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Have some civility.
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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In this post: not realizing that the ideal solution is not a single step away, but rather multiple steps -- and they will not be simple to sell to a general populace.
I'll admit I'm not familiar with the term. 'Electorialism' seems to be, according to Wikipedia, a 'half-way step' between Authoritarianism and Democracy.
As far as I know, we are still not quite in an Authoritarian state here in the US. We are more likely to be headed in the opposite way from Electorialism; where we are transitioning from what is a democratic process to one where oligarchs have consolidated enough power and influence that they can just say, 'fuck it, we win.' In that case, yes, I do want to make a case against Electorialism.
In Electorialism, the dominant party, presumably the authoritarian one, conducts elections that allow their opponents a stage and promises to be free and fair while still controlling the levers of power. What we have seen in the last 8 years is a party, republicans, that are throwing every possible strategy at the wall in the effort to undermine and discredit elections with the end result that if they win, the election will be seen as fair and, if they lose, the election will be seen as unfair.
All concepts of what are optimal democratic processes are going to be just that: concepts. We live in the real world. There are millions of people you have to convince to move to your desired method of representation. I think we agree on the end-goal, I just disagree on how to get there and think we can't jump from a Trump presidency directly to a worker-owned utopia.
Help me out. What's our next step?
Mine is to help elect people to local, state and federal offices that want to make life for everyone better.
Just wanna drill into this; the United States has been an authoritarian state for as long as I've been alive. Deporting people without due process is not new. Supporting genocides is not new. The police state we live in is not new. The rule of law has been a joke for so long zoomers have internalized it. There is a reason why most of the governments we have overthrown have been democracies, and there is a reason the US has mostly replaced those democracies with dictatorships. We are the evil empire, and we have been for decades at this point.
Electoralism in this context means the idea that elections are the solutions to the political issues of our time, that the primary focus of energy from the left should be in winning elections so the elected officials can do as they were selected to do and solve societal ills.
Many Marxists and other leftists ideologies disagree and feel that the four options you've given show that electoralism is a trap for the political energy to change.
I understand your frustration as the entire thread is strawmanning liberal positions.
Essentially, capitalism coopts movements. Liberalism is an ideology which exists and has values, but since this is the primary vehicle for left leaning politics on a national level, companies spend a lot of lobbying effort stuffing liberalism with stuff that helps them.
Conservative have has gone through similar changes, stuffing a fiscal conservative viewpoint with bullshit culture war stuff as the primary vehicle for right wing politics.
When people critique electoralism, they see liberals as unable to organize because the movement has been cooped by big money and liberals refuse to admit they aren't in control of their own party.
When you campaign for liberal values, critics see you as providing ethical cover for the promises to lobbyists that had already been made behind your back which secured their campaign donations enabling them to run in the first place.
Things like funding Israel.
You can discuss being anti Israel, you can rally behind someone like John Fetterman or Krysten Sinema who promises to be a progressive, but the thing about electoralism is you can just lie and turn heel.
This is where I agree with you.
There are steps inside electoralism and steps outside.
If you're saying "just vote Democrat and wait 4 years for things to get better" I agree that's naive and there's action we can take outside of electoralism.
If they're "stay home and don't vote" I agree with you that's nauve and we can take action inside of electoralism too. It's just gonna be inherently pretty ineffectual.
Currently, when candidates we elect take big money and vote against our interests we can't do anything for 4 years about it. But because we have our "I voted" sticker it acts as a balm to the consciousness and deluded is into believing our fellow countrymen actually agree with the direction it takes.
Again, this is where I fully agree with you.
Protesting Kamala from my university campus seems like a better alternative to protesting Trump from El Salvador, even if the genocide is happening in both cases.
I haven't heard a compelling argument staying home and not voting is better.
I'm now mobile, so my formatting will suffer.
Capitalism = bad. I'm fully behind that, and see it as the root of the problem. What I don't see is a path forward that doesn't involve incremental progress, even if not all demographics are served. At least not without violence that will be disrupt even more.
I think this is where we disagree, but I might still be missing something.
You (assorted folks responding to me) want an epoch change where we rise up and take back the power we have. We have it right now, but the price to pay to enforce that is too high for me.
I want a progression where we work towards owning that power. We had it partially when unions were still strong, but it was undermined. In my mind, the solution is education, but I have no power to enact that directly. My ability to influence is limited to my local org and voting.
A green party, socialist party, etc, will never win an election in our current environment. Votes there are literally useless, if not spoiling a candidate that has at least some if your views. The system is rigged, sure, but you can't flip this table and walk away.
Can we separate this discussion into talking about politics and elections and eliminate Israel/Palestine? I'm a-religious, pro Palestine, pro humanitarian, but having that angle seems to quickly degenerate every conversation into 'both sides are genocide' and avoid the'how do we move forward' question. I think these can be separated, but maybe that is also a place we disagree.
But do you actually see a path forward that does involve incremental progress?
I've watched politics incrementally change from Clinton's Third Way to Bush's War on Terror to McCain/Palin and the Tea Party to Trump.
I've watched Fox news incrementally change, I've watched print media incrementally be bought up.
I'm hearing about abortion getting banned, hate crimes going up, school shootings, people being abducted and sent to death camps in El Salvador.
When does this incremental change move us forward instead of backwards?
I'm not the assorted folks responding. What I personally want is a reform. I like the idea of democracy. I do not think we have it.
I think the system we currently have is rigged and not capable of producing the incremental change you ask of it.
Where I agree with everyone else, is that if we have to resort to revolution just to get the slightest pedestrian changes to the electoral system to let incremental change takeover (repeal citizens united, disband both parties, disallow "parties" to subvert primaries, remove big money, etc)... why set it back up more or less the same?
When those other leftists accept revolution as inevitable they can dream bigger beyond the current system.
The more liberalism is cooped by capitalists to resist the reforms liberalism itself demands, the less liberalism as a coherent movement can thrive.
This leaves actual liberals like you and me disenfranchised and without a party. A further leftist might describe that as defeatist.
If you have been following politics from the Clinton era, then you wound have seen the progress and incremental change first hand especially regarding social rights.
Gay marriage didn't exist. They were denied their existence in the military, and on TV.
We went from that to adding new letters to the ltgb alliance every few years. To pronouns and kinks like furries being accepted.
A black president was unimaginable. There were still people alive that experienced segregation.
Most of what you are listing are reactions to the progress. The bigots pushed back, and they won partly because they convinced us to be more cynical and divisive. To ignore and forget the progress that was made and spin as negatively as possible all the change we see.
Incremental change is moving forward 3 steps after falling back 2, not giving up because we couldn't be at step 5 by now.
Liberalism is when some of the war criminals are PoC
Social rights are great, but you're ignoring cost of living and material conditions to paint there being more progress than there has been.
Financially, the average worker has seen the cost of food, housing and transportation increase massively with inflation but wages haven't kept up.
The 2008 banking crisis and COVID 19 have only pushed this even further.
You are viewing everything through the lens of now now now.
Inflation was at record lows from the housing crisis through the pandemic. It only spiked in 2021-2022. Before that, we had nearly 3 decades of sub 2% inflation. You are basing all your conclusions on 3 years worth of data instead of 30.
Look things suck financially right now. Everyone is hurting except the rich and it is absolutely stupid. But no it has not always been that way and social progress is not the reason we are where we are.
We are in financial trouble because we elected a far right party that is breaking everything. Because we would rather be cynical about the Democrats and blame them for the economic fallout of a pandemic instead of having realizing the fallout is due to abysmal mismanagement of said pandemic by the very administration we let back in power.
You've captured the flaw in liberalism extremely succinctly. Liberal ideology calls for the capitalist class to hold all the material power, inevitably leading them to do away with liberal reforms because the ideological liberals don't have the power to stop them.
Thank you!
It wasn't a compliment
When my goal is to describe the flaws of liberalism succinctly and you say "You've captured the flaw in liberalism extremely succinctly." I have a hard time taking that as an insult, ngl.
Sorry, I didn't realize you had abandoned liberalism between that comment and the previous one. You probably should have said something.
Hey, it’s the self admitted troll who has dedicated themself to stalking every single comment I make because they got big mad I said genocide denial is bad.