We need to stop Trump from being elected or he will destroy democracy.
We need to shoot all the Trump supporters.
Nooooooooo, not like that!
You can, if you stop abstaining or voting third party out of protest. You can’t blame the electoral system for being ineffective if you don’t use it right.
Y’know the old saying about the best and second best times to plant a tree? Sweeping political change takes time. You need progressive candidates to prove themselves on local and state levels.
It’ll take 6 years to replace every governor and congressperson, and based on the landscape I see, at least 5-10 years to promote enough progressives to a position suitable to candidacy. 15-20 years of voting for capable progressives in every race from school board to governor will provide us with a rich crop of experienced candidates.
That does mean voting lesser evil until you can get proven progressives on the ticket. That’s just reality. If you don’t vote for a candidate that wins, you didn’t get even the most meager semblance of representation. Not getting what you want because the voters that disagree with you outnumber the ones that agree is the fundamental principle of democracy. Show up. Vote, for someone who might win.
Republicans planted their tree 50 years ago. Progressives’ best move in the next few elections is show up in droves to big tent blue wave, and then splinter when the Republican party is defunct.
I had to just disengage, they were so thoroughly anti-reading and deliberately misrepresenting my words that it was no longer worth engaging.
It's good to disengage when you start losing hair and it's just an internet slapfight anyway, but for future reference you could have argued it much more effectively by explaining how, for instance, Israel stopping attacking Gaza is the majority position, M4A is the majority position, the right thing is frequently the majority position but the "democratic" system of liberalism frequently gives them no way to instate this demand.
As a historical example, we can look at the liberal provisional government in 1917 Russia. They addressed maybe some of the popular demands, but one of the biggest ones, withdraw from the Great War, they refused to budge on. Because they refused to budge on this and other issues, making the ballot box invalid as an approach, they left the bullet box as the only one remaining.
Edit: In our case, you can add in the conspiracies and confluence of liberal media to make humanitarianism electorally nonviable, but without the first part they will just brush it off.
You're correct, absolutely, I was too focused on systems and not on examples.