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Agree with the philosophy, but stupid that she's running for president. Until/unless we change FPTP voting the only the Democrat and Republican running even matter and if you don't explicitly vote for the one then your are implicitly voting for the other.
I don't begrudge her campaign. Making noise on the national level is a good way to elevate the message and slowly undo the demonization of socialism. It's her supporters acting like Harris is the same as Trump that chap my ass.
The problem with that is "the media" treats anyone other than D, R, and occasionally Jill Stein as non existent. She isn't making noise on the national level because that requires the media to "amplify" you and all we hear from them about her right now is
I didn't forget to finish the sentence.
Lenin argued that communists should take part in bourgeois elections because this will get them tribune to loudly proclaim their program, though this should be the least they do, not the most and the main effort should be outside of electorial politics and on organising working class.
Now thing is, when Lenin wrote this, he meant the tsarist duma, which was even fakier democracy than the current American one, with 3 tiers of electors, censuses, workers and peasants barely getting few % of representation and rest going to landowners and their pets, okhrana secret police arresting socialists and peasant activists and closing their newspapers (there was a case where huge participation of workers put iirc 15 worker representatives in duma, and tsar just fucking imprisoned them). But they were still heard.
Now, nearly 120 years later, bourgeosie don't even have to be so heavy handed, they just drown the communist message in a media flood, and even cases like removing third party candidate from ballot and deplatforming them cause no big response from the so called "liberty" advocates.
@Asafum @themeatbridge I think they do that as they might as well be non-existant considering the current winner take all method of assigning Electoral College votes in over forty states. Frankly, you might as well not bother to vote if'n you're going to vote third party. Frankly I won't take any third party seriously until they start caring about down ballot elections where they can make a difference, show people why they should be elected, and change the laws that keep them from being elected.
Frankly, you might as well not bother to vote if'n you're going to vote third party.
Advertising your party platform, signaling strength, and delegitimizing the electoral system are valid reasons to vote third party.
Frankly I won't take any third party seriously until they start caring about down ballot elections where they can make a difference, show people why they should be elected, and change the laws that keep them from being elected.
This is ridiculous. Third parties are not allowed to work within the electoral system, the DNC and GOP collude against that. The electoral system isn't some fantasy where a bunch of parties try to prove their worth, it's dominated by Capitalist donors and establishment parties, hence the necessity for delegitimizing it.
Consider it from the point of view of the millions of under educated working poor.
they live in a state of precarity and they are being told trump is bad apparently because of ‘project 2025’ or some other nebulous concept.
Thats not gonna land with them. They don’t have the luxury of considering the dangers of “dismantling the administration “ under trump. They need to pay the rent and buy groceries and care for their sick, before they can weigh the relative morality of the candidates.
They wake up, they see rich people getting richer and their life getting harder 24/7/365 and they see no one doing anything about it .
This is why the Dems never get it .
Working people are too hard up to worry about a power struggle between the super rich and the ultra wealthy.
Respectfully, Trump didn't just appear this year. There are endless CONCRETE examples of his garbage character and policy ideas. Plenty of people in precarious situations are not so stupid as to somehow believe that Trump is only a danger recently because of project 2025. You would literally have to have just regained consciousness from a 10 year coma to not have been exposed to his shittiness at this point. Anyone who supports him or is undecided about him is wholly ignorant of reality.
And yet he was elected to highest office in the land and went very close again 4 years later and will likely go close again.
So there are plenty of “stupid” people who are “ignorant of reality” and they have vote same as you.
Why do you think Trump became influential? Why did this happen, and how do we not repeat it?
Too many people left behind in hardship in a time of abundance and conspicuous wealth. Easy for Trump to gains support with populist sentiment. Republicans saw their chance, and held their nose a made him leader.
The answer is capitalist decay. Fascism isn't going away even if Trump goes away.
I recently saw someone in the comment section on another social media site (video of Jan 6th) legitimately have their mind blown that January 6th was not peaceful. They had multiple comments of them coming to the realization that it was anything other than peaceful. I think we often underestimate how uninformed (or willfully ignorant) the general public is.
It’s very difficult to view things from another perspective, although it’s phrase we throw around a lot .
I never imagined fast food delivery would take off, because restaurants have drive throughs. My bias is that of a car owner and I was wildly wrong.
As you point out, there is a ton of hard evidence about people’s limited political understanding.
I mean aren't these also the people who say free healthcare is communism and less taxes for corporations and lower minimal wage is better because then companies can employ more people
Hot take but no. I've seen no convincing polling on basically any topic that says that the average voter, or, under-educated working class schmuck, is some hardline neoliberal, or free market libertarian. The average tends to skew populist, for pretty obvious reasons.
There's also a multibillion dollar propaganda apparatus spinning at all times which is created to convince people that climate change isn't real, natural gas cookware is good, their lives are actually great, they can work themselves out of the hole and into the dwindling middle class, and government austerity measures are good because the meritocratic private sector will just altruistically innovate and make everything more economically efficient, and if anyone's getting hurt, then it's the real poor who aren't like them at all, because those people are lazy and can't be changed. So what little anti-populist sentiment we see in the population, I would argue that's something that's been pretty deliberately manufactured.
That's democracy. She's allowed to run for POTUS.
Nobody ever said she couldn't. Do you go outside and yell at the clouds?
Why?
Other countries with FPTP have fringe candidates that almost definitely won't win elections, but influence politics considerably.
Arguably, Nigel Farage is the most influential politician in the last decade of the UK for his role in pushing Brexit, all while being in no less than three different political parties. He only recently won election as a MP on his seventh attempt, but media backing and taking disenfranchised votes from idiots basically allowed him to dictate internal policy for both main parties.
There are 650 MPs in the UK, and unlike ind the US it isn't winner-takes-all; if you win one of the 650 seats you get to be an MP
In the US presidential election, there are 50 states for a bigger population and even then winning one while losing the others achieves nothing
In the senate and house elections, which are more analogous to the UK, independent candidates are viable, right? There's at least a few. But it's not comparable to the Presidential elections
FPTP is fucked, but it's only one element of why the USA is deadlocked into the two major parties being the only contenders. The electoral college, the winner-takes-all nature... all sorts
That's all well and good, but it doesn't answer the primary point. An unelected politician was able to drive change without even being elected as an MP because he had public and media support. Tell me why that isn't possible in the United States, even if it means as a fringe candidate in a primary party?
I see your point but again I'd say it's because of the US's winner-take-all system, as well as 50 states vs 650 seats
Farage posed enough of a perceived risk to the Tories that they moved in his direction to avoid losing votes to UKIP. UKIP never would have won more than a handful of seats, let alone a majority, but by splitting the right vote Labour could have beat the Tories in swing seats
And yes, that could be broadly true of a 'spoiler' candidate in the US presidential election, except that:
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Only 50 states, and therefore a tiny amount of swing seats compared to the UK
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more population per state than per British seat. By a whole huge margin. So its not enough to potentially appeal to 8,000 people to 'spoil' a seat
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The above leads to funding issues. Not only is there more money generally in the US elections, but because you have to flip a big state not a small constituency, you have to spend way way more to make an impact. You can't focus a small budget on one tiny area and win a seat
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Winner-takes-all means that as long as a campaign thinks it will win a state, and then a presidency, who cares if some counties went to a spoiler candidate?
I'd love to be wrong, and I do think that there's probably also a cultural/historical element to the US's two party dominance. But that said, its just a different system, different processes, different outcomes, different challenges than in the UK
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I'm certain the dems and Republicans will vote to end their strangle hold on us politics in just 1 more election cycle!!! Our maybe the next.... or maybe the next.....
End of the day we are the dems. We are the repubs. Get out these and vote.
Unless, and hear me out here, it is possible to change.