Loads of people who vote Democrat are well aware that capitalism is fucked and has only ever worked for the rich. Voting for a Democrat does not imply agreeing with every party decision.
The question is whether you agree with harm reduction, accelerationism, or nihilism.
From a harm reduction standpoint, it makes sense to elect the imperfect candidate who will at least try to make things a little better. This is the same thinking that makes things like needle exchanges a good idea. Yes, maybe it would be better if no one were addicted to heroin, but given that some people are it’s probably be better to reduce the likelihood that they become a vector for blood-borne illnesses.
From an accelerationist standpoint, it makes sense to elect the worst possible candidate in the hopes that it’s jarring enough to get people to change the system. This approach of making things better by making things worse reflects the conservative tendency toward punishment as a solution. If addiction is punished and demonized, people will have a strong incentive to avoid addiction.
From a nihilistic standpoint, it makes sense to refuse to vote for anyone you don’t fully agree with. Participation in the political arena can be disregarded. This approach reflects the perspective that consequences don’t mean anything, so we might as well all share the same needle because it’s easier.
Personally, I find harm reduction to be the most beneficial option.
I mean, you’re right in the general sense, though OP’s quote does say, “liberals”, not, “those who vote Democrat”. So the implication is clearly pushing against people that think Democrats are a good choice and not simply the lesser of the two evils.
Is extending the life of capitalism really considered harm reduction? I bet more people suffer in the long run with no healthcare and constant wars.
Only if they keep making people
These motherfuckers would forcing HepC needles on every junkie if they could.
100% agree, although the post said nothing about voting
I always love when someone thinks the answer to problems usually being replied to with overly simplified (but wrong) answers is another equally simplified answer that surely explains everything.
The post doesn’t even formulate an answer. It just discredits the two “standard” answers provided. Why is everybody in this thread arguing with some strawman
Why is everybody in this thread arguing with some strawman
because OP provides 3 strawmen,
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If the Dems get a trifecta do not expect them to do anything meaningful, say it all takes too much time, and just shuffle chairs around.
Which is not ideal, but better than setting fire to everything…
The earlier we deal with the fire, the better.
But do rest assured, that fire is coming. You’re putting it off and letting it gather strength. It may just consume us all now.
That depends largely on your standpoint. If you’re already on fire then setting more fires in the hopes of getting put out with them isn’t irrational.
I don’t know if you intended “get put out with them” as a euphemism for “killed” but it fits very nicely.
If putting out each fire requires a certain amount of resources, then your chances go down, as firefighters will be busy with other fires before they get to you.
If by meaningful you mean socialist revolution, then no, and nobody expects them to. However there are things to be done better within the system and it’s something we need to do anyway
We had a Dem president after an insurrection attempt that did nothing to go after those who organized it. I doubt they’ll go after the system as it is unless we get more progressive candidates in.
Fun part is, they did so much it’s unbelievable. They were handled severely broken justice system, a bunch of judges that were appointed by the same person they tried to persecute, a bunch mechanisms and systems were completely dismantled, the majority of supreme court are outright taking orders from a outside organisation.
In less than 3 years, they managed to gather all the insurrection perpetrators, used smaller ones as a fodder to persecute bigger ones, overcame all the corruption and bullshit, got cases such tight, they even managed to “al-capone” the biggest one, to the point that was actually convicted of 34 cases. By the standards of the American judicial system, doing so much to a conservative bunch with ties, money, and power, is probably unprecedented.
But then America decided that they would rather have that convicted felon in charge again, and all this hard work went to shit.
Do I think it’s good or fair? Absolutely not. But given the system they had to operate in, Democrats in general did a good job. The obvious answer is, the system is shit and needs to be dismantled and reorganised, but that’s not what Democratic party is, and it’s not what it was elected to do.I doubt they’ll go after the system as it is unless we get more progressive candidates in.
Absolutely correct.
Like arrest all sitting maga in government, and do the needful to the pedophiles in power.
Because anything else is just letting pedos destroy your country and rape your kids.
the point of electing a democrat isn’t to fix capitalism: it’s to try to make the decay slightly slower.
It’s buying time to organize, for real this time!
but only if it’s for a no kings protest, so only like on a weekend, when the weather is nice, and does’nt stay too late, and doesn’t inconvenience the police, and only that one day, and we don’t allow people to protest with their firearms, and we don’t make any demands, or specify a thing we want changed, and don’t interrupt traffic, nor stop people from entering protested buildings, and we remain respectfully quiet, and the news won’t report on it, and i can still go shopping after, only then will a protest be acceptable.
… and the goal is to maybe get people to vote for the party of normal socital harm escalation
When we did it on a weekday they laughed and said we had no job and regular people said it should be on a weekend.
Eh none of this matters. MAGA are funding buses of people to protest where they want while claiming everyone else pays for buses. We are fucked because we let them fuck us.
my issue isn’t in the legitimacy in the eyes of the news media. it’s very obvious that the media is hostile to progressive direction.
my gripe is that protests are used to diffuse public pressure. it’s a tool to prevent change, another circus. any sort of leverage such a group could get to enact actual change is directly fought against, as unacceptable. their only goal is to get more people to vote democrat. but makes no demands from the democrats and is complicit in its rightward side.
in history peaceful protests do not acheive change as they are easy to ignore, yet we are taught otherwise, and said training conveniently ignored the more uncomfortable implementation of leverage to force change that are instead attributed to these protests. history is white washed in order to protect the stability of the exploitative system. any victims of said system are just collateral
Something something Ted Kaczynski manifesto
also known as the Unabomber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
I don’t know what you mean by “something something” though 😅
That was a central point of his manifesto. It didn’t matter if you voted Democrat or Republican they both further the goals of capital and industry. He was concerned about the fall from the height of industrialization back to subsidence farming and that the longer we delay that the worse it gets, and neither party helps deal with that.
thanks, I don’t have the time or energy to read manifestos 😅
I would recommend reading famous things like this so you can make up your own mind about it instead of having your mind made up by others 😅
and risk having your mind made up about other things by the unibomber? 😝
No nuance allowed! We good they bad! Fuck everyone who disagrees with me!
Is that what the post is conveying tho? I know there is a lot of discourse like that on Lemmy, but I don’t see it here. Feels like a strawman
Yea right, let’s elect another Republican and see how that goes. The Republican Party is decidedly more racist, sexist, anti-worker, anti-choice, anti-science, anti-healthcare, anti-regulatory, pro-corporate, pro-slavery, pro-fascist, pro-war, hyper-religious, authoritarian, and anti-progressive, than even the most centrist of Democrats.
This kind of “Both-sides-ism” is a ploy to further weaken perceptions of Democratic candidates before the midterms. The most neoliberal, centrist, corporate Democrats are leaps and bounds better for America since the Right’s embrace of Trumpism. Republicans are literally dismantling our government, our society, and our economy. A vote for any Republican will be a vote for Trump, no matter who the candidate, for as long as the party continues to exist, even long after his death.
Healthy democracies and economies lie in tension between a balance of opposing sides, and managed capitalism worked pretty well until we allowed extreme wealth to penetrate its guardrails. It’s time to swing the pendulum back to the more socialist policies Americans are desperate for, and yet another Republican president is a huge shove in the wrong direction.
cool story the post said nothing about not voting tho?
At this point, I am extremely skeptical of anything that criticizes the Democratic Party while Trump openly loots and destroys the country with weaponized incompetence, and every single Republican representative unabashedly enables him and profits from it.
I believe this kind of content is designed to push voter apathy by making comparisons between the two parties. There is no comparison. A debate about capitalism is relatively minor when choosing between thinly-veiled corporatism or concentration camps and open Nazism.
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Capitalism is working, though. The giant corporations and billionaires are doing great, while workers (MAGA, Democrat, Independent, Unaffiliated, etc) get fucked. Sucks only one party champions these rich assholes as “working for them”…
I mean close your eyes and ‘lalala’ whatever you want vut if you haven’t seen the pattern over the last 12 years maybe you never will.
It’s going to be capitalism. The question is do you want American capitalism that’s free for all, or European capitalism with worker benefits and healthcare?
European countries are installing austerity policies left and right, and have been since the 90s. They’re absolutely barrelling towards the American model in gutting their welfare states. The underlying forces that move capitalism in the direction of deep inequality[1] are endemic to capitalism itself, and are also present in whatever flavor of <adjective> capitalism you subscribe to.
[1] In short, an outsize influence of the owning class through threats of capital flight, direct lobbying, and owning the media that informs the opinions of the electorate, combined with their ability to expand this influence. This is measurable. There’s a 2014 study which shows that the positions of US politicians are pretty much exactly those of economic elites, and coincide with the wishes of the middle and working class only ever by accident (when it coincides with the wants of the economic elites, pretty much). Similar studies exist (with the same result, to be clear) for pretty much every western european country, in particular Denmark, the Netherlands, and Germany (but also others). Tfw your “short footnote” is longer than the comment itself. I feel like a regular David Foster Wallace.
Mmmm yummm delicious capitalist realism.
What you mean is social democracy, or could also be called Keynesian economic policy. The US had it too post-WW2, there’s nothing European about it. Some European countries still have remnants, but by and large we have been moving away from it too :(
I’m not sure I would agree that Democrats care about worker benefits, tbh.
“A better world is not possible”
Me: “a better world is possible”
You: “so you’re saying a better would is not possible”
Unreal.
If it’s still capitalism it’s not better
Oh yeah it’s not like Europe doesn’t have healthcare or maternity leave. Let’s just give up and let Trump win. Soooooo much better. Oh it’s ml. Ciao.
Lol not for long dumbass, get ready to get americanized
Noone wants capitalism to start working again.
We want to stop having a government that wants to murder minorities in the streets you dumbfuck
If Netflix had a show called “hunting oligarchs”, the world would show up to watch.
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It ran pretty well for quite a long time. There was still enough to go around. It’s that late-stage capitalism that’s cooking us. That said, it’s not like we can fix it, it’s gonna have to go.
Small market capitalism is decent at spreading around money but as soon as it gives way to monopoly that advantage disappears quickly. So far no country in history has been able to effectively regulate it to keep it at the small market level.
turns out the term “late-stage capitalism” is over a hundred years old . It is difficult to argue that it has been working before that.
There were plenty of unskilled and semi skilled people in the 80’s and 90’s that bought a house, raised a family and took a long vacation every year on a single tradesman’s income. We had rich fuckers back then too, but they were rare and business was pretty well distributed.
