More than usual, I’m amenable to hearing arguments in favor of abandoning the dems for a third party. If it was done on a large enough scale and fast enough, it could end-run the two-party stranglehold. If you do it on election eve 2028, bad timing. If you got way better than Green numbers well in advance, with a sufficiently bad-ass campaign, it might not be that hard to make a better showing than Harris, next time out. Her numbers were that miserable. These are radical times; radical things may happen.
I don’t have much to say on this right at the moment, and I know the conversation could get acrimonious, but if you can keep it civil, please speak your piece below. As much as I’m “vote dem or die” when there is no viable alternative in sight, it feels more possible than it has in a while that we could all just dust those fools off and do something else.
With dems acting the way they are now, we can be fairly assured of ten to forty years of fascist rule. If they changed their tune tomorrow I’d be open to hearing it, but they’ve been signaling a right-wing turn. What if we had somebody else, another party that wasn’t a fucking piss-take?
I will immediately return to “vote dem or die” if we get closer without a crushing success in building a replacement, so this is idle fancy. But get fancy with me for a minute.
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Yeah, it’s about time to let the democratic party be the conservative party it has been trending toward and form a new party on the left.
The difficulty I see is that it would be too successful at first, and then fail because it didn’t live up to expectations. That is, if a new liberal party was formed, and got backing, there would be pressure to run candidates at the national level immediately. And most of those, probably all, of those candidates would lose. Making the party a joke and unattractive. All of the recent attempts to form a third party suffer from this fault. They see the levers of power at the state and federal level and want to pull them. When they run candidates for those positions they get no votes because no one knows anything about the party.
A new, viable, party would have to start with local races, like school boards and small municipalities. Combine that with community outreach to get the community engaged, i.e. working in soup kitchens, clearing roadsides, etc. Become known as a party which is interested in the community they represent. The new party would have to actively avoid getting into the national news as a national party, and don’t run any candidates at the state or federal level until local people at the community level know who they are and what the party represents. If such a party does start to become known at the local level there would be increasing pressure from news organizations and from citizens who become attached to the party to run candidates at the state and national level. Which would need to be avoided until there appears to be enough citizens willing to vote for it.
It would take a lot of dedication, time and work, but that’s how a viable new political party could start. At the community level.
Of course, that’s also how the republican party was taken over by the fascists. So there is no reason why local progressive democrats couldn’t take over the democratic party and make it more progressive. Other than the fact that the current democratic party leadership is too old and still fighting issues from the 1970’s.
The democratic party no longer represents the will of the people so there is plenty of room for a new party on the left. But great care needs to be taken to prevent it from becoming seen as a joke, because that will stop people from voting for it.
I totally agree with you about “vote dem or die”; but I, too, fantacize about having a viable progressive party, maybe one that runs AOC in 2028. 😎
I also agree with flex@1…start at the local level and make it work ground-up.
pretty much what flex said, has to start at local races. Just throwing someone at the presidency every four years (looking at you, green party, peace and freedom party) does absolutely fuckall for their cause, and helps people like trump, bush, reagan, et al get elected.
And even if some third party candidate did get elected in some wild scenario, they would not be able to get much done – look at how much energy Pelosi and the DNC have put into fighting AOC and “the squad”, and they aren’t even members of a different party. A president can’t really do much to improve things without congressional backing (they can break some stuff, though…)
I’m not very optimistic about things, I feel like there has been a lot of foreign (primarily Russian initially, but now also Iranian, Chinese, and other nations?) interference/propaganda via social media, and it’s been both effective and cheap, and I’m concerned it’s only going to get worse.
It would help to have some sort of alternate to first-past-the-post elections, but here in the SF Bay Area, several cities/counties with Ranked Choice/Instant Runoff, have been facing legal challenges and voting measures to return to first-past-the-post systems, and there is a lot of billionaire money involved. (also abusing the recall system…)
the billionaires have too much power and influence, and want more… I’m not sure the system will work, or continue to work, I fear things are going to get really ugly, and bloody, one way or another…
A common theme across FTB right now is a steadfast belief we still have the option to “vote” our way out of this mess. I don’t see that working anymore (ref. modern-day Russia for an example of how “voting” works under the leadership of a despotic authoritarian). Instilling a progressive party now is gonna require revolution (again, ref. Russia circa 1917) as representation gets whittled down to nothing over the next few years by gerrymandering, stacked courts, and, most dismal of all, a rewritten constitution.
flyby post, no time for much. just wanted to say yeah, i don’t think voting will get us national power next time around, but there may be strategic reasons to do this kind of thing now…
You’ll have to do something about plurality voting first.
I suggest a multi-pronged approach. One is to try to “tea party” the Dems, which means at the local politics level. Try to get more AOCs into the party. A second would be what flex suggests: build up a new progressive party, starting at the muni level. There’s lots that can be done there and even some that *must*: better public transit (with greener vehicles), housing projects, zoning, tax, and policing reforms, muni-WiFi, tightening up efficiency and other regs on new construction (up to requiring either a green or a solar roof, eventually) over time, reversing the cost-burden-shifting trend (here it seems all the municipal governments are doing various things to effectively charge user fees for trash collection, such as requiring bags have stickers to be collected and selling the stickers at grossly inflated prices — undo shit like that and let the rich pay for this out of their property taxes), and an assortment of pro-labor things, starting with not opposing unionization of city employees, requiring contractors be union shops, and so on.
Once you’re meeting with success in one city, expand to more cities in that state, then set your sights on the state government. There you can enact state constitutional reforms, e.g. enshrining abortion rights, and provide support to the municipal policies as well as address larger issues. From there, expand to more states, then move up to federal initially by running candidates only in safe Dem districts (and no presidential candidate) with a promise to, if elected, vote with Dems against Republicans on key issues. Once the party is winning decently often in those districts, widen to safe red districts and see how much support you can peel away from Republicans in the form of voters who picked them to get things to change, rather than specifically because they love reactionary policies. Finally, widen to all federal seats, including the presidential ticket.
Prong three is to be ready, if need be, to fight the union side of a future civil war, or similarly, should it come to that. That means some of you need to tool up and learn how to use it. The right has had subsections practicing this for decades, in the form of the militia movement. They need to stop having a near-monopoly on that.