Failing Reconstruction doomed us.

The first election I ever voted in and I was from South Florida at the time.

I was one of the votes discarded due to ‘hanging chads’

Cynicism began early in me

Nixon not hanging from a noose caused the split in the timeline. His pardon happened around the time when Bernstein Bearenstein bears happened.

I am completely ignorant to the draft. What does “win the draft” mean?

That was a wild ride of an analogy, but I’m here for it.

And the chosen pope had an 0.3% chance. Some times, things with a chance of happening, happen.

They can redo their little procedural vote. But, if Hogg doesn’t win, we will have our list of every member that thinks the DNC exists to serve it’s members and not the public. Every one of them should be tarred and feathered, and I’m not sure I mean that as a metaphor.

It might be technically valid,

It’s literally valid…

Based on your lack of reading comprehension from that alone, I’m literally not going to bother reading the rest of your comment. Since it’s either intentional and you’re a troll, or you do not understand basic english. There is no point try to argue the political game with either type in a written context without getting into essay territory.

EDIT: For those who want to know: The phrase “It might be technically valid, but …”, does not mean it could potentially be true. It means it is true, but there are other factors involved.

Are you high?

He’s positioned as the oligarch’s choice for succession. He was groomed for politics by corporate centrists because he’s got a compelling backstory.

And now that he’s pulling a reverse Fetterman, you hate him. Centrists thought they were getting yet another corporate turd like they wanted, but he turned out to actually want to fix things they like broken.

Part of the appeal for more sc justices/more house of rep members, etc is twofold:

1. It reduces an individual lawmaker’s power and (in the house of rep’s case) makes an individual rep much easier for the public to pressure as they will be beholden to fewer constituents per rep (less constituents, the less support you need in order to rally people to oust the incumbent).

2. It makes corrupting the government with money a little bit harder: more reps = more people you need to pay off, and it’s not like every additional vote you need only costs $1 or smth, we’re talking you need to get everyone enough money to keep them on board, which could be an extra couple million/billion than corrupting people now.

That being said: you’re right, we need more than just that. We need avenues to hold votes of non-confidence (which will both allow us to get rid of bad/not helpful public servants, and also force politicians to stop straight-up lying on the stump). We need to institute public funding of elections to keep things both balanced and less-easily corrupted. We need to end gerrymandering. We need term limits.

I’m speaking of a socialist revolution. Not a fascist takeover.

I don’t care what they want to call it. “Revolutions” serve people. Not demagogues.

I don’t think so. There’s a reason the democratic party is polling worse than Trump. They’re snakebit, even their own voters are disgusted with them. They’ve decided that their optimal strategy for winning national elections is pointing out (accurately) that the other guy is a Nazi and literally nothing else, and they’re still losing, that’s how fucking snakebit they are. There’s nowhere left to go at this point, the plan seems to still be “ratchet right to peel off two more moderate republicans and ask people to be satisfied with just voting against the Nazis for the rest of their lives”, which is a plan that has now failed 2/3 times.

Vote blue no matter who, think about that phrase for a second. That’s basically saying “shut up, don’t think, just do vote for any POS we put out and be happy about it”. Doesn’t seem like very good marketing to me. Do you think the Republicans have to tell their voters to hold their nose, suck it up, and vote no matter how much they hate the candidate? This is investing in loser energy, it’s a shit strategy that’s basically engineered from the ground up to lose.

Dems aren’t helping the ship stay afloat. They’re stopping the people from patching the hole because they’re “powerless”. Dems and Reps aren’t the same because they’re equally as bad, they’re the same because they’re on the same team. They’re both shameless fascists.

Opting out does not save you anything because voting doesn’t cost you anything in the first place.

The bet here isn’t voting; it’s elections. An election is an essentially random process where depending on the result things change either for the best or for the worst. If you somehow quantify how far America is from fascism (say, in terms of how many Republican terms it would take to go from the situation at hand to full-blown fascism) then you can model elections as a bet where you’re forced to participate and don’t get to choose your stake. Again, under this model (which should be accurate since the conditions for its application are all there) you will end up at fascism unless you change the game you’re being forced to play so the odds are in your favor rather than the fascists’. I also want to point out that this isn’t an analogy; it’s a model. I’m simply taking a principle that exists in one field, making some simplifying assumptions and applying it in another. What I outlined here isn’t a “what if” analogy; it’s one step removed from a mathematical certainty.

It’s more like we’re on a sinking ship and bailing water. The ship is going down if we don’t patch the hole, but bailing water still buys us time so that we can make more attempts to patch the hole. Except in this metaphor, bailing is something that takes maybe an hour of your time once every two years.

I have no problem with the act of voting itself. My problem is with… everything else that happens during election season. The whole idea of unity with liberals (aka Democrats) against the right is evidently a failed preposition, and the reason for that failure is specifically that the Democratic Party is invested in the game’s present state and will force you (or, more accurately, already forces you) to cooperate with them to maintain the game before you’re allowed to be “united” with them. To borrow your analogy, the Democrats are the ship’s captain, who is helping you bail water but only on the condition that you don’t patch the holes (and yes, there’s more than one). You’re not even supposed to point out that neither you nor him are patching the holes. Instead, you and the rest of the crew are supposed to just keep bailing and ignore the rising water level. And to be clear, the bailing isn’t just one thing you do every two years; that doesn’t begin to capture the opportunity cost involved. Your bailing in this analogy is voting drives, canvassing and other outreach on behalf of the Democrats; it’s political donations; it’s suppressing criticism of the DNC (attempts to get the captain to patch the damn hole) in the name of unity against the far-right. The actual voting is only the end of this long string of actions that sap energy, money and credibility from the people who would otherwise be out there actually patching the damn holes.

Okay analogy over, back to the real world. The DNC should’ve been fucking flayed alive when they tried to push a pro-genocide ex-DA on Americans, and instead all they got was progressives hushing down other progressives in the name of “unity”. I’m sure you can think of all sorts of examples of this in action, but here’s one to drive the point: the progressive reaction to the Uncommitted Movement. This was a large movement that had gained momentum in an attempt to push the DNC from proto-fascism and into the sanity, and what did they get from not even liberals, but progressives who should have been their most ardent supporters? “Hold your nose and vote for her.” Not a nationwide solidarity to force the Democrats to back down on their most unpopular policies, not even tepid support or apathy, but active, emphatic opposition. That’s not the stuff of democracy; that’s a dictatorship where you roll a dice every four years to find out which boot will step on your neck until the next election.

I should note: I’m not advocating for passivity or apathy here. This shouldn’t be a reason for you or anyone else to stay home and give up; it should be an impetus to organize, embrace solidarity between workers and take on the capitalists and their supporters. Act, but act according to your own conscience, not according to the DNC’s agenda. This is especially important right now because the Democrats won’t save you from fascism even if they wanted to, but even if democracy and the DNC both survive Trump, next time you be on the side doing the flaying and not the side practicing cannibalism on behalf of your blue donkey overlords.

I think you should still vote just to show you’re an active voter that they failed to court, but vote for independents, 3rd party, write in, whatever.

Honestly, I think the only solution for progressives is to elect enough independents that mathematically, while a minority, MUST be courted by the establishment parties in order to secure their legislation. Though that won’t do anything for legislation that both establishment parties fully agree on, that’ll still get rammed through.

But what are we even talking about? These are all legal constructs. We’re living post rule of law now. Dictator just flat ignoring courts.

Exactly this. Stop giving the DNC money. Whenever you can send the message to the officials. No progressive platform and change? No removal of incumbents? No money. No vote.

It isn’t _just _ on us to do something. If they too don’t wanna see the fascists win, then it’s time for them to eat humble pie and realize their policies and their positions for the past 30-40 years brought this pig to prom. They have to pass the torch.

Fascism might be defeated again but it will come at the cost of neoliberalism finally dying as well. There’s very little options of anything else working.

Like another poster said casting a blank ballet sends much more of a message than not voting at all.

So I think I’m going to choose not to vote in the general

You are going to help billionaires get gigantic GOP tax cuts and increase wealth inequality. Got it.

And yet every single time the middle of the road Democrat wins.

It couldn’t be that the middle of the road Democrat is simply popular among the majority of the voting population? Nah couldn’t be. Everybody in my family loves when I rant about the benefits of communism at Thanksgiving.

“Concessions to people like me”:

1. Public transport
2. public education
3. public healthcare

I’m not in dire need of any of those. But I’m not a selfish dickhead.

How do progressives fuck up the democratic party?

I thought progressives didn’t vote.

If the fascism is going to happen anyway, which it will under the current democratic strategy, I would rather it happen now while I’m young enough to fight and not 10 years from now while I’m old and decrepit. (Well, more old and decrepit.)