this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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Although I agree with just about all of this, were talking about what happened this election. Local race influence is at minimum a decade out, if we're still even able to vote when those times come. the right has been actively kneecapping people's ability to vote for a long time. My argument is that it is not perfect, no where near it, but far easier to bounce back from than far right total control. That's the argument, and it's an easy one.
Yeah, well, what happened this election is the product of people like you not putting the effort which could have been done way back in the mid 2010 when the consequences of the policies chosen to "save the Economy" after the 2008 Crash were starting to get pretty obvious.
The Democrat Party has been using "lesser evil" as their core campaign strategy all the whole becoming increasingly evil since way back and this time around there wasn't even the excuse that a guy like Trump could never get elected because he already had been elected once before.
(Also and judging by how they're voting, Democrats have always been relaxed about the possibility of Trump in the White House, which would explain why they persisted in not moving an inch politically to accommodate anti-Genocide and broader Leftwing demands - for all their alarmist talk they were much more willing to lose the election to Trump than to lose AIPAC funding or their non-executive board memberships and speech circuit rewards for being friendly to certain very rich people).
For any sufficiently principled person, the policies of the Democrat party since way back when Obama decided to "save the Economy" after the 2008 Crash by protecting the Asset Owners whilst letting those who work for a living to rot should have been enough to prompt them to become politically active, or at least the first Trump victory should've. In fact it was the British version of such policies (as I was living in Britain at the time) that prompted me to become politically active about 8 years ago in a country which wasn't even my country of birth, even before the whole Brexit mess.
At the very least you should have been heavily criticizing the Democrat Party leadership during all this time, both on the evil things they did and the good things they refuse to do. An argument for withholding criticism can only really be made for the period during the electoral campaign, not for before and most certainly not for after it.
Truly principled people who only voted Democrat because they felt they had no other option are right now laying it out thick on that party's leadership for what they did, are doing and are refusing to do, not coming out to defend them.
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All that said, political activism is something you start investing in sooner rather than later, because even local changes require a lot of people to change their minds and that takes time to make (plus if a movement against them starts growing sitting politicians will take note and might change the way they act), so you start now, not spend the next couple of years wallowing in helplessness only to get to the next election, be faced with an almost-Fascist Democrat candidate all over again and claim "there's nothing we could have done, we just have to vote for this one to stop the pure-Fascist candidate".
You don't just have to help the public become aware of certain things, you have to find those who feel like you, organize and start trying things out to spread awareness even before even truly starting to change public perception of certain subjects and Democrat party representatives, so it takes years, not months.
The worst that can happen is that nothing comes out of it, but then again you might make a difference if you do try, whilst if you don't try anything at all, nothing is exactly what you'll achieve and in a few years' time you'll be repeating a variant of the very same claims of helplessness you're making now.