We love the Americans who are putting up a fight against fascism. We see you and hope that more join in.
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2026
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More registered voters didn't vote in 2024 than voted for either candidate. Yeah, they could have made a difference.
And if there's really an insignificant number of left wingers like you're insinuating, then how do you expect to vote in anyone better than a milquetoast dem?
Wasn't the turnout like 66%? I think that's better than usual, no? Anyway, most of the people who didn't vote are probably just apolitical, not left wingers.
The point isn't that there's some secret reservoir of secret left-wing ideologues the Democrats can tap into, it's that if you make peoples lives better in a concrete way, not only they tend to vote for you, they become politicized. FDR won three terms by doing that. The Democrats of today would prefer to watch the country slide into fascism than offer anyone anything.
The sheer volume of leftists on the internet calling to boycott the elections begs to differ...
And you're right, an unapologetically progressive agenda could mobilize a lot of voters, and the DNC did fuck up by stifling candidates like Bernie Sanders and other progressives in state and local elections. I'm not arguing against that at all.
The DNC views progressive candidates as a risk. Whether that's true or not, I'm not arguing, but they're gonna be reluctant to run progressives until they have a fairly safe majority that can tolerate losing one or two candidates.
Making them even more desperate to court the centrist vote is counter-productive. Why would they put all their money on a voter block that doesn't even show up to the polls?
Sure, but perceived volume of people on the internet isn't necessarily indicative of real life, and I would hazard a guess that a lot of the people boycotting were in safe blue ridings.
The thing is, I don't think it's so much that they see a progressive platform as a risk. I won't say that isn't part of it, but the main thing is they really, really don't want to implement progressive policies. It's anathema to them ideologically, at least for the true believers. More important, it would lose their major donors money, and therefore would lose them money as their donors went over to the Republicans.
As tho why progressives should in general (upcoming elections are arguable of course, given the situation) withhold their votes from the Democrats, it's because it's the only leverage they have. As long as the Democrats can win without offering people anything, they won't offer anything.
It's not leverage to say "You'll never have my vote no matter what you do." If they want leverage, they should vote in the primaries. It might be limited to a few progressive strongholds at first, but that's all it takes to build momentum and prove that these are winnable platforms.
Then primary any officials who votes against progressive policies. Go after the milquetoast party leadership, vote them out of their seats. Participate in town halls, communicate with legislators about what's important to you, run for local office if there aren't any progressive candidates already. Do anything to build momentum and slowly start turning the enormous machine that is the DNC in a more progressive direction. It's a big ship, it takes time to change course.
It's not gonna happen overnight just because leftists stay home crying about neolibs and posting memes about corporate dems while refusing to participate in the democratic processes which are the means of effecting change within our system.
And if your only solution is to violently overthrow the systems in place, then good luck getting anyone in power to listen to your proposed policy changes. It's just not gonna happen.
"You have to earn my vote" is very different from "you'll never get my vote no matter what you do." You can kind of say whatever you want though, given that the Democrats never tried to earn votes.
You should realize there is a spectrum between "working within the existing Democratic party structure" and "violent revolution." The former is as unlikely as the latter. But now that I put it into words, maybe you're right. Maybe all change in America is equally impossible - the establishment is too powerful and entrenched, and the American people just don't have it in them to fight for anything. Maybe you just have to ride this doom spiral all the way to the bottom and rebuild from the rubble before anything gets any better.