The problem in democracy is, that instead of a minimum IQ, there is a minimum age for voting rights.
IQ is pretty much a bullshit statistic that largely correllates to education and economic standing than anything else. There isn’t some grand variance in intelligence, actually, what’s at play is competing class interests and socioeconomic factors determining diet and access to education.
Voting is one of many tools at our disposal - and right now we need all the tools we can get.
So, don’t shit on voting - do vote!
Do the other things too, but don’t skip the vote.
You’re right that voting is a tool; you’re wrong about whose tool it is and what it’s used for.
It can be used for either liberation or oppression. Ceding it to the oppressors does not help you. Promoting apathy among those who would otherwise support liberation helps the oppressors.
What is your goal here?
You are fundamentally confused such that you think there’s any agency in voting in the first place. The only real impact it has is to completely short circuit and subsume all political activity away from any outside organizing that is, historically, literally the only thing that has ever worked to accomplish anything.
My goal is this is a forum. Someone says something wrong and then you say the correct thing under them. That’s what you do on forums.
You are spreading misinformation and promoting apathy among those who would otherwise support liberation. You are an ally to our oppressors.
Nice try FBI
You literally voted to escalate a genocide because the system you’re playing apologist for presented you no other choice. What misinformation am I spreading? You’re the one acting as an enemy of liberation. You literally voted for a genocide. You are literally an ally to our oppressors.
It’s honestly fucking frightening how you’re capable of that kind of doublethink.
And you’re not just an ally of our oppressors in that sense. You want to waste YEARS of time PER ELECTION of people who would otherwise be doing tangible good in their communities working outside of the genocidal system you cap for.
Last election the choice was between Palestinian genocide and Palestinian genocide. You are smoking crack if you think the oligarchy is ever going to provide you with a meaningful choice to loosen their hold on you through the civic ritual of voting.
False equivalence. Last election was a choice between Palestinian genocide vs significantly more Palestinian genocide + Ukrainian genocide + it’s looking Venezuelan genocide is about to be kicking off + who the fuck knows, we’ve got three more years of this shitshow and that’s assuming we even have another election.
You chose significantly more Palestinian genocide + Ukrainian genocide + probable Venezuelan genocide + an untold number of atrocities to come.
Harris was and is shit, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to look at Trump and conclude that he’s infinitely worse. You really going to pretend that opposition to genocide was a motivating factor in allowing Trump to win? Cuz you’ve enabled, and are in some part responsible for, a shit ton more genocide.
You’re also hyperfocusing on the presidential election: voting impacts a lot more than just who gets to be god-emperor of the US for 4 years.
So you knowingly voted to throw Palestinians under the extermination bus, is that it? And you consider yourself to be on the right side of history? And you never considered that perhaps your slavish ideological devotion to following the rules of a fascist political system was slow-boiling you into a fascist?
Ukranian genocide
You’re talking about the ten years of ethnic cleansing the Ukranian nazi government was doing to ethnic Russians within its borders, right? You wouldn’t possibly consider yourself to be against genocide while supporting these guys, right? Because nobody could possibly be that deluded, right? Tell me you’re not that programmed.
Last election was a choice between Palestinian genocide vs significantly more Palestinian genocide + Ukrainian genocide + it’s looking Venezuelan genocide is about to be kicking off + who the fuck knows, we’ve got three more years of this shitshow and that’s assuming we even have another election.
You are doing the thing right now. The other choice is “none of those things,” actually, and you don’t get that by voting harder because as you’ve just demonstrated you were not given the choice. Is any genocide acceptable to you? The line is never “less genocide,” it is “no genocide.”
Vote in the preliminaries, where you can select which bag of shit you’ll get to vote for officially. You may even end up with a decent choice on election day off your area is dope like NYC or Seattle.
Even if you’re stuck in the cousin-fuckingly-deep south like me, where your vote will almost certainly be washed out by a horde of Nazis: still do it. Especially in smaller elections - school boards, city level stuff, whatever you can get in on. Those are the ones where you can really start to turn the tide. All it takes is for the usual rednecks to start feeling apathetic, and a handful of us bleeding-heart-commie-socialist-hippie-libruls to step up, and BAM, we’ve got a progressive oasis elected in our desert of red. Which still isn’t much, but it’s a foothold.
But it does require us to do the bare-assed minimum amount of effort in support of change, which is to vote.
You should definitely vote but it shouldn’t be the only thing you do.
No
Psyop alert
Yes. Voting is useful for showing solidarity with the movement and demonstrating how the current system doesn’t work. Just because it isn’t capable of causing any meaningful change doesn’t mean it’s useless.
Just because it isn’t capable of causing any meaningful change doesn’t mean it’s useless.
I see a lot of folks on .ml and .hexbear not understand this part. It’s like all change must be meaningful, and if it’s not then it’s not worth our time.
Lenin taught us that we need to build within the system of the masses in order to tip them over, not overturn it outright. There is a specific time and place for when change is the most impactful
Lenin’s position on integrating with the masses meant running working class parties in opposition to establishment parties, ie voting PSL over DNC. The vanguard’s task is to become a party that the working class puts their full support behind, so that when revolution does happen, the vanguard can serve as the spearpoint to direct the masses in one unified direction and crush the capitalist state, replacing it with a socialist one.
bro just one more vote bro, bro I swear just one more vote and it’ll fix democracy bro
Now’s not the time for that we can’t afford four years of Vance. We need to hold our noses and vote for Skeletor so we can stop the spread, then focus on progressive issues
Skeletor, we want to vote for you so Vance doesn’t win, but stop supporting Hordak destroying Eternia
Skeletor: Hordak has a right to defend himself
how white liberals think fascism works
Chad voting in a UN resolution condemning Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza
you’re finished
Official portrait of Benjamin Netanyahu
no, pls
you know what hitler? i tried to reason with you but you have left me no choice. i will be voting for somebody else. good luck earning my vote back fuckstick, you’re gonna need it.
This but the election is between Himmler and Eichmann
Just you wait another few more years and I’m gonna vote so hard it’ll make your head spin
Chile actually voted out their dictator.
So did Brazil, and they actually threw theirs in prison.
No, Bolsonaro was not a dictator; if he had been, we wouldn’t have been able to remove him. He had far less power than he thought; that’s why voting worked.
then what happened
I mean this isn’t a “white lib” thing. Most people don’t want political violence or related.
Congratulations
And yet political violence surrounds us. How do you propose voting will stop it? I’ve personally seen that fail for decades now.
“Surrounds us” maybe if you’re chronically online
I can log out right now and go downtown to see tent cities full of starving, sick people. You only don’t perceive that as political violence because you’ve been trained to think poverty isn’t political.
You ever fuckin’ seen a homeless person? How about the miles and miles of tents along stretches of highways just outside the cities? That’s one of many other forms of political violence. Remember how we stopped counting the death toll from Covid and were all told to get back to work? You know how many “incarcerated” “prisoners” we have doing slave labor? GTFO with your “have to be chronically online to see any political violence” bullshit. You’re fucking steeped in it but you’re too blind to see even what’s right in front of you, even if it’s a boot your tongue is apparently stuck to.
All those online ICE raids?
Frequent airstrikes on civilians in Gaza even since the ‘ceasefire’, frequent attacks on likely fishermen/migrants in the Caribbean, strikes on Yemen and Iran within the last few months, Ukraine war, Cambodia-Thailand conflict, ISIS kidnapping in Nigeria less than two weeks ago, attempted arson on a train in Chicago last month, ongoing Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict, Bombing in Delhi last month, I can go on
Does ‘chronically online’ just mean not wilfully ignorant?
Also ICE raids, violent union busting, enforcement of private property keeping hundreds of thousands homeless and millions more on the brink. But sure we’re just “chronically online” God I hate libs.
US foreign policy is a different topic than domestic. US foreign policy has always been vile.
Ok? the topic of this thread is US policy in general
US foreign policy has always been vile.
Agreed and you think you’ll change it via voting?
Um actually you’re disconnected from the world by paying attention to outside
except for all the white conservatives that stormed the Capitol on Jan 6th, 2021; commit acts of violence against Democrat politicians; make reports and call “wellness checks” on others; commit or support police brutality; defend ICE abductions and trafficking…
There’s over 200,000,000 white citizens. A few hundred doing dumb shit isn’t the entire group. Would you apply this way of thinking to other groups of people?
It’s only white lib thing, if you’re a racist
Some of the dumber white libs I’ve talked to honestly believe 51% of American voters voted for Trump 🤣
They don’t know what voting does or how it works but they’re sure it’s the only reasonable solution!
It’s funny how almost 20 million people less than in 2020 voted this time around (most of the missing voters being on the dem side too); people are beginning to realize we don’t really have a say
And it seems like a lot of Americans don’t understand FPTP or the Electoral College, or even the amount of voter suppression there is. Your vote only counts (and only maybe) if you live in a swing state. The votes in rural areas count for way more than in urban ones but those are already captured by R. Let’s not even get into the other branches of government:
Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability.
- James Madison
Is this not also true for liberals who aren’t white?
yes. i did not create this image
Or bearded. You can be a clean shaven, tan, even a woman and the meme still works.
I think the point of the words inclusion is that you might have a very different perspective of the implications and effectiveness of voting when the state doesn’t explicitly cater to your identity as the default.
Lemmy libs next year: “VOTE FOR BLUEMAGA EVERYONE”
Weird how voting always seems to work for the right wing
Maybe voting would actually work if…you know…you actually voted
Maybe people would vote more if the counter offer wasn’t also fascism
My mom said that you gotta vote if you want to complain and I do like to complain.
Once fascists win power democratically, they have never been removed democratically. Not once. Ever.
We forgetting when Americans voted out Trump now?
From another commenter: https://cmarmitage.substack.com/p/i-researched-every-attempt-to-stop
Trump wasn’t full fascist yet in his first term. He was just getting the taste of that power.
You could also believe the rumours that he only won the second time due to rigging and voter fraud. Something he constantly kept accusing the dems of. And we know how much he projects.
I get it but do you actually think we won’t have elections in 2028 and that a democrat can’t win the presidency again?
We just had some elections and democrats absolutely destroyed in almost all of them
I know it’s mostly doom out there but this is absolutely not a full fascist takeover
My bet is that this is all a propaganda campaign.
I hope you’re right and I’m wrong.
With all the fascist things happening right now and it’s barely been a year, and with three more years to go A LOT can change.
I mean in any other civilized country, a rapist would be sucking cocks in prison, not become a president. So, yeah, expect the unexpected.
Not once ever? Not even when Trump lost the 2020 election despite the jan6 raid on the capitol?
The government wasn’t anywhere near as fascist then as it is now.
So you’re saying “No TRUE fascist”, huh?
Americans: “Our FPTP two-party electoral college system doesn’t work. Clearly democracy doesn’t work.”
Meanwhile in Canada we just voted for dental care. Europeans just voted to take on big tech corporations.
I think the problem is years of “it’s not my job to educate you, sweetie”. Turns out it is our job to educate them. Because they vote.
Remember when Canada voted to replace First-past-the-post voting?
The right have gerrymandered and bet million bucks rigged the voting machines too. Always projection with them. Look at Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham voting districts. I read years ago that they have it rigged that they could never lose even if people voted.
Those guys are senators. There are no voting districts for Senate elections. They are state-wide popular votes.
Voting districts are relevant at the federal level for presidential and House of Representatives races.
Okay analysis. Awful solutions. All that just to say what someone far smarter than him had already said: political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Fascists seize state power once they believe they have enough political power (ie the means of dispensing organized violence through a military or paramilitary formation). They are only stopped at the local level by antifascists willing to get their hands dirty, on the national level by the state military that refuses to go along, and on the global level by state actors.
Once they win elections, it’s already too late.
Hey what do you think stops them from winning that first election?
🤫
Thanks for sharing. It’s not bad, except for the lack of class analysis. Assuming the Democrats are principled and will always be opposed to fascism, is sadly wrong. They are exactly like those conservatives who always prefer fascism to socialism.
Yeah, a lot of the historical references and descriptions were good, but then when it got to the present day, essentially the “what is to be done” section, it just flopped hard. Paraphrasing: “a coalition of blue states can just ignore the federal government and do their own thing, boom, fascism defeated.” It’s not actually discussing anything about how fascism can actually be defeated even though the whole first half of it sounds like it’s supposed to be a set up to do just that.
Instead it descends into ridiculous cringe:
California could request Canadian peacekeepers for “election security.” New York could invite European observers for “financial transparency.” Make it embarrassing. Make America’s collapse visible to the world. Force the international community to pick sides.
This is your solution? That’s how fascism is defeated? Any respect I may have built up for the author when they were accurately talking about how fascists slither their way into power using the liberal* political apparatus was nullified by this point.
*(even though the author always insisted on calling the fascist appeasers “conservative” at every turn rather than using the more appropriate word “liberal”)Every solution is just another form of “blue states should just pretend there is no federal government,” even the last one which is titled “International Intervention” but that just means making all the other totally-not-fascist liberal “democracies” play ball with the new blue coalition instead of the liberal democracy that elected Trump.
No, the UN can’t invade America. But they can isolate it. Sanctions work. Ask Russia.
Ask Russia? The country whose economy improved after “the mother of all sanctions” were imposed on it? Russia, who is indisputably winning the conflict that those sanctions were supposed to stop, all while Russia’s economic ties with other enemies of the US have grown and blossomed? How about asking Cuba if sanctions work. Yeah, they work to starve the population and cause civilian immiseration and death, they don’t and never have worked to depose rulers. This doofus has no fucking clue what they’re talking about.
And even with the historical stuff, it left a big fucking gaping hole where the people and organizations that DID successfully fight fascism should have been. But nope, not even a mention. Clearly Christopher didn’t want to admit that communism IS the cure to fascism, theoretically and in practice, historically and right now. This essay is just more cringe liberal drivel.
The upside-down corpse of Mussolini might disagree with that
Surely, having the largest military in human history is going to help us, right?
Funny, posting said article on a nazi platform.
Write more non-Nazi stuff and it will stop being a Nazi platform.
The owner of the site is a fucking nazi so there no making it un nazi. Like keeping X cause you think you can change it from a white supremacist site.
Like keeping X cause you think you can change it from a white supremacist site.
I still lurk on Twitter. Calling it a “white supremacist site” is just… Silly. The whole point of social media is that it’s the users who create content.
I’m seeing a lot of right-wing fundamentalists being clapped by sane people. The only time I see any nazi/fascist/supremacist content is when it’s getting ratio’d or just ridiculed.
I’m not saying this content isn’t there, but I’m saying there’s still a lot of people fighting the good fight. Packing up your toys and going home is not really a method for anything other than getting completely marginalised, IMO.
Well, how about we just try it first instead of resorting to instant armed combat against our own government or a civil war?
Not sure if you have noticed, but your government has already started the armed combat against the people
Yes but my 12 gauge shotgun and my .22 riffle and my .45 handgun seem to be a tad lopsided against their tanks and drones and guided missiles so sorry if I’m not ready to pounce just yet.
riffle
Totally valid. You’re right. Under those conditions, voting will definitely work. But only if you shame people on the Internet to vote the correct way.
Poe’s law has got me good this time. Not sure if youre sarcastic or not lol.
Full on sarcastic
Read up on the Viet Cong or Taliban and stop making excuses
You can’t complain about the quality of your guns in the US. If I pissed in a circle I’d hit six gun stores. $300 and an hour later, I’d have a better weapon than any of the insurgent groups that beat the US military.
Gotta be a bit…
The .45 has me
. That’s specifically the cartridge that people buy when they want to say a 9mm is too weak for whatever combat scenario they have in mind. Some guy near me has a bumper sticker that says “.45 ACP: it’s like 9mm for men”. You can’t be both a .45 ACP chud and a smol bean.The whole comment reads like someone whose Facebook picture is them in the driver seat of their truck wearing Oakley sunglasses and a baseball hat with an eagle on it.
I’m a .45 ACP chud but I also recognize that it’s not gonna do much against any kind of armored target. There are dozens of us
instant
Martin Luther King, Jr. 1963: https://letterfromjail.com/
how many decades have you been trying for and failing?
Liberals have tried and failed to meaningfully improve their situations via voting for centuries. Without analyzing which class is in control of the state, voting will always be extremely weak.
you’re right. one more election and we fix climate change, ranpant exploitation and discrimination! We just have to vote properly.
Sure thing, would another hundred years suffice or would that still be too early to tell?
woah only a century? cool your jets extremist
lol, is this bait?
Instant? My guy where do you draw the line?
Removed by mod
sorry.
Well, how about we just try it first
Nobody in the United States has ever tried to vote against a fascist dictator?
instant armed combat
Who do you think is actually organized an armed uprising against Trump? How do you think they’re doing it “instantly”?
Untrue I tried three times to vote against a fascist dictator but over half of my fellow Americans are morons who overrode my vote two out of the three times. But the key here is that voting worked one of those times and no matter how much kicking and screaming and bitching and moaning may have happened his butt was kicked off the WH lawn on Inauguration Day so clearly it does work.
You mean Biden who believes we would have to create Israel if it didn’t exist, who continued the war drive, who delivered weapons and training to genocidaires, who put infants in solitary confinement at the border, who was instrumental in ensuring that the prisons were full of black people who could be used as slave labor, who pardoned the judge who took bribes in exchange for sentencing 8 year old to juvenile detention for jaywalking, who failed to do anything meaningful to stop Trump, who failed to do anything meaningful to limit the power of the executive so it couldn’t be abused, who failed to do anything to stop fascism at all?
Those 4 years where voting a different guy in didn’t do literally anything to stop fascism in the least?
Sure. Do it again. I am sure continuing to not stop fascism is exactly how we stop fascism
And then we got another genocidal imperialist, worker protections continued to erode, and imperialism persisted.
over half of my fellow Americans are morons who overrode my vote
“How about we try voting”
“This doesn’t count, I voted but then other people voted the opposite way”
Maybe the problem is that people on Lemmy don’t understand what an election is.
But the key here is that voting worked one of those times
Oh yeah. Famously, all the fascism in America stopped existing on January 6th, 2021.
That’s why everyone was at the US Capital celebrating.
I think the leftist point being made isn’t that any particular election has no effect. Of course elections have effects. At the very least they provide legitimacy. I think the point is that even though it worked to unseat Trump in 2020, the election did not halt the long term processes leading us towards fascism. It slowed them down a bit but didn’t reverse trend. Reason being that the owner class kept expanding their wealth and therefore control over the entire system. I think leftist memes about elections are often poorly communicated or understood, which isn’t ideal, but then it’s …memes.
I take this meme to also point out that a fascist could just not follow elections, or call them off entirely. Adolf Hitler, the man in the image, called of elections under guise of security. Yeah, you vote against 'em, but then they refuse to leave.
“BannedVoice” pointed out that this didn’t happen in 2020, but I’d point out that then Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, as well as a fair number of Republican politicians, were what you’d call “Tea Party” or neoconservative. Kevin McCarthy, as well as just about every one of these “moderate” Republicans, have been chased out of the party, largely because of their refusal to bow to MAGA orders. The Republican Party of 2020 is not the Republican Party we have now. It’s loyalists all the way through. Remember what happened with the Epstein files?
That’s important context for what happened in 2020.
Broadly, if one believes that elections are a tool that should be leveraged, it’s crucial to understand that elections are not enough, Never have been. Elections are but a small part of the democratic system. All the other cogs - campaigns, fundraising, at all levels of government, for this or that office, within parties, all of that matters immensely. The people you mention who acted as a bulwark against the fascists were a product of that system. Who the choices are come election time is the product of that. Whether it’s a Turd Sandwich v. Giant Douche. Or whether it’s Mamdani v. Cuomo.
Dont forget the rigged machines in swing states thanks to Elon.
Is Lemmy just full of hateful ass people or something? In what world does saying we shouldn’t start an armed rebellion worthy of all the downvotes? Y’all are fucking wild.
Lemmy is full of leftists, the vast majority of which understand that electoralism and reformism are losing strategies and that revolution is generally necessary.
your commitment to the bit is truly laudable 🤣
how about we just try it first
😭
Because they’re already drawing weapons and we’ve been “trying” so hard we elected him twice. You think this will change? You think the Dems will wave a wand and institute voting reform and healthcare or increase wages or improve the living conditions?
Actually my hope is that when this is over people in the MAGA movement will finally wake up and see how much of their own lives have been destroyed by what this ass clown did to them and we as a country can agree to NEVER allow it to happen again and that we can finally go back to letting the adults govern the country instead of a man who would have been a used car salesman had his daddy not given him everything he has.
after germany lost in ww2 only 300 people stood in front of nuremberg.
every fascist that survived just used their position of power and recognition and continued staying in politics. they didn’t change their minds, only the approach.
fascism wasn’t suddenly eradicated. the generations they put into this world were taught and raised by these fascists in hiding.
MAGA fucks won’t change their minds. They’ll just change the approach.
and honestly: as a non-american it doesn’t matter if trump or a dem are in power. they’ll continue murdering people in their interest.
As an American who’s lived in various countries and can’t stand his home country, I agree with you 100%.
Trump isn’t the problem, he’s a symptom of the problem. The US Empire has never served the working classes, no president has.
when this is over […] we can finally go back
(also the ‘clean energy’ he’s talking about is fracking 🥰 )
If we just keep changing the bandages and apply no antibiotics, surely the infection will just give up
We’ve been trying for a long time? How long should we wait? Do they need to officially declare fascism?
