#Democratic Functions

[adult-female-with-aspergers]

Me living in a Trump town.

[necromancelena]

why is not voting preferable to voting for biden? (genuine question)

Because supporting biden means that there is literally no line that the democrats can cross that would lose your support. Even meeting biden supporters within their framework of "this system sucks but it can't be helped right now so we need to do damage control and support the lesser evil", not voting democrat in this election would still be the 'pragmatic' choice. There are going to be republican presidents off and on until the American empire collapses, so if it is your belief that the democrats can truly be pulled left, the way to do so would be to show them that they will lose if they do bad things, even if it means life would get worse for usamericans.

[eskildit]

sorry im still reeling from that post "It must be nice to live somewhere where the government actually listens to its electorate". hey please give me a numbered list of which governments you think this applies to.

[lasseling]

[emberkyrlee]

I voted

[taliejane]

Omfg UK and US 18-25s I'm begging you to vote in the general/presidential election 😭😭😭 young people already don't vote and then to actively abstain (I get it, all your options suck) but then politicians will have zero reason to appeal to you ever! You're entirely excluding yourselves from the conversation! Vote strategically to vote OUT the worst dude but just vote fr

I know they're all doing genocide and it's fucked but like you literally are not preventing genocide by not voting you're just sitting on your hands

[sybbi]

"If enough of us vote third party for president, we could actually GET somewhere with our policy goals!"

Baby girl you can't even get a majority of third party/independents in a single state legislature. In the past 30 years there have been seven independent/third party state governors, and of those, only three were genuinely independent. The rest either got elected as a R/D and switched mid-term when they alienated themselves from their state party, got elected as I and then switched to R/D during their terms (with some of them having served the R/D parties before), or served as proxy candidates with heavy backing and support from one of the major two parties. Even VERMONT, a relative stronghold for independent/third party candidates -- the place that brought you Bernie Sanders -- doesn't have a majority of third party candidates. And when I call them a stronghold, I mean they are the only state (I know of) that consistently elects (less than a handful of) Independent candidates to the state legislature; the place is still dominated by Ds and Rs.

"The highest power in the land can't actually be voted on so there's no reason to vote for the democrats"

Hey princess here are some high school civics question for you: How are Supreme Court judges nominated? :) By what process are they appointed? Who starts that process? :) Why is the Supreme Court considered reflective of who has won the presidency? :)

[whetstonefires]

Thinking endlessly about how the classical Athenians were like, so, on the one hand, many administrative tasks on which our civic apparatus relies require expertise.

But on the other hand, if we appoint leaders to necessary positions on the basis that they're the ones who are best suited to that work due to knowing all about it, that's putting real power in their hands, for an extended period instead of a safe little increment, which sets up our nice democracy of Every Free Adult Native Male Who Can Afford Armor to collapse very quickly into a narrow oligarchy.

But the fact remains that administration actually is skilled labor, especially on the tens-of-thousands-of-people scale they were dealing with, and also involves situations where it's impractical to run every step of a process through a committee. Not that they really wanted to acknowledge this but they were stuck with it a bit. If nothing else, people have day jobs, they can't always be voting.

But fulltime governators for whom this is their day job have too much power.

And the way they solved this was, most of the institutional memory and expertise and even exercise of force in the name of civic order was invested in slaves.

Mint workers? Executive accountancy clerks? Cops? All state property.

Very Important Job of distinguishing counterfeit coinage: public slave. Fifty lashes if he shirked or fucked up or cheated. Considerable authority in the context of the job. Could live quite a comfortable life. Absolutely no chance of his using this role as a springboard for building a political base and usurping authority, because he didn't have legal status.

This freed the actual executive positions up to be filled by people given one-year terms by lottery who had the authority to make (routine) calls but no personal power associated with the office; they didn't have to know shit to do the job and this kept them interchangeable.

Except generals, apparently. The Athenians were like, okay generals really do have to know what the fuck they're doing or we'll all die, but we can't make military service the defining feature of citizenship, and then put ourselves under the command of a non-citizen.

(Not even because like they couldn't entrust a slave with so much power, although being under threat of a lashing if people don't like your decisions probably isn't great for making strong strategic and tactical calls; it's the cognitive dissonance.)

So they had ten elected generalships, with less term limitation, and it was in fact a good avenue by which to build a political career.

But like, what the fuck huh?

[navree]

democrats, we gotta keep this energy up for every national election after this, i don’t want these vibes to ever die

[musical-chick-13]

Okay for REAL, yell at me and chase me off this site if I'm on here again before the US presidential election to do literally ANYTHING other than post fic.

[anotherpapercut]

the way white liberals talk about Ruth Bader Ginsburg as if she had some sort of unique ability to decide cases correctly and was like the only person standing in the way of the US and utter chaos is so funny to me bc like a) Sotomayor and Jackson have better judicial records than her ?? and b) if you trained an AI by making it watch 250 hours of John Oliver I think it would make the correct decision as often or more than she did

[nando161mando]

This kind of leadership is functionally useless to the American people. Retire.

[silentauthor96]

Reminder from a politically obsessed Michigander: every progressive policy Michigan has passed in the last two years was made possible by citizen ballot initiatives that a) ended partisan gerrymandering and b) expanded voting rights and ballot access.

Recent legislation passed under Michigan's Democratic trifecta (both levels of legislature and the governor):

Red flag laws (gun control)

Free 2 years higher education (economy)

Free preschool (economy)

Free school lunch (economy)

Expanded child tax credit for working families (economy)

Expanded civil rights law to include LGBTQIA+ protections

Ended right to work (pro-union economy)

Codified abortion protections (these were also passed by citizen ballot initiative though)

Stopped local governments from blocking green energy projects like solar and wind (environmental)

Banned child marriage (marriage before 18. You'd be surprised how many Republicans went on the record against this)

Actually, don't take my word for it: here's a list

Edit: I feel I need to put a somewhat finer point on this because I worry some of y'all missed a critical point -

Voting AND organizing got us this progress!!!

Voting alone was not enough until we fixed the underlying system.

Fuck yeah!

[what-eats-owls]

So there's something I want to say re: intentionally withholding your vote, and I want to do it without coming across as condescending or dismissive.

I've worked as a field organizer in two campaigns, 2010 and 2012, and my job was to help turnout the vote for Democratic candidates up and down the ticket. Technology may have changed, but people are still knocking on doors for specific voters the way they were 12 years ago.

If you say you're not voting/voting 3rd party, the campaign volunteer is supposed to mark that and move on. Their job, in the final month of the election, is to make sure the campaign's supporters have all the information and resources they need to cast a vote.

They aren't collecting data on why you're withholding your vote. They aren't submitting opinion polling results to the campaign. Something like 155 million people voted in the 2020 election, and if you say you're not voting, the campaign is not going to waste a volunteer's time and morale begging you to vote when there are literally millions of other voters to turn out.

Let me repeat that: The campaign does not track why you're not voting. They simply note your vote is not a priority for turnout and move on.

I say this because I see a lot of promotion of non-voting like that's a boycott, when the function is not the same. A boycott is a coordinated mass refusal to engage with an institution—which sounds similar if you see a vote as a good or service to withhold. Unfortunately, it's not.

A vote is a choice you're making as part of a community hiring committee. Your abstention doesn't prevent someone from being hired. It just lowers the threshold for the worst candidate to succeed.

All this to say: In my direct experience as an organizer, abstaining from the vote sends a message. That message is not "You need to try harder to win my vote." It's "Don't waste time on me."

[blunderpuff]

actually i'm making a post about it.

HOW COME NO ONE HAS THE "PASS THE TORCH" ENERGY FOR THIS ANCIENT BITCH???

[ceekari]

Yep.

It's okay to hate it. It's okay to loathe Biden and the democrats even as you vote for them. Voting in our current political system is not about moral endorsement. It's about practicality and harm reduction.

The GOP in power would do more harm to more people than the democrats, full stop. Your morality isn't worth much if you value your own clean conscience over people's lives and rights.

I'm just going to leave this here, because this woman said what I've been trying to articulate for ages much more effectively and succinctly than I've been able to