Rachel Maddow warned viewers on Monday that President Donald Trump plans to interfere with midterm election results, following the Supreme Court’s recent 7-2 ruling against his executive order instructing the US Postal Service (USPS) to block states from distributing and collecting mail-in ballots.
Trump’s order, which he signed last March, would’ve directed the USPS to refuse to deliver mail-in ballots to anyone whose information hadn’t been properly submitted to a new state citizenship list maintained by the federal government.
“Trump is counting on confusion, uncertainty, and a lack of confidence in the mail-in voting system to suppress voter turnout,” she said.
The GOP does, wtf are the Dems doing? If if nothing, who out there is and how can we build that community?
Honestly? I think there’s a couple of facets to the answer:
The bad news: The oligarchs have a stranglehold on politics. Not only are the Republicans a completely lost cause for democracy, establishment Democrats largely may care somewhat about human rights, but also are addicted to that oligarch money train. Which is where the “both sides” thing has a bit of merit. HOWEVER
The better news: This is a good time to try and get involved. I think efforts in recent years have sort of been around a few individuals, but it seems like the DSA is emerging as a possible new powerhouse, and a place for progressives to gather around and use. One of the powers of Conservatives has been things like the Tea Party or MAGA. We need to rally around DSA and use it as sort of shorthand: If someone is associated with the DSA, then they are probably decently a progressive and hopefully we can support them.
But building community is hard. That’s the first thing the oligarchs attack to try and disrupt. And for some reason, it seems that while conservatives tend to band together, progressives tend to care about issues and when there’s disagreement, can’t figure out ways to work around that.
So I guess the hard part is, for example, taking a VERY wedge issue: Israel and Palestine. While I personally have lost my respect for Israel (notably: completely different topic than the topic of Jews/antisemitism) and believe the reality is Palestine has been genocided by Israel, it would be foolish for me to see a candidate who hasn’t come to that same conclusion but is otherwise progressive - and fail to vote for them or worse vote for the Republican candidate because of that one issue.
The oligarchs use wedge issues to unify consevatives, and they use wedge issues to divide progressives.
We have to realize that and overcome it to build community.
DSA?
You make some great points. I think with regard to leadership and support, we should become capable of breaking our support into issue specific support. Instead of supporting a person or not, be capable of supporting them on the issues we agree on, regardless of disagreements elsewhere. We don’t have to support them on everything, but can build support issue by issue. In a way it’s dismantling the hierarchy notion of leadership the DNC and GOP use and returning to dispersed democratic form. I don’t know how that actually fits with the systems of democracy we have, as a representative democracy, but it might mean staying involved in the day to day of our representatives and of the systems that grant them their power.
It also means choosing candidates to support this system, first and foremost. Our first agreement together is to vote for candidates who will champion only the issues we all agreed with them on, and won’t vote their beliefs if there is not consensus from us. Even returning for town halls to ask for our guidance. They would function as the person who casts the votes in the system, not the person who decides which votes to cast. Less representative and more direct democracy. We need our hands to be more in the wheel than before, because we can’t trust them.
https://www.dsausa.org/ - not a political party, but seems like progressive Democrats are generally rallying around them, so it seems to be turning into a good org to rally around.
On the rest: I think that’s… generally how it should work. The earlier in the process things are, the pickier you can be to find the person that shares as many beliefs as you have. As they win or lose support, when you get to the primary, you have to vote for the available options, so you pick the one that best represents you. And in the general, again, you have to pick the best possible candidate.
That’s the voting side.
The other support comes before voting: When you find a good candidate, talk them up to your peers IRL or on social media / sites like Lemmy. Do what you can to get the people that represent you better at every stage of the process.
What the fascists want is for us to say, “Oh, my person didn’t make it to the next step, and this other person supports something I hate” and to bow out of the process, when the entire idea is to vote for the person that best represents you.
That’s how we get to “blue no matter who” in the general election because one assumes that the Democrat option is always going to be - at a minimum - less shitty than the Republican option. But people who push back on that… do they not understand that fascists are worse? Or do they not understand that they should have been pushing for Their Preferred Candidate long before that point?
Its a bit different, we pick a candidate that has stuff we like and stuff we don’t. I’m saying only field candidates that pursue things we can all agree on and doesn’t make calls on the rest. They come to us with those calls and we have a conversation amongst ourselves. We tell them what to do, and they do that. We need change the relationship we have with reps and revoke some of their autonomy to make decisions. Less representative and more democracy may be the solution to inability to align.