Moderates would rather lose to fascists than compromise with leftists and progressives.
In the USA, voting Third Party is just helping Republicans, aka. the Fascists.
If you want to change something, organise and unionise.
But dont throw away Democracy, just to be the smuggest guy in the concentraition-camp in the end...
If you want to change something, organise and unionise.
Moderates sabotage those efforts.
But they occasionally work. Name 1 3rd party candidate that has won the presidential election and shut the fuck up.
You just sailed over the point where moderates fight us and it's considered fair game. We fight moderates and they have a meltdown. Moderates are relying on leftist and progressives to win general elections while fucking them over at every opportunity.
Surely you can see the foolishness of that strategy yes?
And yet it's irrelevant. I have no reason to engage that point, because people immediately being horribly hurt by looming electoral consequences supersedes the importance of long-term systemic change.
Nobody disagrees that systemic change is needed, but it is not the most important or immediate problem.
Free pass for moderates. Lectures for everybody else. Got it.
No thanks.
Abe Lincoln could be argued as a 3rd party candidate who won since prior to him it was mainly the whigs and democrats as the two main parties.
Now if you asked what grassroots-led 3rd party candidate overwhelmed the two major parties in a shocker of an election, that obviously never happened.
The last Whig president*, Zachary Taylor, was a political outsider that beat out an experienced politician (familiar?). He was running under the Whig banner because the whigs didn’t have a solution for the issue of slavery- Zachary Taylor was a crude extremely rich celebrity soldier and slave owner who never voted. He was ambiguous on his stance on the future of slavery in America. But the anti slavery wing of the whigs hated this. Taylor ruined the Whig party and it never recovered. Lincoln picked up the anti-slavery whig voters, creating the Republican Party.
The modern day Republicans are only held together with trump and I’m not sure what will happen to their party afterwards. Maybe there’ll be another party “flip” when the Republican Party crumbles, a new more left wing party will rise up as the democrats absorb the former Republican voters, causing the progressive democrats to flee the party. This would be the next success of a “3rd party” candidate. But this won’t happen as long as trump continues to be on the ballot.
*there was Millard Fillmore as the 13th, but this was because Taylor died in office and Fillmore succeeded him as president.
Voting for someone that does not represent you because you are more scared of the other guy is indistinguishable, as a signal, from someone that fully supports them. By voting against your own interests you are actively undermining the democratic process.
Democracy has forever been synonymous with class based societies. It has split entire countries into two barely-distinctive political parties (conservative and "progressive") that are nevertheless permanently at each other's throats. Even in its most libertarian-friendly forms, it has constantly failed to avert hierarchy, coercion and the authoritarian machinations of majority-groups.
Unfortunately, many countries have First-Past-The-Post voting systems, so voting for a third party is often, mathematically, basically the same as voting for the competition.
It's called "The Spoiler Effect", if you want to look it up, and it's why we have many of the two party problems we have today in modern democracy. Ranked Choice/Single Transferrable Vote are much better systems.
Well, many democracies do not vote for their president directly – parliament elects one. They are usually from the strongest party, although if enough smaller parties can get a majority, they can elect the president.
Yeah but FPTP is used for parliament in those countries, which means the party that chooses the president is elected via it.
Ranked Choice, STV, or Mixed Member Proportional Ranking are much better systems. I wish more countries used it.
4th panel is what you're going to get when a republican wins the white house because "leftists" voted for a spoiler candidate.
Moderates will too. Maybe they'll look back and think "Perhaps we should have compromised a bit."
What’s to stop them from compromising with the base of the party that won and become even more auth facist as a result
Are you saying moderates would rather compromise with fascists than leftists and progressives?
Moderates compromise with whoever controls the most seats in legislature
Why are you so afraid of giving a straight answer here?
This reeks of right wing propaganda.
“I’m going to vote against the dude that is giving weapons to Israel, who gives weak-effort strongly worded letters to try to stop being assholes in the butchering of Gaza. Nevermind that in doing so it ensures the win of the fascist megalomaniac who will shove weapons faster, and has given full throated support to Israel, along with the party that says that everyone in Gaza should die. That’ll teach them. Fuckin moderates, compromise with me or I’ll help Gaza burn faster.”
“I’m going to vote for a dude that will ensure the comfort of westerners at the cost of black and brown lives around the world and I feel good about this because the alternative is worse. Of course my life is more important than someone in Gaza! The status quo of this system isn’t stomping on me as much as it can and I’d like to keep it that way as long as I can. Yes, please focus your stomping boot somewhere else and I’ll continue to vote for that boot. There’s no ethical line I won’t cross to save myself from oppression because I’m a coward who refuses to listen to the oppressed”
Democracy is already dead if we are forced to vote for genocide. It might just take those comfortable with the status quo longer to figure that out.
Ok now do moderates.
Easy.
“We like how things are and while we like some of what you offer and suggest you want it all or nothing which is too much of a shock so we’ll stick with what we know. But right now we’re literally trying to fight off a fascist Hitler wanna-be, how about we fucking discus this later?”
suggest you want it all or nothing
"Don't block strikes and don't support genocide." is "all or nothing"?
But right now we’re literally trying to fight off a fascist Hitler wanna-be, how about we fucking discus this later?”
When? You didn't want to discuss it at any point in the last four years.
But right now we’re literally trying to fight off a fascist Hitler wanna-be, how about we fucking discus this later?
When? You didn’t want to discuss it at any point in the last four years.
Considering Biden was on the picket line with the auto strikers, I disagree. Considering Biden is trying to shovel weapons to a Taiwan and to Ukraine, and yes unfortunately to Israel as well, he at least has criticized and made requests for ceasefires and hostage exchanges.
Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Is there more they could do? 100% yes. Is it better than it was 4 years ago with what Orange? Hands down.
Republicans would be 1000000x worse. And clearly you want that, over what the other side has done. Be honest with yourself and stop wasting our time.
Considering Biden was on the picket line with the auto strikers, I disagree. Considering Biden is trying to shovel weapons to a Taiwan and to Ukraine, and yes unfortunately to Israel as well, he at least has criticized and made requests for ceasefires and hostage exchanges.
Oh by "discussion" you thought I meant you say what you think, get your way and the rest of us just shut up and deal with it? That isn't what I meant. I hope I've clarified that for you. This right here is a discussion and it's only happening because you need something from me. The moment you don't need my vote you'll go right back to the kinds of "discussions" you're talking about.
You asked compromise. He did shit. He did a fuckton more than the other fuck did or will do.
Right now we are literally fighting off miniHitler. After that is done we can talk about what MORE they can do. And I personally will be demanding more.
Once the orange fuck is defeated.
Until then? Fuck off with the purity bullshit. You’re wasting my time, your time, and everyone else with a lick of sense in your quest to install Orange back into the White House.
Who, again, is WORSE and completely opposite to everything you stand for. But you’d clearly want that.
You asked compromise. He did shit.
He stood somewhere? That's your example of "compromise"?
The GOP is running out of cash saving the orange fascist from the results of his own actions. They'll go bankrupt and then we'll have a one party system where everyone will have to vote for whatever our party brass puts on the ballot for us.
3rd party candidates will never win. Ross Perot did the best in 92 and did not capture a single state.
There is no 3rd party candidate currently doing as well as Perot was doing in 96 - when he dropped out of the race - much less as well as he did in 92.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_United_States_presidential_election
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_presidential_election
Heck, there isn't one doing as well as Anderson did in 1980:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_presidential_election
All a progressive 3rd party candidate can accomplish is a Biden loss.
If you want 4 more years of Trump, vote 3rd party.
All a progressive 3rd party candidate can accomplish is a Biden loss.
Sounds like Biden should make some compromises in order to get those votes then doesn't it?
He literally can't, because the compromise progressives want is to stop the attack on Gaza and Biden can't stop that, only Bibi can and he is absolutely intent on killing everyone in Gaza.
Cutting off aid to Gaza isn't going to stop the attack because Israel isn't reliant on current aid to make it happen. They have a stockpile built up from decades of support.
So, Biden tells Israel to get fucked, he loses the campaign donations from the Israel pac to get elected.
https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary?cycle=All&ind=Q05&recipdetail=S
There is no equivalent donation machine on the Palestinian side, they have bigger things to worry about.
Someone go tell Bloomberg that campaign money is a better indicator of electoral victory than voters. I’m sure he’d be happy to hear that he won the presidency.
I just realized America’s entire history has been right wing propaganda.
There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even tacitly take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all
-Mario Savio
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