…your argument isn’t with me. I understand how the system works. Voting for Stein didn’t give Trump any advantage at all this election. And even if it did, that could have been negated if Harris had run a better campaign. Every election will have third parties. No matter how much you sneer at them, they aren’t going to go away.
But if the reports are true, and that Harris had internal polling that suggested that she never had a chance, then none of this matters anyway. It was a doomed campaign.
In the same way as voting for Biden was supporting the fascists.
It might be reassuring to be able to point to Stein and put some measure of blame on her for the election. But the reality is much more nuanced than that. They’ve been putting the pieces together for this takeover for decades. And the Democrats forgot all of the lessons they learned from Hillary and from Biden and barely put up a fight.
The Democrat establishment doesn’t stand for anything. Go listen to any of the advisors to the Harris campaign that have been speaking out for the last few weeks and hear how completely contemptuously they speak about the American public. If you want to point the finger at anybody, point it at them. They live in a different world.
Which brings it back to this thread. I don’t think Bernie style populism is the way forward here. Because I don’t think democracy in America will be the same any more. You had “the resistance” after Clinton lost. But that was largely a grassroots movement organised by the activist class: and the Democrats have spent the last four years beating them up and shutting them down.
A win in the midterms may change things. Who knows.
But the Democrats are going to struggle. Not only will they be fighting literal fascism. but nobody in the establishment actually think they got anything wrong. They think they had the right strategy. And nobody will fall on their swords.
So as I’ve predicted in other threads, I think we will see a split. I can’t see how people like Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib can stay in a party that actively conspires against them, that have someone like Fetterman in their ranks. “The big tent” was always going to eventually fail and I think its going to happen.
Short-term thats going to be disastrous. But there is a longer game to play. There needs to be an actual resistance. And its a part that the Democrats aren’t capable of playing. They are part of the “machine.” They will fall in line with the Republicans. We are already seeing signs of that.
There will be a new style of left-wing populism that will grow over the next few years. It won’t be lead by Bernie. It will be revolutionary. And I hate to say it: but probably bloodshed. People throw the word “fascist” around too lightly. Most don’t really understand that its actually here, that it’s a global phenomenon, and it won’t be defeated without people dying.
And it makes this stuff about Stein look so ridiculously petty. She didn’t have any real impact on this election at all.