seawasp | Fight for the best world, but don't be stupid about it.

A cut for length...

In the wake of Donald Trump's re-election, and his subsequent even-more-disastrous-than-anticipated-by-most second term, those who didn't actually want this orange lunatic and his handlers running the country have seen a lot of contradictory in-fighting within their own ranks. Ultimately, most of this boils down to two separate positions:

Half-measures are no good and the only proper path forward is to insist on major, substantive changes to the national dialogue and specifically to the candidates and the policies they support. If a candidate shows any tendency to compromise or to accommodate, to attempt "business as usual", they're ruled out of possible support. They've all had their chances to try their "incremental change" and "middle ground" and all that's gotten us is increasingly radical right-wing lunatics who DON'T bother compromising or accommodating others.
You can't expect to transform a multi-trillion dollar, three-hundred-fifty million person economy and government overnight, or even over a few years -- not and maintain any kind of stability, which the world needs. You also can't win elections if the only people you pitch to are the extremists on one side. Instead of demanding some kind of vast sea-change, you have to accept that even the centrists you don't particularly like are LIGHTYEARS better than, well, Trump and his ilk, and vote for them even if that's not the ideal.

A lot of the arguments have included finger-pointing -- the compromise/slow change people angrily accusing the fast-changers of being such purists that they literally caused Trump's election by refusing to accept any impurity in their candidates, the fast-changers similarly pointing at the compromisers because their candidates are benefiting by the same underhanded approaches that the MAGA crowd is, and supporting all manner of failed practices, and even deliberately undermining more progressive candidates rather than accepting them into the system.

Both sides here have some nugget of truth in their positions, and indeed, I think I hold BOTH positions -- in different situations.

IN THE LEAD-UP TO THE ELECTION -- during the time when candidates are competing -- RADICAL CHANGE needs to be pushed. Ironically, Trump's clown-car of an administration has firmly disproven the idea that you CAN'T do a major makeover quickly. Project 2025 showed us how, and subsequent events showed they were correct. It could be done, and it's BEING done. The election of Mayor Mamdami in New York City shows that this approach can be used on the other side as well.

So prior to every election, MAKE EVERY EFFORT TO PUSH THE BEST CANDIDATES. Who's willing to try to push universal healthcare? Who's going to try rewriting corporate law to make corporations required to act ethically? Who's going to boost Social Security and maybe even a UBI? Who's going to restore our programs to support the health and advancement of our country and others along with us? Who's going to change the way our system works to accommodate multiple points of view? PUSH THESE PEOPLE.

*BUT IN THE ELECTION ITSELF*, you vote for whoever is in the slot against MAGA, unless they're literally worse in every way (hard to imagine, but every time I told myself things couldn't get worse, I've been wrong, so...). Why? Because UNTIL WE CHANGE OUR VOTING SYSTEM, we are given TWO, and ONLY TWO, choices. Unless and until one of those choices is "The Human Beings Deserve Proper Treatment Everywhere" party, we're stuck with what we've got. So even if the corrupt bastards in the Democratic Party managed to torpedo your favorite candidate at the convention, you still VOTE FOR THEM, because corrupt as they are, they're GODDAMNED SAINTS compared to what we're currently dealing with. They are, at the least, not demented sociopaths following a senile monster down a path of racist, hate-filled arrogance and greed.

And AFTER they're elected, THEN you PUSH HARD AGAIN. Push for change. Push for human dignity. Push for the basic rights of workers to be able to support themselves without three jobs, of people to not die of cancer because they can't afford to see a doctor, of all of us to have clean air and water and land regardless of what a group of stockholders want.

I have to emphasize that the next few years are CRUCIAL. The detached-from-reality billionaire class is working on their anti-guillotine measures as we speak (that is, after all, one major point of having autonomous security systems; programmed machines don't betray you or have second thoughts), and Trump's rampage through our system has done tremendous damage to everyone already. If we don't grab the levers of power back out of the hands of these hate-fuelled lunatics, the damage may be irreversible.

So do not, as my dad used to say, cut off your nose to spite your face. Yes, it HURTS to vote for someone who holds positions that you don't agree with, especially if they beat out someone you'd MUCH rather have voted for.

But FAILURE will hurt all of us a lot more.