Just vote to change things.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

@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

We forgetting when Americans voted out Trump now?

Not once ever? Not even when Trump lost the 2020 election despite the jan6 raid on the capitol?

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

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?

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.

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.

🤫

Write more non-Nazi stuff and it will stop being a Nazi platform.

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.

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

“Surrounds us” maybe if you’re chronically online

Congratulations

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?

Depending on the stakes, yes. It is categorically better than not voting at all.

There is still the spoiler effect to consider, which may make voting third party a worse strategy in the complex, blind game that elections are. In elections where that isn't as big of a risk, it's a good way to indicate dissatisfaction with the status quo and the parties on offer. If there is a particularly convincing third party that many agree on, it also communicates what people do want.

In presidential elections, in a country where the president already had so much power even before this whole shitshow, when one candidate is a much greater threat to the basic feasability of resistance, it's a dangerous gamble, risking much for a fairly slim chance at an all-or-nothing victory.

FPTP is one of the many things that are fucked up, but not every election has that kind of impact, and particularly if you're in states where one party is so dominant that the spoiler effect is negligible anyways, it may be the more valuable choice.

This is absolutely the correct answer. Successful revolutions are always multilateral in their approach.

Agreed on all points. It's kinda like a robbery – you probably won't arbitrarily hand a random stranger your wallet, but if they point a knife, things look different.

Though in this case, it's the robber barons getting mugged by their victims.

The success of diplomacy and peaceful protest hinges on the existence of a credible threat that the alternative (war and riots, respectively) will be worse. Even if a (mostly) peaceful solution should be found, I suspect there will have to be some measure of violence to get that point across.

As others point out, the elites won't go down quietly, and as long as there are bootlicks willing to fight on their behalf, they'll rather let their bootlicks die than make concessions.

So while I don't think violent revolutions are good for their own sake, they may be a necessary evil for good ends.

Some take for a socialist to have really…

I wouldn’t assume they are one.

Adding white into this meme doesn’t acknowledge or address any problems, it just serves to divide people.

Anyone on .ml is Bourgeois though...

1. the lyrics said "you might vote for someone else, and i might wanna change your mind, so vote and don't today" and "vote and know it might NOT make a difference; you might see the contradiction, but they're NOT talking to you". thank frick for making linking stuff easier here.
2. if voting CAN'T help, then a revolution would be the next method. oh and do you think indirect voting, and a one-party system (or multiple like-minded parties under a coalition like china or the dprk) is better?

maybe a revolution can work if NOT voting

So you're not at all refuting that minorities are suffering g far more than white people under Trump?

And here's the issue with using the genocide of the Palestinians as an excuse to abandon all other minorities:

Resistance against the genocide in Palestine exists almost entirely within the progressive wing of the Democratic party.

Democracy would still almost certainly continue to exist in some capacity if Kamala had won.

But now that Trump won, Israel is not only entirely free, with zero guard rails whatsoever, to complete their genocide and attack all of their neighbors, but now the US is further involved than ever, outright bombing Iran in the process.

And genocide is your concern, huh?

What about the 4k (minimum) missing minorities that were kidnapped by ICE?

The mass building of concentration camps on US soil?

The massacre of Venezuelan civilians as prelude to an outright war and enslavement of Venezuela?

The campaign of the GOP's to destroy the 14th amendment and Voting Rights Act? You know, eliminating birthright citizenship and voter rights, the same shit the Nazis did to Jews leading to the start of the Holocaust.

Oh, and the total betrayal of Ukraine in Russia's genocidal war on them?

Refusal to vote for Kamala produced more genocide. Kamala was objectively the less genocidal option than Trump.

Yes but my 12 gauge shotgun and my .22 riffle and my .45 handgun seem to be a tad lopsided against their tanks and drones and guided missiles so sorry if I’m not ready to pounce just yet.

woah only a century? cool your jets extremist

Untrue I tried three times to vote against a fascist dictator but over half of my fellow Americans are morons who overrode my vote two out of the three times. But the key here is that voting worked one of those times and no matter how much kicking and screaming and removed and moaning may have happened his butt was kicked off the WH lawn on Inauguration Day so clearly it does work.

Actually my hope is that when this is over people in the MAGA movement will finally wake up and see how much of their own lives have been destroyed by what this ass clown did to them and we as a country can agree to NEVER allow it to happen again and that we can finally go back to letting the adults govern the country instead of a man who would have been a used car salesman had his daddy not given him everything he has.

Lemmy is full of leftists, the vast majority of which understand that electoralism and reformism are losing strategies and that revolution is generally necessary.