So I’m going to tell you something important: You don’t have the leverage you think you have.
Political campaigns are a machine that’s been operating the same way for a long time on the Democratic side. The Republicans may have abandoned a lot of the old ways of doing things, but the Democratic party hasn’t. And you’ve got people running these campaigns who are steeped in the “wisdom” of how you win.
And when a block of voters says they’re not going to vote for their candidate, they tend to believe them. So they decide to go court the people who they think will vote for them. That’s why you’ve seen the Harris campaign trying to court moderate Republicans who might be iffy on voting for Trump a third time.
Right now one of the reasons Netanyahu is refusing to commit to a cease fire is because he thinks Trump can win. If Trump wins, he has no reason to ever agree to one. One of the reasons he thinks Trump can win is because the polling is so close.
If you want to know why they’ve gone to the right recently, it’s because they think they’ve lost the left. And since a lot of those leftists are claiming there’s a line in the sand that they don’t have the power to appease (because — again — they can’t get Netanyahu to do shit right now), they’re going to go for the centrist Republicans.
Also, there seems to be this weird notion that the only way to move the Democrats is during the election. That’s not how you move people. You keep pressuring them during their term and it works. Like Biden is continuing to work on forgiving student debt even though he doesn’t have an election ahead of him. Because they know that what he does reflects on the future of the party. Voting doesn’t end this game, it’s the start of it.
If the left doesn’t vote democrat, but meanwhile, the right votes enmasse for republicans, then the democrats will move further right in an effort to court votes.
But if the left vote enmass, then it tells the democrats, “Hey, the left likes what you’re doing. If you go even further left, you’ll get more votes.”
Aka the more that the left votes democrat, the more leftist the democrats will move.
If the left refrains from voting, then the democrats will move further right.
So for the love of God, fucking vote.
Also, the other thing is, you need to beware of echo chambers.
Just because you and all your friends think Harris is a centrist, that does not mean that that is a common view. How often do you listen to people who don’t agree with you, politically? I have to do it fairly regularly, and the average American is far more likely to think that Biden and Harris are both far-leftist extremists than they are to think they’re middle-of-the-road.
Yes. That’s right. To a lot of Americans, Biden and Harris are so far left that they are terrifying.
I know life-long Democrats who believe that. Who think that, in retrospect, sure, Trump was bad but Biden and Harris are just as bad, in the opposite direction. They’re faced with what they see as a choice between two dangerous extremists, in opposite directions.
They’re wrong, but you will never convince them of that.
And there are two important things to remember about them:
There are a lot more people like that then there are people who think of Biden or Harris as centrists. (The people in America’s political center sure as fuck don’t think Biden and Harris are centrists.)
Centrists vote far more regularly than leftists. Therefore, they have more power per person, because politicians know they have to have them on board to win. Leftists are nice to have, but undependable, so a politician who wants to be elected has to favor the centrists over the leftists.
If we want US politics to move left, we need to do two things:
Vote in every election. Far left in primaries, Democrat in general elections, to prove we are a voting bloc worth listening to.
Build on-the-ground relationships with people who don’t already agree with us, and do active community building, harm reduction, and other stuff like that in our own communities. People don’t change their ideology based on logic and national debates. They change their ideology based on relationships, stories, and seeing how stuff works in their own communities.
I’d like to point out that this is the strategy that the Right had been using for ages, and it’s gotten them a stacked Supreme Court, and the ability to have a competitive race with a man who can’t complete a sentence and a couch fucker. Because they all get out and vote for whoever has that R next to their name, more or less regardless of what their policy is, so long as it’s further right than the other guy.
There were people who voted Trump ONLY to try and ban abortion, despite not agreeing with anything else he said, and disliking him as a person. Los of people, actually.
And they got what they wanted.
The Democratic Party keeps going Right because conservatives vote, regardless of whether they have a perfect candidate. They show up to the polls and then say “I like that guy better” and vote. Every time. Even the Face Eating Leopards party eats their face, they vote for the other guy, but they still vote.
It’s not a big revolution, it’s a century long tug of war, and you can’t stop pulling just because you don’t like where the rope is right now.
ALT
