SwingingTheLamp

He lost Tennessee, his home state, though.

That looks like an advantage, given the track record for Al Gore and Walter Mondale. ETA: Ah geez, how did I forget Kamala Harris?

Didn’t stop Al Gore.

I live in a city with the last vestiges of a progressive 3rd party started in the 1990’s in the upper Midwest to do just that, but the two major parties collaborated to crush it. But we do those things locally. Lots of people do those things. It just doesn’t translate to state and national politics.

Case and point, here I am encouraging people to organize and make changes outside of the electoral system, and getting told in not so many words to pound sand.

Well, if it’s so obvious, answer the question.

Been telling anybody who’d listen that we’re on the path to authoritarianism with the two major parties since '96, donating to and promoting media organizations that spread the message, voting, contracting my representatives, and trying to influence local government.

When is this pushing other angles of reform ever gonna start? If it didn’t in 2020, I have to wonder. I’m just not satisfied with “everybody gets stabbed, but a few years later” as the best possible outcome.

Voting for a third party?! Tsk-tsk!

Connect the dots, please. Those are all wonderful things, but how do they add up to avert the authoritarian takeover of national power that the conservative movement has been working on for so long?

Yes, those are the options. I chose to advocate for peaceful-as-possible legal reforms of the current system, e.g. the big cities should ‘secede’ from state control, while remaining part of the Union, not unlike the free imperial cities of the Holy Roman Empire. The point here is that voting in the “respectable” way for the lesser-evil party has not, and will not, save us from eventual authoritarianism, any more than the right configuration of deck chairs will keep the ship from foundering. (Well,a better analogy is that one party wants to rip the hull open more, while the other wants to run the pumps even if they can’t keep up with the flooding, and repairing the hole isn’t an option under the regulations.)

That’s a non-sequitur, and the polling and surveys show that the Gaza issue was only a small part of why Harris lost, anyway. Righteous indignation feels good, I’m sure, but avoiding the real issues is a losing political strategy. To the point, a Democrat did win in 2020, yet he and we did little to alter our trajectory into authoritarianism.

Even though I recognized the trajectory toward authoritarianism back in 1996 with Pres. Clinton’s Third Way triangulation, and have been saying, guys, we need to start making things better sooner rather than later since then, the past is indeed the past. So, what’s the plan? What are we doing beyond “vote blue” right now to ensure that we don’t have to vote for anti-trans Democrats next time, too?

As I keep pointing out, the problem with this argument is that it presumes that the United States is a law of nature, eternal and unshakable, simply the backdrop for our political battles. It is not. That much should be obvious with how much the fascists have managed to dismantle in such a short time.

Yes, FPTP means that a candidate from one of the two major parties will win. But also, every time a candidate from one of the two major parties wins, we get closer to authoritarianism (slowly with Team Blue, directly with Team Red), and the destruction of the United States. Both things can be true. There’s not always a solution to our problems, or a correct course of action.

We have to do something other than FPTP with the two, current major parties. Well, no, actually, we don’t have to. It’s only if we want to save the United States (and protect vulnerable minorities) that we do.

Why didn’t the “working on making things better” start in 2020? We could’ve kept actual fascists out of power, if we’d started then, instead of breathing a sigh of relief and acting like everything was fixed forever.

We did vote for a Democrat in 2020, yet here we are.

It started in 2015; the articles and commentators pointed out the famous longitudinal study of nuns that found that loss of vocabulary was one of the early indicators of dementia, and that his vocabulary had noticeably shrunk (“big” and “beautiful” taking over for many other adjectives). It was during his first term that somebody pegged it as frontotemporal dementia specifically.

Keep in mind the difference between “he’s dying” and “he’s lost it.” With this form of dementia, a person’s life expectancy after (early) diagnosis can be many years. Six or seven years from the first clear symptoms to the stage we see now is not atypical. I’m not a doctor, but my educated guess is that he won’t croak for several years yet, especially with an elite medical team providing treatment, but he probably won’t be coherent enough for a third term, even by MAGA standards of coherency.

So I understand that the Civil War effectively settled the question of whether the states can unilaterally dissolve the Union, but legalistically, but at what point has the federal government constructively dissolved it? The Constitution very explicitly gives the authority over elections to the states and Congress. Now that the other two branches have ignored it, it feels like they’ve abrogated the whole Constitution, since I believe it’s not severable.

(Yes, I’m aware they’ve done this before, which only makes my question more pertinent. John Roberts has erased any legitimacy the Court once had.)

Vote blue, no matter who.

(/s, obvs)

This is not a popular observation around these parts, but it’s true. My city has almost no private equity presence in the market, yet we still have a housing affordability crisis. The geometry problem came first, caused here in the U.S. by zoning and building codes; then houses became the biggest source of investment wealth for individuals because of the artificial scarcity those codes created; then private equity smelled money and moved in.

Tactical voting may be the correct way to participate in FPTP elections, but unfortunately still doesn’t lead to a good outcome, just like leaping out the window of a burning skyscraper to avoid being burned alive is the better choice.