Sometime in the past day or so, a post floated across my feed congratulating the French left, and saying that next we should do that here in the U.S.
It's an interesting thought, but I'm not sure what that would look like in real-world terms. We don't have a parliamentary system here, and most places in the U.S. don't have runoffs, so it certainly wouldn't be *the same*.
What do you think it would take to attain left wing electoral victory in the United States? Could it be done at all?
@dynamic Turnout. Most people poll left. Traditionally, greater turnout means left victories.
Any thoughts on how best to achieve that?
@dynamic Unfortunately, it depends on the state you live in, because a lot of laws have been passed to disallow assisting turnout. Otherwise you could help provide ways to make it easier to vote and help people feel safer in voting.
The other thing is to somehow convince people that voting isn't just a waste of time. On the left, this means fighting the Democratic Party. In current system fighting standard is geetting more progressives to run and win. #LongGame #frustrating
@dynamic The Democratic Party leadership is neoliberal and anti-socialist. They actively fight to keep progressive candidates out. This disenfranchises many on the left. The only way to fight this within the system is to fight back and get the progressive candidates elected. Getting them elected as Democrats gives the left more power within the party, but even third party gives more power in government.
The other idea is not voting to create more Dem losses to effect a left shift.
Honestly, I think there's a chicken-and-egg situation. People who feel disenfranchised don't vote, and politicians don't listen to demographics who don't vote. Business works to suppress working people's votes and otherwise sow infighting at the same time that it uses its financial influence to shape behavior of politicians.
The Democratic Party isn't the source of the problem. It's the natural outcome of the system working the way it works.
Turnout is important for a bunch of reasons, including convincing politicians that the people affected give a fuck, but there's no way it's going to produce big political change with just a few months before an election for the simple reason that the needed left wing and progressive candidates don't exist.
If the left is going to win in electoral space, it requires prolonged coordinated grassroots efforts to promote left wing candidates.
It's systematically hard because in addition to inequality in money, there's also massive inequity in who has the time and emotional bandwidth to do hard work, including running for office, but also volunteering for campaigns.
There's a valid case to be made that the better path for action is through non-political action (unions, co-ops, mutual aid organizations). All of this requires work, though, which means people willing to take leaps of faith and put in the effort.
Turnout does matter, though, and voting (just voting, not necessarily "voting blue" or whatever) is a low effort way of exercising influence. A friend of mine made a YouTube video reviewing the academic literature on the benefits of voting, and found that there's good evidence that government investment in communities is tied to the voter turnout in these communities.
I can't find the video, but have written to my friend to see if he can send me the link.
One of the striking details from the video was examples of far right racists allocating more money toward black communities with higher electoral turnout. That's really striking, because there's no way that those communities would ever vote for that particular politician.
Personally, I think that in most cases it makes sense to vote strategically (e.g. if you live in a battleground district in the U.S., vote blue, but if you live in a deep blue district vote as far left as you can), but I think that even more important than that is just to vote, and to cast *some* vote for all items on a ballot.
Discourse around voting matters too. When a leftist says "I refuse to vote for Biden" sends the message that voting doesn't matter. If the same leftists instead says "I'm voting for Jill Stein, and here's why", that sends the message that voting does matter, even if your candidate can't win.
(In both cases there's a risk of antagonizing "vote blue" people, so I suspect that the social cost of these two kinds of statements is about equal?)
If the left is going to be concerned with electoral outcomes, then focusing on local campaigns is also a sound approach.
Big change is never going to come from the top anyway, local politicians are more directly beholden to local voters than state or national politicians will ever be, and moving the Overton window of local politics to the left increases the pool of left-ish politicians available to run for higher offices.
Again, this takes time and effort.
Sidebar here for those focused on the importance of defeating fascism at the top: active campaigning for left-wingers at low levels of government serves that goal too.
If a "never Biden" leftist convinces 10 people to vote in a local election who wouldn't vote otherwise, that's 10 more left-of-center ballots being cast. Chances are that at least *some* of them will cast strategic votes for democrats running for higher offices while they are there.
Related:
https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-november-3-2020/
"Historian Kevin Young contends that even when progressive candidates are elected to positions of power, their achievements are constrained by the ability of the business class to disinvest in the economy in protest. He argues that, nonetheless, the Left has a powerful tool to make change possible: through mass disruptive action targeting the business class."
@lwriemen
Curious to hear more about your thoughts on fighting the Democratic Party as a way to convince people voting isn't a waste of time.