Trans journalist Erin Reed has published a list of Democratic midterm candidates with anti-trans records, and the question she is forcing is one the party would rather not answer: if trans voters keep rewarding Democrats who harm them, what signal does that send? The calculation is real, the stakes are high, and there is no clean answer.
Those are all fair points; I can’t argue any of them, at least not with my level of understanding. I would even agree that Republicans and establishment/neoliberalism Democrats are ultimately rolling up to the same folks to get their marching orders, even if their outward facade paints them as opposing factions. I would argue, though, that while the Democrats you describe represent the same brand of fascism as the Republicans they (ostensibly) rail against, they do push it in a noticeably slower, less heavy-handed way than Republicans do. That doesn’t sound like much of a benefit, but I would think it offers progressives a chance to shift the Overton window back to the left during the eras when Democrats are in power; more of a chance than they’d have during a Republican administration like this one anyway, where people are constantly overwhelmed with the avalanche of blatant corruption and intentional cruelty directed toward them. A slower-moving disaster is an objectively better situation than a fast-moving one, because you at least have more time to try to stop it or get out of the way. That’s the cold logic I was referring to in my original comment.
But like I said, I’m not really here to argue. I just wanted to ask a question, the one you skipped right over: What do you expect to gain by either not voting or voting third party in this particular election? You’ve given a salient explanation of why Democrats aren’t much better than Republicans as leaders, but you haven’t explained why picking an unlikely third option (or not picking one at all) is the best choice.
So let’s answer your question. I expect to gain nothing. Which is exactly what I expect to gain if I do vote for them.
There’s a sense in which the process of “power” shifting from one brand to the other brand is much like people buying store brand vs name brand of the same product made by the same manufacturer. People buy the one or the other en masse because of larger economic trends driving their buying behavior. Individuals making deliberate choices to “not pay the brand tax” is such a small component of aggregate buying behavior it’s not even worth modeling.
In this way, the old adage “it’s the economy, stupid” is saying that people don’t really win elections because conscientious voters who are thoughtful and strategic do things - people win elections because of larger economic and social trends. Yes, in individual small swing districts conscientious voting can sometimes become large enough to have a measurable impact, but not in most races, not in most districts, and even among swing districts, not that often.
Instead what’s happening is the 2 brands work to temper the psychological needs of various groups of the American population, serving to create us/them dynamics within the population that serves to divide them against each other and enlist them in maintaining the very powers who oppress them.
Like what happens in these discussions. We are all being oppressed by the entire political system, and yet some of us believe that others of us are paid Russian or Chinese trolls or that we’re actually Republicans because we are trying to keep the focus on the total political system. What we need is to band together as a single group, not as separate groups who fight on the terrain of ballots, but a single unified group of the people against the oligarchs and that means fighting against their mechanisms of control. Party politics is one of those mechanisms.