Because the system currently only supports 2 parties for president. We would need current politicians to be selfless enough to make the necessary changes that would allow for a 3rd party to receive enough funding and media coverage for the vast majority of the American voters - who pay no attention at all to politics - to hear about them. Our politicians only work for themselves, and have no reason to work against their own interests by introducing a 3rd party - hell, they’ve almost condensed down to a single party, but at least one side of it is still keeping up appearances enough to only terrorize its people a little bit so that they can say they’re better than the other guys.
Presidential voting is just trying to use the system to change the system, which only works when the system itself works. The current system is broken to the point that presidential voting won’t fix it - the best we can do is make sure the lesser of the evils wins until we can garner enough support for an actual overthrowing of the system, then begin the work to make one that would allow for politicians that actually care about us. A presidential vote to make actual change is a wasted vote, because a vote no longer holds that much power in America. The best it can do on its own is hold back the greater evil.
For local elections you should absolutely vote for the most progressive person you can, because the voters that don’t pay attention don’t even show up to those votes, making them much more volatile to the point where a true leftist can win. Maybe we’d even be able to get a new generation of politicians to change the system from the ground up over the course of several decades, if the country lasts that long. But the presidential election is far too padded by people who would vote for their party’s candidate even if they killed their own mother - it can’t suddenly change, not in its current state.
You cant build popular support for dismantling the system as it is while you’re actively advocating for people to accept the lesser evil.
Imagine if Sanders got up on the senate floor and said “i believe we cannot compromise on ACA subsidies and let millions of americans lose health coverage, be forced to ration their insulin or die because they cant afford a doctor, but I’ll be voting to reopen the government without them anyway because i have no choice”.
Democrats rely on the inherent violence of a 2 party system. Playing into it isnt pragmatic, it’s denial. Either we’re in this together or we aren’t, and democrats have made it perfectly clear that they aren’t.
You can’t build shit for shit, when you’re being actively hunted by ICE for thought crimes, and like third of the Americans don’t know where their next meal will come from.
In order to build something you need to have a foundation, which you can’t do in a crisis. Democratic party as it is is not a party that people are exited about, and they need to be changed one way or another, but you can only do that if there is no Republicans actively hunting you for sports, and the way US is setup right now, you can either have one or another. Denying that is actively dangerous, acting as if it’s not the case brings objectively horrifying results.
I’m not advocating for people to accept the lesser evil, I’m asking them to understand that their vote is no longer a form of acceptance - it doesn’t hold enough power for you to use it that way anymore. Your acceptance or rejection of the system comes from your actions outside of the polling place, in the form of protests and what inevitably comes after protests if they’re ignored for long enough.
A vote in the presidential election currently only holds the power to slightly shift the current power between bad and worse. It’s like the trolley problem - there’s no real 3rd track right now, no matter how much we want one. If we start building one now at the local level, maybe there will be one for someone later, but we’ve gotta make our own lever choice without it for now.
I’m not advocating for people to accept the lesser evil, I’m asking them to understand that their vote is no longer a form of acceptance
This is a fun rhetorical trick, but I’m not interested in playing a semantic game over the definition of ‘acceptance’. This:
A vote in the presidential election currently only holds the power to slightly shift the current power between bad and worse
is absolutely advocating for the lesser evil. Fine if you don’t want to call that ‘acceptance’, but what I’m pointing to is not the choice itself, it’s the act of advocating for it to begin with. Spending any amount of energy trying to convey the importance of voting for the moderate wing of fascism is a distraction from the message that both parties pose an existential threat to the working class. If your goal is to build support for radical systemic change, then there should be no ambiguity about what actions are necessary to achieve it. To use your bullshit trolly problem analogy- the ‘two tracks’ forced choice is a distraction from the fact that we need to stop the fucking trolly. Even if we end up pulling that lever in the end, you will never get enough people to get off to help derail it if you keep ensuring them that the worst will be averted even if they chose not to.
You can’t build a popular movement against the democratic coalition while openly admitting that you have no choice but to support them no matter how aligned they are with the fascists. Liberals will continue happily existing in the status quo until it’s made clear to them that their privileged position within it is threatened along with everyone else’s if they choose not to act.
I don’t understand your point. Voting is not a form of protest or revolution - you either overthrow the government, or you don’t; voting is just the thing you do in the meantime to hopefully keep living to eventually overthrow the government. If the system worked, sure, voting would keep it working, but thinking of voting as a way to change the system at this point is like thinking an oil change will fix a broken engine. I vote for the lesser evil not because I accept them or want them to be in charge, but because I know the person I want in charge will never be placed in charge by the current system. I advocate for revolution because I know we need it, and that the system cannot be fixed in my lifetime without it, but voting is an entirely separate thing, and can only be used as a tool to keep the world from falling apart quite as quickly as it would under the greater evil.
At the risk of repeating myself, i’ll try restating the point- the problem isn’t the choice of voting in-itself, it’s the choice of placing rhetorical weight on it at all in a system that is designed to diffuse the political power of the working class to begin with.
The overwhelming majority of liberals will do nothing more than whinge about how unfortunate it is that we live in such a broken system so-long as they remain secure in their personal status within that system. It isn’t just about ‘overthrowing the government’ - it’s about stirring the masses into action by raising the issue to such a volume that they can no longer ignore it. That means making it quite clear that democrats writ large risk becoming victims of the fascist movement they helped to create if they continue ‘biding their time’ until a more convenient moment. It isn’t even about boycotting general elections - it’s about making it perfectly clear that they cannot count on voters holding their noses indefinitely, and that they do not have a winning coalition without the working class. That will eventually be true no matter what we say as leftists - under late stage capitalism conditions will continue getting worse until eventually enough people will have lost all faith in democracy itself that the only people voting are various factions of the capitalist class and the petty-bourgeois (if we aren’t there already, frankly).
Democrats believe that voters may not like the way they govern, but they’ll still vote for them anyway to avoid a hostile opposition party. Any popular movement for radical change will be predicated on the notion that nothing short of drastic action will avert that inevitability
The fundamental problem with liberalism is that it makes well-meaning people believe that justice will eventually arrive simply on its own merit, when liberal democracy itself is designed to ensure that popular reform can never happen without organized resistance.
Ah, I see. You think that democrats will change if we just stop voting for them. They wont. As I said, they’re essentially just Republican lite. We’ll either have 2 parties that are almost the same, or the democratic party will simply dissolve and we’ll just have 2 identical republicans running for office. Either way, yes, we will have to bring about change with organized resistance.
However, in the case that the ruling class still allows for the republican-lite party, it’s better to let the democrats keep only mostly destroying the world instead of letting the republicans openly see how quickly they can tear everything down, because that leaves less rebuilding we’ll need to do when the time comes for that. Refusing to vote for the lesser evil is like refusing to eat what meager rations you get from your jailers as you work toward your jailbreak - you’d be a fool to deny it simply because it’s part of the system you plan to dismantle, because your task will be harder for it.
You think that democrats will change if we just stop voting for them
I don’t know how many times I have to repeat this point for you to wrap your head around it:
the problem isn’t the choice of voting in-itself, it’s the choice of placing rhetorical weight on it at all
Democrats will continue losing on their own as conditions for millions of Americans continue getting worse and the democrats continue obstructing popular efforts to fix it. That isn’t me organizing against them or boycotting elections - that’s a very simple statement of fact. Millions of Americans will lose enthusiasm for the democrats if they do nothing. They will continue doing nothing if they think they can still win their elections by appealing to the center. If the people who are screaming at the democrats to take drastic action proudly keep proclaiming that they will dutifully keep voting for them anyway, there’s a very good likelyhood that they will both lose due to voter attrition and mis-diagnose the problem as having not appealed to the center enough. They assume (because the left keeps telling them so) that they aren’t losing support from the left, so they must just be unsuccessfully appealing to the center right.
Clarity of message is everything. Democrats have rock-bottom approval because they continue to obstruct systemic change. Full stop. They will continue losing votes to voter apathy if they continue undermining the popular momentum in the base. Full stop. There is no amount of ‘lesser-evil’ proclamations that will reverse that trend, but it will absolutely mislead liberals into conflating a lack of enthusiasm for democrats for an abundance of appetite for reactionary policy.
You are making that mistake right now. “You’re just republican lite” is the same type of damaging conflation as when Zionists accuse anti-zionists of being antisemitic.
presidential elections do seem like a really lofty goal, but history has given us plenty of examples to prove that it’s possible; with mexico being the most recent one with amlo & shienbaum.
i think it’s a testament to the power of american propaganda that a 3rd party candidate won a presidential election in not only one of the largest and most populous countries of the world; but one of the closest possible to the united states and most of americans are still completely unaware that it actually happened and that it happened in our lifetime.
That’s exactly what I’m saying. Our media has the vast majority of the voters’ sole attention - they don’t know and don’t care that other options exist. If a presidential candidate doesn’t have equal media coverage to the other 2 parties, they immediately lose more Americans than they would need to win the election.
the media and republican/democrat duopoly are powered by the same source, the american oligarchy; expecting the media to ever give airtime to 3rd party is unrealistic.
it’s self-fulfilling propaganda that we’re inflicting upon ourselves.
Correct, which is why the 3rd part is itself unrealistic. We need to change things from the ground-up at a local level, which will take decades, or overthrow everything and start over, which will lead to a huge amount of deaths regardless of whether or not we even win the battle. Regardless, to win the presidential election with a 3rd party right now, we need the media, and that’s not going to happen, so to put your vote in that hole is the same as not voting.
or you can just jump into it like mexico and the other historical examples have done and witness a dramatic improvements in your lifetime without the huge amounts of deaths.
You seem to understand that the vast majority of Americans simply vote for what they see in the media, meaning that only a candidate backed by the media can win, and you seem to understand that we can’t shift the media with our current government, but you don’t seem to understand that, given those 2 facts, there is no way for us to recreate the phenomenon seen in other countries with a larger proportion of people willing to look outside of their televisions and smartphones.
For a 3rd party candidate to win a modern-day American presidential election, either the media would have to validate them, or tens of millions of Americans would have to, in unison, spontaneously decide not to follow the media that they trust implicitly without question.
the mexican example happened in 2018 and proves that it’s possible without attention from the media and the number of people who didn’t vote in 2024 because of gaza; but did vote in 2020; as well as 3rd party voters combined already exceeds this tens of millions of american threshold.
the elections last week and the popularity of the no kings protests prove that we’re ripe for this sort of change; but we keep repeating this sort of propaganda to such a degree that it becomes self fulfilling prophecy.
we need to change our mindset; not a change in unchanging institutions like the media or the political duopoly.
not only is it possible, but it has happened and is currently happening in our lifetimes: either read a non-western history book to see several historical examples of political duopolies being overturned by 3rd parties (until the americans reversed it) or look for modern sources showing a 3rd party named morena overthrow its american backed duopoloy in mexico less than 10 years ago.
The republicans have a strong enough, brainwashed base that will vote for them come hell or high water. Around 35% of people who will vote are seriously engaged on their side and will do whatever they need to vote for them. That’s a pretty strong hurdle to overcome
The democrats also have a contingent of Better Blue than Red and will vote for them no matter what.
The largest party next in line would be the Green party, and honestly, they’re barely trying. I mean the head of the party has investments in Fossil Fuel companies supporting fracking. AOC rightfully critisized them for a lack of organiztional development. It’s just this mess of funding going in and our for visibility and the dilution of the “not republican” vote.
So voting for a third party, at best, lets the republicans continue their destruction of the country and sends a message to the democrats that we’re tired of their crap, which has happened twice now with zero changes.
If you want us to vote for 3rd party, you need to deliver us a 3rd party with enough leadership to campaign and win it.
For nationwide elections I agree there isn’t much of a choice, but I’d argue voting third party outside of swing states is still good to express dissatisfaction, and third parties and independents can still win in local elections.
So voting for a third party, at best, lets the republicans continue their destruction of the country and sends a message to the democrats that we’re tired of their crap, which has happened twice now with zero changes
the democrats and republicans are 2 extremes of this same pro-late stage capitalist status quo system so expecting anything to change by vacillating between them is an unrealistic non-starter.
s are 2 extremes of this same pro-late stage capitalist status quo system so expecting anything to change by vacillating between them is an unrealistic non-starter.
I don’t disagree, but voting for a 3rd in a tw- party race will also be a useless non-starter.
history has given us several examples of this happening; with mexico being the most recent one and in our lifetimes.
those examples prove over and over again that it’s the self-reinforcing propaganda that keeps us back, not two-party; spoiler-vote; fptp; electoral-college; etc. nonsense.
why not vote for 3rd party instead of wasting your vote like this?
Because the system currently only supports 2 parties for president. We would need current politicians to be selfless enough to make the necessary changes that would allow for a 3rd party to receive enough funding and media coverage for the vast majority of the American voters - who pay no attention at all to politics - to hear about them. Our politicians only work for themselves, and have no reason to work against their own interests by introducing a 3rd party - hell, they’ve almost condensed down to a single party, but at least one side of it is still keeping up appearances enough to only terrorize its people a little bit so that they can say they’re better than the other guys.
Presidential voting is just trying to use the system to change the system, which only works when the system itself works. The current system is broken to the point that presidential voting won’t fix it - the best we can do is make sure the lesser of the evils wins until we can garner enough support for an actual overthrowing of the system, then begin the work to make one that would allow for politicians that actually care about us. A presidential vote to make actual change is a wasted vote, because a vote no longer holds that much power in America. The best it can do on its own is hold back the greater evil.
For local elections you should absolutely vote for the most progressive person you can, because the voters that don’t pay attention don’t even show up to those votes, making them much more volatile to the point where a true leftist can win. Maybe we’d even be able to get a new generation of politicians to change the system from the ground up over the course of several decades, if the country lasts that long. But the presidential election is far too padded by people who would vote for their party’s candidate even if they killed their own mother - it can’t suddenly change, not in its current state.
You cant build popular support for dismantling the system as it is while you’re actively advocating for people to accept the lesser evil.
Imagine if Sanders got up on the senate floor and said “i believe we cannot compromise on ACA subsidies and let millions of americans lose health coverage, be forced to ration their insulin or die because they cant afford a doctor, but I’ll be voting to reopen the government without them anyway because i have no choice”.
Democrats rely on the inherent violence of a 2 party system. Playing into it isnt pragmatic, it’s denial. Either we’re in this together or we aren’t, and democrats have made it perfectly clear that they aren’t.
You can’t build shit for shit, when you’re being actively hunted by ICE for thought crimes, and like third of the Americans don’t know where their next meal will come from.
In order to build something you need to have a foundation, which you can’t do in a crisis. Democratic party as it is is not a party that people are exited about, and they need to be changed one way or another, but you can only do that if there is no Republicans actively hunting you for sports, and the way US is setup right now, you can either have one or another. Denying that is actively dangerous, acting as if it’s not the case brings objectively horrifying results.
I’m not advocating for people to accept the lesser evil, I’m asking them to understand that their vote is no longer a form of acceptance - it doesn’t hold enough power for you to use it that way anymore. Your acceptance or rejection of the system comes from your actions outside of the polling place, in the form of protests and what inevitably comes after protests if they’re ignored for long enough.
A vote in the presidential election currently only holds the power to slightly shift the current power between bad and worse. It’s like the trolley problem - there’s no real 3rd track right now, no matter how much we want one. If we start building one now at the local level, maybe there will be one for someone later, but we’ve gotta make our own lever choice without it for now.
This is a fun rhetorical trick, but I’m not interested in playing a semantic game over the definition of ‘acceptance’. This:
is absolutely advocating for the lesser evil. Fine if you don’t want to call that ‘acceptance’, but what I’m pointing to is not the choice itself, it’s the act of advocating for it to begin with. Spending any amount of energy trying to convey the importance of voting for the moderate wing of fascism is a distraction from the message that both parties pose an existential threat to the working class. If your goal is to build support for radical systemic change, then there should be no ambiguity about what actions are necessary to achieve it. To use your bullshit trolly problem analogy- the ‘two tracks’ forced choice is a distraction from the fact that we need to stop the fucking trolly. Even if we end up pulling that lever in the end, you will never get enough people to get off to help derail it if you keep ensuring them that the worst will be averted even if they chose not to.
You can’t build a popular movement against the democratic coalition while openly admitting that you have no choice but to support them no matter how aligned they are with the fascists. Liberals will continue happily existing in the status quo until it’s made clear to them that their privileged position within it is threatened along with everyone else’s if they choose not to act.
I don’t understand your point. Voting is not a form of protest or revolution - you either overthrow the government, or you don’t; voting is just the thing you do in the meantime to hopefully keep living to eventually overthrow the government. If the system worked, sure, voting would keep it working, but thinking of voting as a way to change the system at this point is like thinking an oil change will fix a broken engine. I vote for the lesser evil not because I accept them or want them to be in charge, but because I know the person I want in charge will never be placed in charge by the current system. I advocate for revolution because I know we need it, and that the system cannot be fixed in my lifetime without it, but voting is an entirely separate thing, and can only be used as a tool to keep the world from falling apart quite as quickly as it would under the greater evil.
At the risk of repeating myself, i’ll try restating the point- the problem isn’t the choice of voting in-itself, it’s the choice of placing rhetorical weight on it at all in a system that is designed to diffuse the political power of the working class to begin with.
The overwhelming majority of liberals will do nothing more than whinge about how unfortunate it is that we live in such a broken system so-long as they remain secure in their personal status within that system. It isn’t just about ‘overthrowing the government’ - it’s about stirring the masses into action by raising the issue to such a volume that they can no longer ignore it. That means making it quite clear that democrats writ large risk becoming victims of the fascist movement they helped to create if they continue ‘biding their time’ until a more convenient moment. It isn’t even about boycotting general elections - it’s about making it perfectly clear that they cannot count on voters holding their noses indefinitely, and that they do not have a winning coalition without the working class. That will eventually be true no matter what we say as leftists - under late stage capitalism conditions will continue getting worse until eventually enough people will have lost all faith in democracy itself that the only people voting are various factions of the capitalist class and the petty-bourgeois (if we aren’t there already, frankly).
Democrats believe that voters may not like the way they govern, but they’ll still vote for them anyway to avoid a hostile opposition party. Any popular movement for radical change will be predicated on the notion that nothing short of drastic action will avert that inevitability
The fundamental problem with liberalism is that it makes well-meaning people believe that justice will eventually arrive simply on its own merit, when liberal democracy itself is designed to ensure that popular reform can never happen without organized resistance.
Ah, I see. You think that democrats will change if we just stop voting for them. They wont. As I said, they’re essentially just Republican lite. We’ll either have 2 parties that are almost the same, or the democratic party will simply dissolve and we’ll just have 2 identical republicans running for office. Either way, yes, we will have to bring about change with organized resistance.
However, in the case that the ruling class still allows for the republican-lite party, it’s better to let the democrats keep only mostly destroying the world instead of letting the republicans openly see how quickly they can tear everything down, because that leaves less rebuilding we’ll need to do when the time comes for that. Refusing to vote for the lesser evil is like refusing to eat what meager rations you get from your jailers as you work toward your jailbreak - you’d be a fool to deny it simply because it’s part of the system you plan to dismantle, because your task will be harder for it.
I don’t know how many times I have to repeat this point for you to wrap your head around it:
Democrats will continue losing on their own as conditions for millions of Americans continue getting worse and the democrats continue obstructing popular efforts to fix it. That isn’t me organizing against them or boycotting elections - that’s a very simple statement of fact. Millions of Americans will lose enthusiasm for the democrats if they do nothing. They will continue doing nothing if they think they can still win their elections by appealing to the center. If the people who are screaming at the democrats to take drastic action proudly keep proclaiming that they will dutifully keep voting for them anyway, there’s a very good likelyhood that they will both lose due to voter attrition and mis-diagnose the problem as having not appealed to the center enough. They assume (because the left keeps telling them so) that they aren’t losing support from the left, so they must just be unsuccessfully appealing to the center right.
Clarity of message is everything. Democrats have rock-bottom approval because they continue to obstruct systemic change. Full stop. They will continue losing votes to voter apathy if they continue undermining the popular momentum in the base. Full stop. There is no amount of ‘lesser-evil’ proclamations that will reverse that trend, but it will absolutely mislead liberals into conflating a lack of enthusiasm for democrats for an abundance of appetite for reactionary policy.
You are making that mistake right now. “You’re just republican lite” is the same type of damaging conflation as when Zionists accuse anti-zionists of being antisemitic.
presidential elections do seem like a really lofty goal, but history has given us plenty of examples to prove that it’s possible; with mexico being the most recent one with amlo & shienbaum.
i think it’s a testament to the power of american propaganda that a 3rd party candidate won a presidential election in not only one of the largest and most populous countries of the world; but one of the closest possible to the united states and most of americans are still completely unaware that it actually happened and that it happened in our lifetime.
That’s exactly what I’m saying. Our media has the vast majority of the voters’ sole attention - they don’t know and don’t care that other options exist. If a presidential candidate doesn’t have equal media coverage to the other 2 parties, they immediately lose more Americans than they would need to win the election.
the media and republican/democrat duopoly are powered by the same source, the american oligarchy; expecting the media to ever give airtime to 3rd party is unrealistic.
it’s self-fulfilling propaganda that we’re inflicting upon ourselves.
Correct, which is why the 3rd part is itself unrealistic. We need to change things from the ground-up at a local level, which will take decades, or overthrow everything and start over, which will lead to a huge amount of deaths regardless of whether or not we even win the battle. Regardless, to win the presidential election with a 3rd party right now, we need the media, and that’s not going to happen, so to put your vote in that hole is the same as not voting.
or you can just jump into it like mexico and the other historical examples have done and witness a dramatic improvements in your lifetime without the huge amounts of deaths.
that is until the americans reverse it… again.
You seem to understand that the vast majority of Americans simply vote for what they see in the media, meaning that only a candidate backed by the media can win, and you seem to understand that we can’t shift the media with our current government, but you don’t seem to understand that, given those 2 facts, there is no way for us to recreate the phenomenon seen in other countries with a larger proportion of people willing to look outside of their televisions and smartphones.
For a 3rd party candidate to win a modern-day American presidential election, either the media would have to validate them, or tens of millions of Americans would have to, in unison, spontaneously decide not to follow the media that they trust implicitly without question.
the mexican example happened in 2018 and proves that it’s possible without attention from the media and the number of people who didn’t vote in 2024 because of gaza; but did vote in 2020; as well as 3rd party voters combined already exceeds this tens of millions of american threshold.
the elections last week and the popularity of the no kings protests prove that we’re ripe for this sort of change; but we keep repeating this sort of propaganda to such a degree that it becomes self fulfilling prophecy.
we need to change our mindset; not a change in unchanging institutions like the media or the political duopoly.
When did America decide to remove first past the post? Oh they didn’t …so how is 3rd party not a wasted vote?
not only is it possible, but it has happened and is currently happening in our lifetimes: either read a non-western history book to see several historical examples of political duopolies being overturned by 3rd parties (until the americans reversed it) or look for modern sources showing a 3rd party named morena overthrow its american backed duopoloy in mexico less than 10 years ago.
The republicans have a strong enough, brainwashed base that will vote for them come hell or high water. Around 35% of people who will vote are seriously engaged on their side and will do whatever they need to vote for them. That’s a pretty strong hurdle to overcome
The democrats also have a contingent of Better Blue than Red and will vote for them no matter what.
The largest party next in line would be the Green party, and honestly, they’re barely trying. I mean the head of the party has investments in Fossil Fuel companies supporting fracking. AOC rightfully critisized them for a lack of organiztional development. It’s just this mess of funding going in and our for visibility and the dilution of the “not republican” vote.
So voting for a third party, at best, lets the republicans continue their destruction of the country and sends a message to the democrats that we’re tired of their crap, which has happened twice now with zero changes.
If you want us to vote for 3rd party, you need to deliver us a 3rd party with enough leadership to campaign and win it.
For nationwide elections I agree there isn’t much of a choice, but I’d argue voting third party outside of swing states is still good to express dissatisfaction, and third parties and independents can still win in local elections.
absolutely, and i’m a fan of this, let’s get congress full of third, as long as it’s not libretarian third :)
the democrats and republicans are 2 extremes of this same pro-late stage capitalist status quo system so expecting anything to change by vacillating between them is an unrealistic non-starter.
I don’t disagree, but voting for a 3rd in a tw- party race will also be a useless non-starter.
history has given us several examples of this happening; with mexico being the most recent one and in our lifetimes.
those examples prove over and over again that it’s the self-reinforcing propaganda that keeps us back, not two-party; spoiler-vote; fptp; electoral-college; etc. nonsense.