[throwawaygmbno]

Black people have known for decades, you vote for the people that don't actively hate you.

Sitting out of the process does absolutely nothing, whether its a protest vote, pretending that politics don't affect you, or just giving up completely. The people who get elected in those situations always 100% ignore you.

When people are in office that are at least willing to listen, you then make a lot of noise and put on pressure. You might get ignored mostly, since you are a minority voting block, but you can make incremental gains and even sometimes big wins.

[metalcrow]

what do you do if both sides actively hate you? voting for the lesser of the two evils seems to just guarantee evil forever, and they have no reason to listen to you if they know you'll always vote for them.

[throwawaygmbno]

You also do what black people have known since the civil war ended. You run for office. Hispanic Americans have learned this and their voices are now heard, Asian Americans also seem to finally understand this point. Gay Americans and other minorities are also running and winning. The answer is to never sit out.

[tehjoker]

Somehow this long hundred year process has resulted in genocide, so it seems something is broken.

[throwawaygmbno]

Are you complaining in this post about the suffering of Gaza while downplaying the suffering of black people in the US and the work black people have done? Because you think its productive to pit the different groups against each other?

[scarecrowbob]

Honestly, I have listened to and sought out a lot of diverse voices because I'm genuinely curious.

I certainly found plenty of folks who were not only okay with the DNC's position but who were actively happy with Harris as the nominee.

Black people are, however, not a monolith. I'm quite aware of the differences between the many different sets of ideas (everything from hoteps to DNC-paid shills to people who genuinely liked the Harris platform to black anarchists/commiunists/ ex-panthers/ etc) and it's highly reductive to try to make the claims you're making here about "what black folks have learned".

As a person who genuinely believes actual leftist (communist and anarchist) politics are legitimate I found plenty of folks who abstained or tried to hold the DNS to change their policy.

But regardless of the "harm reduction strategies" or how legitimate you think having any semblance of political representation, the fact remains:

the democrats lost.

Unless you want to concede that "the party can only be failed, it cannot fail the people", the reality is that the party could have changed its policies and accommodated groups that abstained and perhaps won.

You can claim that the voters are just fools, but at the end of the day very few of us have any power at all over the DNC platform so it's simply bizarre to blame us for their horrible, provable failed choices.

[daemoens]

You still vote for the lesser evil? Sitting out only benefits the greater evil, not you. I don't know how to make this any clearer.

[zmgsabst]

Because you didn’t address the substance of their point:

What you’re arguing for is only single-round optimal, but multi-round suboptimal — much like defection in the Prisoners Dilemma is defeated by trust strategies the Iterated Prisoners Dilemma.

Until you show how it’s multi-round optimal, you haven’t addressed their critique.

[navane]

How is not voting for the lesser evil more multi round optimal? How does that argument look?

Right now it looks like you drained the baby with the bathwater.

My bigger question: Why would you make the foreign issues dominate your national issues?

[zmgsabst]

I don’t do the second, so I can’t answer.

But to answer the first, I’ve heard directly from party strategists that they look for people who vote, but not in a particular race. They can’t identify them directly, but a higher ballot submitted count than (eg) presidential vote count is a signal that they can gain voters in that area — which they follow up by surveying independents, etc to see what policy issues they’re concerned with.

The argument is that by not voting some rounds, you influence their platform in subsequent rounds. If you vote for them regardless, there’s no incentive to optimize their platform to address your concerns.

[daemoens]

I don't believe there is anything else we could realistically do. This stage of the conflict is about to hit the 2 year mark.

[jjani]

Doing what you're suggesting is exactly is what has got us here. Do you not see the pattern that the path we're on started very long ago?

What you're advocating benefits the greater evil ten times as much over a 20-year timespan. They're absolutely loving you. The more Bidens, the more Harrises, the more Clintons, the better for them.

You know why China is doing so well? Because they still remember how to think in the long term.

[underlipton]

On the contrary, Democrats win when black voters turn out and lose when they don't. Because Republicans often hold such nakedly racist and repugnant views that voting for them is a complete non-starter, the only practical choice available to most black voters is not who to vote for, but whether to vote.

Black citizens make the most progress by strategies built around embarrassing the powers that be. Those powers generally capitulate (as much as they ever were going to) after a period of tantrum-throwing, which is where we are now. Such politicians hate having to vote against the donor class's wishes, but they'll do it to get reelected (or they'll be primaried by candidates who will). Or, they'll lose. Those are the choices, which Kamala Harris unfortunately learned the hard way.

One other thing black folk have known for decades: nobody you can put into the White House or the legislature will be able to stop half the country from thinking of you as a n!gger. You don't vote based on that because Carter and Clinton and especially Obama and Biden have shown us that election-based social progression is a pipedream.