this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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Bingo.
If we keep voting for a traitor party that deconstructs our federal government every other election then we'll never reach a place of stability where we can push things further to the left and open up debates on universal healthcare and ranked choice voting.
Right now Americans are basically children that slingshot back and forth between the parties because neither one solves every problem known to man in 4-8 short years. If we managed to elect Democrats for more than 4-8 years at a time we'd see massive progressive change in this country.
You're only ever going to have a chance at that by continually voting for the better, more malleable party. Or violent revolution. And I'm getting too old for that.
Negative. Neither party has interest in voter reform. Voting democrat is not a valid path for this. Of the few things the two parties agree on, not losing the ability to frame a vote around their actual interests is at the top. If they allowed ranked choice voting they would see more Bernie Sanders or much higher support of third party candidates who actually run on progressive issues. It is plainly obvious they do not wish to share the spotlight:
https://dcist.com/story/23/08/07/dc-democrats-sue-to-stop-ranked-choice-voting-initiative/
The Democrats outright state their reason to oppose vote reform is that it would “confuse” the voters, and would undermine the parties candidate selection process. Because the party is to choose the candidates, not the constituents. And nothing will get in their way of having a Neo liberal as the only option against authoritarianism.
Parties change, even if slowly. The republicans changed to get to where they got now. 20 years ago they would have rejected the idea of a king as traitorous, but now they are embracing one. Why? Because it turns out that it wins them elections. They will reform voting when they can get the chance, but not to introduce ranked voting, but to eliminate voting and to permanently crown one of their own as your supreme leader. Which is where your chance for any voter reform ends.
For ranked voting to become something the democrats will change for, they need reliable democrat voters to care for it so much it wins them elections. We actually saw an example of this with the ousting of Joe Biden, as that was also unprecedented. Parties change if the pressure is too much. But that pressure simply isn't there for ranked voting. And a good way to ensure it never will is to let the republicans create more brainwashed sheep that are told ranked voting is communist or some bullshit like that. At least the democrats cared a bit about education, free thought, love, and peace, which are factors you need for people to think for themselves and not be consumed in group think.
The reason it was on the ballot was because those districts already had that. The leaders of the party killed it, thus meaningful change is prevented at the lower levels of governance to prop up their true ideals.
But that being said, you are right the democrats need to know that if they do not back progressive ideals, progressives will not vote for them. So until they do progressive policies, they should not be voted for.
So you're saying we should shoot ourselves in the foot by allowing a fascist takeover of our government in order to teach the Dems a lesson that won't matter if fascists take over our government?
That's.....well that's certainly an opinion.
I am saying that the necessary steps forward were decided by the Democratic Party.
We have to clean our shit first before we handle the republicans. I would prefer to prevent harm first, but that is out of our hands now. Fascists have taken over the government. You want nothing to change with the democrats? Don’t expect change in the voting box. What was the democrats reaction to losing this election? ‘We should drop the defense of minorities, we should advocate power to the republicans, uncontested to show everyone how bad it is because they didn’t vote for us. We should not talk about Gaza. we should stop fighting against aggressive deportations.’(which they never did)
No their stance and actions after the election shows that the democrats need to be the first hurdle jumped. Once they are in order and we have a non fractured party THEN we drag the republicans into the light.
They should not be voted for in a functional voting system. But the US doesn't have that. You have a system where your opinion doesn't matter if they can get to 51% of the vote elsewhere. If you want progressives to matter, you need progressives to thrive and become unavoidable to win. One party wants to suppress and eliminate progressives if they could, and they are now in power. Progressives will lose even more foothold. The other party isn't great either, but under them, at least progressives could grow to become that critical mass you need to make actual change in the party and prevent lawsuits like that from happening.
The democrats know the rules of the game, and so should you if you can vote. If you dont want to sacrifice any chance of progressive change, you cant pretend they don't exist and that a party with disproportionate incentive to change for you has to do so in order for you to vote the survival of your ideals.
EDIT: Better phrasing
If they know the rules of the game then not participating in calculated non interference with the republicans. Maybe to spite their bitterness? I would hope not. Maybe to enrich themselves? I would hope not. But the actions speak for them selves. I voted democrat consistently, mainly because i don’t want harm to come to the venerable. But the democrats are not a friend of progressives. They know that if the voting system was changed, they would be irrelevant, and so they stop that change from happening at local levels. Don’t think i can vote for democrats again after what they did. And it feels like they are playing chicken with their own voter base. The only path i see forward is to starve them of power until they are made to change.
I totally feel you on that. You're right. The democrats are despicable for playing with their voters like that. They've pretty much always done that to lesser extents. It's what the stalemate forces them to do. That doesnt make it right, but so long as they cant change the rules, its a constant they will work under.
Starving them of power would be the right choice if there was a viable alternative. But in this case the alternative will eventually starve progressives of power to simply exist. Your only options lie outside of politics and are often just straight up illegal, but you dont have a Trump to bail you out if you start a revolution, nor enough people willing to support it on the progressive side for obvious reasons.
At the end of the day, you do you, but doing nothing if the status quo is hostile to you is a losing strategy. Frustrating sacrifices are neccesary in the US political system, pretty much by design.
We fundamentally disagree on what “doing nothing” means. Voting for democrats so they don’t have to change to stay relevant seems like doing nothing to me. Letting the democrats fail seems like doing nothing to you. But think of this. I am but one and my thoughts on the matter are not unique. Unless democrats are forced to change in some way, they will never have a unified front, and they will doom us all.
I disagree on what you think my position is. Let me clarify. Doing nothing to me is letting progressives be suppressed and die so they can never organize and proliferate their ideas. Even in better political systems people sometimes have to vote strategically to ensure that.
I sincerely hope you are doing something more than just handing victory to republicans and hoping the dems find you important enough. The republicans will make sure you can never reorganize or even exist if you let them. Rather than it just being very hard under dems. I'll leave it at that from my side.