We have a democracy as long as we can keep it. If we lose our democracy we have no one to blame but ourselves.
The purpose of a system is what it does, and America has never done Democracy. Our government is designed to limit choice to only those candidates that the owners of this country find acceptable, and this system is not threatened by the electoral failure of the Democrats, or even the loss of an entire major party, so long as the capitalists own any new party that rises to replace it.
Electoralism is a trap. Voting won’t save us. We have to save us, and we aren’t all going to make it unless we can start working together outside of the existing political establishment.
The electoral college and our first-past-the-post system is a huge part of the problem. With ranked choice voting we would have more choices for candidates and progressives and socialists would have a better shot.
We have been a democracy since the founding of our country. Consider reading a US history book to learn more. Our democracy is flawed. Fascists leveraged the flaws in our democracy to take it away. That’s why Republican voters had to actually vote to take our democracy away, but of course the capture of our democracy has been happening slowly before that. Hopefully fascist incompetence means this isn’t the end for democracy, but we can’t count on that.
Our government is designed to limit choice to only those candidates that the owners of this country find acceptable, and this system is not threatened by the electoral failure of the Democrats, or even the loss of an entire major party, so long as the capitalists own any new party that rises to replace it.
Since Citizens United v. FEC corporations have had an outsized influence in our elections with unrestricted independent expenditures. But even before that, since Regan we’ve collectively adopted neoliberalism as a country. We’ve prioritized markets being free over people being free and all but the rich are worse off because of it. Late-stage capitalism has led us straight to an oligarchy of billionaires pledging fealty to a dictator.
It didn’t have to be this way. We could have chosen socialism, changed to worker ownership of corporations, and levied wealth taxes on the rich. The issue was that we failed to get neoliberalism out of the minds of the population. People say something along of the lines of ‘socialism doesn’t work’ and maybe even ‘the soviet union collapsed’ reflexively when they hear the word socialism.
Part of what we need to do is teach people that neoliberalism is scam and that socialism is the answer to their problems. In the coming years we are going to have a lot evidence that we can show people. But there is no sense in waiting. We can start on that now.
Electoralism is a trap. Voting won’t save us. We have to save us, and we aren’t all going to make it unless we can start working together outside of the existing political establishment.
Democracy is the best system we have for inclusive political institutions. If you know a better one that is more inclusive please share it. We of course need to organize between elections, now more than ever. But if you never vote when you get the chance, and we will be lucky if we ever do, all that organization goes to waste.
The electoral college and our first-past-the-post system is a huge part of the problem. With ranked choice voting we would have more choices for candidates and progressives and socialists would have a better shot.
You’re not wrong, but it’s irrelevant so long as we live under parties that benefit from this status quo. There’s no way to get ranked choice voting without overthrowing the two-party system first. Things will have to get worse before they can get better.
We have been a democracy since the founding of our country. Consider reading a US history book to learn more. Our democracy is flawed.
You seem to have contradicted yourself. Are we a democracy or are we flawed? If the system is structured so badly that fascists can claim totalizing power, can you really call the system democratic?
It didn’t have to be this way. We could have chosen socialism
“We” don’t get to make that choice. The choices available are selected by capitalists and it has been that way since this country was founded.
These aren’t mutually exclusive. Humans are imperfect. The systems we build are imperfect as a result. People have been measuring democracies on a scale from 0 to 10.
The choices available are selected by capitalists and it has been that way since this country was founded.
The US was made by wealthy land and slave owners. The compromises in the document reflect that. After WWII, McCarthyism did a lot to undermine communism, socialism, and the left in general in the US. It laid the ground work for the neoliberals who would come later to fill the minds of Americans with their ideology. The right in this country has been working to undermine the left for a long time. Blaming everything on democracy really misappropriates blame here. Especially when it’s Republicans who have been working to undermine democracy.
Things will have to get worse before they can get better.
Things only get better by making them better. What accelerationism misunderstands is that things haven’t got better in the past because bad things happened to people. It’s that things have gotten better because people learned from the bad things that happened to them and then used that knowledge to make things better. If we let things get bad and no one learns anything, it won’t do any good. We have to educate people. And we can do that without things getting worse.
As it is now we might learn a lot of lessons from the rise of christo-fascism. But we may not be able to act on them. These election results have truly fucked us. Fascists might end up killing us all with fossil fuel emissions. But of course billionaires will survive in their apocalypse bunkers.
The purpose of a system is what it does, and America has never done Democracy. Our government is designed to limit choice to only those candidates that the owners of this country find acceptable, and this system is not threatened by the electoral failure of the Democrats, or even the loss of an entire major party, so long as the capitalists own any new party that rises to replace it.
Electoralism is a trap. Voting won’t save us. We have to save us, and we aren’t all going to make it unless we can start working together outside of the existing political establishment.
The electoral college and our first-past-the-post system is a huge part of the problem. With ranked choice voting we would have more choices for candidates and progressives and socialists would have a better shot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo
We have been a democracy since the founding of our country. Consider reading a US history book to learn more. Our democracy is flawed. Fascists leveraged the flaws in our democracy to take it away. That’s why Republican voters had to actually vote to take our democracy away, but of course the capture of our democracy has been happening slowly before that. Hopefully fascist incompetence means this isn’t the end for democracy, but we can’t count on that.
Since Citizens United v. FEC corporations have had an outsized influence in our elections with unrestricted independent expenditures. But even before that, since Regan we’ve collectively adopted neoliberalism as a country. We’ve prioritized markets being free over people being free and all but the rich are worse off because of it. Late-stage capitalism has led us straight to an oligarchy of billionaires pledging fealty to a dictator.
It didn’t have to be this way. We could have chosen socialism, changed to worker ownership of corporations, and levied wealth taxes on the rich. The issue was that we failed to get neoliberalism out of the minds of the population. People say something along of the lines of ‘socialism doesn’t work’ and maybe even ‘the soviet union collapsed’ reflexively when they hear the word socialism.
Part of what we need to do is teach people that neoliberalism is scam and that socialism is the answer to their problems. In the coming years we are going to have a lot evidence that we can show people. But there is no sense in waiting. We can start on that now.
Democracy is the best system we have for inclusive political institutions. If you know a better one that is more inclusive please share it. We of course need to organize between elections, now more than ever. But if you never vote when you get the chance, and we will be lucky if we ever do, all that organization goes to waste.
You’re not wrong, but it’s irrelevant so long as we live under parties that benefit from this status quo. There’s no way to get ranked choice voting without overthrowing the two-party system first. Things will have to get worse before they can get better.
You seem to have contradicted yourself. Are we a democracy or are we flawed? If the system is structured so badly that fascists can claim totalizing power, can you really call the system democratic?
“We” don’t get to make that choice. The choices available are selected by capitalists and it has been that way since this country was founded.
There has been some progress in this regard. So it is possible to change systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_United_States
These aren’t mutually exclusive. Humans are imperfect. The systems we build are imperfect as a result. People have been measuring democracies on a scale from 0 to 10.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu?time=2023
The US was made by wealthy land and slave owners. The compromises in the document reflect that. After WWII, McCarthyism did a lot to undermine communism, socialism, and the left in general in the US. It laid the ground work for the neoliberals who would come later to fill the minds of Americans with their ideology. The right in this country has been working to undermine the left for a long time. Blaming everything on democracy really misappropriates blame here. Especially when it’s Republicans who have been working to undermine democracy.
Things only get better by making them better. What accelerationism misunderstands is that things haven’t got better in the past because bad things happened to people. It’s that things have gotten better because people learned from the bad things that happened to them and then used that knowledge to make things better. If we let things get bad and no one learns anything, it won’t do any good. We have to educate people. And we can do that without things getting worse.
As it is now we might learn a lot of lessons from the rise of christo-fascism. But we may not be able to act on them. These election results have truly fucked us. Fascists might end up killing us all with fossil fuel emissions. But of course billionaires will survive in their apocalypse bunkers.