Don’t let others strongman our county into the ground by convincing you to gobble down whatever rancid dick a political party throws at you.
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We vote in primaries to avoid that.
I was trying to get people to vote in primaries, you are telling them to give up on the party and depressed primary turnout is how we get stuck with that shit in the general.
Like, if your honest about what you want, you’re literally working against it right now.
Prior to 2012, I also believed that. Please keep in mind that the Democratic abuse of Superdelegates in 2016 to screw Bernie was so egregious that they had to reform their system to curb their egos. Some. Now they only have a 15% party leadership stake. So sanguine. So benevolent.
Many states also have closed primaries specifically to keep the party entrenched. Like where I vote, the GOP set it up generations ago, and guess which party has in recent years not lost sleep over it? Certainly not enough to bother changing it.
Primaries are the same sham as local elections with no primary in heavily single-party constituencies. Which is that the entrenched party decides who can run under their brand sure to collect people who vote down the line, and for anyone else, even lifelong registered members of that party, to run as independents. Local elections matter. So do statewide seats. And both parties want nothing more than to be in power, not to represent you.
Thinking that the other party will somehow fix what you don’t like is how we have gotten here and been here since the 90s. Voting only to vote against someone else lets the slime disenfranchise you when you think it hasn’t. Relying on a party to maybe, hopefully, let your vote go to who they decide, isn’t democracy, and it doesn’t defend or uphold democratic values. Otherwise maybe we would have something a bit more coherent than Schumer’s strongly worded letters and Newsom being cautious as a lawyer “letting” one comms person tweet sass a few times for the media traction.
Maybe I didn’t make myself clear:
Fuck both these parties and everyone involved. Unseat them all. Fuck both the parties, they ain’t done shit but for themselves.
The treatment of Bernie in the 2016 primary also made me lose faith in our form of flawed Democracy. Living in a red state, primaries are my only chance to have any effect on the national Democratic Party and 2016 made it obvious they would accept no challenge to the status quo. Superdelegates are plainly undemocratic, but the post Citizens United world makes both parties absolutely beholden to the corporations.
We literally can not have a candidate that is against business and therefore can not have a candidate that is against fascism.
That said, I will probably continue to pull the lever on my purely symbolic, utterly pointless, placebo vote for the lesser of two evils because people don’t understand that the only non-voters that matter are the ones in battleground states.
We actually CAN have a candidate that’s not in the pocket of big corporate interests. But that person needs to also not look at both parties and think “well, these are the only options.” Ross Perot actually had a decent run in 1992, and he was fucking nuts. A solid governor that declares their own party corrupt and not a part of the future would be seen as a hero, and could build on a groundswell. Newsome just showed us all that he’s not that hero.
Both parties have committed sepuku over the last 12 months anyway. The bravery lies in being the person that has the guts to admit it.
…
We vote in primaries to avoid that.
I was trying to get people to vote in primaries, you are telling them to give up on the party and depressed primary turnout is how we get stuck with that shit in the general.
Like, if your honest about what you want, you’re literally working against it right now.
Stop gloating that the party hasn’t run a presidential primary without a preordained winner since 2008.
Prior to 2012, I also believed that. Please keep in mind that the Democratic abuse of Superdelegates in 2016 to screw Bernie was so egregious that they had to reform their system to curb their egos. Some. Now they only have a 15% party leadership stake. So sanguine. So benevolent.
Many states also have closed primaries specifically to keep the party entrenched. Like where I vote, the GOP set it up generations ago, and guess which party has in recent years not lost sleep over it? Certainly not enough to bother changing it.
Primaries are the same sham as local elections with no primary in heavily single-party constituencies. Which is that the entrenched party decides who can run under their brand sure to collect people who vote down the line, and for anyone else, even lifelong registered members of that party, to run as independents. Local elections matter. So do statewide seats. And both parties want nothing more than to be in power, not to represent you.
Thinking that the other party will somehow fix what you don’t like is how we have gotten here and been here since the 90s. Voting only to vote against someone else lets the slime disenfranchise you when you think it hasn’t. Relying on a party to maybe, hopefully, let your vote go to who they decide, isn’t democracy, and it doesn’t defend or uphold democratic values. Otherwise maybe we would have something a bit more coherent than Schumer’s strongly worded letters and Newsom being cautious as a lawyer “letting” one comms person tweet sass a few times for the media traction.
Maybe I didn’t make myself clear:
Fuck both these parties and everyone involved. Unseat them all. Fuck both the parties, they ain’t done shit but for themselves.
The treatment of Bernie in the 2016 primary also made me lose faith in our form of flawed Democracy. Living in a red state, primaries are my only chance to have any effect on the national Democratic Party and 2016 made it obvious they would accept no challenge to the status quo. Superdelegates are plainly undemocratic, but the post Citizens United world makes both parties absolutely beholden to the corporations.
We literally can not have a candidate that is against business and therefore can not have a candidate that is against fascism.
That said, I will probably continue to pull the lever on my purely symbolic, utterly pointless, placebo vote for the lesser of two evils because people don’t understand that the only non-voters that matter are the ones in battleground states.
We actually CAN have a candidate that’s not in the pocket of big corporate interests. But that person needs to also not look at both parties and think “well, these are the only options.” Ross Perot actually had a decent run in 1992, and he was fucking nuts. A solid governor that declares their own party corrupt and not a part of the future would be seen as a hero, and could build on a groundswell. Newsome just showed us all that he’s not that hero.
Both parties have committed sepuku over the last 12 months anyway. The bravery lies in being the person that has the guts to admit it.