this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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In the 70s, people were making this argument about voting for the lesser of two evils, but it was between two Keynesians rather than two neoliberals. That was 50 years ago. Nixon was to the left of every president in my lifetime. 50 years from now, just how right wing will the Democrat we have to vote for be?
With Gavin Newsom, a Charlie Kirk podcast guest, the choice in 2028 might be two fascists.
We lost to Nixon and it got worse. We lost to Regan and it got worse. We lost to two different Bushes and it got worse. Now we've lost to Trump twice and it got worse.
The throughline is that we keep losing to the greater evil and suffering the consequences of things getting worse as a result. That includes worse choices next time as the Democrats move to the right to chase the people who vote for the greater evil. As opposed to going for people who don't vote or throw away their vote to a third party.
The Democratic Party is going to be rightwing until people learn we have to vote in addition to everything else to get Democrats to move to the left. They will only think about moving left if they win elections. And they only move left when they think they have enough voters to win when they do move.
If we, leftists, want better choices in 50 years we have got to vote in records numbers, so if Democrats get their act together and get someone half-way decent they win. And when they do, they see a leftist voter block got them there.
We elected Carter and it got worse, we elected Clinton and it got worse, we elected Obama and it got worse, we elected Biden and it got worse.
The throughline is that we keep beating the greater evil and suffering the consequences of things getting worse as a result.
Those wins are we how we got gay marriage. After decades of activism queer people won rights. It took time and effort and consistently turning out for elections. And a ton of shifting the culture through the media people consumed. But the voting is a mechanical necessity to bring that result about. There's no way around it. We need to vote for the furthest left Democrats we can.
I put out half of the fires that started in my kitchen, but my house still burned down! Putting out fires is a sucker's game.
If even after putting out fire the house burns down you do have to cut your loses and let the house burn down.
That's what I'm saying, man! I must have turned off the oven when I was done cooking a hundred times. And the very first time I don't turn the oven off, it starts a fire. So what good did turning the oven off do?
If you turn off the oven and it still catches on fire, that's not a you problem, that's a problem with the oven. No amount of turning the knob will make it safe.
Yeah, it's a manufacturer defect. Yesterday I made lasagna and turned it off when I was done. But today I made brownies and didn't turn off the oven, and now my house is charred rubble! I'm suing the oven manufacturer
I mean in your tortured metaphor, it's no error, it's explicitly a feature put there by the manufacturer. The guys who put the constitution together all agreed, democratic government should represent the wealthy land-owning elite and do as much as it can to capture and dissipate any broadly popular political movement from the classes below them. The shape and nature of the ruling class it works for has changed a little, but its still fundamentally that same system.
So you're saying even if we lose again and again, we have to keep trying and hold onto hope? No way, man! Giving up and leaving our friends for dead is the leftist choice. Actually trying is neoliberalism
Add a /s please to jokes like that, my heart needs it
The accelerationists unironically believe that!
/s
🫶
Guess what would have happened if Nixon and Reagan had lost
The point is that they didn't. It's all well and good for those of use who choose to talk about politics in our free time to say that, yes, sometimes you have to vote for someone you don't like in order to prevent a worse outcome. But that's a conversation between individuals! As a campaign message, the kind of thing that needs broad appeal to millions of voters, that is a loosing message that only depresses turnout!
Good thing I'm not a campaign manager and you're not the entire voting population. You and I are two individuals. And as you say, we should talk about strategic choices.
yayyy the same conversation we have every week on this websiteeeeeee shall we remind one another that 30 years ago there was a protest in tiananmen while we're at it
I mean, the Democrats just ran a historically bad campaign. No primary, consistently bad polling, a candidate with one foot in the grave swapped out at the very last minuet for a VP who didn't even survive Super Tuesday back in 2020.
That nearly a year later we keep rehashing the efficacy of "Vote Blue No Matter" lesser-evil strategic voting, kinda doesn't bode well, does it? That even those of us plugged in and paying attention feel like the party isn't gonna learn any lessons, so we better start preemptively defending their future fuck ups. You think the broader public of disinterested yankees is really gonna rally behind that?
Why are you backpedalling on your opinion? You said it's "all well and good" for two individuals like us to talk about strategic voting. Were you lying when you said that?
not backpedaling, just expressing exhaustion
yes, obviously vote for the least bad candidate when there's nothing better. But fuck, it's not even an election year and we're still saying that rather than asking for better candidates
Well that's OP's fault for saying the party can't be reformed. There are people like Zohran Mamdani who can take over the party the same way Trump took over the Reps. And OP wants you to not even try, and be stuck with the same two choices forever.