The point is this: when people are advocating that a voter, who is dissatisfied with the Dems, who may even like the green party platform, should vote Democrat to keep MAGA out, they are speaking strategically. Focusing only on keeping out a worse candidate is tactical voting.
So I was simply pointing out that, if we’re speaking strategically, then other strategies are available.
I did not claim that this was the only, or most popular, reason for people sitting out the 2024 election.
Whether a multi-election strategy has been successful here will depend on what the Dem platform is for 2028 (and, indeed, for the midterms).
Well, the Weimar Republic didn’t happily continue the Kaiser’s foreign wars and torture camps, nor did it outdo its predecessors in deportations, so the analogy was always a non-starter.
When you’ve lived under a fascist regime and then wonderfully don’t [1], you know.
Ask BLM how wonderfully non-fascist America felt under the Dems in 2013…
The next time you get confused by something MrDibble says not making any sense, just come back to this post and remember that to him, anyone to the right of Bakunin is a fascist.
Seriously, is there some rule now that literally every thread about politics has to devolve into an argument about the definition of “genocide” within 200 posts?
:shrug: I’m an anarchist. If I were a purist, I’d only vote for candidates who promised to end the enforcement of laws, dismantle all coercive systems, get rid of elected and appointed leadership positions (including their own, of course), and devote all resources towards refining decision-making structures that involve everyone as equal participants. Assuming, of course, that being a purist didn’t mean I’d be against voting on principle, since voting means privileging the viewpoint of the majority at the expense of the outnumbered minority.
I’m not a purist. I don’t always vote for the Democratic candidate, but the Republicans have an amazing propensity for driving me into the Democrats’ arms. In all honesty, there have been times when the Republican has made some damn good points about generic individual citizens’ rights and the interference of government, ranging from standing up against HOAs and community board pushiness to the right to be crazy and remain crazy if you aren’t breaking any laws. More often, though, when I poke into their actual politics what they really mean is the right for some corporate entities to carry on making profits without interference from regulations and restrictions.
Anyway, now that MfM has posted more details about the Pew survey, I see that it is drawing a distinction between “progressive left” and “outsider left”. AFAICT the only difference is that the former are more politically engaged, and between them they account for 16% of the population, which seems much closer to right. And this schema does reflect my own experience that the Left seems to be divided between people like me who never miss an election and people who need a rock star candidate to get them to the polls, with a relative paucity of “normies” in between.
A fair question, since by their definition outsiders “are very liberal in most of their views”. They are also younger and more diverse than Progressives, but that’s demography, not ideology.
But we have another thread now for discussing the specifics of this typology.
The OP reads to me like someone who is furious at those putative allies who had an emotional reaction to politics and responded, not strategically in a way that furthered their interests, but emotionally in a way that vented their spleen, to their own strategic detriment.
I agree.
I also think that when Democrats yell at leftists in a way that alienates leftists, they’re having an emotional reaction to politics and responding, not strategically in a way that furthers their interests, but emotionally in a way that vents their spleen, to their own strategic detriment.
I get being upset with those on the left who couldn’t find a clothespin for their nose on the way to the ballot box, who couldn’t vote for Harris despite her severe problems as a potential president. It was a fateful and harmful choice those folks made.
But yelling at them and alienating them is also a fateful and harmful choice. If those people are able to influence the outcome of an election, the strategic move is to figure out how to welcome them, how to bring them into the tent.
This is the after-the-fact rationalization. During the election it was punishment of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden for what they saw as failing to prioritize genocide. The outcome (if we can say it influenced the election) was even more genocide because the candidate who we all knew would do even more genocide did just that.
That was the strategy. The strategy failed, and now it’s been recast as, actually, we’re playing a longer game. Which of course reveals that they’re either lying about that, or lying about how much they cared about genocide. And of course there’s also the “respect us or expect us” contingent who suddenly pivoted to “we’re so small, we couldn’t have possibly been responsible for this outcome.”
The most parsimonious explanation is that they played a game of chicken with Dems, failed catastrophically, and are now pretending that it was an intermediate step to force an even more consequential showdown next time.
It’s an absurd strategy because the outcome is:
Dems win, proving they don’t need the fringe (usual outcome), or
Dems lose, proving that the fringe is willing to sacrifice their own goals, indicating that they care more about power than their stated goals, suggesting there’s no real need to concede on their goals.
There’s no real definition of tactical vs strategic voting. There’s effective voting for your preferred candidates and policies, and there’s whatever story losers tell themselves about why they keep picking loser approaches.
Why does everyone in the America polity assume that only Democrats have agency? Republicans are taken to be just sort of a force of nature to be worked-around and not persuaded or confronted. Leftists must be appeased apparently because they’re so sincere or pure-hearted or sympathetic.
Apparently it’s too ground-breaking to ask people simply to back the winning horse that’s most likely to break the back of Trumpist fascism. That’s not sophisticated enough, not strategic enough. Only rubes vote for the candidate that will lead the country in what’s closest to the ideal direction. And of course we know why. If pressed enough, they’ll tell you that Democrats and Republicans are both fascists. Actually some don’t need any pressing, they’ll tell you right off the cuff.
The overall tone of the OP seems to be taking the common line of blaming the Left for the failures of the Democratic Party by implying that leftists aren’t loyal or reliable Democratic voters.
Given that we just saw an NYC mayoral election where the establishment, moderate candidate refused to accept the outcome of the Democratic primary and ran as a spoiler independent, all I can say to that is “pull the other one, it’s got bells that play The Internationale on it”.
Even on this board we have a thread where those based Establishment Liberals are desperately searching for an excuse not to support the Democratic Senate candidate in Maine.
First, that whatever you do to get them into the tent won’t drive out others. I think the Democrats already bend over backwards to appeal to them, to the point where it already alienates some people, especially of my parents’ generation.
Second, that they are actually allies. At the end of the day, if you’re illiberal, you are not and should not be an ally to the Democrats. If you want to vote for us because you think we are the lesser evil, great, but that doesn’t mean we should betray our ideals to appeal to you.
…after becoming completely disgraced within the Democratic Party? He was no longer the “establishment, moderate” candidate; he was a disgraced former Democrat who was almost universally viewed as untouchable due to his scandals.
Forgive me for suggesting there might have been more than one reason for people not voting Dem. Thanks for confirming there was only one motivation; nuance is such a pain.
Interesting phrasing there too – it’s all about punishing Harris and Biden, rather than, say, actually caring about genocide.
Sounds like everyone who disagrees with you are stupid jerks.
In this thread: people claiming the Democrats need to clean their own house.
Also in this thread: Democrats pushing back against some of the excesses of other posters in this thread.
Not in this thread: leftists pushing back against the multiple times within this very thread of calling Dems fascists.
It should be easy to clean one’s own house by starting with the rhetoric. Or are leftists calling Dems fascist simply an inevitability, performed by automata without free will who can’t therefore be held to account?