Vote.
Also knock on doors, volunteer for campaingns.
Get involved locally. Go to meetings, work with others, make your own community safer, better, more organized. Know what's on school board agendas. Show up and comment.
Give politicians a reason to know what you want, and why they should care.
And if you want to laugh in my face, IDGAF. But while you're laughing, try to remember this:
We're in this situation because people on the other side spent 30-40 years doing that kind of thing.
Mike, I respect you but people have been voting, and will keep voting. But unless Republicans never win another election, eventually they’ll use the powers the Supreme Court is granting them. We need to take action to change the court. More specifically, elected Democrats need to take action.
Biden needs to take action. He has had 4 years to set the stage for court expansion and has done next to nothing. This ruling happens and his response tonight is “just vote for me if you don’t want a king.” That’s not good enough.
Yeah you need to hammer it every day. That’s what Republicans do. Democrats will, with a lot of activism pushing them really hard, do one thing so they can check off the box but there’s no follow-through.
And we know how to do that. You fall in love in the primaries and you fall in line in the generals. If you don't get the politicians you want, you try again next time and you hold the line. That's how the GOP got here over the last 45 years or so. You line up but never stop pushing.
Yes. But the other part of it is that the elected Democrats need to deliver. At first it’s just messaging and failed symbolic efforts like calling for impeachment of justices or an expansion of the court that can’t pass. But if the elected officials keep pushing, eventually you get change.
This is not a problem with not voting hard enough. It’s a problem with no activism beyond that, which is on all of us as citizens. But even more it is a failure of leadership in the Democratic Party.
You also vote at the city, county, and state elections. You vote in off elections, special elections, any time you can vote you do vote.
That part Democrats fucking *suuuuuuuuuck* at. We vote for president and go home thinking our job here is done.
I’ve voted in every election since 1988 except for two off-year primary election with a single minor office like utility or hospital commissioner where I could not distinguish between the candidates. I guess I also skipped effectively unopposed presidential primaries in 2012 and this year.
When I hear “vote harder” it’s useless to me because I do that. It gives me nothing. And even when enough of the people who are unreliable do vote, without follow-through by officials after winning elections it goes to waste.
After having some minutes to digest my freakout, I see that your perspective is addressing the “what can I do” perspective where people feel powerless. But my perspective is where I’ve done work (but still not nearly enough), I’m exhausted, and things are worse than ever. And then you say, do more
He missed the entire part where voting is only one step and completely glossed over actually doing the work. I've been yelling into the void about politics for a long time and I'm finally involved and sad it took me this long.
I'm phone banking, poll watching, organizing, getting dialed into the local D organizations including at the county level. Block walking isn't currently possible due to the heat in Texas an my health but hopefully that'll change.
Living to fight another day is a good principle but some days just staying out of the abyss is discouraging. We need small victories and we don’t get many.
The IRA was a larger-than-small victory. Biden's support for unions and student loan cancellations, and his various decriminalizations are small victories.
I guess you said "we don't get many", and we'd be quibbling about how many is 'many'.
He'd do more with a better congress, but we know that.
Voting, and especially enough people being on board with an unacceptable-but-improving status quo over accelerationist bullshit, is a necessary precondition to “elected democrats need to take action”.
And one that has been fulfilled at the presidential level, with the Democrat winning a majority in 7 of the 8 most recent elections. And was fulfilled 4 years ago with Biden. So with that precondition in place, we have needed more action on these structural issues for years.
A majority of the popular vote is nice, but isn’t the condition to wield any power. As evidenced by how four of the last eight elections went.
And that’s to say nothing of dramatic institutional change requiring more than a zero-vote majority in the senate.
The problem isn’t the voters. It’s our broken institutions. Which include the electoral college.
The deal with representative democracy is that voters choose their elected officials and then it’s up to those officials to deliver. On key issues of institutional powers they have not.
The fact that so many share your sense that “couldn’t pass sweeping institutional reform with a zero-vote majority” is a failure to “deliver” rather than a lack of sufficient votes is a big part of how we wound up here.
No it isn’t. The voters have done their part. You can’t vote twice. These institutional issues are not new. The Supreme Court takeover by the Federalist Society goes back to the early 1980s. They had a 40-year strategy and they won. Democrats need to do more and for decades they have failed.
