this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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Advocate for environmental groups? Give grief to the Democratic party, try to extract concessions from them, since they can at least be bargained with on environmental issues, where the Republicans literally want to have the environmental groups shot by the National Guard? Support particular independent candidates, inside or outside the Democratic party? Advocate for voting reform that gives third parties a realistic chance, to put pressure on the Democrats?
Nope. It's just "Let's do the Republicans." In the current system, that's what will happen if you don't vote for Democrats. Changing that system sounds great, but disengaging entirely isn't the way to do that.
At a broad foundational level, the American system is based on this: Concentrations of money and power will always attract corruption and tyranny. Always. It's just how government works. The Democrats are like that, the Republicans are like that. The Green Party is too. They pretty much instantly folded to malign influence, before they even really got started, and now they're a tragic explicit spoiler candidate puppet that isn't even making a convincing pretense of environmental progress as the goal. Even if your goal could succeed completely, and starving the Democrats could make them wither and get replaced by one-party Republican rule, and then something better arose in their place, without the generation-spanning catastrophe that would be that one-party Republican rule... whatever replaced them, would still be open to corruption.
There is a way to make progress. You have to fight for what you actually want. It's not easy. But the strategy of simply refusing to engage with the power-brokerage system, because the people currently in charge of it are bad people, brings broad smiles to the faces of all those corrupt Democrats who are annoyed they had to pass a little bit of climate change legislation and corporate tax increases under Biden. They love hearing that you're getting out of caring about politics. It means they can start to cater more to their core constituency. And they'll be fine, whether the Democratic Party does an inch to benefit the working class or not, or even if it stays around or not.
It's only the people in Washington who are trying to work for working people or the environment who will be hurt by your strategy.
You mentioned a lot of strategies we can use to fight for what we want, and then said that none of those will work.
Then further down you suggested we should fight for what we want, but offer no concrete way to do that.
Letting Democrats know that they can't buy my vote with corporate campaign donations, is me fighting for what I want.
If they want my vote, they need to earn it by offering real solutions for my worsening material conditions. Not expect it simply because they're not Republicans.
During the Great depression, when the ruling class did give many concessions to the working class, we had a strong left-wing party in politics and we had left-wing organizing in the streets.
This tribalism you are demonstrating with the Democrats isn't working for me. And it's not working for the environment. As Biden just demonstrated.
No, I said all of those will work, to some degree. Even refusing to vote within a targeted framework, where you're demanding certain concessions in exchange for your vote as part of an organized coalition, putting effective pressure on the party to make specific changes, is a pretty good strategy. It's how some key environmental legislation has gotten passed in decades past.
In exactly the same way that refusing to touch the steering wheel until the car starts going a better direction is fighting not to crash the car.
I am refusing to vote within a framework. If you look at my initial post I qualified that statement.
If the Democrats continue to move to the right, which they have shown some motions toward post election, I will no longer support their presidential candidates.
If they stay where they're at, I might. And I will still vote for Democrats running in other positions.
2024 was lost by ignoring the material conditions of the working class. As was 2016.
If they don't get the message, I'm going to bet on a different horse.