this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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It's not? That's literally what the Tea Party did.
Not really. The Tear Party replaced a pro-business party with an even more pro-business party. Or they replaced the pro-business party with a more bigoted pro-business party. They made no fundamental challenge to the power of wealth and influence within the Republican party. And they were not a real grass roots organization.
Now I have no idea if that's what the Tea Party did as I was way too young for politics at that time, but American progressives regard this particular strategy as nothing less than anathema to their very existence.
Yes, because it would require them to vote in the primaries to demonstrate the capture of the voting base?
No, because most progressives would never make that threat, let alone follow up on it. I mean would you say "they didn't do what we want, don't vote Democrat"? Exactly.
The fact is that the explicit threat doesn't need to be made for there to be a threat - the Tea Party generally did not make explicit threats. The implicit threat by demonstrating a significant portion of the voting base as adhering to your ideas is, itself, a threat.
Meanwhile, progressives very often, as demonstrated on here, regularly say "The Dems haven't done what we want, don't vote Democrat!" and act surprised that their total lack of demonstration of support in elections for progressive candidates has failed to give them pull with the national party with this threat.
Bernie's performance in the primary was enough of a demonstration. The DNC's obstinacy can't be spun as ignorance after the lengths they went to to keep Bernie down (and, you know, primary results). The point has been demonstrated and they don't fucking care; make of that what you will.
What's happening on Lemmy is a bunch of basement dwellers (including yours truly) yelling at each other. Nobody with any real amount of reach is saying this; that's why Uncommitted (even though they didn't even say "don't vote for Harris") was such a big deal and why so many progressives fucking hated it. I remember in 2024 that for every one person even remotely critical of Biden or Harris there would be nine people calling them everything from undercover MAGA to a Russian troll to a useful idiot and downvoted to hell. The anti-leftist crusades still haven't ended, despite left-leaning voters having overwhelmingly voted for Harris and most non-voters by far being moderates. I'm not passing judgement on either position as that's irrelevant to the argument being made, but while there's a loud anti-Democrat minority, reality has clearly and repeatedly demonstrated how the majority of progressives feel about this.
In 2016, when his success was overwhelmingly due to anti-Hillary sentiment? Bernie won West fucking Virginia, for Christ's sake. It's not because Bernie or progressivism was popular there. Or in 2020, when Bernie won a whopping 26% of the vote?
It's not ignorance. It's complacency - a complacency that is enabled by progressive detachment from Dem politics. Progressives regularly fail to demonstrate significant electoral pull, and then question why no one fucking listens to us.
Alright, but considering that many groups involved with the Uncommitted movement ended up, afterwards, explicitly saying "Don't vote for Harris"...?
Considering that many of them were and remain useful idiots peddling the exact same talking points now as they were then about how voting is implicitly (or sometimes explicitly) worthless?
You also don't seem to remember the ratios very well, considering that such users were highly upvoted and comment chains filled with their supporters; rarely did it drop under 50-50, and the asspat brigade was always there to fluff them.
And yet of the 10 million votes lost between 2020 and 2024, they were overwhelmingly lost from young, progressive voters who cited progressive issues as their reason for not voting for Harris.
One expects right-wing ghouls to be idiots who are okay with increased suffering for marginalized demographics. Leftists who claim to believe otherwise and then act in direct contradiction to those stated values are a bit more jarring.
There's a loud and influential anti-Democrat minority whose effect is multiplicative on the already small turnouts of Dem primaries.
If 2% of the electorate convinces another 2% of the electorate not to vote, that's 8% of the votes lost in a general election with a typical turnout of ~50%, and 20% of the votes in a primary election with a typical turnout of ~20%
The majority of progressives voting is hindered by that very real and significant minority, especially when general elections are won on margins of 1-2% of the actively voting electorate and primaries demonstrate to parties the general sentiment of the party's base.
Setting aside establishment collusion because I'm sure you've read that Jacobin article already, 26% percent of the vote is enough to "capture a small enough portion of your voting base that covers the margin of victory (aka: the short hairs) and demand the party do your bidding". If you disagree with that strategy your argument is with the parent comment, but the condition was fulfilled in 2020.
What, exactly? You're not making any point.
How in the actual fuck is 26% of the vote (after ridiculous amounts of sabotage, mind you) detachment? That's more than twice the proportion of progressives in the Democratic Party (p.96).
Why do you feel the need to respond to statements of fact with moral condemnation? That could be true and it would have no bearing on my argument.
It depended on the community, but on mainstream communities it was a lot more than "rarely". Source: I was one of the ones getting downvoted and flooded with a hundred versions of the same three arguments. That was about the time I lost faith in American democracy, and certainly not because I was getting upvoted when saying progressives needed to pick more fights with the DNC.
Where did you get "young, progressive"? In battleground states the economy was the top issue according to your own link, and as I said before there's no guarantee that all or even most Gaza non-voters are progressives. Yes, opposing genocide isn't a moderate position, but it's not like progressive politics come as one prepackaged set. It's not like Midwest Arabs suddenly became progressive overnight.
That's not the point. Since it's mostly moderates who dropped the ball, the anti-leftist crusades are beating a dead horse, alienating potential allies for no real purpose and a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes leftists an (occasionally) effective political force. Hint: It's not sheer numbers or pandering to the establishment.
This argument would hold water if the "mainstream" progressive narrative was anti-Democrat, but with that decidedly not the case non-voters were people already predisposed to coming to that conclusion for one reason or another. You'd need to completely eliminate anti-Democrat rhetoric to have a shot at keeping those people, which would entail creating a pro-Harris walled garden that realistically cannot exist. Leftwing dissent isn't even your biggest problem here; Republicans are always out there happy to exploit the Dems' political weaknesses, and good luck getting those Arab-Americans to shut up about all those funerals they keep attending and the disdain they keep receiving from the Democrats for it. Remember who organized and formed the core of Uncommitted? The "ideal" (I personally consider it dystopian) environment you're gunning for is a fool's errand because unfortunately America happens to be a society.