If we’re going to talk about complacency, it has to be mentioned that the rightward lurch of the GOP is owed in large part to the tea party fringe going mainstream. If leftists were to organise and get involved in the party, and keep on doing it at every level, the democrats would have little choice but to give up ground to those ideas. The problem is that with politics the way it is, you have to be something of a cretin, or rich, to see much point in it, and so a lot of good people we’d love to see on the ballot aren’t running because they have better things to do with their lives. Campaign finance and media coverage is so fucked up right now that a grassroots local governance campaign based on leftist thought is for most a pretty dire prospect. That’s where I want to see us spending our energy, rather than giving up on democracy at all.
preface: you should vote in every election! not just presidential but there’s an election every year that still matters… even judges are elected!
anyways, it’s kinda like, if you have a shitty broken… say bicycle, where every bit and really the design is broken…
but you need to ride it to do stuff, so you keep spending a lot of resources fixing and maintaining it… jury rigging different bits and pieces to make it sorta rideable…
but if you just walked and recycled it and got/built a new bike with that same energy you spent on the old bike, you’d have a much better bicycling system…
i think there’s a better alternative to throwing the whole bike away… but i do think a lot of good people get lost trying to fix their bike bike while ignoring fundamental flaws…
If we’re going to talk about complacency, it has to be mentioned that the rightward lurch of the GOP is owed in large part to the tea party fringe going mainstream. If leftists were to organise and get involved in the party, and keep on doing it at every level, the democrats would have little choice but to give up ground to those ideas. The problem is that with politics the way it is, you have to be something of a cretin, or rich, to see much point in it, and so a lot of good people we’d love to see on the ballot aren’t running because they have better things to do with their lives. Campaign finance and media coverage is so fucked up right now that a grassroots local governance campaign based on leftist thought is for most a pretty dire prospect. That’s where I want to see us spending our energy, rather than giving up on democracy at all.
preface: you should vote in every election! not just presidential but there’s an election every year that still matters… even judges are elected!
anyways, it’s kinda like, if you have a shitty broken… say bicycle, where every bit and really the design is broken…
but you need to ride it to do stuff, so you keep spending a lot of resources fixing and maintaining it… jury rigging different bits and pieces to make it sorta rideable…
but if you just walked and recycled it and got/built a new bike with that same energy you spent on the old bike, you’d have a much better bicycling system…
i think there’s a better alternative to throwing the whole bike away… but i do think a lot of good people get lost trying to fix their bike bike while ignoring fundamental flaws…