this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2024
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Liberals: "You can't just call everyone a fascist every time you disagree with a policy, it isn't civil."
Also Liberals: "My political opponents are fascist and any third party vote is a vote for fascism and if you don't vote you're supporting fascism and if you argue with me on foreign policy or debt relief or you hurt my election chances in any way, then you're going to let a fascist back into the White House."
The politcal system means that voting for a third party means you're not actually opposing fascism. It has the exact same effect as not voting at all. While it's not supporting fascism, it's also not opposing fascism. So it's just being fascism neutral.
It would be nice if you had a system where a third party vote wasn't the same as not voting but that kind of system will never happen if you continue to waste your vote.
Why would the winning party change the system that compels you to vote for them?
A ranked choice type system would mean a third party wouldn't be just something that screws up elections. In fact it would probably really benefit Democrats as people who might not go to vote otherwise might go vote green as their top pick and then vote Democrat as their second pick. If the Green candidate won, that's someone they could make some compromises with to get legislation passed. If the green candidate loses, then many of their votes would go to the Dem candidate making it more likely they would win.
Twice in this century a GOP candidate has won the EC without winning the popular vote. So it's obvious why the Democrats would want to get rid of that.
But as it stands voting third party (or not voting) is just letting everyone else decide how things should be. The way it works now is you vote for the candidate most likely to care about your concerns (and who could feasibly win) and write to them and tell them what you want. Yeah it's a pain in the ass to write to a representative, but it's more likely to have an effect than anything you write on the internet. Be polite, tell them the things you want that can be reasonably be implemented. Also you're probably going to have to vote in many elections to get what you want. But if it's something you really care about you're willing to vote in as many elections and write to your rep as many times as needed to get it done.
It takes time, but it's more effective than doing nothing.
This is a naive understand of how the Democratic Party wants to function.