How Leftists Need to Think About Voting This November
slate.com
The lessons of history are vital for 2024.

Leftists who don’t like Biden don’t want to see him in office again, so they don’t want to vote for him, or they want to withhold their vote until he changes course. Seems simple enough.

But that’s not how politics works.

So announcing that you'll vote for him no matter what he does will make him change course? Is that how politics works?

Never, in the history of this country, has there been a president who hasn’t engaged in what the left would regard as unforgivable crimes. This is the nature of presidents, and politicians in general. If you, like me, are on the far left, you should never fully trust or have faith in any elected official.

But when I look at the Biden administration, I see a group of people who can be bullied in a leftist direction on some policy priorities.

lenin-laugh

Can anyone today truly argue that the world wasn’t drastically changed by Gore’s loss in 2000? Even if you don’t accept the argument that Nader’s candidacy is what lost Gore the election, how can you argue that the world wouldn’t have been at least a little better if all of those Nader votes had gone to Gore and put the Dems over the top?

Democrats have held the presidency 50% of the time since 2000.

  • InevitableSwing [none/use name]
    ·
    4 months ago

    Emphasis mine.

    I've seen better whining by libs lecturing me personally in r/politics.

    Leftists who don't like Biden don't want to see him in office again, so they don't want to vote for him, or they want to withhold their vote until he changes course. Seems simple enough. But that's not how politics works. The point of electoral politics, as it is lived, is not to vote for a friend; it's to vote for your preferred enemy. You will never find a morally pure candidate, or one whose positions perfectly align with your own preferences. So you must find one whom you can effectively bully.

    In Weimar Germany...

    In Weimar Germany, where the German Communist Party was far more robust and ready to fight in the streets, the revolution-oriented strategy—allowing a fascist victory to raise urgency and bring about a more lasting leftist one—didn't work. Infamously, in the fateful early years of the 1930s, the German Communists viciously opposed the governing center-left Social Democratic Party. Calling the centrists "Social Fascists," they declared that there was no substantive difference between liberalism and Nazism. They refused to ally themselves with the center.