George Takei's Based Voting Take [Rule}
Image Transcription:
A tweet from the George Takei Twitter account which states:
"A Democrat was in the White House when my family was sent to the internment camps in 1941. It was an egregious violation of our human and civil rights.
It would have been understandable if people like me said they’d never vote for a Democrat again, given what had been done to us.
But being a liberal, being a progressive, means being able to look past my own grievances and concerns and think of the greater good. It means working from within the Democratic party to make it better, even when it has betrayed its values.
I went on to campaign for Adlai Stevenson when I became an adult. I marched for civil rights and had the honor of meeting Dr. Martin Luther King. I fought for redress for my community and have spent my life ensuring that America understood that we could not betray our Constitution in such a way ever again.
Bill Clinton broke my heart when he signed DOMA into law. It was a slap in the face to the LGBTQ community. And I knew that we still had much work to do. But I voted for him again in 1996 despite my misgivings, because the alternative was far worse. And my obligation as a citizen was to help choose the best leader for it, not to check out by not voting out of anger or protest.
There is no leader who will make the decision you want her or him to make 100 percent of the time. Your vote is a tool of hope for a better world. Use it wisely, for it is precious. Use it for others, for they are in need of your support, too."
End Transcription.
The last paragraph I find particularly powerful and something more people really should take into account.
When you roll out the feasible alternative let me know. Until then, I'll be voting for the candidate whose rallies don't break out in chants of "kill f*ggots, kill all transgenders"
We need to get RCV passed at the state level in at least 33 states, then we can get rid of FPTP at the federal level, and actually force some change
oh if it's that simple then lets just do that. surely we can bang it out in a weekend.
Thinking like this is the reason the 2 party system is still in place today
It is possible to fight for RCV while working within the system we have in the meantime.
Exactly. Strictly voting only means you're complacent in the system, more needs to be done if we ever wanna see any real progress.
Of course, but you should also vote for the lesser of two evils come election time.
That's exactly my point. Do both.
thinking realistically about the likelihood of getting ~= 80 million people to vote for any one third party, or thinking realistically about the likelihood of getting those two parties to agree to vote their own power away?
See, that's the issue, you're thinking within the bounds of voting. There's other stuff you can do, like community outreach, or talking to local politicians, or protesting. Real change in America was never won with a vote, it was fought for on the streets.
Who says I'm not doing that too?
Are you?
yes, regularly. I'm active in labor organizing, have walked picket lines with people who would go on to be US senators, make and give care packages to homeless people on the street and volunteer at my local food pantry. I've helped organize letter writing campaigns to get the tipped minimum wage raised and to get higher wages from the state for people who work in support services for adults with developmental challenges. I've flyered the parking lots of restaurants that were fighting the unemployment claim of a pregnant woman they fired without cause in an effort to pressure them to drop the case. I've protested outside town halls and other political events like that since 2001. I don't owe you my bona fides at all, but here they are. The idea that you can't be a good progressive unless you abandon the only meaningful resistance available against someone who is openly trying to dismantle democracy is simply horseshit. Trump played this same game against Clinton in 2016 and it worked. He actively campaigned for people who might have voted for her to stay home. "she's not a real progressive", "they're all the same anyway", "she's got this in the bag", etc. I absolutely DO NOT volunteer myself and my family to be sacrificed to some twitter communist's ideological purity test. You do the job that's in front of you, and the job that's in front of us right now is preventing another Trump presidency. Don't be a fucking Republican psyop.
Hell yeah! That's what I'm talking about! Preach! This is the fire!
You don't need 80 million people to vote third party.
What you need is enough votes to show as a big enough blip on the election results to make both the Democrats and Republicans sweat out of fear they may be losing their iron grip.
Change will soon follow
How many would you estimate you need and what's the plan to get them?
Nobody said it was simple, but yes. Let’s do that.
Doing the easy thing is what’s got us to where we are.
can you pull it off in under a year? because in a year we're gonna have a presidential election and one of the leading candidates is someone whose already been determined by a court to have engaged in insurrection and has said that he'll have the military suppress protests starting day one and will replace 50,000 government functionaries with people whose only qualification is that they're loyal to him personally. his friends tell me every day that god has commanded them to kill me 😀
I would surmise it would take between 15 and 40 years to get it passed.
Imagine if we’d started pushing for this in earnest 15 years ago.
Like they say, the second best time to plant a tree is today.
What might help to effect this change? If I'm not mistaken, a number of states are almost under single-party rule, particularly those that might benefit most from this kind of change.
Is it something that may be built up from a municipal to county to state level to then establish on a national level?
Back in the day the "Moral Majority' took over the GOP by taking over the local offices. If the usual attendance at a meeting was twenty folks, the MMs would make sure to show up with 50. It took them a while, but they were persistent.
We tried to pass it at a county level here in California, and it passed in several counties, only for the registrar of voters go to the state legislature to overturn it, so, maybe?
Nice idea, but it isn't going to happen before the 2024 elections. First things first.
RCV favors moderates and promotes political stability. That's kinda the opposite of a revolution.
That's better than the fascism that FPTP favors. It's not revolutionary, but at least we might start heading in the right direction
RCV does the opposite, actually. It exhibits center squeeze, where centrists are often eliminated early even if more people prefer them over the eventual winner.
Yeah that happens most of the time in a PR system
Radicals come to power under fair systems by being able to reach disenchanted voters in a national crisis or uproar.
That word "feasible" is doing a lot of work. No doubt the politician I want to vote for won't be "feasible" for some reason, and the one you want me to vote for is.
which politician do you want to vote for, and what's their path to victory that doesn't involve making massive systemic changes to both the electoral system and the electorate in under a year?
In the general election the "feasible" candidate is always the Democratic nominee, so you should never have any argument about it at that stage. Meanwhile in the primary people try to use that sort of "feasibility" / electability argument against farther left Dems, but it is total nonsense and can be completely ignored at that stage.
Ok guy.
When you figure out a means of political activity that doesn't involve refining the capitalist regime as it stands, let me know. Until then, I won't be voting for candidates who help slaughter innocent people around the world.
Apathy is acceptance. Apathy is death.
You say that like complicity isn't also both of those things.
You need to understand that violent people will kill a pacifist. Quite easily.
Then maybe the Democrats should run candidates who treat Republicans as an existential threat rather than their friends across the aisle. Heck, they could start by refusing campaign donations from the rich assholes who fund both sides of the election.
Some Democrats do. You find them in the primaries. It's how politicians like AOC got to where they are. But it starts with people like you paying attention in primaries.
I do, despite the fact that they rarely ever get past the primaries. The party establishment cares more about preserving the status quo for their financiers than faithfully representing their voting base. The threat to withhold my vote in the general election is the only leverage I have against the party, and I will apply it to the best of my ability.
Vote in the primaries, put in the work in the primaries. And if you don't get it, vote not Hitler.
I refuse to promise my vote, and especially not a year in advance. "Safe" voters can be safely ignored since you'll vote blue no matter who, it's undecided voters control the outcome of the election.
If you want the party to suck less, then you need to start demanding better and back it up with the threat of withdrawing your support.
Remind them that they're supposed to represent you, and what the consequences are if they fail to do so.
You're halfway there. But not voting at all is giving a vote to the opposition. And they vote no matter who.
The Democrats certainly see it that way, which is why I'm employing the threat to stay home on election day. I'm not rich enough to wield any other influence.
Not voting against a fascist is a vote for fascist. It sucks but that is your choice. If Trump wins you will most likely never vote again.
So you won't use your vote to help less people die?
Ah, so you are never voting again.
That is part of the calculus people are making when they express the idea they won't vote for candidate A for reasons X and candidate B for reasons Y.
It is how voters can express their political will during the primary and electoral process. If a candidate can modify their position on X or Y because of voter concerns, that would be a meaningful part of the democratic process influenced by the voters. They're trying to forge that alternative.
The real unfeasible alternative is actually just doing nothing and letting the donors buy their selected policies and voting for the lesser evil between them. That is just supporting the status quo.