Political Memes

Now the question is which is easier, convincing millions of people to vote for “anyone not a republican” or convincing a candidate to be more than “not republican”

If you are form the US, you are having your primaries by now.

Those are the ones where good people appear and need your vote to stay on the race. Go participate there, instead of complaining about the main election.

They'll try to shove you off the platform with constant negativity and trying to act like Trump is just a continuation of all the same. If you didn't care before, why do you care now?

It's not. It's different.

"But they'll steal the elections!!!!!"

Oh yeah? Just like all those state and special elections they've been losing by double-digit electorate shifts for the last 18 months? Including the one covering FUCKING MAR-A-LAGO???

Grow the fuck up. Get registered to vote, and when elections come round, VOTE, DAMN IT. Fascism only wins if you just give up and let it.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, you dumb fuck Americans should have voted for Vermin Supreme.

both sides are pretty bad, but you still gotta get on the bus

I mean, both sides DO suck. But the decision being made boils down to which side you think has the best chance of leading to an eventual outcome that doesn't suck. I'm not voting for a party I like, because frankly that doesn't exist as a viable option, but I'm not going to not vote just because neither side is better than a 3/10. I'd rather the 3/10 than the 1/10.

I think there's real value in being honest about your feelings. The people who represent us need to know we think they suck. The people around us need to feel like others have the same struggles we do. The space for nuance does exist.

Your frequent reminder from the local queer, leftist furry that if "voting didn't work," Republicans and billionaires wouldn't spend billions of dollars on voter suppression and propaganda telling you that your vote doesn't matter.

Do your part, waste billionaire money by voting anyway, by any means necessary~

Imagine the hammer is the polling box and all your solutions look like voting when see all your problems as nails.

Everyone should vote. Absolutely. Go out, do it, cast that ballot.

Voting won’t solve all of our problems. We need to go beyond just voting.

One should vote, it simply shouldn't be the end of it.

If you voted Democrat and thought you made your part, wrong. You barely made one shift towards one slightly less terrible group. This is not victory. A part of what you should do, yes. All you should do - not.

To only have two sides is the problem.

A lack of good options in the general is a sign of poor turnout in primaries.

No, the point is to agitate you against an establishment that wants to prevent you from having a better choice.

Liberals who are passionately defending lesser evil electoralism before primaries have even started are either idiots in denial or moderates who don't want to talk about why their party is nearly as unpopular as Trump.

People deserve to vote for someone they actually support, not the least terrible option.

Stop blaming the voters.

Dear Americans, voting for Democrats will get you nowhere, too. I know this is hard, but you will have to start a revolution or vote for a third party in an unprecedented coordinated effort.

If you don't vote then you don't get to complain until the next election.

You refused to have a say and now you have to live with the consequences. No bitching.

And you should do that in all elections. Small and big.

As a lifelong Independent, this post can F all the way off.

Yes, this is my civil, indoor voice.

Don't you MFing tell me not to have opinions and free will, and that I should change who I am so I don't make a bunch of establishment Dems that genuinely don't care if I'm alive or dead have bad feels. Maybe the Dems should Fing field people that don't gobble billionaire scroat like they invented it.

And Democrats can maybe, just once in a while, not happily fundraise and capitulate and do the policy strategy version of pump and dump schemes around the central point of "hey, we're not the Nazis, we're the mildly annoying guys that whimper when Nazis do Nazi shit, but do eventually give them everything they want. So it's Nazi shit FAST or Nazi shit less fast with some of us around :D"

"Both sides suck" posts should encourage anyone with guts to see how much of the country wants a god damned set of independent candidates or even, (shudder) another MFing option between Shibag A and XXXL Shitbag B. People need to shed the chains of both parties and run at the local level. Give both sides a fucking scare.

“Literally the only way”? They tried violent treason and have refused to swear in duly elected reps that are not of their party. If you think they’ll leave when their term is up just because you voted someone else in… the major players aren’t going anywhere. These aren’t the kind of people that gain power and then let it go. Don’t not vote, but don’t believe that’s how we’re getting out of this mess.

It's two-fold.

The overton window has shifted so far that we're getting warmongering from the democrats.

'Half' of the congressional left are sleeper agents for the right.

The DNC keeps pushing right and refuses to do anything to keep us from sliding into authoritarianism. Appeasing the right, Siding with Israel.

But not voting left is the same as voting right, that IS how the right wins.

And voting left is just giving them a blank check to keep sliding that window further right.

Neither party is going to let a third party in.

Appeasing the left is making them worse.

The rub, people think if they keep not-voting or voting independent, the DNC will give in and start moving stuff left. They won't. They don't truly want to win.

It's like fucking Brewsters millions out here, but "None of the Above" won't fucking help either.

I think, mostly, we can agree that the agenda of the "left" is the lesser of two evils, but the evils are getting so bad that we need desperately to do something to move the window back left a little.

If you have a problem with the truth, that's a you problem. You can disagree with a course of action, but if truthful criticism of Dear Leader makes someone The Enemy to you, you're much closer to fascists than you'd like to admit.

Voting is about the lowest form of political influence (besides doing nothing). If all you do is vote then you're left with candidates determined by others. You can (and should) still vote for the least worst option of those that have a chance of winning, because not voting effectively means you approve of all options. The only thing you can vote against in an election where one of two options will win is one of those options, by voting for the other. Anything else won't matter.

If you want better options to vote for, you need to be politically active besides voting, actively working to establish better options, tell the established parties what candidates and policies you want them to support, support smaller parties that represent your interests better, and that might slowly shift it into a direction more to your liking.

Of course that's much harder that doing nothing at all and proudly telling yourself that that will somehow delegitimize the system - the system doesn't care. Election results are shown only as a proportion of valid votes, anyone else has no influence on the result at all.

As an American that's never not voted, I don't understand these fucking assholes.

Genuinely... Fuck them. We're fucked because of the people that don't vote, not because of the minority of insane MAGA's.

The winner of our last presidential election was actually "didn't vote".

Both sides bad AND you still have to vote.

That doesn't negate the fact that both parties are, in fact, bad.

Yup.

That said, please be kind to leftists, and try to primary a candidate people can vote FOR, rather than just voting against Republicans. (America needs more Mamdanis, and "vote blue no matter who" is a reasonable stance but a TERRIBLE slogan.)

Same goes for leftists: Be kinder to and more understanding of liberals. Not everyone has it in them to be a hardline revolutionary. (And don't forget to vote in the primaries.)

I usually see it as calling out the political capture of the two-party system which has rendered the United States an oligarchy with increasingly dysfunctional democratic functions. Quite often it is a call out of the partisanship that reinforces the rigidity of the two party system and preventing any positive or lasting reform. At the very least those are the valid contexts I know of for bringing up any both-sideism of the two American political parties.

But yes, the Republicans do win when there is less voting.

Try your hardest to create a new party the day after election day. If it fails, vote Democrat and start trying again the next day.

You have no idea how strongly and passionately I wish to see the day that you guys get a proper multi-party system. What you have right now is super fucked up.

https://ballotpedia.org/List_of_political_parties_in_the_United_States

EDIT: Also, yes, Trump and GOP are definitely trying to downright rig elections and that can't be ignored, of course