I feel like – tell me if I’m wrong – you’re interpreting all this that I am saying like I “support” Kamala Harris, and you’re trying to get me not to.

No, and I find this reduction to be a huge part of the problem with most of the political discourse on Lemmy. There’s this intense urge to reduce or interpret discourse into ‘support’ or ‘don’t support’, usually electorally and usually as a strict binary. To most Americans, the most interaction they have with politics is voting, sometimes even just for the general. IDGAF if anyone ‘supports’ Kamala/Joe/Dems, whatever that means. I view who people end up voting for as almost incidental to the broader direct action that I think is the true driver of political change.

That’s not to suggest you’re making a reference to that binary - you’re clearly speaking more broadly. But even the way you’re interpreting direct action through its “actual” electoral result is frustrating. Because the people protesting (even the people on lemmy who seem (to you) dead-set against democrats) contain multitudes, and most of them will end up voting for an option that’s not perfectly aligned to their principles in the end (because there are none who are). That’s not the point of direct action. You (or maybe not you specifically, but liberals generally) complain that people repeatedly casting criticism without proposing an electoral solution are just fanning the flames of division, but what they’re doing is creating a kind of “positive tension” within the electorate that the democrats will eventually need to address if it’s allowed to grow. Democrats can’t do x or y policy change because “it just isn’t popular”, but it isn’t popular because people aren’t being confronted with the results of the policy that needs changing. Protesting is a part of that, but so is posting on social media about it. Those are doing the same thing.

But what I specifically take issue with is your objection to protests that have real and legitimate standing, simply on some theoretical calculation where policy doesn’t change but the damage to voter enthusiasm remains, and the “fault” **implicit ** in that judgement. I realize you’ve made explicit statements of affirmation toward Palestinian protests generally, but you’ve still defended this abstracted way of assessing advisable/in-advisable protests independent from the ‘righteousness’ of the cause itself. From your perspective, it seems that even a protest that is completely justified in its cause can be viewed negatively (and liable to accusation, labels and insults) if your personal judgment has determined it will only cause damage and not result in policy change. It’s a form of dismissal that comes from an intense sense of paternalism that rhetorically allows you to identify yourself with the cause but avoids the uncomfortable work of reflecting on your own complicity. Even if you object to that complicity on grounds that you do direct action yourself, blah blah blah - you’re also vocally defending a system that enables that type of subjugation you’re fighting against. (I can already hear you objecting to this framing on the grounds that you want the system to change, and I’ll just say it now that i’m not talking in abstraction. I’m saying you’re defending the electoral system by insisting we must conduct ourselves in a way so we can preserve your desired electoral outcome)

You keep bringing it back to shit that doesn’t matter. I don’t care whose fault it is. I don’t care what you think is opaque or ambiguously defined, or what frameworks you feel like are too complicated to want to spend the mental effort on, so you use simple ones instead. I care about dying people, and how we change it; what’s going to work, and what isn’t.

Funny. I don’t care about whose fault ‘it’ is, either! I don’t care if you’ve judged a form of protest as ineffectual or not, even. I care about dying people, and the real ways in which our system of power enables and supports the killing of those people. I think the point of direct action is to tie the policy outcomes of the system to the people acting on that system’s behalf in order to pressure them, and tempering that direct action around preserving a desired electoral result is antithetical to that rhetorical goal. You cannot pressure political agents into change if you’re undercutting the protest by implicitly assigning electoral responsibility to that protest. I know ‘you don’t care’ about fault, but you’re still drawing a causality between the protest and the electoral outcome, when the explicit goal of that protest is to draw causality between the electoral outcome and the policy.

If you show me a strategy “hey here’s how we can get better than the Democrats in power” I will start supporting it instantly. It feels like – again, tell me if I’m wrong – you think that what you’re advocating is that, and I’m refusing to support it and so I must love Democrats or something.

No, that is not what i’m advocating. It sure would be great if we had a better system, but placing our political goals behind that fantastic revolutionary goal first is just a way of deferring our problems to a different time, a better season. We have the system we have, and trying to change that system (even simply influence the outcome of that system) without damaging it is like trying to box with both hands tied behind your back. Democrats won’t do their job better until they’re made to swim in their own shit, without trying to white-wash it or rhetorically dance around their own complicity in them. Protest helps to reflect the impact of those policies back on the office, and a side effect of that is damaging their electoral chances.

I think judging a form of protest based on its hypothetical electoral impact isn’t just pointless, it neuters and subverts it. It isn’t ‘abuser logic’ to assign responsibility for electoral losses on the policies being protested - if anything it’s holding the ‘abuser’ responsible for the harm they themselves are committing. By flipping the responsibility of that loss on protestors it rhetorically excuses democrats for their shit policy.

I hope that makes sense.