Vote Democrats if there is no progressive alternative. But always primary progressives in Democratic primaries.
The time to argue and complain about candidates is during the primaries. When a candidate for a party has been chosen you vote with the party. Out system is the way it is and no amount of protest votes are going to fix it. Do not vote 3rd party in the general election.
This is the way, at least until we get rid of First Past the Post and other Ordinal voting systems.
Score, STAR, or Approval would all make primaries unnecessary, and also reward people for honestly voting their preferences. Which is sort of why there’s so much pushback against them.
Issue with that tactic is that it’s actively being used to justify Chuck Schumer’s “for every big city liberal we alienate, we will gain 3 to 4 hillbillies from the rural area” schtick, which is costing democrats elections and us (the world) the real progressive movement.
Just tell Schumer his shtick cost everyone two presidential elections.
I’ve heard so called “liberal” media discuss and condemn Hassan Piker more than I’ve seen them discuss and condemn Trump and all his lackeys combined.
They’re the definition of controlled opposition.
Hassan piker is a nepotistic pos that cosplays as someone that fights for equality.
I’ve heard so called “liberal” media discuss and condemn Hassan Piker more than I’ve seen them discuss and condemn Trump and all his lackeys combined.
Bud, what the hell is your media diet??? That’s a fox-news level of informed take
That’s probably hyperbolic, but Piker’s a big story if you don’t stay in safety bubble lemmy land. It’s a whole new world out there.
I’d provide links and discuss further, but honestly I would rather not get my comment deleted or banned.
Lemmy in my experience has been like this.
“Hey Republican did evil thing”
Well DID YOU KNOOOOOW DEMOCRAT ALSO BAD??!
Until there’s someone that accurately represents GenX and lower, people are just gambling by voting for the next geriatric senior that’s gonna go fucking senile, shitting themselves and having agendas that don’t benefit anyone of the current age of the actual workforce. We’ll keep getting someone who’s focused on social security and wars rather than the housing crisis and the AI workforce replacements that are pushing out people who dedicated time and effort and went into crippling debt becoming proficient at a six figure or top five figure earning positions, only to consider switching trades.
How about we get a president for the people, under 50 and doesn’t fucking hate us.
Well this comment section is a fucking dumpster fire. I guess MAGA trolls are back on the menu, bois.
The beauty of your comment is that both sides of this argument can agree with you, confident you’re secretly talking about the other half.
I actually like this scenario for US elections. The two parties are throwing parties onto the two track options while the oligarchy creates and maintains the system. What we need here is to get this train off the tracks in the first place. The switches are our voting system. We get a chance to get off this train at the polls, but we always choose to get right back on.
This is called a straw man argument.
How so? Seems to perfectly describe the issue from my perspective.
Maybe you don’t know the US primaries are over? It’s now down to First Past the Post, where bipartisan voting is mathematically mandatory; the chance to choose the most progressive candidate within the party is over.
Seems to perfectly describe the issue from my perspective
Then you fail to understand why the Trolley problem is an actual problem and why the ethics of of it are STILL debated. This is not as simple as you pretend it is, and while you can make excuses for your own choice it doesn’t mean the problem is solved.
And that text is falsely framing the issue to mock those who have a different opinion than the author.
I have a pretty firm stance on the Trolley Problem, which is only a serious dilemma for people who should exclude themselves from conversations about whether to pull the lever or not.
That’s not to say I would feel good about pulling the lever, nor do I feel good about the choices in this scenario. It just has to be done, so I’ll do it. You can be unwilling to plug your nose and vote for the Lesser Evil if you want, but convincing others to do the same has awful results, as we can see from Trump getting elected repeatedly due to millions of “I guess I’ll just stay home” voters.
Russia pays lots of money to spread the message you do. Why do you think that is?
Ah, another person who thinks they solved the question for good and can’t see what the big deal is or why others may struggle more than you on the issue.
I don’t have time to argue this yet again. Feel free to tell one of the philosophy subs and see if they agree with you.
And to your political point, a ton of people held their nose and did like you said, only for people to blame them anyway for not winning the race. Arab-Americans rejected Trump and voted for Harris in swing states but she lost anyway and now people are scapegoating them as if her loss was their fault. (Even though she lost states like Michigan by a margin greater than the entire Arab-American population there).
Ah, another person who thinks they solved the question for good and can’t see what the big deal is or why others may struggle more than you on the issue.
That’s not what I said. Try reading more carefully.
And to your political point, a ton of people held their nose and did like you said, only for people to blame them anyway for not winning the race.
So? What does that have to do with me? I didn’t do that.
Isn’t it always pre-election? Every two years and all.
Meanwhile, the reason that the claim is so prevalent is because it is so true.
bOtH sIdEs are anti-union, anti-labor, pro-corporate, and pro-billionaire.
US workers have lost income and standard of living for over FIFTY YEARS. You will hear this for the rest of your life, because it’s an indisputable fact.
The USA needs a labor party, the Democrats are no labor party.
You are depicted in this meme, and you don’t seem to see it.
To me, we on the left reinforce this idea that both sides are the same when we sink to their level. We don’t need fake videos or out of context clips of him to prove he’s a terrible person. It’s there for all to see in his unfiltered words and actions. Same with the slop about Musk that does the rounds. We don’t need fake stories to spread the word. It’s self-evident in his actual, real life behaviour, and only serves to weaken the truth.
Both sidesers are slime. Period.
The “all options are bad” voter discouragement has ramped back up for a while now. But also interesting is the absence of another kind of anti-democracy discourse: where are the “vote 3rd party” stooges that always become active before USA presidential elections?
If the stooges aren’t promoting 3rd party voting now, then does that mean that 3rd party voting is not actually a bad thing during USA congressional elections? I mean, if it were bad for democracy in the USA, then I’d expect the authoritarian bootlickers to be promoting it now as well. But it’s also possible that they are and that I’m just not watching the right places, since I don’t follow any state specific discussion forums.
It’s a 4yr, pres cycle gig. Part of the problem
This comment section right here is all the proof that there will be no salvation in November.
Every pig-ignorant savior is so absolutely certain that their ideologically pure solution is the only acceptable way to fix anything that everyone is going to cancel each other out and it’s just going to continue sliding towards the cliff edge.
Under NO circumstances attempt to learn ANY lessons from parliamentary coalitions who banded together to stop the hijacking of their governments by radical fascists despite sweeping policy disagreements. Everyone keep nitpicking every minute detail, make no compromises whatsoever no matter the costs, and make stupid, pointless, self-destructive, aggrandizing gestures so you can talk down to strangers on the internet, and enjoy the ride to hell.
Not only are they expecting it to go over the cliff’s edge, they are outright hoping for a collapse-level event.
They believe the only way forward is for a catastrophe to happen to make ‘the masses’ accept their “told you so” and will magically follow them when the time comes, that elections are broadly counter-productive because ‘the masses’ are, effectively, ill equipped to take care of their self-interests and need a core of ‘smart people’ to make the decisions for them. No where do I see how they reconcile their inability to win a contest of rhetoric but somehow win whatever decidedly less civilized power contest that would happen in such a catastrophe.
I will say I don’t see a realistic chance of the ‘best’ outcome, even if the legislature finally is opposed to the executive branch, we are dealing with an executive branch that is willing to break laws and only 2/3rds of Senate could hold it accountable, and that’s absolutely not going to happen. But it is certainly worth a shot to move the needle in the right direction.
Also, the coalition scenario doesn’t play out in the American system, so we could use some unlikely seeming reforms to get there. More parties with a more sophisticated voting system and perhaps removal of directly elected executive.
It really makes me feel like the arguments (and votes) to the contrary (which are plenty throughout this thread) are coming from one of two kinds of people:
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Foreign interests attempting to push the US further towards fascism
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Incredibly naive people, likely including children
I just don’t see how else a Trolley Problem answer like “I can’t touch the lever, because that would mean I killed someone” could be applied here. You can either sit back and allow the US to slide further towards fascism or you can vote for the party lightly tapping the brakes. When it’s primary season again, we can resume the very valid conversation about opposing the rightmost factions of the DNC.
Imagine a system where there are two rounds of voting, where we vote for a dinner we must all eat, between Salad, Sand, or Sewage. For numerous and mostly stupid reasons, Salad loses the first round and we now have to vote for Sand or Sewage.
I’m voting Sand, y’all. I know you’d rather eat Salad, and I would too, but it’s off the table as of the end of the primaries. Encouraging people not to vote for Sand just pushes us towards being forced to eat Sewage.
Yes, it’s infuriating. But here we are.
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This is such an annoying discussion at this point. The “let’s keep doing what we’ve always done because obviously that’s working” folks never really engage with any arguments. They just ignore what people say and keep attacking the same strawmen over and over.
“Both metallica and the strokes have a guitar player”
“Oh so you’re saying that metallica and the strokes are the same? That’s so ridiculous, they don’t even have the same number of members, you idiot.”
It’s so tiresome and pointless. And quite upsetting as well, because in attacking some of the strawmen, the “stay the course, this is going well” folks sometimes say some really heinous thing, bordering on full on genocide denial, or even worse, acknowledging the genocide but essentially saying “not my problem”. It’s really upsetting to read such things.
I guess that’s at the core of it actually. It’s one group of people that look at the millions of people that American imperialism has killed, and the way both parties have toed the exact same line on imperialism specifically, and consider this absolutely unacceptable. And on the other side you have people looking at this and thinking “yeah but what about my problems, the parties are different there”. It’s a fundamental difference in values, and there’s no amount of convincing that either side can do to bridge that gap.
Anyway, here’s my favorite Hannah Arendt quote, because I refuse to accept that we cannot somehow learn, eventually, from the holocaust:
In their moral justification, the argument of the lesser evil has played a prominent role. If you are confronted with two evils, the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Its weakness has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget quickly that they chose evil.
I am not sure the group that thinks American Imperialism has killed millions is significant in American politics. Perhaps here on Lemmy there are quite a few people who rightly say this, but the vast majority of Americans reject this thought outright.
I view it as one group who is fine with the status quo so much they will fight to keep it that way. They are resistant to change and feel that the strong hierarchal orders are good and that people have their place and should stay there. They are a strong minority.
You have another group of people who don’t really care and kind of just go where the wind takes them. They don’t have particularly strong political beliefs. They are mostly self serving but generally good natured. These people are the majority.
You have the last group of people who are against the status quo for a myriad of reasons. They embrace change and are resistant to hierarchal structures. They are not really organized as they are incredibly diverse in their reasonings and are generally a weak minority.
I think the annoying part comes from the lack of critical thought and introspection. There are so many good ways to solve our problems we have never even thought of. There are solutions to moving forward and we absolutely have to find them.
I am not sure the group that thinks American Imperialism has killed millions is significant in American politics. Perhaps here on Lemmy there are quite a few people who rightly say this, but the vast majority of Americans reject this thought outright.
I agree with this, and my comment really focusses on the discussion here, on this niche forum. But I do think that a slightly amended version of this sentiment is broadly popular in the electorate. Something along the lines of “bring our boys home” or “we don’t need to be spending our tax dollars on this”. The motivation is much more selfish, but the desired outcome has significant overlap with the anti-imperialist sentiment, namely the cessation of war or funding genocide (the anti imperialist stance is broader than this, and would for example also be against the sanctions on Cuba, but this people really just don’t give a shit about generally). I believe it’s a big part of why the candidate promising “no new wars” won over the candidate promising to “ensure that america has the most lethal fighting force in the world” in the last presidential election.
No notes on the rest of your comment. “Fuck you I got mine” is infuriating.
You knew it was going to shit the moment the" no new wars" candidate’s administration changed the Department of Defense to the Department of War. While a certain part of me does feel that the US deserved what it got it is hard not to see the epic rug pull here.
Is voting the end all be all of one’s political choices? Or perhaps after mitigating the worst outcome, people could have recognized that there is more work to be done?
Because voting democrat is not necessarily an endorsement of them, at least in a two party system. It is a condemnation of the other party. Thus, voting democrat is not choosing a lesser evil it is rejecting a greater one.
I’ve previously voted democrat because of great deal many completely unselfish reasons that would have helped people other than myself. Sure, self interest played a role, but it was far from the main reason.
Now… spite and self interest is kind of is my main reason this midterm election, but that’s because I’ve grown to simply hate most people after November 2024 as its dawned on me the number of selfish imbeciles I’m drowning in and assume we’re fucked anyway so might as well get some relief before the big funny kills all/most/many of us, whatever it may specifically be.
Lol at the comments in here, it’s a fucking dumpster fire. Hey at least it’s not Twitter
I think there should be more focus on what politicians stand to represent, their history, their associations, and what they voted for.
Policy changes are extremely important as well, but it gotten more and more complicated over time. Sounds good on paper, but turns out to be a market grab for corpos.
Then you have people like Charlie Crist… The I will be whatever party that will make me money. He was a republican and now he’s a democrat. Right
In countries like the US, that approach would work if we actually had campaign reforms and a concerted effort to break the ‘two-party’ system (I use quotes because one hand of the corpo-fascist state hits us just a little less hard than the other and at least says “I’m sorry, baby” afterwards).
Rank choice voting, uncapping the House of Representatives, NO primaries at all (WYSIWYG politics), etc,. It would go a long way.
A lot of that would help. I would say the thing I yearn for is to be able to remove politicians from office in a emergency vote reform. Someone like Prick Scott committing the biggest medicare fraud should be voted on life imprisonment instead of a seat in senate.
We got to love symmetrists
