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.
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