Stuff like this is why the online left's impulse to abandon electoral politics is a dead end, losing strategy. If people hear "voting doesn't matter" out of context, they remember stuff like this and write you off as a lunatic. It doesn't matter what your long-form justification for "voting doesn't matter" is -- you're a lunatic, so they're not listening to it. Even if they do listen to your justification for "voting doesn't matter," they're probably not going to buy it, because at the end of the day some limp-dick conservative Democrat is still a big improvement over open fascism. And if you somehow get a lot of people to buy it, your efforts to translate not voting into some positive political movement are going to be kneecapped at every turn because you've ceded state power to the worst, most reactionary people in the country.
The far better approach is to try to gain ground wherever we can, which includes elections. In the context of horrible shit like this, it's a million times easier to convince people to vote for DSA-style left-wing Democrats than it is to convince them that they should abandon elections to Republicans. Getting people to look to the left of Democratic Party orthodoxy is the first step to truly radicalizing them, and running candidates like that in Democratic primaries is a proven way of reaching a mass audience.
Yeah, I've been in Texas my whole life, and it's been clear for a while that this platform was the direction that the GOP were going. This community's tendency to shit on not even advocating electoralism, but just merely voting has always and continues to rub me the wrong way. Because I feel very fucking obligated to vote against this shit, which more often than not means checking the goddamn Dem box out of necessity (the alternative here, in races where one exists, is usually a libertarian).
Yeah, leftists protesting electoralism leads to brain dead shit like Ecuador's recent election.
It was supposed to be a slam dunk for a left-wing candidate, but so many people wanted to not vote in order to protest voter suppression (???). Incredibly absurd. Because there were powerful people who didn't want the poors to vote, some lefties got back at them by... not voting even if they were perfectly able to. Yay upset rightist victory! At least the true leftists weren't cringe electoralists and totally not an op.
Stuff like this is why the online left's impulse to abandon electoral politics is a dead end, losing strategy. If people hear "voting doesn't matter" out of context, they remember stuff like this and write you off as a lunatic. It doesn't matter what your long-form justification for "voting doesn't matter" is -- you're a lunatic, so they're not listening to it. Even if they do listen to your justification for "voting doesn't matter," they're probably not going to buy it, because at the end of the day some limp-dick conservative Democrat is still a big improvement over open fascism. And if you somehow get a lot of people to buy it, your efforts to translate not voting into some positive political movement are going to be kneecapped at every turn because you've ceded state power to the worst, most reactionary people in the country.
The far better approach is to try to gain ground wherever we can, which includes elections. In the context of horrible shit like this, it's a million times easier to convince people to vote for DSA-style left-wing Democrats than it is to convince them that they should abandon elections to Republicans. Getting people to look to the left of Democratic Party orthodoxy is the first step to truly radicalizing them, and running candidates like that in Democratic primaries is a proven way of reaching a mass audience.
:rat-salute:
Yeah, I've been in Texas my whole life, and it's been clear for a while that this platform was the direction that the GOP were going. This community's tendency to shit on not even advocating electoralism, but just merely voting has always and continues to rub me the wrong way. Because I feel very fucking obligated to vote against this shit, which more often than not means checking the goddamn Dem box out of necessity (the alternative here, in races where one exists, is usually a libertarian).
Replace 'voting doesn't matter" with "voting by itself is woefully insufficent"
They're libs -- they love "yes, and"
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Yeah, leftists protesting electoralism leads to brain dead shit like Ecuador's recent election.
It was supposed to be a slam dunk for a left-wing candidate, but so many people wanted to not vote in order to protest voter suppression (???). Incredibly absurd. Because there were powerful people who didn't want the poors to vote, some lefties got back at them by... not voting even if they were perfectly able to. Yay upset rightist victory! At least the true leftists weren't cringe electoralists and totally not an op.
^Dumbest take of the day folks