As I think one of the panthers said when talking about running presidential candidates (paraphrased from memory because I can't find the quote), "Even if Malcolm X was the president of the United States, he would be forced to be President of the United States".
There are no good United States presidents. You pick conditions of battle the next four years, not saviors.
I guess just I don't get the thing where people cope with the existential threat of the worst option possible, for both foreign and domestic policy, by trying to tear down the other guy this late in the race when the only new candidates who could win would require high-hundred-millions in corporate money just to get the word out.
The time for that was 2-3 years ago, and even then, the candidates would have been maybe 5% different. Obama conducted a huge numbers of drone strikes, remember? But the right wing presidents can just have half of every gov organization flip over to following them. it's not an even playing field.
"but we're just rewarding the Dems if we vote" is a common theme, but they literally aren't listening to you, we're a drop in their statistics if they even bother to look at us. Every time it happens they just say next time they need to refocus on moderates with even more unhinged monetary policy (primaries are different). Because their consultants aren't tracking your political philosophy demographic data in any useful way for it not to just be noise on the graph.
how many elections in the last 20 years came down to 1k votes in a . handful of states? Not voting and (rightfully, extremely in Clinton's case) vilifying the dem side is A strategy, but it certainly didn't work in 2016. For people who talk about historical materialism and studying the past I'm baffled how many people don't look at... recent history.
the reason to pick a president is to reduce collateral damage and pick someone at least willing to add friction to bad bills. The role of the President is such that they will always be doing these same things people cite as issues until other parts change. They've got advisors who's work isn't checked, the legislature has control over most things, etc. Will a president who plays hardball be better? maybe, but even Sanders wouldn't have done that, if anyone even could. The position is rigged, but it's still important.
The reason there was so much fought and built in 2017-19 is huge swaths of people in the various movements burned themselves out on emergency power and that's still kinda been in a state of recovery where people are still rebuilding. We couldn't even shut down the ICE camps. That's not because Biden chose to continue, though he did, it's that the whole game is rigged. So embrace that and play it strategically.
I'm concerned we aren't going to be able to do it twice and still have enough to build or pass on anything we've learned.
Elections will never save us until other things change, but the way to help other things change is... to vote for the guy who puts the least obstacles in the way, and starts the least fires Movement has to break off to fight before they can go back to trying to get things built.
the whole thing is fucked. but we have to work with it because like, the active Left in the US is maybe 750k people. there's about 150 million people in the US who are able to vote if they can register. this is my last post on this, but like... idk maybe people don't grasp the scale of things. some places, hundreds to low-thousands of votes in a state are what decides elections. The one place you can affect by telling people in your circles to not vote, is those. otherwise the argument is irrelivant because we're in no state to make much difference in the presidential elections even at the average rando voter level, yet.
I wish people would consider helping add spin to the flywheel instead of trying to flake chips off. It sucks, it's a very grim calculus, but a loss is worse.
even for Palestine. especially for Palestine.
we aren't in the primaries. remember there's more than domestic policy at stake here.
you can link this but I'm not going to enable shares