this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2024
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Not to take away from the importance of voting Harris today (or hopefully, prior to today), but this:
feels out of touch. It's already gauche in most progressive circles to be proud to be American (What are you proud of? The settler-colonialism? The Imperialism? The choice to back genocide? The still-haven't-abolished-slavery-ism?). Lots of us know that this supposed "eventual" conversation will never actually come. We're never going to get the country to move to RCV or abolish the electoral college, if we forever stick to the parties who directly benefit from the status quo.
Vote Harris today if you can, people, because it's too late for anything else this cycle, but we have to stop this spiraling descent rightwards by adhering to a party that would rather lose Leftists than "Centrists". As people who care about social justice and progressive politics, we should be abhorred that our platform is palatable enough to Dick The-Fucking-War-Criminal Cheney to get his endorsement.
For every person claiming that we'll eventually totally have the conversation about the party platform, there's another Centrist Democrat who is saying, "No, actually, the party doesn't need to move leftwards... It's always been a lesser of 2 evils choice... Don't let perfect be the enemy of good by drawing hard lines like not supporting genocide...".
Republicans unshackled themselves from their Centrist arm of "respectable" anti-social-justice goons to fully embrace their white supremacism in the open, and those goons have now taken up residence in the Democratic Party in response.
If we're just fundamentally unwilling to consider unshackling ourselves from them, we're never going to stop the rightward-shift happening now. We didn't move Leftwards in the 60s because our politicians led us there, people protested and rioted and made people uncomfortable until they acquiesced and got off their asses. And unless Citizen's United gets overturned, that route isn't going to work within the Democratic Party, because the police are now powerful enough to keep protesters from actually making politicians feel uncomfortable enough to choose their constituents over their corporate donors.
At the risk of not be(e)ing kind, unless you can give me a timeframe for when "eventually" is, you are part of the problem, providing cover and excuses for our rightward shift as a country.
No, Gore likely had more votes (if they had performed a statewide recount). We had Bush (and Cheney the now-Democrat) because SCOTUS stepped in to stop the recounts, and the Democratic Party chose to "keep the peace" instead of fighting it. Just like they will every time.
I've neither the inclination nor energy to relitigate the details of 24-year-old events. Rest assured, we agree on what the outcome really was; this was when we as a nation stopped believing in voting.