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.
There’s the danger of massively wasting yours and others’ time
So don't get invested in electoral politics. You can check in at the polls every year or two without obsessing over it. Tons of people do it.
blowback from tying socialists to liberal politicians, furthering the ubiquitous misunderstanding of what socialism is
At this point the priority is to de-stigmatize the concept of socialism, because we can't do anything until we do that. Elected officials calling for popular policies like Medicare for All and associating those policies with socialism is a big step in the right direction.
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
Lol this doesn't make any sense. Did Obama appoint those conservative justices? If no one turned out to vote for Obama in 2008, would John McCain have appointed liberal or conservative justices? If Hillary had pulled it out in 2016, would she have appointed Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett? Democrats fuck up a lot of things, but they at least don't appoint complete shitheads to the Supreme Court.
I’m not against electoralism, I’m against vague calls for electoralism
The only vague thing here is "I'm not against electoralism despite mocking it constantly."
So don’t get invested in electoral politics. You can check in at the polls every year or two without obsessing over it. Tons of people do it.
Someone suggesting you :vote: to influence the Supreme Court is already "too invested in electoral politics". The full sentence was about Quixotic ventures, and that definitely is one.
At this point the priority is to de-stigmatize the concept of socialism, because we can’t do anything until we do that. Elected officials calling for popular policies like Medicare for All and associating those policies with socialism is a big step in the right direction.
There is no "we". This is bourgeois electoralism and as you're describing it it's someone who only checks in at the polls every few years. There can only be a "we" when we are organized together, when you and I have an apparatus that amplifies our voices and develops real leverage, not atomized personal choices at the :vote:ing booth that inevitably mean, particularly in the context of the SC, :vote:ing blue no matter who, i.e. loudly declaring that you hate having leverage and don't need to be considered at all by pols. Finally, the "we" is actually a top-down declaration by liberal socdems like Sanders misleading people about what socialism is, raising Denmark as the ideal. You can critically support that if you'd like, but there is no "we" having a priority in this situation, it's top-down messaging from liberals.
I also disagree about this priority. My priority is to grow the ranks in socialist party membership and to push discipline and organization within them, including building dual power and engaging in direct action, along with strategic participation in electoralism to spread a very clear socialist (not socdem) message. Then there can actually be a "we" and we can begin to talk about wielding leverage and power and strategy.
Lol this doesn’t make any sense. Did Obama appoint those conservative justices? If no one turned out to vote for Obama in 2008, would John McCain have appointed liberal or conservative justices? If Hillary had pulled it out in 2016, would she have appointed Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett? Democrats fuck up a lot of things, but they at least don’t appoint complete shitheads to the Supreme Court.
It makes perfect sense and I explained why in my first post. Your intent would be "we can try to nudge the SC to be less horrible by voting in a Dem president". The reality is that this "worked" for two less-shit appointments, but you also elected a liberal who wouldn't actually fight for his third appointment, lost Congress via dismantling his electoral machine and promoting people like Rahm Emanuel, set up Clinton for a cleared-field 2016 run, and whose betrayal of normal working people created the conditions for a backlash and Trump, leading to the current 6-3 court. This highlights two uncontestable facts: (1) your intent in your :vote: is dramatically divorced from the realities of power over the SC and (2) there is very frequent blowback because of the monsters you end up helping rather than even doing a third (socialist) party vote.
Perennial lesser-evilism also means you have zero leverage over how Obama decides to handle the SC, whether he promotes Clinton to a position in a lead-up to another presidential run, etc. etc. You have the exact opposite of leverage: your concerns as dismissable. You show up, if you show up at all, as a left-leaning person who always votes for the Dem candidate anyways no matter how much they fuck your preferred candidate.
Finally, the connection between your vote and the SC is incredibly circuitous, as I mentioned in my first comment. There is not actually a meaningful direct connection between your atomized liberal vote for, say, Biden, and a Supreme Court nom.
The only vague thing here is “I’m not against electoralism despite mocking it constantly.”
Let me remind you of my very first sentence in my first comment: "Unless you’re ing as a block and are willing to withhold that as a bloc, you’re just playing a dumb little game with bourgeois democracy, especially with the presidential election.".
I hope that this convinces you to actually read what people say before dismissing them.
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?
There's a reason I'm asking you the question, and your refusal to answer shows that you seem to have zero awareness of any US political history before 2016.
The rise of Trump is directly tied to the "lesser of two evils" song and dance that has been going on for over a century. Happened in 2016, happened with LBJ in the 60s, happened with the SPD and Hitler in the 30s, and even before that, Engels was remarking on the bullshit scaremongering that takes place every election cycle when a vote for a 3rd party candidate is said to basically be a vote for the right wing Boogeyman.
Voting for someone like a Biden only kicks the can down the road. There is already talk of the Republicans sweeping their way into power again within the next 4 years. They already have a 6-3 majority in the SC, which the toothless Dems couldn't do anything about because of their disastrous 2014 midterm campaign. They're gerrymandering districts unopposed because both parties have set up a ridiculous electoral system which makes the popular vote a sham. Trump is still hovering in the background, with the QAnon hordes ready to crown him for another 4 years. If not him, it'll be another ghoul like a Tom Cotton perhaps.
The Democrats are slaves to capital as much as the Republicans. History indicates that there is no "lesser of two evils" and it is even more fucking bizarre to suggest so, when you have an individual like Joe Biden and his long history of basically being a right wing senator masquerading as a Democrat. The guy voted in Clarence Thomas, despite the legitimate Anita Hill accusations, and even scolded her during the process. Not surprising that it was in line with his own proclivities. That itself had a direct impact on the SC as it is currently constituted. That's just the tip of the iceberg.
Unless there is a real and legitimate socialist voting bloc, voting is pointless. Any attempt to blame individual voters is pointless. A clear indicator of that is your refusal to consider maybe voting for someone in the PSL, or even the Green Party. Clearly they were the least evil, no? But you wouldn't consider it because you'll just trot out the canard that it would siphon votes from the Dems, and the right wing Boogeyman will win. So we're right back to square one.
Edit- seems like another poster already pointed out some of these issues above, and your best response was "lul not reading all that". Fucking lib lmao
Lol I answered you as directly as possible. You really do want to have a reddit debate where you just ignore what the other person is saying, don't you?
And yeah, I'm not going to waste my time combing through multi-paragraph screeds that don't even attempt to be responsive to the point I'm making. That's not how you have a conversation. If you want to have a conversation -- you know, where we think about what the other person is saying and try to address it -- I'm all for it. But I've seen no indication that you're processing anything I'm writing. You're just putting words in my mouth and arguing against those.
Here's a simple question if you want to actually discuss this: Does voting in any way hamper non-electoral political efforts?
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.
So don't get invested in electoral politics. You can check in at the polls every year or two without obsessing over it. Tons of people do it.
At this point the priority is to de-stigmatize the concept of socialism, because we can't do anything until we do that. Elected officials calling for popular policies like Medicare for All and associating those policies with socialism is a big step in the right direction.
Lol this doesn't make any sense. Did Obama appoint those conservative justices? If no one turned out to vote for Obama in 2008, would John McCain have appointed liberal or conservative justices? If Hillary had pulled it out in 2016, would she have appointed Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett? Democrats fuck up a lot of things, but they at least don't appoint complete shitheads to the Supreme Court.
The only vague thing here is "I'm not against electoralism despite mocking it constantly."
Someone suggesting you :vote: to influence the Supreme Court is already "too invested in electoral politics". The full sentence was about Quixotic ventures, and that definitely is one.
There is no "we". This is bourgeois electoralism and as you're describing it it's someone who only checks in at the polls every few years. There can only be a "we" when we are organized together, when you and I have an apparatus that amplifies our voices and develops real leverage, not atomized personal choices at the :vote:ing booth that inevitably mean, particularly in the context of the SC, :vote:ing blue no matter who, i.e. loudly declaring that you hate having leverage and don't need to be considered at all by pols. Finally, the "we" is actually a top-down declaration by liberal socdems like Sanders misleading people about what socialism is, raising Denmark as the ideal. You can critically support that if you'd like, but there is no "we" having a priority in this situation, it's top-down messaging from liberals.
I also disagree about this priority. My priority is to grow the ranks in socialist party membership and to push discipline and organization within them, including building dual power and engaging in direct action, along with strategic participation in electoralism to spread a very clear socialist (not socdem) message. Then there can actually be a "we" and we can begin to talk about wielding leverage and power and strategy.
It makes perfect sense and I explained why in my first post. Your intent would be "we can try to nudge the SC to be less horrible by voting in a Dem president". The reality is that this "worked" for two less-shit appointments, but you also elected a liberal who wouldn't actually fight for his third appointment, lost Congress via dismantling his electoral machine and promoting people like Rahm Emanuel, set up Clinton for a cleared-field 2016 run, and whose betrayal of normal working people created the conditions for a backlash and Trump, leading to the current 6-3 court. This highlights two uncontestable facts: (1) your intent in your :vote: is dramatically divorced from the realities of power over the SC and (2) there is very frequent blowback because of the monsters you end up helping rather than even doing a third (socialist) party vote.
Perennial lesser-evilism also means you have zero leverage over how Obama decides to handle the SC, whether he promotes Clinton to a position in a lead-up to another presidential run, etc. etc. You have the exact opposite of leverage: your concerns as dismissable. You show up, if you show up at all, as a left-leaning person who always votes for the Dem candidate anyways no matter how much they fuck your preferred candidate.
Finally, the connection between your vote and the SC is incredibly circuitous, as I mentioned in my first comment. There is not actually a meaningful direct connection between your atomized liberal vote for, say, Biden, and a Supreme Court nom.
Let me remind you of my very first sentence in my first comment: "Unless you’re ing as a block and are willing to withhold that as a bloc, you’re just playing a dumb little game with bourgeois democracy, especially with the presidential election.".
I hope that this convinces you to actually read what people say before dismissing them.
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
You shouldn't have faith in electoral politics, but you also shouldn't abandon them entirely to libs and chuds.
I honestly don't know how "vote in addition to doing other political organizing" doesn't communicate this.
There's a reason I'm asking you the question, and your refusal to answer shows that you seem to have zero awareness of any US political history before 2016.
The rise of Trump is directly tied to the "lesser of two evils" song and dance that has been going on for over a century. Happened in 2016, happened with LBJ in the 60s, happened with the SPD and Hitler in the 30s, and even before that, Engels was remarking on the bullshit scaremongering that takes place every election cycle when a vote for a 3rd party candidate is said to basically be a vote for the right wing Boogeyman.
Voting for someone like a Biden only kicks the can down the road. There is already talk of the Republicans sweeping their way into power again within the next 4 years. They already have a 6-3 majority in the SC, which the toothless Dems couldn't do anything about because of their disastrous 2014 midterm campaign. They're gerrymandering districts unopposed because both parties have set up a ridiculous electoral system which makes the popular vote a sham. Trump is still hovering in the background, with the QAnon hordes ready to crown him for another 4 years. If not him, it'll be another ghoul like a Tom Cotton perhaps.
The Democrats are slaves to capital as much as the Republicans. History indicates that there is no "lesser of two evils" and it is even more fucking bizarre to suggest so, when you have an individual like Joe Biden and his long history of basically being a right wing senator masquerading as a Democrat. The guy voted in Clarence Thomas, despite the legitimate Anita Hill accusations, and even scolded her during the process. Not surprising that it was in line with his own proclivities. That itself had a direct impact on the SC as it is currently constituted. That's just the tip of the iceberg.
Unless there is a real and legitimate socialist voting bloc, voting is pointless. Any attempt to blame individual voters is pointless. A clear indicator of that is your refusal to consider maybe voting for someone in the PSL, or even the Green Party. Clearly they were the least evil, no? But you wouldn't consider it because you'll just trot out the canard that it would siphon votes from the Dems, and the right wing Boogeyman will win. So we're right back to square one.
Edit- seems like another poster already pointed out some of these issues above, and your best response was "lul not reading all that". Fucking lib lmao
Lol I answered you as directly as possible. You really do want to have a reddit debate where you just ignore what the other person is saying, don't you?
And yeah, I'm not going to waste my time combing through multi-paragraph screeds that don't even attempt to be responsive to the point I'm making. That's not how you have a conversation. If you want to have a conversation -- you know, where we think about what the other person is saying and try to address it -- I'm all for it. But I've seen no indication that you're processing anything I'm writing. You're just putting words in my mouth and arguing against those.
Here's a simple question if you want to actually discuss this: Does voting in any way hamper non-electoral political efforts?
That question is answered in the paragraphs you won't read lmao
I'm sorry if you're completely tunnel visioned because your political consciousness doesn't go back more than a few years
When someone disagrees with you, they never have a point, they're just an idiot!
how about no
lol