for to save her shoes from gravel

alarajrogers:

qqueenofhades:

Okay, look. I respect the fact that you’re a young person, and I appreciate that you have not only registered to vote, but plan to vote in the primaries, so I don’t want to lecture you too much. That said: I am taking you out for coffee, I am sitting you down, I am looking into your eyes, and I am urgently telling you the following:

The Green Party is a scam. It is a scam. It has existed for decades in American politics as an empty shell corporation weaponizing the good intentions of young people like yourself, because all it theoretically stands for “it’s good to save the planet maybe.” Which is not something that any non-insane person seriously disagrees with, but there is no world in which that cause is actually furthered by registering/voting Green (you mentioned that you did vote for Democrats, which – good, but listen to me here, youngun, okay?) It ran Jill Stein in 2016 to siphon more votes from HRC, and this election it plans to run Cornel West, a pro-Russian tankie who positively equated Bernie and Trump, as another spoiler candidate. It does not stand for “protecting the planet” or America in any real way. It has never elected a single senator or congressman, let alone a president. It stands for empty performance/grievance political theater by those people who feel too morally superior to vote for/affiliate with Democrats, often because the internet has told them that it’s not Cool or Hip or Progressive enough.

If your main priority is climate/the environment, you’re doing the right thing by registering as a Democrat and voting for Democrats. (Also: the adjectival form is Democratic. It is the Democratic party and Democratic candidates, otherwise you sound like the Fox News host who wrote a book literally entitled “The Democrat Party Hates America.”) They are the only major party who has in fact passed major climate legislation and have made environmental justice a central tenet of their platform. As opposed to the Republicans, whose Project 2025, along with the rest of its nightmare fascist prescriptions, openly pledges to completely wreck existing climate protections and forbid any new ones, just because we weren’t all dying fast enough under their death-cult rule already. That’s the main logical fallacy I don’t get among both the Online Leftists and the American electorate in general: “the Democrats aren’t doing quite enough as I’d like, so I’ll enable the active wrecking ball insane lunatics to get in power and ruin even the progress we HAVE managed to make!” Like. How does that even make sense?

On a federal level, the Greens have contributed nothing whatsoever of tangible value to American or international climate policy/legislation, environmental justice, or anything else, because as noted, they don’t have any elected candidates and mostly focus on drawing voters away from Democrats. There might be plenty of good candidates on the local or city level, which – great! Vote away for Greens if they’re available, or the only other option is a Republican! But on the federal/primary level, please understand: once again, they are a scam. There is no point in affiliating yourself with them. You’re welcome to register Green and vote Democratic, if that makes you feel better or if you prefer having another label next to your name, but once again, I’m telling you in my position as a salty Tumblr elder that they have done nothing but harm to the causes they claim to care about, because “environment” is such a nebulous priority and has demonstrably been hijacked to stop the American government entity, i.e. the Democrats, that is actually working to improve on it.

As for your question: nobody is “forcing” or “pressuring” you to vote in primaries. By your own admission, you made a conscious choice to register as a Democrat in order to vote for Democratic candidates. If you were just a regular registered voter of whatever party affiliation, you would vote in the general election for whatever candidate the primary process produced. But if you are sufficiently vested and committed to that process that you would like to have a say in who is running under that party label, it is not unreasonable that you would register as a member of that party. Nobody has twisted your arm behind your back and made you do so; you are taking a considerable level of initiative on your own. Likewise, open primaries can be both a good and bad thing. This falls under the “the political system we have is flawed, but we can’t magically pretend it doesn’t exist and act according to our own fantasyland versions of reality” thing that I keep saying over and over. So yes, if you want a role in shaping the Democratic candidates who emerge from a Democratic primary process, you will usually register as a Democrat, and nobody has forced you to do that. It’s that simple.

Likewise as a general programming note: I’m trying to cut back on politics a bit right now, because I don’t have the spoons/bandwidth/mental health to deal with it. I apologize. So if you’ve sent me a politics-related ask recently and haven’t received a response, I’m not deliberately or maliciously ignoring you; I just am not able to handle it as much as usual and will have to put it on pause. However, I feel as if this is important enough to be worth saying, so, yeah.

To amplify this:

There can only ever be two significant national parties in the US at a time. This is because we have a winner-take-all system, where the guy who gets 51% of the vote is treated the same as the guy who gets 89% of the vote. Smarter people than me have mathematically proven that a system like that will always turn into 2 parties. Other countries with multiple viable parties have things like ranked choice voting, where you pick your first choice, your second choice, and so on. Then if your first choice doesn’t get enough votes, your second choice gets counted, so your vote for, for example, Ralph Nader of the Green Party would not have ended up drawing votes away from Al Gore the Democrat and resulted in George W. Bush the Republican being elected.

It’s not likely that the US will adopt ranked choice voting anytime soon, since it’s in the interest of the existing political parties not to do it. And as long as we don’t have it, there are two parties, and voting for a Green candidate in a national election is throwing away your vote. Which, it’s your vote, you have the right to throw it away, but right now one party is flawed but believes in democracy, and the other one is going full on fascist. We are literally fighting to keep Nazis out of power.

I didn’t sign up with a political party when I was your age because I wanted to maintain the mental fiction that I was independent. In fact, because I have always favored minority rights, in my lifetime I could only ever be a Democrat, and I have no time machines to go back and vote for Abe Lincoln. My life began with an incredibly shitty and corrupt Republican president in power, and they have only gotten worse over time.

The only thing that joining a party does is to give you some right to pick that party’s candidate. That’s it. In majority red states, many people who vote for Democrats sign up as Republicans so they can try to get less terrible local Republican candidates because in their state, the Republican will win. Same thing in majority blue states, the other way around. So there is some degree of calculation in deciding what party to sign with, but you definitely should sign with one or the other so you have some say over what candidate ends up on the ballot. Even if you then choose to vote Green, you’ve still had your say about who became the candidate for the national-level big party, because one of the two national level big parties is going to win. (And because Republicans are currently dominated by a fascist faction, and non-fascist Republicans are being forced out of office, please don’t vote for Greens at a national level. They won’t win, you’re sending the wrong message to the Democrats – basically when you say “you’re not far left enough for me” they hear “I’ll never be good enough for you so I should pander to the people in the middle” – and, for the immediate future at least, you’re not helping the fight against fascism.)

When you vote for a Democrat and you’re a leftist, you can pressure them to move further to the left. “I voted for you and I am very disappointed in your decision to authorize drone strikes” kind of thing. You cannot pressure Republicans to move left. You can barely stop them from skidding all the way to the right.

If you dislike this, work toward getting ranked-choice voting implemented in your state. If all of them have it, then we can have legit national third parties. But until then, all voting Green does is tell Democrats that they can never capture the votes of the far left, so they should move to the middle instead. Don’t tell them that! Tell them that if you see them making reasonable efforts to become more progressive, you see that progress and you reward them with votes, then keep up the pressure.