Voting is one of many tools at our disposal - and right now we need all the tools we can get.
So, don’t shit on voting - do vote!
Do the other things too, but don’t skip the vote.
Vote in the preliminaries, where you can select which bag of shit you’ll get to vote for officially. You may even end up with a decent choice on election day off your area is dope like NYC or Seattle.
Even if you’re stuck in the cousin-fuckingly-deep south like me, where your vote will almost certainly be washed out by a horde of Nazis: still do it. Especially in smaller elections - school boards, city level stuff, whatever you can get in on. Those are the ones where you can really start to turn the tide. All it takes is for the usual rednecks to start feeling apathetic, and a handful of us bleeding-heart-commie-socialist-hippie-libruls to step up, and BAM, we’ve got a progressive oasis elected in our desert of red. Which still isn’t much, but it’s a foothold.
But it does require us to do the bare-assed minimum amount of effort in support of change, which is to vote.
Ugh. I agree with this. But I don’t, at the same time. I’m of the opinion that people need to expire. There was a time where we could make the world a better place by working with people, but some just shouldn’t exist. Some people just can’t be reasoned with.
Both are correct we need a multilateral approach to win this. A peaceful movement is good but it’s a lot stronger if it’s backed by an adjacent movement that has some threat of force. A user above mentioned the civil rights movement with MLK being backed up by the Panthers. This was a great example because if you look at any successful revolution the approach was multilateral. The abolition movement was also multilateral
No I’m with you there - but it’s hard to discuss that stuff without getting banned; and you can do that stuff while still casting a vote every now and then. I’ve stirred up a lot of drama here by encouraging the use of that tool - this thread is stuffed with mouth-foaming Trump progandists, so proceed with caution. And grab some popcorn - it’s a shitshow, but it’s a show!
You don’t have to be violent to encourage alcoholism or smoking.
You’re right that voting is a tool; you’re wrong about whose tool it is and what it’s used for.
It can be used for either liberation or oppression. Ceding it to the oppressors does not help you. Promoting apathy among those who would otherwise support liberation helps the oppressors.
What is your goal here?
You are fundamentally confused such that you think there’s any agency in voting in the first place. The only real impact it has is to completely short circuit and subsume all political activity away from any outside organizing that is, historically, literally the only thing that has ever worked to accomplish anything.
My goal is this is a forum. Someone says something wrong and then you say the correct thing under them. That’s what you do on forums.
You are spreading misinformation and promoting apathy among those who would otherwise support liberation. You are an ally to our oppressors.
You literally voted to escalate a genocide because the system you’re playing apologist for presented you no other choice. What misinformation am I spreading? You’re the one acting as an enemy of liberation. You literally voted for a genocide. You are literally an ally to our oppressors.
It’s honestly fucking frightening how you’re capable of that kind of doublethink.
And you’re not just an ally of our oppressors in that sense. You want to waste YEARS of time PER ELECTION of people who would otherwise be doing tangible good in their communities working outside of the genocidal system you cap for.
You voted not just for genocide, but to crank the genocide up to the max. “No genocide” wasn’t an option, because our system is shit, so why not at least try for damage control instead of taking the absolute most evil path you could?
You want to waste YEARS of time PER ELECTION of people who would otherwise be doing tangible good in their communities working outside of the genocidal system you cap for.
Which of those actions are mutually exclusive to voting?
BlueMAGA continues to insist that, because they denied the extent of the genocide when it was their team doing it, the genocide actually wasn’t that bad when it was their team doing it.
Last election the choice was between Palestinian genocide and Palestinian genocide. You are smoking crack if you think the oligarchy is ever going to provide you with a meaningful choice to loosen their hold on you through the civic ritual of voting.
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So you knowingly voted to throw Palestinians under the extermination bus, is that it? And you consider yourself to be on the right side of history? And you never considered that perhaps your slavish ideological devotion to following the rules of a fascist political system was slow-boiling you into a fascist?
Ukranian genocide
You’re talking about the ten years of ethnic cleansing the Ukranian nazi government was doing to ethnic Russians within its borders, right? You wouldn’t possibly consider yourself to be against genocide while supporting these guys, right? Because nobody could possibly be that deluded, right? Tell me you’re not that programmed.
but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to look at Trump and conclude that he’s infinitely worse
This line is smoking gun proof that everyone in this thread trying to engage with you is talking exclusively over your head.
Last election was a choice between Palestinian genocide vs significantly more Palestinian genocide + Ukrainian genocide + it’s looking Venezuelan genocide is about to be kicking off + who the fuck knows, we’ve got three more years of this shitshow and that’s assuming we even have another election.
You are doing the thing right now. The other choice is “none of those things,” actually, and you don’t get that by voting harder because as you’ve just demonstrated you were not given the choice. Is any genocide acceptable to you? The line is never “less genocide,” it is “no genocide.”
You people really are hell bent on reducing the word “genocide” to meaninglessness
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No, we’re calling for the overthrow of our oppressors. We’re calling for seizing the means of production. We’re calling for real and permanent liberation from the bourgeoisie.
Which of those are mutually exclusive to voting?
I don’t care whether you vote, and I’m not telling anyone whether or not to vote. But I am pointing out how little power it gives us for the amount of time, money, and energy people are putting into it. The juice ain’t worth that much squeeze. We’re never going to vote ourselves out of wage slavery.
There it is. If you’re not a liberal you’re personally getting checks written by Putin or whomever’s the villain of the month.
You’re projecting.
Bruh
Nice try FBI
Widespread violence and voting? That’s the answer.
People not voting is why we’re in the situation we are in right now
Yeah man, the Neo-liberal turn? The war on terror? The GFC? All irrelevant, “people not voting” is the reason we have a goddam Cheeto in the white house.
Yes but they don’t want to admit that, since it makes their feelings hurt, so they pretend voting is useless.
Even as much as I love the Fediverse and tend to lean pretty far left, sometimes this place honestly feels like a Marxist circlejerk.
You should definitely vote but it shouldn’t be the only thing you do.
No
Yes. Voting is useful for showing solidarity with the movement and demonstrating how the current system doesn’t work. Just because it isn’t capable of causing any meaningful change doesn’t mean it’s useless.
Just because it isn’t capable of causing any meaningful change doesn’t mean it’s useless.
I see a lot of folks on .ml and .hexbear not understand this part. It’s like all change must be meaningful, and if it’s not then it’s not worth our time.
Lenin taught us that we need to build within the system of the masses in order to tip them over, not overturn it outright. There is a specific time and place for when change is the most impactful
Lenin’s position on integrating with the masses meant running working class parties in opposition to establishment parties, ie voting PSL over DNC. The vanguard’s task is to become a party that the working class puts their full support behind, so that when revolution does happen, the vanguard can serve as the spearpoint to direct the masses in one unified direction and crush the capitalist state, replacing it with a socialist one.
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Badjacketing is bad. Don’t do that.
You’re right, I dont know that they are a psyop. I do, however, know that the position of ‘voting is not worthwhile if you are a leftist’ that they are taking above is the same position that many psyops would like to have in the minds of leftists. Put more simply, what might they have said differently if they were a psyop? Nothing, I presume.
It is better to root out psyop talking points that diminish our ability to form a collective voice, than it is to allow foolish notions like ‘dont vote’ to continue in our spaces.
Voting doesn’t do much, though. I support voting for working class orgs like PSL, but not for the DNC or GOP, and I know it’s very unlikley that PSL will win electorally. Leftists understand that the path to change is via organizing, not by supporting orgs that work against our interests, and we know we can’t magically turn a capitalist org into a proletarian one by wishcasting.
If you want to argue against that, then do so, don’t badjacket.
Im literally just telling folks to not engage in the same behavior that the fascists hope we engage in.
Fascists don’t care if we vote, what they care about is if we organize. Now that the spoils of imperialism are drying up, fascism is rising, and the super-exploitation we inflict on the global south is turning more inward. What fascists are scared of is working class organizing and building actual power.
- I don’t care what fascists hope.
- If fascists say the sky is blue, does that make it a “fascist talking point,” and therefore isn’t blue? That’s just not how it works.
I don’t know why you think you own the place when this is their Lemmy instance, while you’re a guest here.
I dont own the place. But neither does anyone in this comment thread, no one here is a mod on memes.ml, not that I should be expto know who owns what on a public forum
Just you wait another few more years and I’m gonna vote so hard it’ll make your head spin
bro just one more vote bro, bro I swear just one more vote and it’ll fix democracy bro
Now’s not the time for that we can’t afford four years of Vance. We need to hold our noses and vote for Skeletor so we can stop the spread, then focus on progressive issues
Skeletor, we want to vote for you so Vance doesn’t win, but stop supporting Hordak destroying Eternia
Skeletor: Hordak has a right to defend himself
Can’t wait for the next biggest elections of our lifetime between JD Vance and Gavin newsome 😂 yikes
The total lack of show-up from the majority of the left to primaries and the general election is precisely why fascists are in power today.
You speak just like a privileged white psuedo-leftist who lives in relative peace while minorities have the largest crackdown on them since the start of the War on Drugs.
Is this not also true for liberals who aren’t white?
yes. i did not create this image
Or bearded. You can be a clean shaven, tan, even a woman and the meme still works.
I think the point of the words inclusion is that you might have a very different perspective of the implications and effectiveness of voting when the state doesn’t explicitly cater to your identity as the default.
you know what hitler? i tried to reason with you but you have left me no choice. i will be voting for somebody else. good luck earning my vote back fuckstick, you’re gonna need it.
This but the election is between Himmler and Eichmann
Lemmy libs next year: “VOTE FOR BLUEMAGA EVERYONE”
Weird how voting always seems to work for the right wing
Maybe voting would actually work if…you know…you actually voted
My mom said that you gotta vote if you want to complain and I do like to complain.
Once fascists win power democratically, they have never been removed democratically. Not once. Ever.
@falseWhite what’s crazy is that hitler wasn’t even voted in- he was appointed, which means that fascists don’t even PRETEND to play by the rules of democracy
He was appointed by the elected government
We forgetting when Americans voted out Trump now?
We forgetting that the person who replaced him was also a fascist and then Trump got reelected anyway now?
Because people like you stayed home.
You’re the reason for Trump, it’s your fault.
Damn, I didn’t realize I - a non-eligible voter not living in a swing state - was that powerful. That makes it even more egregious that the Democrats didn’t try to win my vote. I personally chose who would win and they wouldn’t even not do genocide to convince me
From another commenter: https://cmarmitage.substack.com/p/i-researched-every-attempt-to-stop
Trump wasn’t full fascist yet in his first term. He was just getting the taste of that power.
You could also believe the rumours that he only won the second time due to rigging and voter fraud. Something he constantly kept accusing the dems of. And we know how much he projects.
I get it but do you actually think we won’t have elections in 2028 and that a democrat can’t win the presidency again?
We just had some elections and democrats absolutely destroyed in almost all of them
I know it’s mostly doom out there but this is absolutely not a full fascist takeover
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Ah yes, the “definitely not mad” emoji
My bet is that this is all a propaganda campaign.
And yet, we’re seeing GOP reps resigning in critical and contested seats that have been demonstrated to lean far more towards the Dems, especially when Dem-Socs are on the ticket.
We shouldn’t just vote, but not voting will ensure we never get out of this mess.
The MAGAts wouldn’t be trying every voter suppression trick in the book if voting wasn’t currently still a colossal threat to their power
Not once ever? Not even when Trump lost the 2020 election despite the jan6 raid on the capitol?
The government wasn’t anywhere near as fascist then as it is now.
So you’re saying “No TRUE fascist”, huh?
Which just resulted in a different fascist being elected, and then Trump got reelected anyway?
Maybe people would vote more if the counter offer wasn’t also fascism
Americans: “Our FPTP two-party electoral college system doesn’t work. Clearly democracy doesn’t work.”
Meanwhile in Canada we just voted for dental care. Europeans just voted to take on big tech corporations.
I think the problem is years of “it’s not my job to educate you, sweetie”. Turns out it is our job to educate them. Because they vote.
Remember when Canada voted to replace First-past-the-post voting?
Don’t you have SS veterans to be giving standing ovations too right now?
The right have gerrymandered and bet million bucks rigged the voting machines too. Always projection with them. Look at Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham voting districts. I read years ago that they have it rigged that they could never lose even if people voted.
Those guys are senators. There are no voting districts for Senate elections. They are state-wide popular votes.
Voting districts are relevant at the federal level for presidential and House of Representatives races.
Tfw when you vote for the lesser evil and they proceed to appoint Hitler as cancellor.
Thanks for sharing. It’s not bad, except for the lack of class analysis. Assuming the Democrats are principled and will always be opposed to fascism, is sadly wrong. They are exactly like those conservatives who always prefer fascism to socialism.
Yeah, a lot of the historical references and descriptions were good, but then when it got to the present day, essentially the “what is to be done” section, it just flopped hard. Paraphrasing: “a coalition of blue states can just ignore the federal government and do their own thing, boom, fascism defeated.” It’s not actually discussing anything about how fascism can actually be defeated even though the whole first half of it sounds like it’s supposed to be a set up to do just that.
Instead it descends into ridiculous cringe:
California could request Canadian peacekeepers for “election security.” New York could invite European observers for “financial transparency.” Make it embarrassing. Make America’s collapse visible to the world. Force the international community to pick sides.
This is your solution? That’s how fascism is defeated? Any respect I may have built up for the author when they were accurately talking about how fascists slither their way into power using the liberal* political apparatus was nullified by this point.
*(even though the author always insisted on calling the fascist appeasers “conservative” at every turn rather than using the more appropriate word “liberal”)Every solution is just another form of “blue states should just pretend there is no federal government,” even the last one which is titled “International Intervention” but that just means making all the other totally-not-fascist liberal “democracies” play ball with the new blue coalition instead of the liberal democracy that elected Trump.
No, the UN can’t invade America. But they can isolate it. Sanctions work. Ask Russia.
Ask Russia? The country whose economy improved after “the mother of all sanctions” were imposed on it? Russia, who is indisputably winning the conflict that those sanctions were supposed to stop, all while Russia’s economic ties with other enemies of the US have grown and blossomed? How about asking Cuba if sanctions work. Yeah, they work to starve the population and cause civilian immiseration and death, they don’t and never have worked to depose rulers. This doofus has no fucking clue what they’re talking about.
And even with the historical stuff, it left a big fucking gaping hole where the people and organizations that DID successfully fight fascism should have been. But nope, not even a mention. Clearly Christopher didn’t want to admit that communism IS the cure to fascism, theoretically and in practice, historically and right now. This essay is just more cringe liberal drivel.
Okay analysis. Awful solutions. All that just to say what someone far smarter than him had already said: political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Fascists seize state power once they believe they have enough political power (ie the means of dispensing organized violence through a military or paramilitary formation). They are only stopped at the local level by antifascists willing to get their hands dirty, on the national level by the state military that refuses to go along, and on the global level by state actors.
The upside-down corpse of Mussolini might disagree with that
Once they win elections, it’s already too late.
Hey what do you think stops them from winning that first election?
🤫
Surely, having the largest military in human history is going to help us, right?
Funny, posting said article on a nazi platform.
Write more non-Nazi stuff and it will stop being a Nazi platform.
The owner of the site is a fucking nazi so there no making it un nazi. Like keeping X cause you think you can change it from a white supremacist site.
Like keeping X cause you think you can change it from a white supremacist site.
I still lurk on Twitter. Calling it a “white supremacist site” is just… Silly. The whole point of social media is that it’s the users who create content.
I’m seeing a lot of right-wing fundamentalists being clapped by sane people. The only time I see any nazi/fascist/supremacist content is when it’s getting ratio’d or just ridiculed.
I’m not saying this content isn’t there, but I’m saying there’s still a lot of people fighting the good fight. Packing up your toys and going home is not really a method for anything other than getting completely marginalised, IMO.
Chile actually voted out their dictator.
then what happened
So did Brazil, and they actually threw theirs in prison.
No, Bolsonaro was not a dictator; if he had been, we wouldn’t have been able to remove him. He had far less power than he thought; that’s why voting worked.
I would argue the same is true of Trump. It certainly was in his first term. This term has all the aesthetics of authoritarianism, but he is failing to consolidate power, which is kind of pathetic considering how much power in the US was ready to surrender on day one.
They’re only allowed to be voted out after they establish the rules of the game lmao. Military dictators are just puppets of capital used to organize society with force and when capital is happy with it they just move on from them. It’s absurd to think they were voted out lmao. Every single liberal democracy that evolved from a military dictatorship still uses the constitution written by the dictators, i.e. Spain.
Same as most Eastern Block countries. Except Romania, they chose other ways.
how white liberals think fascism works
Chad voting in a UN resolution condemning Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza
you’re finished
Official portrait of Benjamin Netanyahu
no, pls
Mamdani just started manufacturing consent for the regime changes in Cuba and Venezuela. 😂
three weeks ago
Some of the dumber white libs I’ve talked to honestly believe 51% of American voters voted for Trump 🤣
They don’t know what voting does or how it works but they’re sure it’s the only reasonable solution!
It’s funny how almost 20 million people less than in 2020 voted this time around (most of the missing voters being on the dem side too); people are beginning to realize we don’t really have a say
And it seems like a lot of Americans don’t understand FPTP or the Electoral College, or even the amount of voter suppression there is. Your vote only counts (and only maybe) if you live in a swing state. The votes in rural areas count for way more than in urban ones but those are already captured by R. Let’s not even get into the other branches of government:
Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability.
- James Madison
I mean this isn’t a “white lib” thing. Most people don’t want political violence or related.
And yet political violence surrounds us. How do you propose voting will stop it? I’ve personally seen that fail for decades now.
“Surrounds us” maybe if you’re chronically online
I can log out right now and go downtown to see tent cities full of starving, sick people. You only don’t perceive that as political violence because you’ve been trained to think poverty isn’t political.
You ever fuckin’ seen a homeless person? How about the miles and miles of tents along stretches of highways just outside the cities? That’s one of many other forms of political violence. Remember how we stopped counting the death toll from Covid and were all told to get back to work? You know how many “incarcerated” “prisoners” we have doing slave labor? GTFO with your “have to be chronically online to see any political violence” bullshit. You’re fucking steeped in it but you’re too blind to see even what’s right in front of you, even if it’s a boot your tongue is apparently stuck to.
All those online ICE raids?
Frequent airstrikes on civilians in Gaza even since the ‘ceasefire’, frequent attacks on likely fishermen/migrants in the Caribbean, strikes on Yemen and Iran within the last few months, Ukraine war, Cambodia-Thailand conflict, ISIS kidnapping in Nigeria less than two weeks ago, attempted arson on a train in Chicago last month, ongoing Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict, Bombing in Delhi last month, I can go on
Does ‘chronically online’ just mean not wilfully ignorant?
Also ICE raids, violent union busting, enforcement of private property keeping hundreds of thousands homeless and millions more on the brink. But sure we’re just “chronically online” God I hate libs.
US foreign policy is a different topic than domestic. US foreign policy has always been vile.
Ok? the topic of this thread is US policy in general
US foreign policy has always been vile.
Agreed and you think you’ll change it via voting?
“killing brown people isn’t violence”
Both here and on my HB main account, I notice you have a way of cutting to the core of liberal bullshit that I really appreciate
The gulf between the wealthy class and the rest of the country has reached the critical point where those with power see all of us as “foreign”. The imperialism is turning inwards.
The wealthy don’t even live in the same world we do, nevermind nation.
Um actually you’re disconnected from the world by paying attention to outside
Congratulations
except for all the white conservatives that stormed the Capitol on Jan 6th, 2021; commit acts of violence against Democrat politicians; make reports and call “wellness checks” on others; commit or support police brutality; defend ICE abductions and trafficking…
There’s over 200,000,000 white citizens. A few hundred doing dumb shit isn’t the entire group. Would you apply this way of thinking to other groups of people?
Nope and I’m not applying it to “white citizens”; just “conservatives”. I’m saying to the "white lib"s and others that the violence is already here.
It’s only white lib thing, if you’re a racist
