the base consistently voting. Neoliberals and neocons and now fascists are the groups that vote regularly. Accelerationism is self-evidently getting us to fascism faster.
In the 70s, people were making this argument about voting for the lesser of two evils, but it was between two Keynesians rather than two neoliberals. That was 50 years ago. Nixon was to the left of every president in my lifetime. 50 years from now, just how right wing will the Democrat we have to vote for be?
Guess what would have happened if Nixon and Reagan had lost
The point is that they didn’t. It’s all well and good for those of use who choose to talk about politics in our free time to say that, yes, sometimes you have to vote for someone you don’t like in order to prevent a worse outcome. But that’s a conversation between individuals! As a campaign message, the kind of thing that needs broad appeal to millions of voters, that is a loosing message that only depresses turnout!
Good thing I’m not a campaign manager and you’re not the entire voting population. You and I are two individuals. And as you say, we should talk about strategic choices.
yayyy the same conversation we have every week on this websiteeeeeee shall we remind one another that 30 years ago there was a protest in tiananmen while we’re at it
I mean, the Democrats just ran a historically bad campaign. No primary, consistently bad polling, a candidate with one foot in the grave swapped out at the very last minuet for a VP who didn’t even survive Super Tuesday back in 2020.
That nearly a year later we keep rehashing the efficacy of “Vote Blue No Matter” lesser-evil strategic voting, kinda doesn’t bode well, does it? That even those of us plugged in and paying attention feel like the party isn’t gonna learn any lessons, so we better start preemptively defending their future fuck ups. You think the broader public of disinterested yankees is really gonna rally behind that?
Why are you backpedalling on your opinion? You said it’s “all well and good” for two individuals like us to talk about strategic voting. Were you lying when you said that?
not backpedaling, just expressing exhaustion
yes, obviously vote for the least bad candidate when there’s nothing better. But fuck, it’s not even an election year and we’re still saying that rather than asking for better candidates
With Gavin Newsom, a Charlie Kirk podcast guest, the choice in 2028 might be two fascists.
We lost to Nixon and it got worse. We lost to Regan and it got worse. We lost to two different Bushes and it got worse. Now we’ve lost to Trump twice and it got worse.
The throughline is that we keep losing to the greater evil and suffering the consequences of things getting worse as a result. That includes worse choices next time as the Democrats move to the right to chase the people who vote for the greater evil. As opposed to going for people who don’t vote or throw away their vote to a third party.
The Democratic Party is going to be rightwing until people learn we have to vote in addition to everything else to get Democrats to move to the left. They will only think about moving left if they win elections. And they only move left when they think they have enough voters to win when they do move.
If we, leftists, want better choices in 50 years we have got to vote in records numbers, so if Democrats get their act together and get someone half-way decent they win. And when they do, they see a leftist voter block got them there.
So you’re saying even if we lose again and again, we have to keep trying and hold onto hope? No way, man! Giving up and leaving our friends for dead is the leftist choice. Actually trying is neoliberalism
Add a /s please to jokes like that, my heart needs it
The accelerationists unironically believe that!
/s
🫶
We elected Carter and it got worse, we elected Clinton and it got worse, we elected Obama and it got worse, we elected Biden and it got worse.
The throughline is that we keep beating the greater evil and suffering the consequences of things getting worse as a result.
Those wins are we how we got gay marriage. After decades of activism queer people won rights. It took time and effort and consistently turning out for elections. And a ton of shifting the culture through the media people consumed. But the voting is a mechanical necessity to bring that result about. There’s no way around it. We need to vote for the furthest left Democrats we can.
I put out half of the fires that started in my kitchen, but my house still burned down! Putting out fires is a sucker’s game.
If even after putting out fire the house burns down you do have to cut your loses and let the house burn down.
That’s what I’m saying, man! I must have turned off the oven when I was done cooking a hundred times. And the very first time I don’t turn the oven off, it starts a fire. So what good did turning the oven off do?
If you turn off the oven and it still catches on fire, that’s not a you problem, that’s a problem with the oven. No amount of turning the knob will make it safe.
Yeah, it’s a manufacturer defect. Yesterday I made lasagna and turned it off when I was done. But today I made brownies and didn’t turn off the oven, and now my house is charred rubble! I’m suing the oven manufacturer