My disenchantment is based on how differently the current administration reacts to 2 conflicts: Ukraine-Russia and Gaza-Israel, in the latter supporting Israel’s indiscriminate war against Palestinian civilians with the excuse to exterminate Hamas. This post summarizes my disappointment after finally accepting that the US is not the benevolent hegemon I thought it was and how even the supposed American liberals, the democrats, while publicly calling the Israeli government to restrain itself, keep sending them every weapon they ask for and protect them at the UN with our veto. I’m now politically orphan.
I always thought America stood against bullies, America was the great nation, a country where we help others protect their human rights, fight authoritarianism of any kind, be it left, right, religious… the way we did with Ukraine against Russia. Ukraine fits here because authoritarian Putin decided he couldn’t accept an independent Ukraine anymore: I’m all for sending Ukraine the means they need to defend themselves to deny authoritarian Russia a successful occupation. The Ukrainian war is not a morally gray one like the ones in Iraq or Afghanistan, this one is black and white. Putin has to be stopped. America is here on the right side of history supporting Ukraine.
However, in Gaza, America doesn’t act like the benign hegemon I thought we were, but like a external power supporting a client state: Our government supports the indiscriminate bombing of Palestinian civilians in the name of fighting terrorism and calls everybody that questions the narrative that Israel is fighting against terrorists an antisemite, yet ignoring that Gaza has been an open air prison for 20 years and that these conditions make it ideal for fanatics and hate to thrive.
No, I’m not an Islamist (I don’t care about any religion) and no, I don’t want Israel to be wiped off the planet and no, I don’t have anything against Jews or Israelis, and no, I don’t deny the holocaust and the 6 millions of Jews who were murdered. It’s ridiculous to have to say this before even criticizing Israel.
America loves to support Israel’s right to defend itself, yet this same right in practice means carte blanche to kill Palestinian civilians as well, destroying their hospitals and their capability to function as a normal society. The Israeli army and government are not behaving any better than the Hamas fanatics that invaded Israel and killed 1300 Israeli civilians, the Israeli army has killed far more Palestinian civilians than Hamas did when they invaded Israel, yet simply saying what I did, simply comparing both sides like I did or calling for a cease fire gets you labeled an antisemite, hoping that simply uttering those words will make everybody rally against you and justify killing Palestinians.
A life is a life everywhere. All lives matter.
No, not every Palestinian is a terrorist, yet the media and the Israeli and American right insist in no making distinctions, make no effort to create a separate Palestinian state and keep not questioning the conditions of deprivation that will make another violent reaction against Israel in 20 years possible, when the current Palestinian children, now bombed and homeless, grow up and reach maturity, accusing Hamas of hiding behind civilians, ignoring that the policies of the Israeli right created them.
And our government does nothing to stop that. Worse, keeps arming and protecting the other side, the more powerful side.
Where do I go now?
I’m truly in the same boat as you.
“You need to push this button that kills innocent people, to counteract the people pushing the button that kills more innocent people.” really seems to be the only argument anyone can muster for why I should vote at all in this system.
Participating in a system that only aspires to offer different numbers of murdered Innocents isn’t a very morally compelling stance, and because there is no vote on individual stances of a candidate, any vote is a blanket endorsement of ALL of the candidate’s stances.
Fuck this country.
You’re not pressing the button yourself, you’re voting for which one gets pressed. By not voting, you’re basically saying “I don’t care which button gets pressed, even if one of them is objectively worse”.
It’s a shitty situation to be in but unfortunately there are lots of people in your country who are rabid about pushing that worse button.
Yeah. You can protest against the candidate you voted for and it is fine to vote for someone in a general election you voted against in the primary.
And it is important to participate because the loss of a vote may affect other elections down the ticket who are better representing you.
You are literally pushing a button on a voting machine that says, “put this person in charge of the weapons, who says they’re going to use the weapons to kill people”.
Just because both buttons you can choose result in dead people doesn’t make the dead caused by one more okay than the dead caused by the other.
Both buttons result in dead people, but one button results less dead people.
The choices suck, but the less shitty choice should be pretty obvious.
Of course the less shitty choice between the 2 main candidates is obvious. There are also other choices, and some of those are even less shitty. Arguing for only ever voting for the less shitty of the top-2 just means nothing will ever change. You go vote for murderers if you want, just don’t tell yourself it makes you a good person because you pick the less prolific murderer.
“I voted for Goebbels instead of Hitler, so I’m a hero!”
Go vote for non-murderer if you want, just don’t tell yourself it makes you a good person because you pick the one who can’t possibly win and let the bigger murder win.
“I ignored the shitty reality of the situation, so I’m a hero!”
The only practical course of action would be to vote for and support progressive candidates who are morally and ethically consistent in an effort to change the make-up of the democratic party.
You can use resources like opensecrets.org to investigate where candidates get their money for campaigns, which will tell you the truth about whether they believe the things they say or just say them because they know it’s what people want to hear.
There’s no way of improving a democracy without participating in it, even when the conditions are less than ideal.
There are two things you do when voting in a two-party system:
- Vote to keep out the candidates that would do real damage
- Vote to communicate your preferences for candidates with platforms that match your priorities
I know it seems like a third party is the only solution to your current situation, but it’s not. The solution is to keep the idiots out by voting Democrat in general elections, and then to vote in primaries or with your campaign contribution dollars for Democrats who match your views on Israel/Palestine.
You might also support candidates who are in favor of voting reform, including things like ranked choice voting, which also happen to be people who currently run as Democrats.
☝️☝️☝️ this ☝️☝️☝️
Nobody gets their way 100% in democracy. Vote in the primaries or try and run… Then vote from who’s on the field.
Yes, exactly. The short term solution requires that people recognize the greater evil in the room and defend what little progress we’ve made. We can’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Our first part the post voting system is horrible, but until we can build up enough progressive movement to update it to a better system, priority 1 is exactly what you said.
Choosing not to vote for Democrats because they’re not perfect is choosing to step back and give republicans a free ticket to burn all of our progress to the ground. It’s naïve to think otherwise.
And honestly, that naïveté is holding us back from actually addressing issues like israel vs palestine. Enoguh splintering among progressives will by default give control back to republican leaders who would happily sit back and watch palestinians die while lying about it and blaming it on anything anyone else.
but until we can build up enough progressive movement to update it to a better system
We also need to try and expose as many people to the alternatives as possible. Anyone who can should be trying to utilize RCV. Trying to figure out what game(s) to play at game night? Use RCV. There are plenty of free apps out there to facilitate.
The more people who use it, see it’s benefits and that it’s not as complicated as people make it out to be, the faster it will happen.
Instant runoff voting is terrible and more complicated than people think, and I will never support it. It’s a false improvement whose adoption will discourage meaningful change.
If it’s a single winner election and you want a simple improvement, use approval voting. If you want to take on a little complexity for some further improvement, use delegable yes/no voting. I have one idea for further improvement, if anyone is really interested in voting methods.
It’s not ‘terrible’, but it does have issues just like every other voting system. It’s significantly better than what we have now.
Approval voting simplifies things but also has limitations because it removes any weight/preference people may have. If 55% vote for A, and B, but prefer A over B, and 45% vote B and C, but prefer C over B… B wins but 55% of the voters preferred A. Same exact issue you’re raising with RCV but occurs more often with approval than RCV.
Keep fighting the good fight, but don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
STAR voting offers the same benefit of “vote for as many as you want” without Approval Voting’s drawback of being unable to rank your preferences. I have yet to find a better method. It is, of course, miles better than IRV, both in complexity to the voter (rate candidates 0-5 stars) and simplicity of tallying the result (two steps).
Any thoughts on the alternative I mentioned, DYN, described here?
At first blush, that sounds really complicated for the voter to understand what happens to their ballot. Potentially delegating part of their vote to one of the candidates? That’s going to be a hard sell. Sure, the direct mechanics for voting seems simple, but the system that ballot would go into feels unlikely to lead to better satisfaction than STAR, and might even lead to less informed voters. Even reading your link several times, I’m still not sure I correctly understand how the delegated votes are supposed to work, because I keep going back to “Why would anyone want that?”
My takeaway is either what we value in a democratic voting system is significantly different in some key area, or I don’t understand how the delegation in DYN is supposed to work, but I suspect it’s the former. I’m not a political scientist or a voting system enthusiast though, I just happen to like STAR.
By not voting for the lesser evil, you’re helping the greater evil. Badee badee badeep, that’s democracy!
You have no choice.
The US political system is utterly rigged in many, many ways to prevent the emergence of a third party.
In order to change this, the American public would have to somehow pressure both parties to agree to pass many laws, at the federal and state and county and city levels to /effectively/ alter the system.
They are of course never going to do this.
The only possible way to throw off this deathgrip is to somehow get an ‘extreme’ member of either party to become that party’s nominee.
This has been attempted twice in my life time:
Ron Paul was ‘the internet candidate’ of many young people who focused on his opposition to the Iraq War, Libertarian Economic and Social policies, either overlooking or being unaware of his ties to the rather unsavory John Birch Society, and the extremely ideologically fervent but ultimately delusional Mises Institute. Started on 4chan, hundreds of young Americans photobombed any random live newscast anywhere they could find with Ron Paul signs, raised millions for Paul’s campaign, functionally acting as his PR department as he barely had one and it was terrible, and they even raised enough money to rent a blimp, plaster it with Ron Paul banners and fly it around the country.
It didn’t work.
Later, Bernie Sanders emerged as a candidate in the Democratic primaries with a chance to shake up the Dem/Rep balance. The Democratic Party basically did everything they possibly could to sideline Bernie, handing the nomination to Hillary Clinton.
She of course lost to Trump.
Anyway, voting for a third party in America will statistically nearly never work on the Federal level. Even most Congresspersons and Senators in the past 20 years that have not been an R or D have been an ‘Independent’, nearly always being somewhere in the middle of R and D. You might have some third party candidate actually win on the State and Local level, but this is very, very rare.
Functionally all the voting for a third party does is remove votes from a more popular candidate with more moderate views.
Anyway, none of this matters: It was about a decade ago when a study revealed that Congress people of all kinds nearly never advance legislation that is highly popular among their constituents. They nearly always do advance legislation that will materially benefit their donors.
We do not like in a functional democracy or democratic republic.
We live in a functional corporate oligarchy, where hot button cultural issues are used to wedge voters, and massive PR and advertising campaigns are everywhere to convince the public that policies and legislation that helps businesses and hurts voters has a function deathgrip on the mind of the average American.
My honest to god suggestion to you is to either hunker down and form a local group of capable individuals to provide mutual aide to your local community as income disparity continues to rise, more and more become homeless, infrastructure continues to collalse, etc., or to get out of this nuclear armed banana republic with more guns than people, where somewhere between 1/4 to 1/3 of voters are so incredibly delusional and successfully propagandized that they believe a large amount of the Q Anon / MAGA insano-version of real life.
There is no problem so bad it cannot be made worse. Look at more than one issue, and vote carefully.
This rule hasn’t changed.
I understand your frustrations but unfortunately have no actionable solutions. I wanted to reach out to say that you’re not alone on this, and that we have a lot of structural problems this question is emblematic of. I’m having trouble keeping any sort of hope for a better future, and the Gaza war has not been helpful.
Be well. Maybe we finally get the three seashells out of this!
You’re naive.
Ukraine wasn’t attacking Russia before they invaded. It’s a completely different situation.
Gaza has been attacking Israel for it’s entire existence, and far worse since Hamas took over 15 years ago. The Gaza strip was literally created by an invasion from Egypt (and four other countries) when they invaded Israel the day after Israel declared independence.
You call Gaza an open air prison, but it has a wall to another country (Egypt) who doesn’t want to help these people either because they realize that this isn’t actually a Palestinian vs Israeli war.
As with most things, you just need to follow the money. This war isn’t being funded by Palestinians on that side, they’re far too poor for that. So who’s bankrolling them, and what do they want? It’s Iran.
Iran sure as hell doesn’t give a shit about Palestinians independence. I’ll tell you that for free.
The reason why western governments support Israel is for that exact reason, they’re fighting a proxy war against Iran.
You don’t fix this situation by backing off support for Israel though, all that would result in is the mass killing of Israelis, and you’d be complaining the government isn’t doing enough to keep Israeli’s safe.
I’d like a citation on the funding from Iran. Iran is mostly Shi’ite, and doesn’t generally get involved in Arab or Sunni affairs. And this article from 2021 (prior to the current conflict) points out that the bulk of Hamas funding comes from Qatar and Turkey, respectively.
This Wikipedia article that’s been around for more than a decade covers a lot of info and has references.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–Israel_proxy_conflict?wprov=sfla1
Gaza has been attacking Israel for it’s entire existence, and far worse since Hamas took over 15 years ago.
Israel has been attacking Gaza for about the same period of time too. Occupations are an act of war.
Congratulations, you’ve now figured out it’s a war.
In your opinion, should Israel or Palestine surrender? Because if one side doesn’t surrender, the other option to end a war is literally just killing everyone on the other side.
Uh… Neither? Usually peace is preferable in cases like this. So from that perspective it’s Israel and its far-right government that has sworn against a Palestinian state multiple times that should back down, but nobody needs to surrender to anyone.
Peace treaties are just a nicer name for one side surrendering. Go look up the Paris Peace Treaties (Germany surrendering), or the Treaty of San Francisco (Japan surrendering), hell even the Paris Peace Accords were just the US surrendering in Vietnam. Go read the terms of these agreements, it’s pretty obvious they’re surrenders.
Are you really that naive?
Peace treaties are just a nicer name for one side surrendering.
You’re either being willfully obtuse or have zero knowledge of history. Either way you’re using a very convenient definition of surrendering. If you interpret the aggressor pulling out as surrendering then yeah a lot of wars will end in one surrender or another, but that’s not how that works.
What about the winter war?
The problem is we have a First Past the Post system. This essentially means that you get to vote for one or the other, and refusal to vote means the one you like even less gets more voting power.
To complicate matters, this particular upcoming vote is actual Nazi-style fascists (down to quoting Hitler) who would fund the Israel/Hamas war vs Dems (and Republicans) who are funding the Israel/Hamas war. Basically, it’s a really bad time to push for a third party when FPTP is still the main hurdle.
So I would encourage you to look at your local races and your state races to change things from the bottom up. These local candidates are often not beholden to the whims of the DNC. I’m not a fan of Dems, either, but I am also under no illusions that if I don’t help them win in 2024, we’ll wind up with a fascist dictator and lose our ability to meaningfully vote at all.
I believe we can dump both the Dems/DNC and the Fascists/RNC, but we have to vote strategically to get there in several cycles; it’s not going to happen overnight, and the sad reality is a lot of people are going to die in Gaza no matter which option we choose.
ETA: As someone smarter said, “Your vote is a chess move, not a love letter.”
if you don’t care about other matters I would say green. I mean the result certainly won’t be gaza being better off but you will be able to tell folks you did not vote for kang.
US is not the benevolent hegemon I thought it was
Welcome to the light, shall you get free of other pieces of propaganda too. 🙏✨
this one is black and white. Putin has to be stopped
Putin’s regime is rotten to the core, and it would be best for everyone, Russians included, if it was stopped.
However, don’t let that blind you to what Ukraine is doing: giving out pensions to Nazi veterans, using the fascist salute along a slogan that used to be “Glory to Ukraine, kill all the Poles”, renaming streets to honor their Nazi heroes, or using the black sun and other Nazi symbols for their troops. In addition to still falling behind on curbing corruption among its own government.
I support Ukrainian people’s right to get from under an oppressive regime, or to not get bombed and raped in their homes, but I’ll hold my judgement about the current government until I see what it does after the war. In the meantime, just be aware that arming Ukraine('s fighters) “too much”, might not be the best of ideas, you might not want (although some might) another US-sponsored “Mujahideen freedom fighters” situation (coincidentally, that was also against
RussiaUSSR).in Gaza, America doesn’t act like the benign hegemon I thought we were
It acts like the
drugarms peddler it’s been for a long time already: fund building new weapons, sell the old ones, destroy the old ones using newer ones, repeat.Bonus points when you realize that all the “government spending” to give weapons to Ukraine or Israel, goes to the same weapon manufacturers. Aren’t hidden subsidies in plain sigh great? Except for some religious fanatics who want the Armageddon to happen ASAP, helping Israel is not even about what Israel is doing (war? genocide? TikTok bombing videos?), it’s about getting rid of weapon stocks so America (as in, its citizens) can be convinced of a need to pay for new ones… plus reminding the whole world that they better like the USD, “or else”. 💵
Based on latest news, it seems like Israel hasn’t been using up their stockpiles fast enough, so now the US has started attacking “Irani forces in Iraq”, just to “keep the peace” in the region. 💣💥🕊️
All lives matter not every Palestinian is a terrorist
Yeah, all lives matter… they’ve just been severely devalued since there are 8 billion instead of only 0.5 billion of them, and we’re expected to hit over 16 billion. Right now, a good portion of Palestinians and Israelis, are trying to produce new offspring as quickly as possible, with rates like 8 kids per woman or more.
How many women, and men, taking part in that, are not radicalized or oppressed by someone radicalized?
[Sometimes I wonder if the problem is not so much the wall around Gaza, but the lack of a wall around all of Eretz Yisrael 😒]
Where do I go now?
If you want to fight for your ideal “benevolent hegemon America”… probably into politics. Maybe economic sciences, try finding a way for America to change its business model.
If you want to solve world’s problems… maybe AI. People have proven again and again to be too stupid to solve their own problems.
Otherwise, maybe Canada? Or the EU? We’re having some right-wingnut trouble of our own, but our economies don’t depend on promoting wars (for now).
Support third parties, vote strategically, push for voting reform to bust the first past the post duopoly.
To add: it should be possible for Democrats to win your vote, iff they oppose FPTP. It’s been gaining in both visibility and popularity within the Democratic party - the push is working.
There is literally no qualified candidate who supports FPTP.
FPTP
Can you explain in more detail? I’m unclear on what First Past the Post voting has to do with the OP’s concerns.
First Past the Post ensures that, to prevent a party from winning, the only option that’s effective is to vote for the party that stands for as much the opposite platform as possible, and it favors the incumbents.
This means that in the US system, it will always be one of the two parties that wins, instead of people being able to vote for the representatives they actually want to represent them or for the policies they actually want to see put into action.
There’s no way to say “whoever wins, I don’t want X to win” or “moderate politician that everyone sort of likes is my first vote, but if he doesn’t get enough votes, I’d prefer the Democrat to win instead of the Republican.”
Because of this, saying “no” to the Democrats supporting the war on Palestine is saying “yes” to the war on women’s rights, for example.
Sure, I guess that’s a… very long term?.. solution to the OP’s problem.
The us political system isnt about voting for who you want doing what you want. Its about who’s gonna kill less people over time sadly. Dems are center right and GOP is far right but we dont have a choice we can go for that wont result in a split vote allowing things to get even worse. The american political system is broken trash and there isnt room for a third party very very on purpose.
But was it really on purpose? It could very easily be an unintended consequence.
It was maybe an unintended consequence a 100 years ago, it’s completely intentional now.
Even if it wasn’t on purpose in the very beginning it was obvious very early that politics were coalescing in two coalitions. The US had 200 years to fix the problem, and there are plenty of examples and alternatives on how to fix it around the world but it chose to keep its system. So, right now, it’s very much on purpose.
Power struggles are on purpose. They do not want company as it would split either of their constituents
Fix the political system by supporting IRV. Until then vote for the best offered that can win. Be involved in the party prices too so the best is better then it is…
Keep in mind that both the Palestinians and Iran and Russia enabled Hamas and are enabling similar entities in Lebanon and Syria. Hamas is the government of the Gaza Strip. They are heavily armed and well entrenched with something like 40000 solders on their side. Until the Palestinian death numbers reach 40000 the Hamas sourced numbers really could be all combatants as they are not broken out nor are they third party numbers so who knows. They also do not care about the rules of war… they will murder anyone. The war would not have stared without Hamaa, Palastinians, and their supporters making it so. So hold all of these parties to the same standards you hold Israel.
That said yes. Seems like Israel is over the top. Then again look at what the US did after 9/11 and about 3000 killed. How do we justify that. Consider if 30000 were killed in 9/11. This is roughly proportionally what Israel experienced. What would you have them do instead.
Only responding to the IRV portion of your comment, and repeating myself from elsewhere in this thread:
Instant runoff voting is terrible and more complicated than people think, and I will never support it. It’s a false improvement whose adoption will discourage meaningful change.
If it’s a single winner election and you want a simple improvement, use approval voting. If you want to take on a little complexity for some further improvement, use delegable yes/no voting. I have one idea for further improvement, if anyone is really interested in voting methods.
I think you can choose almost any system and be better then what we have.
We have IRV for some offices. I love it. Biggest problem ranking 6 or 7 candidates takes some time and looks complicated.
Frankly open to other systems. Proportion representation seems interesting for example in some cases.
Protest, write your officials, work on primary campaigns. Make it clear how you feel and then vote for the candidate that will do the least harm actually.
So yes for local races or races that are competitive third party sure. My supervisor is a socialist he’s great.
For federal elections harm reduction and accountability is still the answer
A third party vote for president gives us a fascist dictator which is easily the worst possible option
I’m with you on this feeling sick of this war and the endless apologia but the tide of opinion and our policy is shifting. There is a huge generational divide on this issue that cuts across party lines
