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If you’re always on the defence, you are losing long term.

Voting might stop a problem from getting worse, but it’s not a viable solution to fix the underlying issues that require real systemic change to occur and that cannot happen from inside the system.

So vote, do all you can to stop it from getting worse. But remember that to fix it you need to fight for a revolution.

In Australia, you can vote for whoever you want first, and then you just have to make sure to put the better big party before the worst big party.

In America, your voting system is fucked, so you only get three options: Democrat, Republican, no preference. Abstaining is no preference. Abstaining and saying you want to burn down the system, is still no preference. You gotta make a good choice with your vote, so you can move on to making change on the ground with your hands and your feet and your voice. If you spend all day at your keyboard talking about how abstinence actually means whatever you want it to mean, then you're not making change, you're just getting mad.

Here's the thing that bothers me with the whole harm reduction/purity test/don't let perfect be the enemy of the good argument when it comes to US politics:

1. Saying that I should vote for the person who agrees with me on some stuff even if it's not everything kind of assumes that for some list of policy stances, they're all essentially equivalent. Not saying mean things about minorities is put on the same level as continuing to run a massive, racist prison and policing system or a massive military that is essentially only used for killing foreigners to exploit their resources. It's insane to argue that I should be able to overlook these truly reprehensible and harmful actions because they're a bit better on some smaller thing.

2. Even if you ignore the bad things that are still done by the less bad party, structurally, the systems we have in place all but guarantee that we will repeatedly have more of the worse party every election or so and that they will have access to tools that let them abuse their power. So at best, voting for the lesser evil just slightly delays the greater evil. If we just go vote every few years then go back to brunch and trust that the people we elected will be doing a good job, nothing will ever change. We never see these blue no matter who people go "I know it sucks, lets do this for now, but here is the plan for the next few years to make sure we can get a better option in the future."

3. The way things work now, even if a politician says they agree with you, you just have to trust them. There is no real recourse for holding them accountable if they were lying. You just have to let them do whatever they were going to do, maybe write some strongly worded letters, and then in 2/4/6 years you end up having to vote for them again because of the way the system is fucked. And as long as they are taking corporate money, they aren't representing you. You can't trust anything they say.

If a Democrat came around who:

1. Didn't take corporate money and seemed trustworthy.

2. Promised significant democratic reforms in both how elections work and the government works so that we can actually have real choices next time.

3. Promised to significantly reduce the military so we couldn't keep doing imperialism everywhere.

4. Promised to significantly reduce the police and surveillance state so that they won't have the capacity to keep spying on us and disrupting real opposition.

Then I would 100% vote for them and even canvas for them even if I disagreed with them on some other issues that I cared about. At least then we'd be moving forward. We'd have a chance to do better in the future. But they're not going to do that because the people who have made it into power benefit from things as they are, so they're not going to change that. As things are now, we're just stuck in an endless loop, slowly drifting towards oblivion.

To be clear, just not voting and doing nothing else isn't super helpful either, but the key is we need to get everyone on board with an organized plan to fix things. The people who show up every election just to tell you that actually trying to organize a new party is bad, voting for the progressive in the party primary is dividing the party, and you can't complain too much about the bad things the lesser evil does because it'll hurt our chances next time are NOT HELPING.

The question then is how do we do this? We have a bunch of people who know the system is fucked, but there's no direction for them to express that. How do they even begin to fight? "Let's organize a new party for this purpose!" Ok now we have yet another 3rd party to divide the vote even further. (Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/) "Lets all pick this existing party and use it for this purpose!" Ok, which one? The DNC? They're part of the problem and actively work against progressive candidates in primaries. Sure, we sometimes get the win, but those victories often take all of our time and attention just to secure one relatively small seat of power that is useless without winning way more of them. Another existing 3rd party? Can we get people to agree which one to join? This is where the leftist infighting argument holds some water. There are a few existing parties of varying lefty persuasion, but people aren't necessarily going to agree with all their policies, so getting people to compromise on one of them when we have no central organized structure is borderline hopeless. And that's before you even consider the collective action problem of getting enough people to take the leap that they aren't worried about the splitting the vote issue.

And regardless of what path we decide to take, how do we spread this message to get people on board? All of the major channels for mass communication are captured by corporate interests. Even social media, which had the hope of being a place where the people could talk to each other directly, has become almost useless for that function since the corporations that own them control the algorithms that allow messages to spread beyond their starting group.

And I already know someone is going to say something to the effect of "Don't worry about the big picture. It's too big for you to handle, so try to do things locally that are more possible." To that I say: Holy shit we are running out of time. The government keeps getting more and more fascist, he environment is falling apart and will kill us at some point, and technological advances in surveillance and military technology are going to keep making it easier for the powerful to cling onto power without care for what people want. Getting on your town's school board or something sounds nice and all, but it's like being on the Titanic and telling people to grab some buckets. Like I said earlier, even winning a single seat in congress doesn't mean much if it took our entire movement's collective effort to get that seat while the capitalists used their money to win the rest of them.

I really don't know what to do, but I'm so fucking sick of hearing people chastising people for not wanting to just keep doing what we've always been doing when that clearly hasn't been working and not only not helping to change things, but actively working to disrupt the efforts of people who do want to try to change things.

EDIT: Just to add my own personal anecdote to this: In 2020 I both volunteered for Bernie's campaign and worked on the campaign for a progressive congressional candidate in my district. The mood felt so optimistic. We were all working so hard to try to change things and for a while it seemed like it had a chance... and then we just straight up lost both elections to some absolute pieces of shit. Our incumbent representative was such a fucking terrible person he might as well have been a Republican.

Not that this has any bearing on the broader argument, I just want to share how my own experiences have shaped my feelings on this, but the broader pattern kind of reinforces that.

Thank fuck someone is saying this. There are a few posters in c/progressivepolitics that seem to be saying Democrats have to pass all their purity tests or you shouldn’t vote and that’s nuts because it hands Republicans elections. Luckily they usually get downvoted

3rd option voters seething at a reasonable strategy.

ML users : reeeee

Don't let .ml see this.

They were yelling at me to not vote Platner, to start a single man revolution.

I'm ready for one, I hate our system, the democratic establishment is aiding fascism as much as the terrorist republicans. But not voting for the guy advocating for policy to help working class people, that calls out both democrats and republicans, that both parties are spending against...

That's just shooting ourselves in the foot at that point. People will die if a republican wins. Healthcare will be pulled back further. Etc etc.

You would think the people yelling at you to read theory would understand it themselves.

From Marx: dialectical thinking, I can work with 3rd party advocacy while recognizing the material and concrete situations as the exist currently and make strategic decisions.

From Lenin: being a single individual starting a revolution would do nothing buy get myself killed and harm the building of a revolution. The first person who dies would not be a billionaire in such an ill conceived violent revolution without mass support and parallel alternative systems to capitalism to support revolutionaries.

This image I've been resonating with as, of course, I've been attacked by the right, but now I've been fending off the authoritarian left and I think this is where the whole "horseshoe theory" really comes from. It's just authoritarianism.

I guess this is what you do if there are only two candidates running and they are "100% Hitler' and "99% Hitler". Fortunately, I've never encountered this situation, but I'd really be in a moral dilemma if I did.

We should have a "None of the above" option on the ballot. If "None of the above" got the most votes, then they'd have to run another election with all new candidates.

Add a 3rd option for "neither" and if that one wins the two other candidates get executed.

I am too tired at the moment to really talk, but here are the systems we need to no longer need defensive voting.

Approval Voting

And

Sequential Proportional Approval Voting

Every dumbass voting this down is EXACTLY why we have Dumbass as president.

It doesn't feel that the Democrats will actually listen much anymore, we're shouting we're drowning at the top of our lungs everyday and they're like "Thoughts and prayers with a pride flag."

Based AF

EDIT: Perhaps I should clarify my view a bit. Any vote preventing the worst candidate from taking office is a good one. Especially in our First-Past-the-Post system.

This kind of post isn't helpful. It's useless finger wagging at this point that isn't actually going to substantively change things and it does nothing to challenge Democratic ineffectiveness.

Is the Democratic party better than the Republicans? Sure. But during the whole time Biden was in office that didn't stop my rights from eroding in the state I live in and the current Democratic status quo is to claim that standing for some civil rights is a problem. I won't say some things didn't get better but an improving economy didn't help with the cost of living for those of us who actually have to live in THIS economy.

The general argument though, is that if you vote for the lesser of two evils, therefore you're picking the opponent that you feel you are most likely going to nudge on the issues. The DNC ran a postmortem, claimed that they were going to be open and honest about the results, then hid the results when it contradicted their pro-Israel stance.

Nevermind that our leaders are fighting corruption and fascism with strongly worded letters, while the establishment is engaged in actively trying to destroy any momentum from their left while they seek out this mythical centrist Republican that'll vote for them. Am I supposed to feel okay with a party who's establishment thinks my rights are optional? Are brown people supposed to feel safe when out government is engaged in active ethnic cleansing and the opposition is dog whistling about how much they love strong borders? Are people of middle eastern descent supposed to feel okay when the opposition party supports a genocide?

Are we supposed to be convinced that a political party is willing to pay attention to protests and act on them, when they can't even be bothered to be transparent about and learn from a postmortem that told them actual fucking genocide is a line in the sand that enough people are unwilling to cross that it'd cost them one of the most consequential fucking elections of century?!

Voting blue is a tool, but how is doing it no matter who going to be meaningful when the Democrats won't learn from their mistakes, will double down on their harms, will throw their own candidates under the bus for being too far left, and will continuously shift rightward?

I'm all for not letting the perfect get in the way of the good, and I have absolutely followed through on the "picking your opponent" mindset, but you actually have to have good on the board.