I have a friend who is very much into activist causes. She writes occasional pieces for a local communist newspaper. I guess she considers herself a communist, but I never directly asked.
From hearing her talk, I’m of the opinion that she doesn’t really support communism or has studied it in depth, but just likes protesting and advocating for disability rights, fair housing, and care for seniors. She really enjoys community meetings and passing out literature about this stuff. She’s very sincere about it.
The thing is, she’s not voting for Kamala Harris. She told me she can’t because of how our government is rallying in support of Israel against the Palestinians. She was a part of the Palestinian protest march during the Democratic Convention here in Chicago.
She says she will vote for Cornel West, a Black intellectual activist who is running for President under the slogan of “Truth and Justice”. She says he has a lot of good ideas.
Yeah. This guy’s running for President, and I’ve never heard of him until she told me. You see how much of a chance he has.
Anyway, I didn’t try to dissuade her. It’s her vote and she can vote however she wants to. But goddammit, the Presidential race is running neck and neck, and the outcome will affect how this country is basically run. I mean from the foundations. We have the status quo, inequitable as it is, against dangerous looney toons who want basically a god king who will take us back in time before civil rights were established.
These are the civil rights that she’s so adamant about. That she spends so much time fighting for. They are in real danger of being stripped from us. And she wants to make a grand empty gesture of voting for a provocateur with NO chance of winning because he happens to be right about a lot of stuff? Excuse me?
I comfort myself that this actually means very little. Illinois is a solidly blue state, and the electoral college will not be affected by my friend’s one vote.
Maybe she’s playing the radicalization card of wanting things to become so bad that it sparks open rebellion and revolution. If she actually is a communist that’s a long-standing move from the Marxist playbook.
At some point you’ve simply got to decide when it’s best to cut bait or keep fishing. The great myth of communication is that by using the right magical words you can get through to anyone. You can’t.
This. Your opinion that “this contest needs everybody to get over here on the right side of it” should outweigh her concerns about being on the right side of each individual issue conflict is an opinion you’re entitled to, but you aren’t “right”. Illinois will cast its electoral votes for Harris, as will New York, and many of us Greens here in NY are really really pissed at the Democratic Party and will not be voting for Harris. (We have legitimate reasons, although the worst offenses can’t be laid at Harris’ feet but at former gov Cuomo’s).
Of course it would be a massively awful outcome if that drooling bully got elected again, but neither your acquaintance in Illinois nor the annoyed Greens in New York are important factors in making (or allowing) that to happen. If you want to make a difference, sign up to send postcards to potential voters in swing states, or donate to organized efforts, or sign up to make phone calls etc.
The political world does not resolve to a binary “us vs them” = “good vs evil”. Your friend is spot-on about the bullshit perpetrated by the government of Israel (Bibi in particular) and the ethnic cleaning of the Gaza strip. She’s entitled to decide Harris does not deserve her support for not taking a principled stand on this issue.
Sure, but what would the equation be if their friend lived in a swing state?
I think the operative concept here is that there is sort of a hierarchy of interests in play, and a lot of people don’t realize that.
Our primary interest ought to be the preservation of our democratic system of government from candidates and parties who desire to subvert and undermine it for their own purposes. All the rest should be secondary, as it all only really counts if the system allows us to vote and for the will of he people to be heard and obeyed.
But a lot of people either just assume that our system will just chug along like it always has, or they are too dim/ignorant to understand that Presidents aren’t elected absolute monarchs, or why screwing minorities is bad.
That’s the problem at hand- their friend is one of the assumers- they’re assuming that the system will chug along as always, and voting for West is some sort of protest and/or authentic vote on their part for what they believe. If they were clued in, they’d realize that the real vote here is a referendum on whether we want to remain a democracy, and would not do something so clueless as vote for a candidate like West with no chance of winning.
As for Trump and Israel, Donald’s statements have not been consistently supportive of Israeli victory. DJT has repeatedly called for Israel to end the war, as if Israel’s enemies had no say in the matter.
So I can see Cornel West supporters preferring Trump to Harris.
I wonder how West supporters would vote if we had ranked choice.
Your friend isn’t wrong. If we were to use the crisis-transcends-principle principle, then third-party candidates would get zero votes each election and third parties wouldn’t even exist.
The purpose of third parties (in theory) is precisely to put pressure on the two major parties - not that there is any risk of them being overtaken, but rather, that they could lose an election because of spoiler effect if they alienate part of their own wing too much.
In our current democracy, the First Amendment gives everyone the right to protest every single day. You can march, post your opinions on social media, write letters to newspapers and congresspeople, wear offensive t-shirts, or stand on a street corner and scream your lungs out. There are myriad ways to share your opinions and protest against the political system.
Voting is not for protesting. It’s for electing leaders.
And if we elect the wrong one next month, most of those protest methods above could be taken away. We may never have another election.
Third party voters can go fuck themselves. Third party voters in swing states can do it with a cactus.
But it’s precisely because votes actually count that makes that protest method more useful. Why would a politician or party leader ever care about protests or demonstration or placards on a non-election day if he knows that those protesters (who are of the same ideology as him) are still going to vote for him on Election Day?
The votes carry actual weight, so their use as a protest tactic carry actual threat/leverage (in theory.)
Not to derail the thread too much into the Palestine issue, but a party can’t take a stance that tells pro-Palestine voters “We’re OK with Israel killing lots of your people, and if you vote third party rather than vote for us, then go fuck yourself with a cactus.”
If she values long-term prospects for Palestinians more than fighting immediate threats to actual democracy, and the rights of trans people, women, LGBTQ people, disabled people, poor people, immigrants, etc., then her vote is rational. If not, then it’s not. That’s how I’d approach it in an argument (not that there’s really any hope of swaying such folks).
In reality this tactic has failed every single time.
The reality is that a third party that actually had a chance of winning elections would be a different animal than the current roster of vanity votes. Deals would have to be cut with various powerful people. Hopefully it would look different, be an improvement, but it’s a nation of 300 million people with vast wealth, expecting that these tiny parties are going to go national with millions of votes and supporters and somehow remain the same thing, remain pure, that’s just complete fantasy.
Hard disagree. Do you suppose Al Gore or Hillary Clinton sat back after the 2000 and 2016 elections and said, “Golly, I need to start paying more attention to the issues those 3rd party voters care about!”? No, because they didn’t get elected to the job where caring about those views would have mattered. And the guys who did get elected sure as hell didn’t care about those views.
And I strongly doubt that Obama or Biden, despite winning, gave two thoughts to the views of 3rd party voters, either.
Voting is about outcomes, not protesting. Either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump is going to win next month’s election. Voters should do their best to determine which one best meets their criteria for leadership, and if they both suck vote for the one that sucks less. Any other action is at best stupid and at worst counterproductive, and literally no one is going to look at the 3rd party vote totals and say, “Geez, I guess these guys have a point.”
Show me any statement by any Democratic candidate or official that even remotely resembles this hypothetical quote.
However, I have to recognize, “we need to protect the system” is not a great argument to make to those that are convinced the system is not delivering on what it should (or even on what was promised) and can’t by design. If you truly are such an ideological far leftist of course you don’t want to help legitimize bourgeois liberal corporate “democracy” of the privileged.
Now, sure, the frustrating part is the “let the MFer burn” segment of the Right had the ability and luck to take over of the Republican Party. While their Left equivalent just goes into “refuse to cooperate” mode.
You’ve presented the best argument for me to present to her so far. But you’re also right that it wouldn’t sway her vote.
My take on her motives is that she loves being a contrarian. She’s fond of what she sees as “sticking it to the Man” more than anything else. I’ve known her for years, and she’s never been such a Palestinian fan before this, so I find her explanation a little dubious.
The third party doesn’t have to win elections - or even come remotely close to winning them - to achieve its goal. It only needs to threaten enough as a spoiler to carry serious threat leverage.
Ralph Nader successfully siphoned off enough votes from Gore to hand the election to Bush in 2000. Whether Nader actually wanted that to happen may be a different question, but with enough clout, a third party can become powerful enough that it can’t be safely ignored. In today’s polarized climate, commanding just 4% of the vote may enable a third party to be the overall kingmaker.
Nader is basically the case study in why it’s such a horrible tactic.
Nader himself probably was happy with W getting elected, it’s why I never respected him after that.
The tactic was a COMPLETE failure. W went in and acted as if he had a mandate. The problem is there’s another side, and if those people aren’t within your sphere of influence, what then?
Please tell me what single thing was gained from Nader 2000. What pressure was put on the Democrats by him. I’m all ears.
I’d also point out that everyone here in this thread objecting to third parties is only objecting in instances of them taking votes away from Democrats. If there were some Never-Trumper third party in the conservative wing that was siphoning votes away from Trump (think a third party comprised of sane Republicans,) everyone here would be all in favor of that.