"Progressives should not make the same mistake that Ernst Thälmann made in 1932. The leader of the German Communist Party, Thälmann saw mainstream liberals as his enemies, and so the center and left never joined forces against the Nazis. Thälmann famously said that ‘some Nazi trees must not be allowed to overshadow a forest’ of social democrats, whom he sneeringly called ‘social fascists.’
After Adolf Hitler gained power in 1933, Thälmann was arrested. He was shot on Hitler’s orders in Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944."
You need ranked voting
Just a note, while ranked voting is much better, the people who are influenced by parties that game the system and a gullible ignorant base usually consolidate themselves into one big party that still does everything to undermine the rest of the coalitions as long as it makes them look bad even if it’s worse off for society as a whole and that like a tumor can keep growing until it goes past the midpoint for toppling the democracy that elected it. It’s part of the solution, but not all of it, societies act like headless chickens when things get bad enough, regardless of who was responsible for them. For example, Brexit.
He can write executive orders all day long but unless he’s repealing a previous order, it requires Congress to fund them.
And you might think he’ll just blunder along like last time, and I’d like to point out he did a lot of damage last time, but I believe he is FULLY aware of Project 2025 and I think he would try his best to enact much of it because it involves loyalty to him and enriching him. Either way, I’m not interested in finding out.
These posts are always missing the point. Voters will vote third party. Your moral claims won’t change that, but your candidate’s policies could. Also, most of us don’t live in swing states. Don’t pretend our vote matters when it never did.
Not a single party on the face of the earth is gonna switch to an alternative voting system. Democracy devolving into 2 parties is a problem in nearly every country and unfortunately the ones who can make the change are the ones who benefit from first pass the post voting
No “democratic” party is gonna switch to STAR or a similar voting system unless the citizens start being very loud.
On other hand, radicalizing people to support alternative voting is also very hard, because it is hard to explain and hard to understand for majority of people and its often viewed as if the supporter is trying to benefit from the said change and trying to sabotage democracy, when in reality, they are the ones who want real democracy
After Adolf Hitler gained power in 1933
WHO GAVE HITLER POWER MOTHER FUCKER?
Nobody in history has been more vindicated than Ernst motherfucking Thälmann. A vote for a Social Democrat is a vote for fascism now just as it was then - and the Democrats aren’t even that!
Vote for who YOU want to be president, regardless of if they have a chance to win or not. I wasn’t going to vote for Biden (or Trump) no matter what. I see people saying if you vote 3rd party you’re waisting your vote. You aren’t. You are supporting the candidate you like.
We keep doing “harm reduction” but after what point is is truly harm reduction and when does it because a slow decline into fascism? Right now the “harm reduction” policy means voting for genocide, war, a fascist border policy, less social programs for the poor, more money for the rich, mass censorship, and surveillance. What will you Liberals say when the Kamala runs again but even more right wing, and then what? When does the insanity end? At what point do we vote for Fascists as a form of “harm reduction” while the planet dies? How long do we truly have to keep making the capitalist class rich at our expense before there is no future generations to protect? I reject this line of thinking, true freedom cannot come from reform. We need a new revolution or we will not be alive to tell our story.
Plus we keep using this outdated first-past-the-post voting system in the 21st century.
Yup. We need ranked choice/instant runoff voting first.
Approval Voting is even better.
Literally any voting system other than the one we use is an improvement.
Yeah, ranked choice already seems to have a lot of momentum, and would fix a lot. That counts more than theoretical perfection that may not even exist in the real world.
I think people just want the emotional satisfaction of submitting a vote that says “this is my preferred person”
I second Approval Voting. STAR as well, but perhaps slightly less intuitive.
That’s why one should always vote for Democrats who support voting system reform.
Are we talking about the same Democrats that sued to keep ranked choice boating off the DC ballot this year? or the Democrats that chose to keep ranked choice voting that had already been passed by voters off the Alexandria VA ballot?
I interpreted it as “vote only for those democrats who support voting reform,” but it could also be sarcasm.
Do those sound like Democrats who support voting system reform?
We need the presidency first. We need a majority in both houses first. We need a supermajority in the senate first. We need a 2/3 majority in the senate first. We need to completely overhaul the voting system first.
There’s always something we need to do first. It’s right there on the timetable. Timetable subject to change. Offer void in red states.
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What’s your plan to change the system?
Different user, but still have an idea.
Take over the DNC with actual leftists that will implement better voting systems, starting at the lower levels with grassroots campaigns, and slowly work our way up.
We desperately need more real third-party participation in politics, but voting for third parties in presidential elections doesn’t make that happen—the US voting system isn’t a business that adapts its products to meet consumer demand.
Yup. We need ranked choice balloting first.
in presidential elections
Or in House of Representative, or Senate. The real power is in Congress.
Local elections is where most of the current people in power got started. Anyone voting for third party in the presidential race missed the boat.
Vote progressives into local offices so they can get experience to work in state offices so they can get experience to work in Congress so they can get experience to be a good presidential candidate. Also to fill offices at every level with progressives.
And it’s a hell of a lot easier to reform voting there too.
That… is the exact opposite of what the article is arguing. If one side of the political spectrum (inevitably right-wing) unites, they immediately run over the side that is split up into different fragments that are arguing over just how much of a school lunch should be subsidized by the government.
And we have seen this in the modern day as well. A couple months back basically the entire Left/Center-Left of France had to unite to try and prevent fascists from taking power and… it is unclear if they actually succeeded.
Its fun to parrot the exact same text every single time a topic comes up. But shit like this is a lot more important than meming about Subway and it is well worth understanding what efforts do and don’t address and think through those problems. Otherwise we just leave ourselves more and more vulnerable to hate.
The point though is that ranked choice allows you all the benefits of 3rd parties without the downsides.
One can just as easily argue that that is the point of primaries in the US and other countries. You get a wide range of left and right leaning candidates and you downselect based on who the majority wants as well as general election theory to handle moderates.
And… the end result is that people get incredibly pissy when their candidate doesn’t win and disenfranchise themselves. Theoretically, a very strict ranked choice model that requires ALL candidates to be ranked could help with that but you still get into the realm of “protest votes”. See: People who refused to vote for Biden because he had shit stances on genocide and who would have given trump, who is openly genocidal, the win.
The reality is that we need to actually educate people on how governments work to undo decades of “haw haw, douche or a turd sandwich” levels of narrative. But we also need the politicians to actually unite against common threats. The fascists already understand that. But the Left continues to infight at every opportunity.
voting for third parties in presidential elections doesn’t make that happen
In a winner-take-all system, the marginal votes on the winning and losing side don’t matter. Third parties are an extrapolation of this principle. But when you’re voting in a state that is 60/40 for a given party, any individual vote for a given party is equally meaningful.
The only real benefit to valuing a Big Two party over a Third Party is if you’re in a swing state, where the odds of your vote being the tipping point are reasonably high. And even then, the powers invested in the partisan state secretary and county election’s commissioner offices render that decision relatively meaningless.
People losing their shit at Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan in 2000 seem to have completely overlooked the impact of the mass voter disenfranchisement under Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris, the Butterfly Ballot design that confused voters into voting Buchanan over Gore, as well as the transformative impact of the Brooks Brother’s Riot and the subsequent SCOTUS decision to halt the vote count in Dem leaning districts.
At some level, Americans must stop treating their elections process as free and fair, and then deflecting blame of defeat onto anyone who doesn’t vote for your favorite candidate.
Tbf, it very much appears similar to battered partner syndrome. It’s going to be painful either way, but if I stay blah blah blah.
Don’t feed up on the propaganda all it takes is a bunch of celebrities endorsing third parties and then they become popular enough to make a change. The moment the red and blue start to lose votes and their grip on power they have to go in damage control mode and change their politics to please people and get votes back.
The liberals fucking won that election and it was the liberal Hindenburg appointing Hitler to the Chancellorship that facilitated his rise to power, not anything the KPD did. This is disgusting historical revisionism that a search engine could dispel in 5 seconds, but you choose to warp history to make it look like Hitler actually won the election and make the liberals who enabled him seem blameless. It is, in effect, apologia for Nazi collaborators. Exactly appropriate for someone shilling for Dems while they gleefully subsidize genocide.
there sure seems to be a lot of Nazi apologia coming out of .world recently. wonder why that is 🤔
I’ve seen a lot more come out of lemmy.ml.
Especially the Russian and Chinese kind, they apologise for all kinds of atrocities those fascist states make. Even apologise illegal invasions of sovereign nations.
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No way it’s something connected to America, one of the most direct inspirations for the Nazis. No, the reason there’s this Nazi apologia must be the sissy pee.
Gleefully?
No you’re right they’re super sad about funding the genocide
I feel like we need something like the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact that is aiming to eliminate the electoral college, but for Ranked Choice.
Passing this federally is too hard. We need do to this state by state.
Until I can vote for a third party with RCV, then I might as well be saying that I have zero preference about the GOP and DNC options on the table.
Alaska does it (assuming they won’t repeal it in nov). Oregon is going to try and do it, if it hopefully passes. If we get two states proving it works and isn’t a problem, that momentum can snowball.
Please help support the RCV effort in Oregon if you can. https://www.oregonrcv.org/
I heard this a couple of days ago, and the more I’m looking into it, the more I find the green party a joke at best.
Alaska has a number of things. A population of conservationists amoung the general population who are likely disaffected. An environment that is being exploited harder than most states. Now ranked choice voting. Most people would see them as the environmentalist party. How much good could they do towards that cause if they got into that state legislature? What if they could take the congress seat or a senator? If they took the electoral votes it would be harder since the ranked choice only seems to be for the states choice, but they could prove they could win at some level. How many candidates are they running in Alaska? One, jill stein. How much effort are they putting in there for her? I can’t tell. The main criticism of them does not exist there, but they aren’t even trying. They can accomplish many of there goals there more easily than anywhere else. It’s the perfect storm for them. Pathetic.
I wish it were different, but the Green Party sucks in the two countries I’ve lived in. I want to vote for environmentalists, but they seem to be Russian shills in the US, and they’ve had literal stasi members in Germany, where they were so opposed to nuclear, that the country still uses mostly coal.
Rightwing Dems that get to the primary off corporate donors in the primary will never let RCC take over
The only reason they win in generals is the only other option is Republicans.
To fix anything on the federal level we need the Dem party onboard and all on the same page, then heavy majorities, then fix the system
I’d argue that you don’t need it in every state. You just need it in enough states to make a 3rd party candidate viable.
Look up the Moral Majority. They wrested control of the GOP from Nelson Rockefeller et al by showing up at every local Republican function with enough votes to make sure they got heard. They started out putting their sheriffs and county clerks on the ballots.
Dems are not letting that happen.
Problem is that RCV will only have a chance in deep blue states, and all it would accomplish is reducing the blue representation in congress.
To put it bluntly, all it would accomplish is more in fighting and contributing to the reputation that Dems are ineffective. Except, it would be the “blue aligned coalition” instead of “Dems”
The only real path to making this change is to give Dems a super majority so they can amend the constitution.
And, well, the minority of Red voters have a majority of power thanks to the electoral college, so a super majority is absolutely impossible for the foreseeable future.
Edit - it’d also cause disruptions in States that don’t adopt RCV, as “progressives” protest vote 3rd party and sandbag the Dems
Blaming progressives for not aligning with centrists instead of blaming centrists for siding with Nazis to lock out progressives is a weird take.
That’s historical revisionism. They would have easily created a coalition government to oppose Hitler, but without the support of the communist party, the conservative block ultimately held onto control, and Hitler was appointed chancellor by Hindenburg.
You’re disingenuously conflating the conservatives that ceded power to the Nazi party (that had only taken about 30% of the vote) with the center left that reached out to the communists in an attempt to stop them. A decision by the head of the communist party that directly led to the murder of millions of people, including himself.
We are talking about a parliamentary system. The communists could have formed a coalition government that had a majority, but they refused. Without their support, no party won a majority or were able to form a majority coalition government, and the Nazis were able to take control from the conservatives in power (or more accurately, they gave it to them freely).
I’m not a historian, so someone correct me if I’m wrong.
That comment was not referring to literal nazis. They were talking about the American right wing.
Ok. Then I was explaining why it’s not a “weird take.” Because, you know… History.
It may not have been a weird take in the early 20th century. It’s a weird take now.
It’s literally an equivalent scenario.
Ah, of course. America’s communist party should be trying to form a coalition government in Parliament this year. Literally equivalent.
Essentially, yes. Bernie Sanders caucuses with the DNC.
No, at no point did the Centre try to form a coalition with the KPD, but were turned down. In the Weimar system, it is the Chancellor that is in charge of forming coalitions, so even if the KPD, SPD, and Centre had enough seats to form a majority (which they didn’t), they couldn’t just form a coalition. This is why Franz Von Papen was appointed by Hindenburg, since he was expected to be able to convince the Centre party and Nazis to form a coalition with the conservatives and monarchists. And why when that failed and there was a failure to form a ruling coalition that Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor to create a Nazi lead coalition.
Huh. Thanks for the correction. Sounds like Hindenburg sold Germany out big time.
Hitler didn’t win because he beat Hindenburg after Thälmann split the vote. He lost to Hindenburg, the center-right candidate endorsed by the social democrats, then won anyway because Hindenburg appointed him Chancellor.
The social democrats were the ones who refused to back Thälmann, the only anti-Hitler candidate in the race. And the same way that the communists called them “social fascists,” the social democrats used similar rhetoric, frequently saying that the communists were no different from the Nazis, that there was no difference between the far left and the far right.
But also, we don’t have to keep rehashing 100 year old grudges from another continent.
I’m not voting for Harris. I’m voting against Trump via Harris.
I’m voting FOR Harris in the same way I was previously voting FOR Biden. Biden/Harris & Harris/Walz support policies that most closely match those policies I support.
If Trump died tomorrow I still wouldn’t support Vance or any other Republican because they support policies that I am strongly opposed to.
I would like to have more options, but realistically those are my choices.
I don’t have to agree with Harris/Walz on 100% if issues. I’m allowed to criticize them. But at the end of the day I’m voting FOR something and not just against the worst possible choice.
Given that she has the same stance on Gaza / Palestine as Biden, I vote against the orange bad rather than for her.
I agree that is a fucking terrible stance. It’s fair to criticize them both for that stance and, especially after the election, we should all push them hard to change their stance.
It is absolutely shitty that they won’t charge until after the election (if ever). Yes. Is it fair? No. Is it likely the only chance? Yes.
Single issue voters are hilarious. That’s how we got here.
My comment said that I’m voting against my conscience wrt Palestine, so your comment doesn’t really make sense.
I’m voting for Harris i like the money for middle class people thing
There currently is no middle class. There’s people that think they are still middle class, but they are struggling just as much as they poor.
I hope you never suffer an illness or injury that suddenly thrusts you into the group of working poor, living out of the car, couch surfing or sleeping rough.
And they have no clue how close to reality that is for all of them.
We know. I have plenty of my own cognitive dissonance to sort.
American mercenary healthcare is the primary reason I abandoned my green card efforts. It just wasn’t worth the risk that a car accident could render me homeless.
The average American tax payer individuals who make less than a certain amount get nothing in return. If we got services instead of global war, I believe very few would have an issue with taxes.
i hope so too yes :c
By the math, just the economic policy changes will give the non-rich a bit of a boost.
Same!
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“I am single issue” - at least you are under no illusion about it.
ok but you are voting republican
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but you are though
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yeah just don’t kid yourself
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This is silly in our current voting system. Not voting in this election is equivalent to voting for Trump.
People on the right (e.g. evangelicals) often see voting as their responsibility and will vote for whomever they see as the lesser of two evils. Those of us on the left get too bourgeois about our candidates. Our failure to vote keeps moving the window right!
