The right loves anti-electoralism on the left, it means that they have less of a fight from the left.
Can you imagine how bad things would be if people didn’t vote if they felt like they were picking between the lesser of 2 evils?
This nation would look a whole hell of a lot like modern Florida with it’s politics because Republicans in general turn out way more often than anyone else to vote.
Ummm because nuance is a thing that exists. Global conditions, etc. I mean the guy in power during the pandemic saying we should inject bleach or nuke incoming hurricanes sure as shit helped things be worse.
Do you think gay marriage would have been protected?
Access to birth control secured?
Anti-sodomy laws getting struck down?
The Affordable Care Act passing?
Disability rights?
Do you think any of those things would have happened if Republicans been able to seize power and hold it unopposed over the last 50 years? No. None of those things would have happened. Those things happened because people further left than them got elected, the lesser of 2 evils won some elections.
They’re sitting on shaky ground because Obama refused to seat a justice, RBG refused to retire when she could have been replaced, and because Biden et all refuse to stack the courts.
Obama didn’t refuse to seat a justice, he was blocked by Mitch McConnell. Who also blocked every single judge appointment that Obama should have been able to make in the last 2 years of his presidency. And Republicans were talking about leaving that seat open until a Republican won the presidency. This is why trump has the most judicial appointments of any president.
And RBG reduced to retire likely out of pride during the Obama years, but smartly didn’t retire during the trump years.
Biden refusing to stack the courts is pretty shitty, but if he does so it’s going to open the flood gates for that being a possibility. Do I think he should? Yes. But I also think that if he does so their should be a cap put in place, but to put a cap in place would require a constitutional amendment, and there’s no way that will get through our current Senate.
It would have been on a state-by-state basis, which is what we’re coming dangerously close to anyway.
We don’t go around campaigning specifically to discourage people from voting. Our project is to get people to see beyond the seesaw spectacle.
When someone offers you two poor options, the right thing to do is to create a better option, even if you take the less bad option in the short run. Voting a Democrat into office and then congratulating ourselves on doing it is how progress slips and how we lose sight of what’s needed.
Gay marriage isn’t protected. Scotus can shoot it down on a whim
Lol Biden lost Roe
Court decision
Sucks
What rights? SSI tops out at 700$ a month, I can never have more than 2k in assets, and if I get married I lose it all. Just happened to a friend of mine, they’re going to have to annul their marriage so they don’t starve to death. “disability rights”.
Because Republicans? We’ve not had plenty of blues elected. We’ve seen abysmal showings from the left and republicans being elected across the nation who are setting out to destroy people’s rights.
The crux of the issue is, where you see a democracy that is keeping fascism at bay, we see through the illusion of choice that keeps allowing the slow steady march towards fascism.
It’s a ratchet. Gop moves everything rightward (including the Dems) and the Dems refuse to push left in the name of “bipartisanship”. Then conditions get worse (because the policy is further right than before), Dems eventually lose because they allow gridlock and the ratchet suddenly frees up and cranks to the right again.
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
further down:
In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.
Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page present historical data that show that average Americans, even when represented by majoritarian interest groups, have negligible influence in shaping public policy. In sharp contrast, the economic elites and their business-oriented interest groups wield tremendous influence in public policy.
Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez have shown that the flow of income to the top has resulted in a concentration of wealth that is not only self-sustaining but likely to perpetuate the transfer of more wealth to the wealthiest, at a cost to everyone else.
This combination – a concentration of wealth at the top with the domination of policymaking by the economic elite, does not bode well for new policies that would be established for the common good.
In health care reform, the common good would have been served by improving coverage through the removal of financial barriers to care and by expanding coverage to everyone. Instead, the interests of the economic elite were served by increasing the market for private insurance products that, for the majority, increased financial barriers to care and reduced choice of providers, while leaving tens of millions of the most vulnerable without any coverage. More wealth moves to the passive investors at the top, while the deterioration in coverage requires average Americans to spend more out-of-pocket through higher deductibles.
We desperately need a well-designed single payer system if we want everyone to have the health care that they should have. At this point it appears that the economic elites are not going to allow single payer, and we will have no say.
Even though our Constitution laid the plans for a democracy, by fiat we now have a plutarchy (plutocratic oligarchy). Although Gilens and Page have shown that our Majoritarian Electoral Democracy has “only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy,” perhaps the people can still change that. Although recent history demonstrates citizen inertia, that does not necessarily lock in the future. Think of Social Security, Medicare, and the Civil Rights Act.
A decade ago, in a book review for the NEJM on “Universal Coverage: The Elusive Quest for National Health Insurance” by Rick Mayes, I wrote the following: “Mayes does give us hope. Although he acknowledges that critical junctures are rare, he notes that they do occur, especially in response to unmet social needs. Perhaps the deterioration in insurance coverage that has taken place may have brought us much closer to our next critical juncture than most of us realize.” (https://www.pnhp.org/news/2005/july/rick-mayes-on-the-elusive-quest-for-national-health-insurance)
So what can we do to reverse the process under which “policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans”? Will citizen action through education, coalitions and grassroots efforts be adequate? In spite of such ongoing efforts, we have certainly fallen short so far.
History has taken us to a point wherein the economic elite rules. Can the people revitalize democracy, or is the wealthy ruling class too powerful? If the elite are not responsive to our needs, will our nation be ripe for civil unrest? At the moment, citizen inertia continues to empower the economic elite.
No the right actually hates that. Democrats have been shrieking at us to vote for years even though the entire left in the US is a tiny fraction of the registered electorate. But the right wing won’t stop screaming at us about it.
The right loves anti-electoralism on the left, it means that they have less of a fight from the left.
Can you imagine how bad things would be if people didn’t vote if they felt like they were picking between the lesser of 2 evils?
This nation would look a whole hell of a lot like modern Florida with it’s politics because Republicans in general turn out way more often than anyone else to vote.
Then why have things been getting so much worse over the past 50 years even with plenty of blue boys and gals getting put in office?
Ummm because nuance is a thing that exists. Global conditions, etc. I mean the guy in power during the pandemic saying we should inject bleach or nuke incoming hurricanes sure as shit helped things be worse.
What about the good that has happened?
Do you think gay marriage would have been protected?
Access to birth control secured?
Anti-sodomy laws getting struck down?
The Affordable Care Act passing?
Disability rights?
Do you think any of those things would have happened if Republicans been able to seize power and hold it unopposed over the last 50 years? No. None of those things would have happened. Those things happened because people further left than them got elected, the lesser of 2 evils won some elections.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of better.
disability rights were fought for by disabled people, not fucking democrats. Gay people rioted to get their rights.
and do you actually think contraceptives are secured?
Do you think any of those things would have passed in a country where people didn’t vote?
And all those rights secured by supreme court rulings are sitting on shaky ground, why? Republicans stacking the courts.
They’re sitting on shaky ground because Obama refused to seat a justice, RBG refused to retire when she could have been replaced, and because Biden et all refuse to stack the courts.
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Obama didn’t refuse to seat a justice, he was blocked by Mitch McConnell. Who also blocked every single judge appointment that Obama should have been able to make in the last 2 years of his presidency. And Republicans were talking about leaving that seat open until a Republican won the presidency. This is why trump has the most judicial appointments of any president.
And RBG reduced to retire likely out of pride during the Obama years, but smartly didn’t retire during the trump years.
Biden refusing to stack the courts is pretty shitty, but if he does so it’s going to open the flood gates for that being a possibility. Do I think he should? Yes. But I also think that if he does so their should be a cap put in place, but to put a cap in place would require a constitutional amendment, and there’s no way that will get through our current Senate.
It would have been on a state-by-state basis, which is what we’re coming dangerously close to anyway.
We don’t go around campaigning specifically to discourage people from voting. Our project is to get people to see beyond the seesaw spectacle.
When someone offers you two poor options, the right thing to do is to create a better option, even if you take the less bad option in the short run. Voting a Democrat into office and then congratulating ourselves on doing it is how progress slips and how we lose sight of what’s needed.
Gay marriage isn’t protected. Scotus can shoot it down on a whim
Lol Biden lost Roe
Court decision
Sucks
What rights? SSI tops out at 700$ a month, I can never have more than 2k in assets, and if I get married I lose it all. Just happened to a friend of mine, they’re going to have to annul their marriage so they don’t starve to death. “disability rights”.
Because Republicans? We’ve not had plenty of blues elected. We’ve seen abysmal showings from the left and republicans being elected across the nation who are setting out to destroy people’s rights.
The crux of the issue is, where you see a democracy that is keeping fascism at bay, we see through the illusion of choice that keeps allowing the slow steady march towards fascism.
It’s a ratchet. Gop moves everything rightward (including the Dems) and the Dems refuse to push left in the name of “bipartisanship”. Then conditions get worse (because the policy is further right than before), Dems eventually lose because they allow gridlock and the ratchet suddenly frees up and cranks to the right again.
And how much worse would it be right now if Dems never won elections due to people saying “this dem isn’t far enough left therefore I won’t vote”?
How far right would things have flown?
Voting for the lesser of 2 evils reduces harm now. And when the lesser of 2 evils isn’t pushed that things are allowed to shift further to shit.
Let me be more blunt. We do not live in a democracy. Voting is fundamentallly unable to change that.
idk man there’s a literal genocide going on right now I think we’re past the point of quibbling over minor differences in the deree of evil.
A genocide being perpetrated by Republicans.
Who can forget these 16 states (blue states) introducing trans refugee bills. Does that look like something republicans would do?
The parties are not the same, there are differences between them.
Study: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens:
From the abstract:
further down:
public comment by Don McCanne, MD, regarding the study::
No the right actually hates that. Democrats have been shrieking at us to vote for years even though the entire left in the US is a tiny fraction of the registered electorate. But the right wing won’t stop screaming at us about it.
And the right is currently openly talking about raising the voting age because younger people tend to vote more progressive.
Sure sounds like voting works and has republicans scared.