Yay a spoiler candidate
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.
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.
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.
Fptp is never leaving, and the US will continue with ts rightward slide until balkanization finally separates the incompatible parts of this country they from each other by force. That being said some want to have hope things can get better, and doing the same thing that failed to work for the last 100 years seems to not be the way to do that.
RCV is starting to get some traction in places. What we have to do is continue supporting that and not let the detractors shit on it.
Even if it passes, i wouldn’t be very hopeful. Look at Europe, all those countries have better and more democratic election system than USA, but there are fascists on the rise in each of them and shit like in France and Poland happen more and more. Also what’s the use of having more parties if they still all represent the same influence groups (for example in Poland we currently have 17 parties and 42 independents on 460 seats in sejm, but you won’t find anyone outside of neoliberal status quo).
FPTP Britain says Good Morning 👋
Yeah i’m pretty torn on how democratic is UK, not only they do have FPTP but it’s also A FUCKING MONARCHY.
Way out is realisation that they spent last centuries or at least decades on trying to stop being Europe in every sense. If they could they would probably do it even geographically, rowing their island to physically join USA.
It’s also been outlawed in certain states. Many of those same states have outlawed voter led initiatives, meaning they have no recourse to change to rcv without changing the majority of their states legislators with people that support it and will pass it. You’re talking over a lifetime of change necessary to undo that damage. That still is hoping that dems will actually vote against their own best interests once in majority control…
In order to pass rcv nationally you need to convince either party that it’s in their best interest, and it’s simply not. By definition it takes away power from both main parties in the US without giving either one an advantage.
Like all meaningful change, you have to convince enough people to get involved and to do so more often and consistently than every four years at the Presidential general election. It’s this belief that the change is going to come from the parties that is the core problem. Everyone complains about having to vote for the lesser of two evils, but then they do it and go back to sleep for another four years. At best, they just gripe about the government never acknowledging that they are responsible.
That’s nice, we’re doing that. The people going to sleep for four years don’t want change, they don’t want things to improve, they want to complain so it seems like they’re worse off than they really are. You’re not going to convince them until their lives are ruined.
It’s also not like local or even state level RCV would realistically be sufficient for these whole sets of overarching problems that the US struggles with. You’re not locally voting for RCV and then gaining the ability to vote for a party that will actually give you healthcare, will connect your city with others via rail to help rework infrastructure, will solve your housing problems and your homelessness, and they probably won’t be solving unemployment. You can maybe vaguely hope that the existence of such a party would put pressure on the federal government to ask “why can’t you do this”, but that would only happen at the state level with one of the states that actually matter, like california or new york or texas, and good luck getting any of those places to go in for RCV considering how strangleheld they are.
The most you could hope RCV to improve is maybe to make it so you can get someone that’s willing to make your ISP give you free shit, or establish a free ISP, and also maybe to give your town a bunch of roundabouts, and maybe approve some missing middle housing which will probably skyrocket housing prices in the surrounding areas since it won’t really be doing anything to solve the problem at a national level. Which isn’t nothing, right, but that’s kinda boof.
Then we vote them out
How? They pick who runs, and if you suggest or even hint that voting third party is the only solution to that problem then you get in circular arguments with conservatives from either party that claim you’re voting for whoever the opposite of their genocidal fascist happens to be.
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…
that’s my president(ial candidate) :)
