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Defensive Voting
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2026
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Hence the crabby letters and the protests. Right now in the US, there are a lot of issues that are popular, and Democratic candidates can be pressured into movement on those issues. Republican candidates have to obey Dear Leader or face getting primaried by the propaganda machine, hence billion-dollar ballrooms and no accountability for the $1.776 billion slushfund.
...or the inadvisable elective war on Iran.
If Americans were more literate about their elections (which is a prerequisite for democracy to work) then we wouldn't be in this mess.
No, they literally can't. Kamala chose to lose rather than change the dems stance on Israel. They chose genocide over winning.
This simply isn't true. Biden witnessed the protests regarding him supporting Israel and he told them to go fuck themselves.
One counterexample does not make it untrue. I have the same complaint regarding Obama's failure to rise to the moment after the slaying of Michael Brown in 2014 and the Ferguson unrest. That incident demonstrated that law enforcement was due some severe reformation. It did happen, and the high rate of officer-involved homicide entered public consciousness and the Overton Window. We've actually seen some police reform since in some counties, but not coming from Obama or the Congress of the time.
It doesn't take every time. But it does sometimes.
Right now things are severe, especially now that SCOTUS can pretty much veto anything it wants (including the Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments). The US public may have to resort to noncooperation, general strikes or even civil war to create a governmental system that is public-serving. At least those of us who survive will have to try.
But for now, we're focused on the midterm elections, to see if we really can push enough of the GOP out to stop Trump and his push towards autocracy. Things are going to get far worse if the Republican party is able to lock in a permanent majority in both houses of Congress, and that's exactly what they're trying to do.
Name one centrist that has changed their mind on genocide. One.
Oh wow. Such a victory.
Give me a fucking break.
So your complaint is that we're not moving far enough fast enough?
I share your frustration, especially as the Trump regime is moving fast and breaking things, breaking laws and then defying either courts or Congress to stop them since much of law enforcement is on its side.
I don't know if we're still at the point where we can a) get the Democrats back into sweeping power and b) depend on them to make sweeping reforms of elections and the US Supreme Court, and then start to rebuild what the Trump regime has destroyed, or if we're already doomed to a one-party system and need to focus on organizing resistance like a general strike. Spelling it out like that, it seems like a long shot.
Part of it depends on how the ~~2016~~ 2026 mid-term elections go, if they go. I suspect that swing voters may still be under the influence of the massive far-right propaganda machine that dominates social media and mainstream news. If that's the case then the US will fall to one party autocracy and then to civilization collapse.
All that said, so long as we do have elections, it's still worthy to consider voting defensively, especially if the alternative is voting third party or not at all.
They won't. You know they won't. Stop trying to pretend like you think otherwise. Nobody is buying it.
Trump was convicted of 34 felonies and we depended on Democrats to make sure he was sentenced. They did not.
They might reform SCOTUS now that their careers, and possibly their very lives, depend on it.
I do fear they might not do enough. The damage caused by allowing this Supreme Court to run amok is overwhelming and might not be easily reversible. They need to not merely add term limits and expand the court (possibly to over a hundred) and mandate an enforceable code of ethics, but it may be time to strip SCOTUS of jurisdiction so that they no longer have total veto power over legislation and executive action.
Curiously, term limits might require an amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Stripping them of jurisdiction only requires legislation.
Since you just repeated yourself I'm just going to repeat myself.
They won’t. You know they won’t. Stop trying to pretend like you think otherwise. Nobody is buying it.
Trump was convicted of 34 felonies and we depended on Democrats to make sure he was sentenced. They did not.
Women's rights were rolled back nationwide, but a few counties had some minor police reform!
Incremental progress! /s
Why didn't they do so thrice when they were in power?
You're going to be able to find instances where it doesn't fully work, where positions don't evolve. Obama era Democrats were mostly neoliberal, which factored into why Trump was able to take power.
But that shouldn't stop you from voting against the guy who is going to do more damage.
Voting is the least an activist might do.
What you mean is it never works when it actually matters. The two pivotal moments of Biden's presidency was the rail workers gearing up to strike and the protests around support of Israel. In both instances he and nearly every Democratic politician told voters to go fuck themselves.
Which is infuriating enough and the only thing more irritating is the endless number of people like yourself trying to tell us that didn't happen.
I'm not saying it didn't happen. I'm saying it distracted enough voters from the threat of the GOP, of Trump, of Project 2025, of the white Christian nationalist movement, that they allowed it all to happen.
Now Palestine is even worse off, as are the rail workers. As are we all.
Your position raises a valid concern. The human species just might not be able to organize from the left well enough to stop the right with a charismatic strongman, a base of uneducated soldiers and the financial support of the ownership class. The left may, in fact, be unable to organize due to internal differences. It sucks if that's the case. I hope not, but I haven't ruled it out.
The politician you expect me to vote for tells me to go fuck myself and you call it "internal differences".
Yeah okay bud.
You're speaking as if there's equal blame here. There isn't. Liberals have treated leftists like second class voters for decades rather than making real concessions. They're calling all the shots and that means they own all the responsibility.
And curiously, you think the solution is to let the Republicans, who hate you even more and have now set up concentration camps, win.
I do not refute that some of the Democratic organizations are captured by corporate interests, but the Republicans are even more captured, and pose a dire threat to the meager democratic features of the US political system.
Maybe you're an accelerationist?
And you've decided the best way you can contribute to the situation is tell Leftists the same thing they've been hearing for 40+ years? That strategy is no longer effective. It has lost to Donald Trump twice now. When do you finally decide to appeal to Liberal voters and tell them it's time to make real concessions with Leftists in the Democratic primaries if they want to win elections?
Maybe you prefer MAGA to Leftists.
Part of why that strategy lost to Donald Trump twice now is because the Republican propaganda machine, including Russian state actors and Cambridge Analytica levied a massive campaign against the Democrats. And its largest push was to get Americans -- black Americans specifically -- to not vote. Tens of millions were spent discouraging voting.
So regardless of what you or I think, the Republican strategists that decide how to budget their campaign believe Democrats voting is pretty darned important. Perhaps that's why voter suppression is central to the Republican platform: if more people vote, Democrats win. If fewer people vote, they win.
I do agree with you. It's not enough for Democrats merely to campaign harder (as Biden advised soon after his presidential victory). And I admit I don't have all the answers, but this single graphic is not the sum of my effort.
If I preferred MAGA to far-left politics I wouldn't be looking for ways to aid the resistance at all.
On the contrary, if you prefer MAGA the best way you can help them is spend all day deflecting responsibility away from liberals and their failures. Thereby allowing liberal voters to show up to future Democratic primaries to vote for more pro-corporate trash guilt free.
At what point am I deflecting responsibility away from liberals? Saying voting is important is different from saying one needs to do more than merely vote.
Shit like this bud.
I already called you out for it.
You're trying your best to deflect away from this. And I can only assume it's because you want people to keep showing up to the Democratic primaries to vote for strike blocking, genocide supporting trash like Clinton, Biden, Harris and Schumer.
If that isn't your intention then let me see you say it: "Registered Democratic voters need to stop showing up to Democratic primaries and voting for strike blocking, genocide supporting trash like Clinton, Biden, Harris and Schumer."
The Republican party is dead set on ending elections altogether and installing a one-party autocracy. What we have is bad, but it's not as bad as it will get once the parties don't have to compete for votes.
So long as its possible to vote out Republicans by voting for Democrats, then voters need to be voting for Democrats, even if they block strikes and do nothing about genocides abroad. They might be bad but their Republican counterparts are far worse.
Leave your electoral apologia out the /c/: Your votes all amounted to empowering Nazis back into power. You refuse to directly act, because it's inconvenient to your positions.
Voting is exactly how the electoral college elected them 5 times. Thrice against you, twice for you.
That's the problem. More people voted for Biden than voted for Harris or Clinton. Democrats were unmotivated to stop Trump from winning, and in all three elections, he was a greater threat no matter who was running against him.
I don't like the EC either. In fact, no-one other than the far right likes the EC.
Then directly demolish it. Ensure it never exist.
Blue Nazis are still Nazis.
That's not a power I personally have, though there have been two attempts to amend the Constitution to eliminate it, and currently there is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is only a couple of states away from having legal force.
The worst of Democrats, establishment Democrats who focus on serving their donors are not fascist. They're neoliberal, and granted, neoliberalism makes states vulnerable to fascist movements (a problem faced in the EU, Australia and Canada as well as the US) but that doesn't actually make them fascist.
Because you keep giving it away. That is your political position: Empowering your oppressors.
Get out of the internet, and actually collectively Riot all of California out of electoralism.
What the Fascist did correctly was to show force. Time to do your physical part.
Is that a version of KYS? Because it sounds to me like a version of KYS.
Among all the possible examples of revolutionary action in US history, you chose the most pathetic of the lot.
What ratios of death occured in 2021-01-06 compared to the ongoing deathcamps?
Oh, you know successful ones‽ Please share!
The Civil Rights movement comes to mind, as do the numerous labor movements.
Or do you believe revolutions have to be violent to count?
Both which got concessions due to show of force. It's pitchforks season, so you better rearm.
Nazis sure as hell are.