Online left-wing infighting seems to me to be about applying labels to people because they argue or have argued one thing on a particular topic, and then use it to discredit an unrelated argument topic or paint their overall character. I know there are pot-stirring trolls and compulsive contrarians, but I do witness users I personally judge to have genuine convictions do this amongst each other.
Within US politics, CA Gov. Newsom is an illustrative example (plenty of examples exist too for other countries and around Lemmy/Fedi). I don’t particularly like him, he has done things I think are good, some things I think are funny, something things I think are bad and some things I think are downright horrible. Yet I have encountered some users online who will say they can’t ever applaud a move of his if one specific other policy or set of other unrelated policies crossed a line for them. I’m not asking people to change their mind on what they think of a person because of an isolated good thing they do, but to at least acknowledge it as a good thing or add nuance describing what about it you like or don’t. I can accept saying “I don’t think this is a good thing in this circumstance”, “this person will not follow through with this thing I think is good thing because ___”, or “they are doing a good thing for wrong and selfish reasons” too. But to outright deny any support for an action because of a wildly extrapolated character judgement of the person doing it, when that user would support it otherwise, vexes me greatly.
I know this is not every or most interactions on Lemmy, but these are just some thoughts I have to get out of my head. You don’t have to agree with me. I’m using ‘left-wing’ because the definition of ‘leftist’ or ‘liberal’ is wide-ranging depending on who you talk to. And on the side of the spectrum I’m calling left to left-centre, we seem to let the fewer things we disagree with get in the way of the many more things we would agree with each other. That’s all, thanks for reading.
The main issue for leftists is that both of your two parties are full of corrupt unabashed neoliberal capitalists who are so far to the right they would make even Margaret Thatcher blush, the main difference being that one party is more openly racist and fascist than the other. That’s not a purity test, it’s a fundamental difference of values.
Are you really living in a democracy when only one of two parties can ever win, and both are 100% commited to neoliberal economics? Nothing is gonna get better in the long run under a system that is designed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. No war but class war.
I’m so glad nothing has improved since 1789 in your eyes. As we all know, minorities and the actual working class, as people don’t actually matter; only being able to beat your chest about how ‘pure’ you are over championing the abstract demographic at the expense of the actual living human beings who make up these classes matters.
I get your point about the rise of neo-liberalism and the helpless feeling of having no good choices. But there’s a mindset that stems from “differences in values”, that could lead to someone today self-describing as a communist who would reject class-war opinions from a resurrected Karl Marx, because of his 19th-century patriarchal views, him not talking enough about the oppression of women transgender and non-binary folks, he may view Indigenous culture as a barrier to social progress and collective power, or because modern-day Russia attacks Ukraine or whatever. I’m not saying this is you, but I hope this illustrates what frustrates me with the online progressive movement.
If one has to wait for a perfect vessel before anyone can start agreeing on policies, then we will never find a vessel that everyone finds perfect and never get started organizing around the policies we want.
Riddle me this
Where did all these people go who were so supportive of the Green Party and PSL and all that? During the election, there were super important parties to vote for, who represented a chance of real change not these dumbfuck Democrats, and a bunch of people on Lemmy were rallying behind them and saying they planned to vote for them and basically never shutting up about it. What happened to those parties and all that advocacy for them? Why, after the election, did it pivot right back around to focusing purely on the Democrats (or on how important it is not to vote just in general as a general rule)?
Also, there are people existing outside the two-party system, Bernie Sanders is one. Do you support expanding out efforts like that to try to break into the two-party oligarchy fest?
they ditched their burner accounts when their job is done to move onto to other targeted messaging.
Yeah. I was seriously curious what they were going to switch to after the election, a lot of them have pretty much just gone silent except for general “we all hate Israel amirite” messaging, and maybe individual issues they wanted to weigh in on. A bunch of them jumped in to make sure everyone knows Graham Platner is a POS and a Nazi, which to me was fascinating.
Dunno, ask them.
I do remember a few brave souls encouraging people to vote Green during the last election, but they were mostly drowned out and hounded by enraged Dems for “throwing away their vote” or for “effectively voting for Trump”. But no rational analysis of the voting patterns from the last election suggests that leftists were responsible in any way for the election loss.
Criticisms of the Democratic Party, the DNC, and the broken two party system are valid and need to be heard. If the Dems keep losing elections, that’s on their terrible candidates, rigged Presidential candidate process, terrible policy choices (e.g. wrt Israel), uninspiring election campaigns, and (mostly) because they are a party of the corporations and for the corporations.
I don’t care if you vote or don’t vote, because it won’t make any difference to where the country is headed unless major political reforms are made to address poverty, break up the two-party system, and stop corporate abuses. And major reforms like that are simply not gonna happen via the shambles that is the existing US political system. As I said before, nothing is gonna get better in the long run under a system that is designed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. And the Democrats are just as responsible for that system as the Republicans. Making the rich richer and hating on leftists are the only two things they can both agree on.
Yes, absolutely. Anything to break the stranglehold of the two party system would be good. While I don’t think Bernie is perfect, I would totally be enthused to vote for him (if I lived in the US) because he is consistently on the right side of most issues. I’d support Mamdani too. That fact that neither of those people are “acceptable” representatives of the Democratic party from the perspective of the DNC is very telling though. They did everything they could to stop Bernie’s campaign, and are still doing everything they can to stop Mamdani. Anything to stop the Overton window from moving left an inch or two, right?
Why do you ban content from your server that says it’s a good idea to vote, then?
Honestly, this argument has been going on for 100s of years…
What’s changed? I’m with Rosa on this topic:
And to answer you directly…
Because of all of the above. I do sometimes remove comments promoting electoralism in leftist communities if I think it’s getting disruptive. From a leftist perspective electoralism is really nothing more than hope-mongering peddled by the State to keep the masses in check without threatening the system as a whole, and which only results in status quo outcomes. Or to put it another way, it works as a sop for the masses so they feel like they are control somehow, despite only ever being able to vote for one neoliberal party or another more openly racist neoliberal party. All this effort to try to get people to vote for a party that doesn’t align with their values and clearly couldn’t give a damn about them is a complete waste of time. If folks instead spent that energy protesting in the streets, disrupting ICE operations, protecting immigrants, and organizing for candidates who aren’t part of the status quo (like the Bernies and Mamdanis of the world), then leftist votes would naturally follow.
Glad you asked. Most countries of the world have abandoned the kind of “51% take all” approach that the US uses, with its inevitable collapse into two and only two parties, each one a hair’s breadth from the center on one side or the other as a mathematical certainty. Voting was a nice idea but the US framework for it is shit. And that’s even before you factor in the fact that “the center” is defined in wildly distorted half-Nazi terms by our corrupted media to an indifferent and uneducated populace.
I do think that advocating for reforming or overthrowing that system is a better use of time than urging people not to vote in it (or to vote for a more palatable candidate than the two-major-party dogshit on offer, which is functionally the same thing). That was my question – why not more time spent on that? I think that is badly needed. I genuinely don’t get why people who claim to be anarchists or similar spend so much time talking about the election specifically within the two-party system and talking about Democrats specifically.
I mean… yeah. That’s what they do. Communists in power use the idea of socialism as a falseness to justify their mandate. Fascists in power use the idea of virtue and strength of character as a falseness to justify their mandate. Democrats (small d, democrats) in power use the idea of voting and the voice of the people as a falseness to justify their mandate. It doesn’t mean that socialism, strength of character, or voting become these horrible things that we have to avoid because corrupt politicians used them as a way to justify their tyranny. That is just what people do once they get in power: They lie to make it sound reasonable the way they cheated their way in. Is this your first day visiting Political Science Adventureland?
If you are saying that you don’t support the current US voting system with all its corruption and naked fascism / oligarchy, then sure, I 100% agree. We should fix it, although I am going to sort of disagree with you there that just not participating in the system will suddenly make it crumble instead of just making things worse. If you are saying that you don’t support voting as a concept (which, given “electoralism,” it sounds like you don’t), not worth subjecting to any kind of improvement to make it represent the will of the people, then… IDK, I guess you are in good company on Lemmy sort of speaking. I had the revelation recently that a lot of these Lemmy communists really do want just seizing power at the barrel of a gun, they really don’t like non-authoritarian or non-tribally-based systems and that is the root of a lot of their politics.
Not saying that’s you. I am slightly curious about which camp you fall into (reform voting camp or abolish voting camp)… let me ask this: How will refusing to vote produce any reduction in the power of the US government and institution of a better life for people in the US government-wise or tyranny-wise or oligarchy-wise? What do you see as the progression by which not voting at all could lead to better things in the future?
I think we probably agree on the general principles. But i feel like you are missing the point a bit. I’m not advocating for not voting, per se. I’m just pointing out that voting is not a real solution to the problems we face. Because reforms to the two party system are basically impossible to achieve by working from within the system, by design. The quotes I provided clearly articulate that idea. By all means vote, but let’s not pretend it will achieve any sort of meaningful change in the economic status quo. I mean, sure if voting for the Dems stops the deportations and shuts down ICE completely then that’s worth a go in the meantime. But even then, conditions for US workers are unlikely to change materially. Wealth inequality will be just as bad as before and the Dems will do nothing serious to address it. We all surely recognise that.
The problem I have with electoralists is that there is an implicit and sometimes explicit suggestion that one can simply vote fascism and oligarchy away. I’m more of the view it will take a revolution or mass protest movement of some kind (like a general strike) to achieve any serious reforms to the economic and political status quo.
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I have literally never heard anyone say this. Not once. There seems like there is this strawman that somehow people who are saying you should vote are also saying that you should not do any other thing, but in my experience the correlation is the exact opposite: The people who are strongly minded about voting tend to do other work in and out of the system to try to make things better.
I more or less agree with this. It’s a pretty big fucking problem. How does refusing to vote help solve it?
For what it’s worth, Biden did the first reduction in income inequality and the biggest increase in people’s take-home pay in decades after making a huge corporate tax increase to pay for it. Almost no one knows that that even happened. I get what you mean, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the kind of change that would be required… but in my experience, the people who are anti-voting just as a general rule also often tend to be negative even about people like Bernie Sanders who are trying to fight to fix all of this on a more fundamental level, and generally unaware of when things change or what is happening in the places where big rules that could affect the oligarchy get made or unmade.
If you can’t be bothered to support people who are fighting for you, by putting in an hour of action once every couple of years, how would you expect any progress to happen? Organizing outside government is needed also yes, but it’s going to be so much harder than supporting people inside government (the tiny handful of them) who are actually fighting to make things right.
Like if you organize a general strike to enforce better working conditions, but then congress is 2/3rds Republicans because no one on the left was voting, doesn’t that make it harder for the general strike to accomplish anything? I don’t get this value proposition where voting is not a good use of time simply because it is not enough on its own (let alone affirmatively a bad thing that people should be banned for advocating for).
I know multiple people personally who were not deported because of Obama-era reforms. ICE would probably not exist if Al Gore had won his election. And, of course, “anti-electoralism” to whatever extent it impacted the last election has had a massive impact on people’s safety and food safety and all the rest in the present day. Just because they were already hanging by a thread under the current system which urgently needs to change doesn’t mean it suddenly makes sense to let Trump in and cut the thread and let them just fall.
That’s exactly what I’m trying to say. An hour of action every two years is nowhere near sufficient. Sure, do it, but don’t expect that to be sufficient.
I really wish Gore had won that election.
I really don’t think “anti-electoralism” had anything to do with US voter turnout in the last election. I think it had everything to do with the Dems repeatedly letting down their own constituencies, many of who are substantially further left than the establishment of the party is. At least that’s my impression from Lemmy (biased sample no doubt). It’s a fundamental rule of any campaign that if you offer nothing inspiring to vote for, then many people won’t leave their homes to vote. It feels wrong to me to blame the voters in that case - the blame falls squarely on the DNC and party leadership imo. They effectively sabotaged their own campaign because they didn’t want to budge on unpopular policy decisions, and it alienated them from their base. At least that’s the way I look at it.
people like this are going to get JD Vance elected in 2028
Yeah it definitely won’t be the fault of the Dems for putting forward yet another corporate stooge up for election, and sticking with their unpopular policies, no matter what their own voter base actually wants. They will be blameless, as always.
By “no matter what their own voter base actually wants”, you mean “some bizarre envisioning of the Dem voter base as far-left”
https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-want-party-move-right-poll-2030713