Progressive Politics

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Too accurate (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

You don't vote for a political party in the hopes that you might be able to push them to represent your interests, you vote for a party who WILL represent your interests.

In a true democracy, yes. That is what you would do.

In a false democracy, like Russia, you would ignore the rigged elections entirely and focus on agitating for the implementation of democracy.

But in a flawed democracy, you have a system where the elections are not exactly rigged, but where you do not have truly proportional representation.

In such a system, your primary focus should be on fixing the system. The closer to a true democracy this is, the easier it will be to accomplish via reform, although one should not discount direct action. However, when an opportunity to vote arises, you should take it. You can't afford to spend all your effort on elections, but ignoring your opportunity to do some harm reduction would be ineffective.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

In such a system, your primary focus should be on fixing the system.

If you're talking about the USA, there isn't really a way forwards within the system. It's effectively rigged. The only way to gain useful power in that system is to work out of it. A vote is free, use it, but in a system that broken, that vote is almost worthless and cannot solve the problem.

The US federal election is a two-party system with FPTP, making other parties very very very difficult to elect and easy to demonize as a 'wasted vote' helping the worse of the main two parties to win. Both of the major parties benefit from this duopoly and have no interest in reforming the election to allow better parties to gain seats. The Democrats didn't even doing much on removing voter suppression when they had the power to, there are so many easy wins they could make if they cared.
Consolidation of mass media under private owners, combined with the general concentration of wealth and its political influence, give the owner class effective control over which candidates are presented in a positive light and therefore more likely to be known and popular. You can't make a federal candidate viable without the support of the owning class, and they won't support a candidate who isn't enriching them. The selections are rigged.

It may be a flawed democracy on paper, but when you account for the surrounding conditions, the people don't have the power to choose their leaders. It's as false as Russia's.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

I don't know how things will be post-Trump, but up until now I'd say that (especially at the local level) it was very possible to field more left-leaning candidates and move the Overton Window to the left. We know this because the far right has very successfully shifted the discourse rightward, and a door can be traveled through in either direction.

Now, though, I'm not sure if Trump & co will even bother with sham elections. I suppose time will tell.