You’re treating “Democrat” as a fixed ideological category that determines outcomes regardless of the individual, the race, or the conditions
I'm not. I'm treating it a dynamic component of a larger structural system organized to maintain an equilibrium.
The Democratic Party is a ballot apparatus, not a coherent political entity
This is incorrect. The Democratic Party is a public relations arm of the ruling class, just like the Republicans are. Both parties have clear ideological overlap - liberalism. That there are two liberal parties competing on the ballot is where the incoherence comes from, if we expect them to differ ideologically. Once you stop expecting that, the coherence comes into focus. The two liberal parties are organized to capture the greatest number of votes each by having huge tents, they are organized to create a divide-and-conquer strategy (like sexism, like racism) and they do this through virtue signalling. They both spend millions of dollars researching the population and they find the fault lines that divide people and they take up positions on either side of those fault lines. This consumes all electoral energy while maintaining a singular ideological foundation - liberalism.
The Tea Party used the Republican apparatus to primary and replace establishment Republicans with candidates who were genuinely further right. That’s not a hypothetical, it happened, and it reshaped the party against the establishment’s will.
The Tea Party was bankrolled by the elites, a corporate project, not a grassroots one. Yes it had grassroots elements, built into the design to create legitimacy. But the same donors who ten years prior were supporting what you call "the establishment" republicans were now supporting the Tea Party. It happens all the time. Donors that used to support the Ds switch to support the Rs, and vice versa. It's all a game of PR effectiveness, not of ideology. The rise of fascism is not a psychological choice originating in individual, it is a collective psychosis originating is class conflict and economic crisis. The timing of The Tea Party's rise has as much to do with the rise of Obama as it did with the global financial crisis caused by the US finance industry as it did with the IMF naming China as the single most important contributor to world economic growth in 2007. The Tea Party was not a proactive effort it was a reaction to the signs impending collapse of the US empire.
You haven’t demonstrated that everyone who uses the Democratic ballot line to run against that establishment is equivalent to Obama. That’s the gap in your argument.
No. You think I'm saying don't vote for any Democrat ever. I'm saying don't vote for genocidaires. If the Ds ran someone who wasn't a genocidaire, I'd probably vote for them.
the interest convergence point, which is correct, doesn’t rule out supporting candidates who are themselves creating the political pressure you’re describing
Correct
as the only thing that works
Incorrect. American history has shown us time and time again that voting barely works at all and that it is conflict in the streets that precipitates the changes we want, regardless of which party is in power at the time.
And until we’ve reached a point, as you mentioned it would have to be incremental under our existing system, to educate voters and provide them with more options to better represent them, what more can we do?
We can stop carrying water for fascists you yourself have pointed out. The number of people on Lemmy who think arguing against Platner is a cardinal sin is a prime example of my point. The man was literally a mercenary soldier and then became a petite bourgeois farmer and then organized people to fight against a big corporate farm to protect his financial interests and suddenly everyone thinks he's a good candidate to not only vote for but to put all their energy and voice behind. Then it turns out he had a Tottenkopf tattoo for 20 years and he proudly showed it off in public and he was someone who studied WW2 history and considered himself an expert in it and now what happens? They double down on why voting against Platner or even CRITIQUING Platner is not merely unacceptable but equivalent to actively supporting fascism because Collins is a Republican collaborator.
What we can do is stop playing Blue No Matter Who and stop entertaining Blue MAGA and be serious and open about the fundamental fascist nature of the Democratic party, the failings of their heroes, and undermine the case for lesser evil voting. Because lesser evil voting is not educating voters and it doesn't provide them more options.
What we can do is demonstrate that since the founding of the country voting has done almost nothing while getting in the street and shutting down the economy or making the elite scared is the only thing that's ever really worked.
We’re attempting to do the work that we can while we can, but that still exists under the same system
Limiting your imagination of the work to only the things they approve is not doing even half of what you can.
If voting is advocating for genocide, then what is participation in our capitalist society?
Voting is a proactive action. Working for a wage is a reactive action, driven by starvation and exposure. The only way you can get access to resources is through our resource distribution system. And even THEN it's important to make some distinctions - one should not consciously join the military, one should not consciously join the police force or the prison force, one should not consciously work for a weapons manufacturer, etc. They have captured all of us, they are starving us to death, and they are allowing us to live if and only if we work for them. This is not at all equivalent to voting for someone who says they have no intention of stopping Israel from committing genocide with the billions in weapons we provide them.
Our taxes fund the actions of the government and our labor helps corporations to gain their capital and influence, but we still work as we need our own capital to survive, protect each other, and organize.
Which is fundamentally different from why we vote.
Maybe our taxes fund the actions of the government. MMT is still being debated. Our labor doesn't help corporations gain their capital and influence, it helps them maintain what they already had. The bourgeoisie is somewhat permeable, but it's not so permeable that you choosing to work created new forms of capital and influence.
I’m saying do that in addition to making sure the fascist don’t have the easiest time at the voting booth as well.
That's literally impossible in the US. Both parties are structurally part of the liberal capitalist system. Fascism emerges from liberal capitalism, not from one party or another. If the voting booth isn't fighting liberal capitalism, it is completely orthogonal to the question of the rise of fascism. The rise of fascism is happening through the actions and inactions of both parties, and getting one more "nice liberal capitalist who doesn't want to harm me" into power has literally no effect on the rise of fascism. As I said, it's not a phenomenon of individual psychology, it's a collective phenomenon and the only solution to it is to physically defeat them. Fascism has never lost in the voting booth.
Play the longer game so we can actually fix this shit instead of putting a bandaid on it.
The agitprop I do here is specifically the long game. It's an attempt to break down the compatabilist position, because such a position allows people to psychologically avoid the inner work that needs to be done. People need to go through a process of grieving for their false beliefs in order to change, and they need that change to be willing to lend their power to the cause. If people hold on to the belief that voting matters, then 2 things happen: 1) they vote and engage in bystander effect assuming other people will do the other work and 2) as it becomes more and more obvious that voting is not working they protect their belief by lashing out at everyone who isn't voting like them. They have to do both of these things to maintain their self-image of a good person living in a good place with good people doing good things. They have to believe this to avoid realizing that their parents and their grandparents and their kids and their friends are participating in a system, and possibly taking direct actions, that violates their core values. We HAVE to break down these false beliefs if we're ever going to raise consciousness to the point of fighting fascism.
We cannot keep giving people easy ways out of the difficult reality: the USA is and always has been a white supremacist genocidal rapacious destructive violent misogynistic duplicitous mass murdering elite entity, born of European empire and heir to European empire, maintainer of European empire, and fundamentally the biggest worst and most evil problem the world has ever seen. That's a lot for people to process. But if we keep saying "it's good to fight for Platner and everyone else is morally failing" then they're never going to get to the point where they'll organize with the anti-fascists. The best thing possible for the fight against fascism is for Platner to disappoint everyone, because it will force people through the grief cycle, just like Bernie failing did. Bernie failing and then subsequently demonstrating his complicity was one of the best things for the cause. By contrast, Obama and Hillary are STILL nearly untouchable hero figures and people still cannot learn the lessons of Libya, of Homan, of ICE and BORTAC, of the Pivot to Asia, because they're emotionally attached to those people being good because it means that not only were they good because they voted for them but that the society they live in is good because these heroes are living proof of the goodness of this country.