Probably be more successful if you stopped being rightists and joined them?
And I think you’ll find that blindly supporting blue no matter who has been done far more often for a couple of decades now. How successful has this been at moving the Overton window left?
What planet are you living on where either of those strategies are actually what’s being employed?
The right turns out because they’re getting what they want. Would they still turn out of the candidate was a RINO who was soft on things like guns, abortion, or immigration? Probably not! The party has been disciplined by the base for deviating on those issues often enough that they have kept moving to more extreme right positions and the right no longer has any reason to defect.
Meanwhile, there are tons of people on (what passes for) the left who will readily agree that Biden and Harris were complicit in genocide, in some of the worst crimes imaginable, and yet, we should still fall in line behind them. Right wingers will be like, “Sure, this guy has an impeccable record on most of the issues I care about, but he accepted free federal Medicare expansion, which is socialism, so fuck that RINO piece of shit commie traitor I’m voting Libertarian!” And so the Libertarian Party is triple the size of the Greens. And yet, somehow, libs are constantly obsessed with this idea that somewhere out there, someone might be standing on leftist principles, and that’s the worst thing ever and they must immediately be lectured and shamed for it.
Try to pull that shit in some of their circles and you’re liable to get shot. I mean, can you imagine? “Look, I’m as upset as anybody that the only realistic candidates are anti-gun, but you just have to accept that guns are not on the ballot this time around, you’re going to have to vote for someone who wants to take your guns away, and if you don’t, it means you’re a bad person and I’ll constantly lecture you about it. Hey, where are pointing that- OK, OK, I’LL LEAVE”
The Tea Party pushed more conservative candidates in primaries, but in general elections Tea Party voters never sat out in protest - instead, they either supported the GOP candidate or, in a few cases, backed third-party or independent runs, but there were never large-scale abstention.
And also I’m correct, every election is like groundhogs day, like being trapped in a time loop, where leftists go:
“The lesser of two evils is still evil, I’m going to keep my hands clean”.
“Voting doesn’t work, because you can’t fix an inherently flawed system from within the system.”
“Voting is just part of the system of oppression by keeping people complacent from making real changes.”
In my memory this anti-voting/vote boycotting goes back at least to 2000 Bush/Gore.
Now let’s say I’m completely wrong, let’s say I’m crazy and I just made that all up in my head. Let’s say that leftists have always been enthusiastic participators in American democracy, and 2024 was the first ever leftist election boycott.
Now from 2025 to 2028, is the overton window moving left, or right? Will the 2028 election be to the left of 2024, or will 2028 be to the right of 2024?
I’m dead serious willing to bet $500 that 2028 will be to the right of 2024. The overton window is still moving right.
So did my original statement even matter? Either way leftist election boycotts are moving the overton window right, whether it started in 2000, or 2024.
The only question is, how many election boycotts have to fail at doing what leftists want until leftists suddenly become aware they are poking the stick in their own bicycle wheel?
Leftists have been doing this strategy for a couple decades now
OBJECTION!
What actual evidence do you have of this claim?
This gets thrown around all the time as “conventional wisdom,” but it’s never actually backed up by anything. In fact, the Libertarian Party typically gets roughly three times the number of votes as the Green Party, and the last major third party candidate, Ross Perot, split the Republican vote leading to Clinton’s election.
More recently, the 2016 election had two major “outsider” candidates. Of them, Trump refused to rule out a third party run, while Sanders went all out campaigning for Clinton, despite all the shenanigans with superdelegates.
Only in 2024 can I see a credible case that some of the left has begun using the stubborn, “my way or the highway” tactics that the right has been employing for decades - with a high degree of success, I might add! The Republican Party has shifted further and further right to accommodate the demands of their base, because they know that if they’re soft on things like guns or abortion, significant portions of their base will denounce them as RINOs and sit out or vote third party. The Democratic Party, by contrast, knows that they can always count on the left to flinch, to be “reasonable,” to accept the “lesser evil,” and so they have moved further right as well, taking those votes for granted.
Again, every piece of actual evidence contradicts this “conventional wisdom,” which only exists in the first place because liberals are so preoccupied with the idea that someone, somewhere, might choose to stand on principle rather than fall in line. Meanwhile, people on the right are constantly choosing to die on the dumbest, most petty hills imaginable.
Join a Union? Feed the homeless? Organize your fellow tenants? Actually attend a city council meeting?
You’re smugly confirming your allegiance to the liberal death cult, because your only conception of “political engagement” is voting in a system that is crumbling before our very eyes.
And no, just voting wouldn’t have stopped that decay. Nothing in the world is static, and 1000 years of Obama wouldn’t stop the larger political-economic factors that are fueling fascism, political polarization, and civil unrest.
Cool, go vote, especially if it’s in your local and state elections that no one actually pays attention to. But disengage from the rat race, and do something with an actual impact in your community.
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I guess this means you don’t know what a “progressive” is, huh?
Not voting means the party has to start offering policies to entice you back.
Blindly supporting means the party can start offering policies to entice those who don’t vote for them (conservatives).
Tell me again which moves the overton window?
No, it doesn’t. The pseudo-democratic spectacle liberals call “democracy” is completely immune to abstinence or boycotts.
The libs don’t lose when the fascists win. There’s a good reason they keep fascists around.
That’s an assumption. Another assumption is that they try to win over the voters who reliable show up and ignore the ones who don’t as unreachable.
How do you ensure the outcome you’re looking for happens? Hope is not a strategy.
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Okay centrist.
Choosing not to vote doesn’t make you not a centrist.
No that comes from not voting for centrists.
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Okay centrist.
Okay centrist.
Leftists have been doing this strategy for a couple decades now. How successful has this been at moving the Overton window left?
Probably be more successful if you stopped being rightists and joined them?
And I think you’ll find that blindly supporting blue no matter who has been done far more often for a couple of decades now. How successful has this been at moving the Overton window left?
Let’s compare leftist strategies of never turning out with the evangelical strategy of driving massive turnouts.
Who has had better success shifting their party?
What planet are you living on where either of those strategies are actually what’s being employed?
The right turns out because they’re getting what they want. Would they still turn out of the candidate was a RINO who was soft on things like guns, abortion, or immigration? Probably not! The party has been disciplined by the base for deviating on those issues often enough that they have kept moving to more extreme right positions and the right no longer has any reason to defect.
Meanwhile, there are tons of people on (what passes for) the left who will readily agree that Biden and Harris were complicit in genocide, in some of the worst crimes imaginable, and yet, we should still fall in line behind them. Right wingers will be like, “Sure, this guy has an impeccable record on most of the issues I care about, but he accepted free federal Medicare expansion, which is socialism, so fuck that RINO piece of shit commie traitor I’m voting Libertarian!” And so the Libertarian Party is triple the size of the Greens. And yet, somehow, libs are constantly obsessed with this idea that somewhere out there, someone might be standing on leftist principles, and that’s the worst thing ever and they must immediately be lectured and shamed for it.
Try to pull that shit in some of their circles and you’re liable to get shot. I mean, can you imagine? “Look, I’m as upset as anybody that the only realistic candidates are anti-gun, but you just have to accept that guns are not on the ballot this time around, you’re going to have to vote for someone who wants to take your guns away, and if you don’t, it means you’re a bad person and I’ll constantly lecture you about it. Hey, where are pointing that- OK, OK, I’LL LEAVE”
The Tea Party, they obliterated the old GOP by not voting them and voting for their people instead.
The DNC has kept their party under lock and key to avoid any of that happening/
You’re misremembering.
The Tea Party pushed more conservative candidates in primaries, but in general elections Tea Party voters never sat out in protest - instead, they either supported the GOP candidate or, in a few cases, backed third-party or independent runs, but there were never large-scale abstention.
No. The left hasn’t.
Yes it has. Voting turnout in the US is dreadful. Who do you think does reliably get out to vote? I’ll give you a hint: it’s right wingers.
No, it hasn’t. That is, unless you want to claim that liberals lying themselves into a corner is (somehow) “leftist strategy.”
What? What does that mean in the context of this conversation?
This you?
I could have sworn that was you.
I’m not a liberal, I’m anti-capitalist.
And also I’m correct, every election is like groundhogs day, like being trapped in a time loop, where leftists go:
“The lesser of two evils is still evil, I’m going to keep my hands clean”.
“Voting doesn’t work, because you can’t fix an inherently flawed system from within the system.”
“Voting is just part of the system of oppression by keeping people complacent from making real changes.”
In my memory this anti-voting/vote boycotting goes back at least to 2000 Bush/Gore.
Now let’s say I’m completely wrong, let’s say I’m crazy and I just made that all up in my head. Let’s say that leftists have always been enthusiastic participators in American democracy, and 2024 was the first ever leftist election boycott.
Now from 2025 to 2028, is the overton window moving left, or right? Will the 2028 election be to the left of 2024, or will 2028 be to the right of 2024?
I’m dead serious willing to bet $500 that 2028 will be to the right of 2024. The overton window is still moving right.
So did my original statement even matter? Either way leftist election boycotts are moving the overton window right, whether it started in 2000, or 2024.
The only question is, how many election boycotts have to fail at doing what leftists want until leftists suddenly become aware they are poking the stick in their own bicycle wheel?
OBJECTION!
What actual
evidencedo you have of this claim?This gets thrown around all the time as “conventional wisdom,” but it’s never actually backed up by anything. In fact, the Libertarian Party typically gets roughly three times the number of votes as the Green Party, and the last major third party candidate, Ross Perot, split the Republican vote leading to Clinton’s election.
More recently, the 2016 election had two major “outsider” candidates. Of them, Trump refused to rule out a third party run, while Sanders went all out campaigning for Clinton, despite all the shenanigans with superdelegates.
Only in 2024 can I see a credible case that some of the left has begun using the stubborn, “my way or the highway” tactics that the right has been employing for decades - with a high degree of success, I might add! The Republican Party has shifted further and further right to accommodate the demands of their base, because they know that if they’re soft on things like guns or abortion, significant portions of their base will denounce them as RINOs and sit out or vote third party. The Democratic Party, by contrast, knows that they can always count on the left to flinch, to be “reasonable,” to accept the “lesser evil,” and so they have moved further right as well, taking those votes for granted.
Again, every piece of actual evidence contradicts this “conventional wisdom,” which only exists in the first place because liberals are so preoccupied with the idea that someone, somewhere, might choose to stand on principle rather than fall in line. Meanwhile, people on the right are constantly choosing to die on the dumbest, most petty hills imaginable.
Join a Union? Feed the homeless? Organize your fellow tenants? Actually attend a city council meeting?
You’re smugly confirming your allegiance to the liberal death cult, because your only conception of “political engagement” is voting in a system that is crumbling before our very eyes.
And no, just voting wouldn’t have stopped that decay. Nothing in the world is static, and 1000 years of Obama wouldn’t stop the larger political-economic factors that are fueling fascism, political polarization, and civil unrest.
Cool, go vote, especially if it’s in your local and state elections that no one actually pays attention to. But disengage from the rat race, and do something with an actual impact in your community.
Removed by mod
Aaaaaaand moderators have nuked my comments. Awesome. Any explanation as to why, besides not liking the points I was making?
it’s in the mod log.
rule 7
Removed by mod
you can leave
Blocking the community now. Enjoy your very correct views that aren’t allowed to ever be challenged for very good reasons.
bye