This is exactly why it’s stupid to sit out an election between a milquetoast corporate democrat and Trump. You’re not going to change the democrats in 4 years, you’re just going to get 4 years of Trump.
Well at least you’ll have four years of finger-wagging to look forward to.
Yes when a predictable bad thing happens and a group of people chose not to take a very low-investment to stop it and then their supposed rationale for this action doesn’t materialize I blame them. They apparently feel as though this is “finger wagging” because of course there was no actual material good their choice was intended to achieve in the first place, it was just a spite-based decision and they don’t like this being pointed out to them.
Excellent idea. Who told you that they were owed a vote? Let’s have exact realism and cites, please.
Probably nobody. It’s a rhetorical flourish. Consider mine to be the same.
Wrong. You very specifically suggested that such strategies spanned multiple elections. If we’re talking about multi-election strategies, then it is very much appropriate to ask, how’s it working out for you?
God this is so tiresome because you don’t see the plain other side of the coin. These people voted for a candidate that we all told them would get them even more genocide, and that has definitely happened, and this is inefficient to show them that maybe they should’ve reached out to Dems to help defeat that guy. It cuts absolutely both ways.
Stop trying to tell me what I think, you’re obviously terrible at it.
I’ll just note you’ve jumped from “Weimar” to the post-Weimar election like nobody would notice.
Not something I said, but whatever it takes to enable yourself to continue to deny America’s essential fascist nature, I guess?
Jah vohl freunddernazi
Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput![1]
makes about as much sense as the mock-German you just posted ↩︎
Gesundheit!
You’re trying to apply reason to a MrDibble argument. Just start from the conclusion that America Bad and work back from there if you want to understand how he “thinks” (I use the term loosely).
We aren’t talking about Trump voters in this thread. It would probably be more productive if we were (though I’d still prefer we put our focus on future elections).
Glad to finish on a note of agreement.
As opposed to your (for want of better phrase) thought process of “if it’s for the benefit of (most) Israelis, job’s a good 'un! Yes, of course that includes genocide, why’d you ask?”
I think what a lot of people overlook is that there were a lot of people on the Left who fundamentally rejected the concept of working within the Democratic Party and felt only an explicitly leftist third party could be trusted to carry out its platform if elected. It’s not the case that these people would have voted for the Democrats if they had had a “purer” platform.
As we can see from the cite above, the third party vote has gone from a sliver to a crumb in the last couple elections:
2000 2.86%
2016 1.18%
2020 0.26%
2024 0.67%
I think this is because of two things: sensible leftists have realized that the Green Party is now a nest of Putinist crazies and don’t want to encourage them by giving them protest votes. And the success of AOC, the Squad, and now Mamdani have proved that working within the Democratic Party gets actual results.
It might be reasonable to wonder why it took them so long, but the electoral Left finally seems to have gotten over the third party dream.
Which is why they’ve now been branded corporatist Neoliberal shills! Some people seem entirely allergic to “getting results”.
Of course - no one is more plugged into the views of the progressive left than @Babale!
Yessiree, the best way to defeat fascists is picking fights among those who oppose them.
He is all three, dumb, (with a b o’ course) insane and demonstrably demented. ~sigh~
That’s where the analogy kind of breaks down somewhat. In fact, not taking a bus that doesn’t get you close enough to your desired destination does send a message to transit authorities, who spend a lot of time analyzing ridership patterns and figuring out how to tweak routes to boost bus use.
Yes, there have always got to be compromises and workarounds, because no bus route (and no candidate) is going to deliver all the things you want from them. But I would not blame or chastise somebody for deciding “actually, none of the available routes get me close enough to my destination in an acceptable timeframe, taking the bus is not significantly better for me than just not getting where I want to go at all”.
Agreed. There’s no reason to think these people were winnable, or ever intended to be winnable, or will ever become winnable. It’s the posturing of people who decided years ago that they’d never oppose Republicans because it interferes with their primary goal of opposing Democrats.
Let’s continue with the math. According to Pew about 4% of the US are part of the progressive left. This is based on opinion surveys: for all I know, I could very well be among their number.
The OP does not apply to most of them. But in 2024, 0.67% of the public supported Trump by voting Green or for the Socialism and Liberation Party. I don’t have figures for 2024, but in 2020 0.56% were progressive left nonvoters. Adding them together gives a rough estimate of 1.23% of the country, scientifically a high enough population to pit on the SDMB.
That’s about 31% of the progressive left. So most of the progressive left are not leftist purists who very much deserve this pitting and much much more. But a hefty chunk are.
I think they are susceptible to mockery on social media. The sharp decline in Green support and the high voting participation of the progressive left shows there’s some blood in this turnip.
Whether hippie punching is the best use of our resources is another matter. I say it’s a fine effort now, but that patriots need to get focused during the summer. Big tents include progressives and I am a big tent Democrat.
It’s more that they hope for a general collapse of society so they can build their socialist utopia in the aftermath. In my experience these people don’t believe that it’s possible to accomplish anything with elections and disdain the assertion that it is as “electoralism”. They are mainly just sitting around waiting for the inevitable World Revolution that will just…spontaneously happen at some point.
They always came across as the socialist equivalent of Christians waiting for the Rapture to sweep them into Heaven, actually.