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John Fetterman says he'll 'never understand' progressives who refuse to support Joe Biden
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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I'm still soured by how the primary shook out in 2020. Before any votes were cast, all everyone said about all the candidates were that anyone could beat Trump. Bernie won the first 3 races, and the Democratic establishment fought anyway they could to kill the movement, including pressuring flailing campaigns to back out. Biden finally won and the only message is for the left wing of the party to get in line. Kind of a hard pill to swallow when the Democrats claimed to be the party of the youth, but the youth voted 80%+ for Bernie in the primary. Ended up voting Green in 2020. Will I do so again in '24? Who knows, but at this point it isn't looking good. I don't like that the right wing of the Democrats (center-right overall) expects the left to follow along no matter what they do.
I'm not sure I buy this whole "third party votes are wasted votes" or "third party votes are a vote for the opposition". The US system heavily heavily biases towards having a two party system, but third parties exist, and just because Democrats and Republicans are the two major parties right now, doesn't mean they will be in the future. The Whigs were one of the two major parties for 25 years of US history, even winning the Presidency a few times, but now they're not. It took people not willing to accept the party line and jumping ship to change that, which again the system biases against, but it still happened. Democrats aren't the end-all-be-all of lefty politics. The next left wing party won't be the end-all-be-all either. Democrats have no incentive to change the current system. By continuing to vote for them, whether you believe it or not, you're approving and perpetuating the behavior. It isn't a useful method of change to say "I don't agree with anything the Democrats say, but that's the world we're in". That's how you end up in a situation where 70% of the country supports universal healthcare, but only 5-6 members of Congress do. Voting for a further left party than the Democrats will cause the Democrats to wise up to what their traditional base wants.
Politics in Democracy is not a passive system. Passivity leads to what we have now, two parties that write the rules for the states and the governments that represent the interests of almost no one, but have convinced us that they're the only and best options. There are agents of the Democrats currently in jail for breaking election law in their efforts to keep the Greens off the ballot. I'm sure the same is true for Republicans. Don't tell them its okay by giving them your vote. Don't give in to the political version of the Paradox of Thrift.
Whether you buy it or not, at least for the presidency, the US is realistically a two party system. A vote for 3rd party is a wasted vote, because you certainly must have a preference in which of the two real options you'd rather have.
Voting 3rd party is selfish. You're willing to let the worse option win because you want to make a "statement"
And your statement translates to "we can easily manipulate these 3rd party voters away from our rival by back channel funding our oppositions redheaded step child"
And this is definitely why we haven't needed any parties but the federalists and the anti-federalists.
The parties only change when one of them just totally shits the bed. Then they're usually replaced by a party that kind of does the same things but doesn't seem to stink as much as the last one. Sometimes their opposition moves toward the center enough that the new party springs from their base instead.
At this point, the Democrats shitting the bed is very realistically the end of democracy, so instead of getting a shakeup and a New Left we'll just end up with increasingly restrictive rules on who gets to participate in elections and increasingly questionable vote counting. But if you want to shake things up by just completely destroying the Republicans and hoping the Democrats (who are kind of suckers for "converting" Republicans) become the new conservative party, that I can get behind. The Republicans are already in shaky territory as they get more and more repulsive while dwindling in number. They're dangerous because of that, but they legitimately could fall apart if they keep getting destroyed in elections while the diehards refuse to believe they need to change.