welp. - eviltoast
  • knightly the Sneptaur@pawb.social
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    2 days ago

    Accelerationists didn’t depress the vote, the pro-fracking genocide apologist who tried to appeal to Republicans instead of her own base did.

    The Democrats were never going to save us, only we can save us. The lazy people are those who thought voting alone would be sufficient and won’t re-engage with politics until the next election.

    • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 day ago

      We knew who the Democrats and Republicans are. The Democrats are neoliberals. The Republicans are fascists. We have a democracy as long as we can keep it. If we lose our democracy we have no one to blame but ourselves. We elected Biden last cycle. We could have elected Harris this cycle. We failed to do so.

      The Democrats were never going to spontaneously become populist this cycle. Harris’ campaign was at least progressive leaning before DNC consultants ran into the ground. Our job was to spread the word to vote for Harris and how it would be useful for advancing progressive and socialist causes over time.

      Instead accelerations spread the propaganda that Harris and Trump were the same on Israel’s genocide and that people needed to protest vote. Not enough people voted this election in part because of that. We failed to use our tool, the Democratic Party, to prevent fascism.

      It’s not lazy to think voting was sufficient. The only way to win was to get enough votes. That’s how democracy works. People spread pro-democracy messages as best we could. We lost the election to fascism. Now we need to organize, because there isn’t necessarily going to be a next election. Hopefully there will, but we may need mass protests if we even want a shot at another election.

      Also, Trump threatened to arrest top Democrats. It seems like the Democratic Party could be dead by the next presidential election.

      • knightly the Sneptaur@pawb.social
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        1 day ago

        We have a democracy as long as we can keep it. If we lose our democracy we have no one to blame but ourselves.

        The purpose of a system is what it does, and America has never done Democracy. Our government is designed to limit choice to only those candidates that the owners of this country find acceptable, and this system is not threatened by the electoral failure of the Democrats, or even the loss of an entire major party, so long as the capitalists own any new party that rises to replace it.

        Electoralism is a trap. Voting won’t save us. We have to save us, and we aren’t all going to make it unless we can start working together outside of the existing political establishment.

        • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          1 day ago

          The purpose of a system is what it does

          The electoral college and our first-past-the-post system is a huge part of the problem. With ranked choice voting we would have more choices for candidates and progressives and socialists would have a better shot.

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

          and America has never done Democracy.

          We have been a democracy since the founding of our country. Consider reading a US history book to learn more. Our democracy is flawed. Fascists leveraged the flaws in our democracy to take it away. That’s why Republican voters had to actually vote to take our democracy away, but of course the capture of our democracy has been happening slowly before that. Hopefully fascist incompetence means this isn’t the end for democracy, but we can’t count on that.

          Our government is designed to limit choice to only those candidates that the owners of this country find acceptable, and this system is not threatened by the electoral failure of the Democrats, or even the loss of an entire major party, so long as the capitalists own any new party that rises to replace it.

          Since Citizens United v. FEC corporations have had an outsized influence in our elections with unrestricted independent expenditures. But even before that, since Regan we’ve collectively adopted neoliberalism as a country. We’ve prioritized markets being free over people being free and all but the rich are worse off because of it. Late-stage capitalism has led us straight to an oligarchy of billionaires pledging fealty to a dictator.

          It didn’t have to be this way. We could have chosen socialism, changed to worker ownership of corporations, and levied wealth taxes on the rich. The issue was that we failed to get neoliberalism out of the minds of the population. People say something along of the lines of ‘socialism doesn’t work’ and maybe even ‘the soviet union collapsed’ reflexively when they hear the word socialism.

          Part of what we need to do is teach people that neoliberalism is scam and that socialism is the answer to their problems. In the coming years we are going to have a lot evidence that we can show people. But there is no sense in waiting. We can start on that now.

          Electoralism is a trap. Voting won’t save us. We have to save us, and we aren’t all going to make it unless we can start working together outside of the existing political establishment.

          Democracy is the best system we have for inclusive political institutions. If you know a better one that is more inclusive please share it. We of course need to organize between elections, now more than ever. But if you never vote when you get the chance, and we will be lucky if we ever do, all that organization goes to waste.