In Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the Court’s six right-wingers ruled, over the dissent of the three liberals, that Arizona’s “out of precinct policy” and “ballot harvesting” provision did not violate Section 2 of the VRA.
Electoral politics has its limits, but one thing it can do is get you judges that don't make decisions like this. Three of those six right-wingers were appointed by Trump. We should be pursuing every angle we have, and voting is a relatively easy one.
Unless you're :vote:ing as a block and are willing to withhold that :vote: as a bloc, you're just playing a dumb little game with bourgeois democracy, especially with the presidential election.
You're talking about the Supreme Court, an unelected body. Your influence on it through :vote:ing and helping elect someone is to cast a state-level ballot for a Republican or a Democrat who is almost certainly a mainstream monster.
The first filter is at the state level: the primaries. Because you want to influence the Supreme Court, you will be working within a bourgeois party apparatus. You will also likely be acting on your own or with a very small cadre in terms of :vote:ing influence. You'll fight for some milquetoast socdem because you'll constantly have to contend with the notion of electability vs. a candidate not being a monster. Depending on the state, this process will be run by that bourgeois party that runs an insane and confusing system whose rules can and will be changed during the process by the party establishment to cancel out your voting and organization. When they do so, lefty folks focused on :vote:ing will go, "oh well, nevertheless" and continue exactly the same strategy. If the state runs the primary, it will be subject to all of the antidemocratic garbage :vote:ing usually is and even if you win, it'll come down to a fight at the convention.
The second filter is also at the state level: the electoral college. If you're in a winner-take-all or highly lopsided state, any group of leftists you convince (likely via bourgeois democratic shaming) will have no impact on the outcome. Every leftist party could :vote: as a bloc and not change the outcome in your state. Every socdem and demsoc and "progressive" Democrat, too. Your :vote: is worthless at a systemic level in those states.
The third filter is the actual president. You fought long and hard to get this president elected because you're so worried about the Supreme Court. What guarantees do you have that they will get any appointments? That they will select better choices? That they will fight for their choices against the opposition party? None. It's a gamble and The Democratic politicians, who you are definitely actively supporting, don't care.
The fourth filter is the justices themselves. They often have subtle (some would say incoherent) views that change over time. They're not a sure thing ideologically. And even then, they're constrained by common law and the Constitution: they're still gonna say that bulldozing a bunch of immigrant families' homes is A-Okay if the right boxes were ticked.
You very nicely helped get Obama elected, leading to (1) 2 less shit justices (hooray), (2) a right wing nomination (hiss) as a "strategy" to get him pushed through, (3) that nominee getting blocked and Obama not caring at all, doing nothing, playing no hardball, and (4) assisting the rise of the Clinton nomination, which got us Trump and a 6-3 Supreme Court. Good job.
So please, for the love of God, do socialist party organizing and only then consider using a bloc to force issues in this. Your efforts are utterly wasted otherwise. And remember that you're saddling socialists with whatever ghoul you get elected and I do not appreciate that. There must be discipline and actual socialist organizing or all you've done is made potential socialists into a wing of the Democratic Party, saddled with it's guaranteed failures and monumental death toll.
Edit: in contrast, if you just got a small but active cadre to become Precinct Captains, you could literally take over the state party just like in Nevada. All it takes is organization. The fact that you haven't done that means that you have no chance of doing jack shit about the Supreme Court.
I'm not reading a 10,000-word essay when you're not even taking the premise seriously.
Voting is easy relative to other political strategies, so we should do it as well as those other strategies. There is no counterargument to that, no matter how much you write.
There's the danger of massively wasting yours and others' time by getting them invested in Quixotic strategies. I can and (partially) already did expound on this at length.
There's the blowback from tying socialists to liberal politicians, furthering the ubiquitous misunderstanding of what socialism is and why it's necessary and making socialism less palatable by association.
There's the blowback from the inherent lack of control via the typical :vote:ing strategies, the unintended yet virtually guaranteed negative consequences of the compromises individuals going this route are willing to make. Organizing for and voting for Obama led fairly clearly to the current 6-3 Supreme Court, yet we all know the strategy was as simplistic as "Dems will appoint less bad justices so we should critically support them with :vote:ing". A :vote: is a very weak thing individually that gives you incredibly little power, not only in terms of your part in aggregate choice of representative, but in terms of what they can and will actually do to further the goals that you have in mind.
There's the constant liberal sheepdogging that warps your priorities, making you consider incredibly terrible ghouls as needing critical support and the false pretense that your presidential vote matters. See: the many "I've gotta vote for Biden" threads in October. So many confused leftists who have fully bought into the "this is an important personal choice" paradigm, regardless of whether they thought it was a good idea to :vote: for Biden or not. Those are brain worms and you get them by default.
I'm not against electoralism, I'm against vague calls for electoralism, particularly regarding the presidential election, because they're liberal and counterproductive by default. The elephant in the room is how you engage with it. In this thread, the idea of :vote:ing to influence the Supreme Court was absurd.
The point is that the Supreme Court would look very different today (and by all indications would have decided this case differently) had Trump lost in 2016. It's absurd to write off voting entirely when it has consequences like this.
You don't need to say it because it's assumed when you say that voting would have stopped this from happening. What were the conditions that led to Trump even winning in the first place, and why should we have any faith in a political and electoral system that allowed these conditions to arise?
So we're doing the reddit thing where we put words in people's mouths and get mad at them over it. Seems productive; I'm sure that'll bring the revolution any day now.
There's a world of difference between "vote Biden, he'll solve all our problems!" and "it makes sense to vote in addition to doing other political organizing."
What were the conditions that led to Trump even winning in the first place, and why should we have any faith in a political and electoral system that allowed these conditions to arise?
It's fine, I'll just vote harder, that should cancel it out.
Electoral politics has its limits, but one thing it can do is get you judges that don't make decisions like this. Three of those six right-wingers were appointed by Trump. We should be pursuing every angle we have, and voting is a relatively easy one.
Pursuing every angle, like expanding the supreme court?
Absolutely.
Unless you're :vote:ing as a block and are willing to withhold that :vote: as a bloc, you're just playing a dumb little game with bourgeois democracy, especially with the presidential election.
You're talking about the Supreme Court, an unelected body. Your influence on it through :vote:ing and helping elect someone is to cast a state-level ballot for a Republican or a Democrat who is almost certainly a mainstream monster.
The first filter is at the state level: the primaries. Because you want to influence the Supreme Court, you will be working within a bourgeois party apparatus. You will also likely be acting on your own or with a very small cadre in terms of :vote:ing influence. You'll fight for some milquetoast socdem because you'll constantly have to contend with the notion of electability vs. a candidate not being a monster. Depending on the state, this process will be run by that bourgeois party that runs an insane and confusing system whose rules can and will be changed during the process by the party establishment to cancel out your voting and organization. When they do so, lefty folks focused on :vote:ing will go, "oh well, nevertheless" and continue exactly the same strategy. If the state runs the primary, it will be subject to all of the antidemocratic garbage :vote:ing usually is and even if you win, it'll come down to a fight at the convention.
The second filter is also at the state level: the electoral college. If you're in a winner-take-all or highly lopsided state, any group of leftists you convince (likely via bourgeois democratic shaming) will have no impact on the outcome. Every leftist party could :vote: as a bloc and not change the outcome in your state. Every socdem and demsoc and "progressive" Democrat, too. Your :vote: is worthless at a systemic level in those states.
The third filter is the actual president. You fought long and hard to get this president elected because you're so worried about the Supreme Court. What guarantees do you have that they will get any appointments? That they will select better choices? That they will fight for their choices against the opposition party? None. It's a gamble and The Democratic politicians, who you are definitely actively supporting, don't care.
The fourth filter is the justices themselves. They often have subtle (some would say incoherent) views that change over time. They're not a sure thing ideologically. And even then, they're constrained by common law and the Constitution: they're still gonna say that bulldozing a bunch of immigrant families' homes is A-Okay if the right boxes were ticked.
You very nicely helped get Obama elected, leading to (1) 2 less shit justices (hooray), (2) a right wing nomination (hiss) as a "strategy" to get him pushed through, (3) that nominee getting blocked and Obama not caring at all, doing nothing, playing no hardball, and (4) assisting the rise of the Clinton nomination, which got us Trump and a 6-3 Supreme Court. Good job.
So please, for the love of God, do socialist party organizing and only then consider using a bloc to force issues in this. Your efforts are utterly wasted otherwise. And remember that you're saddling socialists with whatever ghoul you get elected and I do not appreciate that. There must be discipline and actual socialist organizing or all you've done is made potential socialists into a wing of the Democratic Party, saddled with it's guaranteed failures and monumental death toll.
Edit: in contrast, if you just got a small but active cadre to become Precinct Captains, you could literally take over the state party just like in Nevada. All it takes is organization. The fact that you haven't done that means that you have no chance of doing jack shit about the Supreme Court.
I'm not reading a 10,000-word essay when you're not even taking the premise seriously.
Voting is easy relative to other political strategies, so we should do it as well as those other strategies. There is no counterargument to that, no matter how much you write.
Well, I read it and found it to be an informative and nuanced description of the problems that plague bourgeoise democracy.
There are tons of good criticisms of bourgeoise democracy, but that's what we're working with right now. So it's a choice between:
Why not pursue every possible avenue?
I already explained the danger of simplistic "let's use :vote:ing".
There is absolutely zero "danger" from voting and also pursuing other organizing strategies.
There's the danger of massively wasting yours and others' time by getting them invested in Quixotic strategies. I can and (partially) already did expound on this at length.
There's the blowback from tying socialists to liberal politicians, furthering the ubiquitous misunderstanding of what socialism is and why it's necessary and making socialism less palatable by association.
There's the blowback from the inherent lack of control via the typical :vote:ing strategies, the unintended yet virtually guaranteed negative consequences of the compromises individuals going this route are willing to make. Organizing for and voting for Obama led fairly clearly to the current 6-3 Supreme Court, yet we all know the strategy was as simplistic as "Dems will appoint less bad justices so we should critically support them with :vote:ing". A :vote: is a very weak thing individually that gives you incredibly little power, not only in terms of your part in aggregate choice of representative, but in terms of what they can and will actually do to further the goals that you have in mind.
There's the constant liberal sheepdogging that warps your priorities, making you consider incredibly terrible ghouls as needing critical support and the false pretense that your presidential vote matters. See: the many "I've gotta vote for Biden" threads in October. So many confused leftists who have fully bought into the "this is an important personal choice" paradigm, regardless of whether they thought it was a good idea to :vote: for Biden or not. Those are brain worms and you get them by default.
I'm not against electoralism, I'm against vague calls for electoralism, particularly regarding the presidential election, because they're liberal and counterproductive by default. The elephant in the room is how you engage with it. In this thread, the idea of :vote:ing to influence the Supreme Court was absurd.
Okay bye then lol
:LIB:
I didn't know the entirety of American politics only started with the election of Trump
Did I say that?
The point is that the Supreme Court would look very different today (and by all indications would have decided this case differently) had Trump lost in 2016. It's absurd to write off voting entirely when it has consequences like this.
I know that's why I'm so glad we elected Biden who very quickly expanded the supreme court
The point is that electoral outcomes do change some things, not that every elected official is good.
You don't need to say it because it's assumed when you say that voting would have stopped this from happening. What were the conditions that led to Trump even winning in the first place, and why should we have any faith in a political and electoral system that allowed these conditions to arise?
So we're doing the reddit thing where we put words in people's mouths and get mad at them over it. Seems productive; I'm sure that'll bring the revolution any day now.
The reddit thing would be to tell people to vote, so everything's coming up aces for you
There's a world of difference between "vote Biden, he'll solve all our problems!" and "it makes sense to vote in addition to doing other political organizing."
I'll let you have another shot at it
how about no
lol