Moderates would rather lose to fascists than compromise with leftists and progressives.
In the USA, voting Third Party is just helping Republicans, aka. the Fascists.
If you want to change something, organise and unionise.
But dont throw away Democracy, just to be the smuggest guy in the concentraition-camp in the end…
Voting for someone that does not represent you because you are more scared of the other guy is indistinguishable, as a signal, from someone that fully supports them. By voting against your own interests you are actively undermining the democratic process.
Democracy has forever been synonymous with class based societies. It has split entire countries into two barely-distinctive political parties (conservative and “progressive”) that are nevertheless permanently at each other’s throats. Even in its most libertarian-friendly forms, it has constantly failed to avert hierarchy, coercion and the authoritarian machinations of majority-groups.
look at their post history, they do nothing but shill anti-biden, pro-trump, 24/7
If you actually look at my comments, you will see that i have not posted anything pro trump. Why is being critical of biden and establishment dems pro trump? Definitionally it is not.
If you want to change something, organise and unionise.
Moderates sabotage those efforts.
But they occasionally work. Name 1 3rd party candidate that has won the presidential election and shut the fuck up.
Abe Lincoln could be argued as a 3rd party candidate who won since prior to him it was mainly the whigs and democrats as the two main parties.
Now if you asked what grassroots-led 3rd party candidate overwhelmed the two major parties in a shocker of an election, that obviously never happened.
The last Whig president*, Zachary Taylor, was a political outsider that beat out an experienced politician (familiar?). He was running under the Whig banner because the whigs didn’t have a solution for the issue of slavery- Zachary Taylor was a crude extremely rich celebrity soldier and slave owner who never voted. He was ambiguous on his stance on the future of slavery in America. But the anti slavery wing of the whigs hated this. Taylor ruined the Whig party and it never recovered. Lincoln picked up the anti-slavery whig voters, creating the Republican Party.
The modern day Republicans are only held together with trump and I’m not sure what will happen to their party afterwards. Maybe there’ll be another party “flip” when the Republican Party crumbles, a new more left wing party will rise up as the democrats absorb the former Republican voters, causing the progressive democrats to flee the party. This would be the next success of a “3rd party” candidate. But this won’t happen as long as trump continues to be on the ballot.
*there was Millard Fillmore as the 13th, but this was because Taylor died in office and Fillmore succeeded him as president.
You just sailed over the point where moderates fight us and it’s considered fair game. We fight moderates and they have a meltdown. Moderates are relying on leftist and progressives to win general elections while fucking them over at every opportunity.
Surely you can see the foolishness of that strategy yes?
Unfortunately, many countries have First-Past-The-Post voting systems, so voting for a third party is often, mathematically, basically the same as voting for the competition.
It’s called “The Spoiler Effect”, if you want to look it up, and it’s why we have many of the two party problems we have today in modern democracy. Ranked Choice/Single Transferrable Vote are much better systems.
Well, many democracies do not vote for their president directly – parliament elects one. They are usually from the strongest party, although if enough smaller parties can get a majority, they can elect the president.
Yeah but FPTP is used for parliament in those countries, which means the party that chooses the president is elected via it.
Ranked Choice, STV, or Mixed Member Proportional Ranking are much better systems. I wish more countries used it.
FPTP is used for parliament in those countries
No, it isn’t always. In Germany for example, you have two votes per state and federal election. One vote goes to a candidate in your district (fptp, yes) but the other vote is just for a party. The parties put up lists of candidates and parliament gets filled proportionally to the votes they got nationally or statewide.
Now all these smaller parties could form a coalition to get the majority or just use their extensive array of minority opposition powers that the law grants them.
Ranked Choice/Single Transferrable Vote are much better systems.
Which moderates will never support.
I don’t think it’s a moderate, left, or right problem. More a “the current power structure will never support it” because it works for those in power now to their advantage.
That just sounds like an attempt to deflect blame away from moderate voters. They undermine, sabotage and attack every effort by progressives and leftists. Then they turn around and expect us to show up in the general election after fucking us over for four years.
Or just hand the election over to the guy who is going to push the pedal down all that stuff you claim to care about. We’re trying to minimize our losses as best we can, and right now, Biden seems to be the best that Democrats can muster up. Not the best situation to be in, but he’s still miles ahead of Trump on everything. Any issue you care about, well you’ll be reading about them in history books as an afterthought if Trump comes to power… if history books haven’t already been censored to just ignore any controversial issues altogether. Who the hell even needs history books when we have the Bible, the only source of information a citizen would ever need, that and TNN, the Trump News Network.
If third parties really want to make a change, they need to go after smaller, local elections, you build up a movement from the ground up. Any third parties in national elections that have almost no presence anywhere else are highly suspect and likely just there for the attention and/or to draw votes from one candidate or another.
I live in a solidly red state. The odds of it flipping in the next 20 years is nil. If I vote 3rd party, it
- tells the entrenched parties that I’d rather have a lunatic than either of their candidates and
- cause more infighting in the RNC as they will assume the lost vote was meant for them.
Your third party vote count will be below the lizardman constant and will be ignored.
We’re trying to minimize our losses as best we can, and right now,
You mean “forever”.
If third parties really want to make a change, they need to go after smaller, local elections, you build up a movement from the ground up.
We’ve tried. Moderates fight us there too.
Glad to hear it. How long until that results in some material improvements for the American people? 10 years? 20? 30? I’ve already waited 16 years.
4th panel is what you’re going to get when a republican wins the white house because “leftists” voted for a spoiler candidate.
Moderates will too. Maybe they’ll look back and think “Perhaps we should have compromised a bit.”
What’s to stop them from compromising with the base of the party that won and become even more auth facist as a result
Are you saying moderates would rather compromise with fascists than leftists and progressives?
This reeks of right wing propaganda.
this is literally, 100% right wing propaganda
“vote for the lesser evil” has always sucked… but there’s a pretty big difference between neoliberal and guy who directly says he wants to be dictator, already tried to overthrow the government once, and is promising mass deportation (on a genocidal level) and theocracy
if he wins, it’s the end of the ability to vote third party…
