Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent appearance on the Pod Save America podcast had, for me, the feeling of a final disappointment, the kind that’s a little sad but brings a set of quixotic hopes to a close. AOC appeared on the popular Crooked Media show to announce her endorsement of Joe Biden for president in the 2024 election. To deliver that particular endorsement while appearing on that particular podcast — where former Obama-administration staffers define the limits of acceptable left-of-center opinion — was to send a very deliberate message. It was AOC’s last kiss-off to the radicals who had supported her, voted for her, donated to her campaign, and made her unusually famous in American politics, the beneficiary of a wholly unique cult of personality that is now starting to come undone.
An endorsement of a sitting president, after all, doesn’t have to be a ceremonial affair. Ocasio-Cortez could have sent out a tweet. In making her announcement in a forum where the hosts were saying that a vote for anyone but Joe Biden was a vote for Donald Trump — a distillation of the hollow “We’re Not Trump” message that Democrats have been loudly pushing for the past seven years — AOC was putting a bow on a half-decade-long drift from radical outsider to Establishment liberal. Since taking office in January 2019, she has deferred to party leadership again and again on the issues that matter, even as she has made token gestures of resistance to solidify the illusion that she is a gadfly. And increasingly, she seems stung by criticism from the left to the point where she appears ready to simply embrace her party and its politics with open arms.
In a 2021 interview with a publication of the Democratic Socialists of America, Ocasio-Cortez attacked left critics of the Biden administration on identitarian grounds. “We really have to ask ourselves, what is the message that you are sending to your Black and brown and undocumented members of your community, to your friends, when you say nothing has changed?” This is a stark example of what socialist critics have accused Democrats of doing for years — that they forbid criticism and enforce loyalty to the party through vague accusations of racism and references to people of color and other marginalized groups. Yet during the very period in which she gave that interview, the Biden administration had been busily deporting tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants, almost all of them Black and brown.
Less than three years earlier, on the campaign trail, Ocasio-Cortez had sung a very different tune about partisan politics. At a campaign event in 2018, she addressed how Brett Kavanaugh could be confirmed to the Supreme Court despite the sexual-assault allegations against him, saying, “When people say, how could this have happened — it is because of the slow slide of our public institutions, when too many people sat on the sidelines and read the news and said, ‘Wow, that’s crazy. Time to go to class.’” In her consistent fealty to Democratic Party leadership, she has done exactly that, lamenting about how crazy the world is, then hurrying off to dutifully follow the lead of her superiors.
There are two indelible images of Ocasio-Cortez, neither of them flattering, that bookend her evolution. The first is the photo of her weeping outside an immigration camp in Texas in 2018, before she had won election to Congress. Dressed all in white, she wails in protest of “kids in cages,” the phrase employed by activists to denounce Trump-era immigration policy. The protest itself wasn’t offensive; our treatment of migrants at the border is indeed indefensible. The trouble lies in what didn’t happen next. When Biden took office in 2020, American immigration policy did not meaningfully change. This is often chalked up to COVID-era restrictions, but those restrictions are long gone and Democrats have not made significant changes to Trump’s border policy. There are, literally, still kids in cages — so why isn’t Ocasio-Cortez at the border again, protesting her country’s president?
The second image of AOC is at the 2021 Met Gala — a who’s who of celebrity and wealth, a celebration of precisely the elitism that the left is meant to oppose. So it was a bit depressing, but not at all surprising, to see this champion of the working class at an event in which celebrities wandered around unmasked while their many servants dutifully wore masks to prevent the spread of COVID. Politicians, even lefty politicians, go to fancy events and hobnob with the ruling class; it’s a fact of life. But Ocasio-Cortez tried to have it both ways: she wore white again, this time a dress emblazoned with the words “Tax the Rich” in bright red. And this made her opportunity to rub shoulders with the one percent a matter of direct hypocrisy. It’s one thing to go to the party; it’s another to blare out a message that you disapprove of the party while you’re there.
If there is a key to AOC’s political persona, it lies between these two poles. The former betrays the fundamental moral corruption of partisanship: It compels people to care about political issues precisely to the degree that those issues are convenient for the party. Losing interest in our immoral immigration system after Biden’s election is exactly the sort of thing that AOC’s rabid fans once said she would never do. The latter not only sees AOC transported from outside the gates to inside the most elite of venues; it also showcases AOC’s increasingly half-hearted attempts to cover up her genuine predilections with the most superficial of symbolic acts.
Take, for example, the chronic mistreatment of workers in our railway system that contributed to the derailment and subsequent air crisis in East Palestine, Ohio. Ocasio-Cortez publicly castigated the railway companies and demanded better conditions for workers — then voted to forbid them from striking. It’s hard to imagine a clearer example of her overall political orientation, speaking up like a militant supporter of workers in the press then immediately betraying them with her vote. She would go on to claim that this was really a matter of supporting what the workers wanted, but Railroad Workers United quickly clarified that this defense was an act of remarkable dishonesty. Labor is the heart of the left, and strikes are the sword of labor; to vote to forbid workers from striking, for a supposed socialist, amounts to an unforgivable betrayal of basic values.
Less surprising, but just as damning, has been Ocasio-Cortez’s meek attitude toward Biden’s foreign policy. The Israeli occupation of Palestine is perhaps where AOC’s position has been most indefensible, most self-parodic: She has mixed at times impressive rhetoric with total inconsistency as a legislator. On the campaign trail in 2018, she ruffled many feathers by saying, “The occupation of Palestine is just an increasing crisis of humanitarian condition.” It’s a testament to just how constrained the Establishment conversation is on this issue that such a mild statement drew controversy, but simply referring to the occupation as an occupation was an encouraging sign. So disappointing, then, that Ocasio-Cortez has spent the past half-decade waffling on this issue. Notoriously, she cried on the floor of Congress over a bill to fund Israel’s “Iron Dome,” one small part of our country’s seemingly limitless willingness to support that country’s domination of Palestine — and then proceeded to vote “present” rather than “no” on the funding bill in question.
Some suggested that there was a deeper political purpose to her “present” vote, that she was playing 12-dimensional chess. It’s powerfully difficult to understand how this could work, though. Israel’s vociferous champions will denounce any opponent as an antisemite, and indeed AOC’s vote did not spare her from their wrath. Perhaps it’s true, as some suggested, that the point was to better position her for a Senate run, but again it’s difficult to see how voters motivated to defend Israel would ever support her given her past statements anyway. If she simply privately agreed with sending Israel’s military even more American funding, then she had little to worry about; the measure carried by a margin of 411 votes. So what was she doing, beyond simultaneously angering the base of voters who had put her into office and the pro-Israel Establishment that would be antagonistic toward her regardless?
As is so often the case, Ocasio-Cortez seemed simultaneously aimless and calculated, a ruthless political operator and someone in over her head. Even her symbolic acts are confusing and inconsistent. Consider the debates within the Democratic Party about using the 2021 American Rescue Plan COVID relief bill to raise the federal minimum wage. Adjusted for inflation, the 1970 federal minimum wage was more than $12 an hour; the 2023 minimum wage stands at $7.25. Under the auspices of a federal Democratic trifecta, some left-leaning Democrats proposed raising that meager minimum. There was nothing nefarious about this effort; ramming through favored legislation as part of major packages is a bog-standard element of congressional practice. Republicans do it all the time. And yet, predictably, centrist Democrats fought against the effort.
Ocasio-Cortez, at first, looked like a champion of the minimum wage increase. “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Take Minimum Wage Fight Directly to Joe Biden,” read a Newsweek headline that was typical of the breathless style with which AOC has been covered. “There are progressive Democrats that have that muscle in the House,” Ocasio-Cortez was quoted as saying. “If we as a party decide to stand down on our promise of elevating the minimum wage, I think that’s extraordinarily spurious and it’s something that as a party we could have a further conversation about how to fight for it.”
Would it surprise you to learn that they did not, in fact, use that muscle? When the time came, she voted for the ARP bill anyway. Of course she would have lost if she had voted against the bill, but then why not do so as a symbolic gesture? She clearly has no issue with making such gestures, given that some 18 months later she would stand as the only Democrat to vote against an omnibus spending bill supported by the president. This has been a maddening element of her tenure in Congress: There’s no rhyme or reason to when she will and won’t buck party leadership, no internal logic to which hills she’s willing to die on and which she isn’t. Are protest votes valuable, or aren’t they? If they’re valuable enough to do in some scenarios where her vote won’t matter, why not demonstrate solidarity with Palestinians or in favor of a higher minimum wage? What is the plan here? How are her values operationalized? I have no idea, and I suspect that Democratic voters don’t, either.
Ocasio-Cortez once said, “In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party,” an assertion of her distaste for the Democratic Party. Now she seems increasingly comfortable with leaving her past radical branding behind. If she wants to be a docile Democratic senator one day, she should. Just drop the wince-inducing efforts to have it both ways.
Typically, when I criticize Ocasio-Cortez, the response is not to argue that she has actually acted deftly as a politician, much less that she’s demonstrated any consistency between her statements and her actions. Instead, I’m constantly told that the problem lies in expecting anything from her at all. Hey, she’s just one congresswoman! She’s hemmed in by her party and an undemocratic system! She’s constrained by capitalism! Again and again, I’ve been told that asking Ocasio-Cortez for minimal ideological consistency or, even worse, results, is simply to ask too much.
But this defense immediately suggests a rather damning question: If AOC never had a chance to do anything … what have we been celebrating her for? Why has she been subject to such immense, embarrassing hagiography? And if the response to every complaint about a lack of results is to say that we should never have expected anything in the first place, what was the point of nominating her instead of Joe Crowley, the ten-term Democratic machine politician she displaced?
And, more concretely, if this wing of left-leaning Democrats was always so powerless that we would be fools to demand anything in exchange for supporting them, what were all the donations for? The Justice Democrats and various associated figures, particularly Bernie Sanders, have hoovered up tens of millions of dollars in donations since the 2016 presidential primary. That wing of the party is in the habit of bragging about the fact that this money comes from small donors — from regular people like you and me, rather than the rich or big institutions. But will AOC or anyone in her sphere ever divulge what we have purchased with our donations? It seems decidedly unlikely.
“Now I’m elected I have the power to draft, lobby, and shape the laws that govern the USA,” said Ocasio-Cortez in 2019 after being sworn in. How quickly that awesome power gives way to the insistence that nothing can be done.
The lurking issue here is that taking a jaundiced look at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might prompt people to critically evaluate Bernie Sanders, whose favorability among American leftists exceeds that of Santa Claus. We might, if we’re asking what exactly AOC has accomplished, or why her reception has been so rapturous if we aren’t allowed to expect anything of her, have the same conversation about Sanders. Many ardent lefties I know will go to great lengths to avoid that conversation. I am thoroughly convinced that Sanders’s 2016 primary campaign was worth the work and resources, and I have great personal affection for him. But that affection is precisely the problem — too many otherwise sober, politically minded leftists can’t see past their personal regard for Sanders, treating him as a kindly old socialist grandpa instead of a career politician whose legislative victories are meager and who should be held to the same critical accounting as anyone else.
The macro situation is this: Establishment Democrats and their liberal media mouthpieces expect total electoral loyalty from leftists while offering us little in return. As the Pod Save America crew demonstrated, the party Establishment barely attempts to hide its contempt for its leftmost flank. But as the constancy of third-party voting in presidential elections shows, the tactic of shaming voters has limited effectiveness. I don’t think Ralph Nader or Jill Stein cost the Democrats presidential elections; I think Al Gore and Hillary Clinton were terrible candidates who ran incompetent campaigns. But if you do think lefties voting third party determine the outcomes of national elections, perhaps at some point you might consider actually giving those lefties something to vote for?
For years, the standard line has been that Bernie and AOC and the Squad have value beyond their votes because they serve as a symbol of what’s possible on the far-left of partisan politics, and their visibility will inspire more people to vote for left candidates, donate to their campaigns, or run for office as socialists themselves. In 2016, I was told that, win or lose, Sanders’s primary battle was generating a permanent infrastructure for left organizing within the Democratic Party, that the email lists and donor corps would live on past that primary and beyond Bernie and become a tool for durable lefty muscle within the Democratic system.
Well, I think the jury has come back in: The increased visibility of a few socialist politicians has not made far-left Democratic power any more achievable or scalable. The radical wing of the party can still fit our representation in Congress in a three-row SUV. And perhaps we’ve waited long enough to recognize that there’s no reason to expect better in the near future. it’s been three years since a Democratic presidential primary in which candidates professed, so briefly, to care about the left wing of the party, including making broad promises about desperately needed health-care reform; five years since Ocasio-Cortez was elected after making constant self-aggrandizing statements about her revolutionary potential; seven years since the Bernie Sanders primary run in 2016, when it briefly seemed like real change might be coming to the Democratic Party; 12 years since Occupy Wall Street, which demonstrated the organic demand for radical change; and 15 years since the financial crisis that convinced so many Americans that the system is broken and that the wealthy broke it. What do we have to show for all of the noise that’s been made in that time? Where are the next-generation champions who were supposed to emerge from the Bernie for 2016 machine? Where is this much-ballyhooed wave of socialist agitators who were going to win office? We might, finally, have to admit that the too-pure-to-live lefties who insisted that nothing would ever come from all of this noise were right and that the Democratic Party is simply structurally resistant to socialist change. There is no more fruit to pick here.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was once a symbol of what American politics might become. Now she’s a message to the rest of us: it’s going to take more than symbols.
I get it. I was a new leftist once too. Hoping there was some way I could push the system such that we would reach our leftist utopia before I die. But the reality is harsh. We’re not going to fix this in our lifetimes and we’re going to suffer for it, and that’s okay.
Let’s put political power in where we can and prepare the next generations of leftist to be successful.
A revolution only works when we have agreement on a large enough scale to be successful. We are not there yet. Consolidating ideologies only going to hurt us at this point.
AOC never really was any different. She just pretended to put on a show. Sadly, her performance was convincing because I fell for it. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Lesson learned.
I preface this by saying that I agree that the Justice Democrats and related have not lived up to expectations, but what I’ve realized is just how foolish it is to think that it would have gone significantly differently. And no, I’m not an electoralism doesn’t work person. Every vote matters, but it also needs to go hand in hand with an active and engaged citizenry.
As long as the democrats can point to the republicans and say ‘vote for us or else!’ then we can only chip away at the ranks every couple of years.
The biggest threat we can pose to them is to start getting voting reform passed, which needs to be done in each state.
To not derail too much:
Personally, I find that STAR voting is the best option, with Approval just behind it. I’ve recently learned that ranked choice is a fundamentally flawed system that still leads to 2 strong parties and weakens election security, so I’m actively trying to push back against it when I see it.
Once we drive a wedge between what can literally be described as a chokehold on our country’s freedoms, we can start to make larger impacts at the federal level. For now we need more people on the ground talking to people about the issues and waking them up to its causes. I’ve found it to be a lot nicer out there than it is online, and encourage everyone to start a small group to canvas. It’s going to take all of us
True, though this is really the major flaw of any single-winner system. Approval would go just the same way.
and weakens election security
Huh? I’m afraid I don’t know what this means. There’s certainly no good reason to believe IRV would result in it being harder to secure the ballots that I’m aware of.
There are some flaws of IRV. In some edge cases it can lead to perverse outcomes. Specifically, when you have a three-way race where all candidates are reasonably likely to win, if you prefer one of the more “extreme” candidates (i.e., of the three, not the one politically in the centre), you can be incentivised to vote [1] the central candidate anyway, if that centrist candidate’s voters are likely to be split between your favourite and your least-favourite candidate. But they really are edge cases, and the usual day-to-day makes IRV an excellent system if you’re using single-winner seats. In practice, at least in the elections where I have seen this happen (we use IRV here in Australia, and I happen to live in an electorate where it was a very close three-way race at our most recent election), even though they are a more centrist candidate, they tend to have a very strong preference towards one of the two outer candidates. So the flaw does not often manifest.
STAR, much like any cardinal voting system, has the flaw that it trivially devolves into Approval. If my honest votes are: PartyA: 5, PartyB: 3, PartyC: 2, but I know parties B and C are the most likely to win, I am strongly incentivised to vote PartyB: 5, PartyC: 1 (or 0, if that’s an option). When the right tactical voting choice is that obvious, it’s a system that is far too flawed to give any serious consideration, in my opinion.
As for approval voting, my personal objections to it are very simple: I want to be able to express a preference. I want my vote for my favourite candidate to be worth something more than my vote for my preferred major candidate. In close three-way races it can also lead to some pretty perverse outcomes, and in my experience this is much more likely than the cases where IRV becomes corruptible. My most honest vote might be to approve of PartyA and PartyB, but if I think all three candidates might stand a reasonable chance of winning, my strong preference for PartyA might cause me to think about voting PartyA only. But if I do that, I run the risk of helping out PartyC if they’re closest to the win.
Fundamentally, I just don’t think that voters should be making these calculations. They should be incentivised to vote as honestly as possible, with the only thing they have to think about being what each party’s policies are and how to translate their opinion onto paper. Of single-winner systems, IRV does that the best.
But realistically, single-winner systems are fundamentally majoritarian. They will tend towards a two-party system. Independents and third parties will have some successes (look at the LibDems in the UK, the Greens in Australia, or the so-called “teal independents” in Australia’s most recent election), but there will be a strong tendency towards a smaller number of major parties. This leaves people’s true opinions unrepresented. Multi-winner elections using proportional systems are far, far better. There are a number of options: STV, MMP, Sainte-Laguë, D’Hondt, and more. But what they all share in common is a much lower degree of possible tactical voting, much more resistance to gerrymandering, and a better representation of the breadth of political views.
If you would like to see where I’m coming from on these points you can check out this video that goes through approval, score, rcv, and star and debunks some rcv claims
It’s 3 hours though so trying to condense to a comment is tough but I found the points eye opening
I’ll try to TLDR the election security standpoint, which is covered in the video:
Most voting methods can be tabulated locally, like the fediverse you can tally them at the local level and report updates as you go. For rcv every ballot needs to be shipped to a central location for counting. We lose out on local data that can catch errors along the way, and targeted attacks can be made in transit. The sheer amount of votes and the tabulation process in the central location is slow and error-prone. The video gives some examples of how this has already caused issues in the few states that have used rcv so far
To throw out another critique that opened my eyes: we all agree that plurality voting is bad, but in a way, rcv can be thought of as a series of plurality votes. With each round you only are able to give backing to one person, and based on the order of the rounds some very unfortunate situations can occur. So on a fundamental level I think score voting methods are better, where approval is basically a 0 or 1 score, which is why I prefer STAR as a 0 - 5.
The concept of ballot exhaustion in rcv is also not spoken about enough. I think most people believe that its okay to vote your conscience for first because your next votes will count, but that simply is not the case for many people under rcv. This is also covered in the video
To your point about proportional systems, I think they have a place in our system, and proportional STAR is part of equal votes “package” of methods (also mentioned in the video :D)
Most voting methods can be tabulated locally, like the fediverse you can tally them at the local level and report updates as you go. For rcv every ballot needs to be shipped to a central location for counting. We lose out on local data that can catch errors along the way
In the real world this is pretty achievable with IRV, most of the time. Because most of the time it’s fairly predictable who will be the two-candidate-preferred. Even in the absense of that clarity though, you can provide local first-preference counts for reduce the likelihood of errors occurring.
I’ve done work for the AEC and my state’s equivalent, ECQ before. The way we count votes is very simple and provides a useful early indication of the count so that the result is known on the election night in most cases, with official counts produced over the subsequent days in a central location. The first step is to separate all ballots into their first preference and count that up. That result is recorded and reported back to headquarters. Then, on a per-electorate basis, you are given the names of the two candidates the AEC (or ECQ) believes are most likely to win. Rather than doing the full step-by-step runoff, you jump straight to these two candidates, splitting the ballots into which of those two candidates is ranked most highly, and provide a count back to headquarters.
In most cases this assumed two-candidate-preferred result works, because the top two candidates have more than 2/3rds of the votes between them, so they are guaranteed to be the winners. If that’s not the case, then you can do the full elimination back at headquarters. Or you could adapt the system and have each booth provide a 3-candidate-preferred result, assuming the top 3 candidates achieve three quarters of all votes; again, if this proves not to be correct, headquarters can perform a full count and runoff.
rcv can be thought of as a series of plurality votes. With each round you only are able to give backing to one person, and based on the order of the rounds some very unfortunate situations can occur
But no system is without flaws. And I have seen in the real-world that this does not actually tend to matter. Replace “A” with “Australian Greens”, “B” with “Australian Labor Party” (who call themselves centre-left, but are in reality a sort of moderate centrist), and “C” with the “Liberal/National Coalition”. Then look at any of the electorates: Brisbane, Griffith, and Ryan at the 2022 Australian Federal Election. In each of these, the centrist candidate’s votes almost all flowed through to the left-leaning candidate. (My point would have also worked if they had almost all flowed through to the right-leaning candidate. It’s only when those votes are split that strategic voting becomes an issue.) It turns out that in the real world, by and large, people who most like one party will share a common belief about which party they like next most.
So on a fundamental level I think score voting methods are better
On a very fundamental level, this is wrong. Cardinal voting systems with a range greater than 2 ([0, 1]) immediately devolve into just 2 options. Unlike IRV, where strategic voting is a rare niche case, in cardinal voting systems (other than approval) it is very obvious how you should vote if you want to be strategic, and it doesn’t just have an effect on situations with a close three-party race, but even in any predominantly two-party race if your 1st favourite candidate is not one of those two parties. (And remember: because we’re talking about a majoritarian system, most races will probably be two-party races.)
So as far as cardinal voting methods are concerned, approval is the only option that’s even remotely viable. It’s really a matter of preference here, because the cases where strategic voting is possible in approval are roughly the same as in IRV. Personally, I think the idea of not being able to say “I like this candidate the most and this other candidate a bit less” is terrible. But it’s a value judgment, and if you don’t think that’s important, approval voting is fine.
The video gives some examples of how this has already caused issues in the few states that have used rcv so far
Frankly, America is uniquely terrible at running elections. The bizarre use of different digital voting machines in hybrid with physical paper ballots, the way even federal elections are run by State bodies, bizarre limitations around scrutineers, etc. I would not be making any inference about whether a voting system is good or bad based on failures of the process in America.
In Australia, everything is done under scrutiny. When the ballots have been counted at the booth and they’re ready to be sent back to headquarters for the night, they get put in boxes and sealed with tags signed by two employees. When opened back up later, two employees are again involved and they verify which tags have been used. You simply can’t tamper with it.
As a side note, I don’t really like the term “rcv” because IRV is not the only ranked choice voting system. It’s certainly the most popular, but there are other ways of counting ballots that contain ranked choices. Minimax is one great example of a different ranked choice system.
I think they have a place in our system
I wouldn’t just say that they have “a place”. Proportional systems are simply fundamentally better than non-proportional systems. It might be a little difficult to see if you’re coming from an American perspective where everything is so intensely two-party. But compare it to the UK which has a bit of variety in parties despite its FPTP, or to Australia with its current IRV. Over 10% of Australians want Greens representation. Only 2.6% do—and that’s after the latest election where their overall vote didn’t go up much, but they got very lucky in winning 4 times as many seats as before. Or the UK, where at the last election the LibDems won 1.7% of seats off of an 11.6% vote count, or the Greens who got 2.6% of the votes for just a single lonely seat (0.2% of all seats). That’s what happens when you don’t have a proportional system, but it only becomes obvious when you actually have candidates from other parties in the mix, so it may not be obvious to an American.
Some things cannot be done proportionally. There’s no way to make a presidential race proportional, because there can be only one winner. But the House of Representatives should definitely be proportional—probably on a per-state basis, although this would have the unfortunate side-effect of making it so that states with just 1 or 2 representatives would have less proportional representation than the larger states. There’s just no good reason to not have a proportional system.
Just to comment on the “devolve into approval”, if I were to vote strategically with a score voting system like star and 3 candidates, I would give my first preference 5 stars, my second 1 star, and my third no stars. This couldn’t be done with approval and in the instant runoff step my full vote would go to either my favorite or second if they made it. And unlike rcv IRV I was also able to express significant difference between my choices.
As a side note, I don’t really like the term “rcv” because IRV is not the only ranked choice voting system. It’s certainly the most popular, but there are other ways of counting ballots that contain ranked choices. Minimax is one great example of a different ranked choice system.
I’m speaking to what’s being pushed in the US, I am open to look at other versions, but at the same time after fully looking at STAR I’m not sure how much of an advantage they’ll have over it. In the US we’ve already seen vote splitting and tabulation impact the few elections we have here, and some states have reverted to plurality over it.
As a scientist I’m always open to changing my opinion with new information, but STAR performs strongly across many statistical domains so it’ll be an uphill battle for anything else imo.
if I were to vote strategically with a score voting system like star and 3 candidates, I would give my first preference 5 stars, my second 1 star, and my third no stars. This couldn’t be done with approval and in the instant runoff step my full vote would go to either my favorite or second if they made it.
Right, it couldn’t be done with Approval, and that’s a good thing. Because if you vote that way, you are helping option C to win, compared to if you voted A:5, B:5, C:0, if the final result is a close call between B and C, with A a distant third.
For me, it comes down to game theory. Cardinal systems like STAR perform extremely well if everyone votes honestly. The tick a lot of the boxes of various criteria by which voting systems can be evaluated, like the condorcet criterion, the monotonicity criterion, and the later-no-harm criterion (among others). Whether a given system meets each of these criteria is a simple objective measure, and I think a lot of people make the mistake of pointing to that as a way to say a system is objectively superior. But how important each of these criteria is is not an objective measure, and comes down to subjective weighting.
For me, game theory comes into it because if a voter can easily see how voting dishonestly might help them, they are very likely to do that. Look at how people vote in America today. Almost nobody votes third-party because they know doing so would be more likely to cause harm to their preferred electoral outcome. And when people do vote for third parties, you get outcomes like the Presidential election in 2000 in Florida (and hence, who won the Presidency).
So for me, this is what matters more than anything else. If a system has excellent performance in every other way, but is easy for people to manipulate the outcome by voting dishonestly, I’m going to throw it out from consideration. Especially if that manipulation causes it to become basically like another system, which you could use instead. (In this case, all cardinal systems devolving into Approval.) You can never come up with a perfect system, so you might as well pick the one that is the hardest to deliberately game.
I see we’ve reached the “leftists eating their own” stage of the discourse. You could set your watch to “leftists find someone they love who then dares to compromise on something because that’s how the world works and is subsequently abandoned by leftists.” 🙄
To be fair, I don’t think deBoer is really a leftist, but someone who claims to be leftist to seem authoritative when he shits on leftists, ala David Brooks. He’s a high school teacher with a handful of bad articles and a book that argues people are born dumb or smart and can’t be changed.
As always, the radical flank is perfectly happy to leave unimportant issues like “can we help people in small ways now even if helping them in the bigger ways we’d prefer isn’t achievable within the limits of our current democratic system?” And “how do we stop the right-wing fascist takeover of the country?” by the wayside order to focus on the far more critical problem of enforcing maximal ideological purity.
I completely agree. And it’s deeply frustrating too because this is something the right does EXCEEDINGLY well. There’s a lot of ideological diversity on the right (none of which holds up to much rigor, but there sure is a lot of it) but they all agree that step 1 to getting their way is pulling the Overton window further right. Which is true, so while the left quibbles about whether anarcho-syndicalism or marxist-leninism or whatever else is really “correct” the right gets to sway common consensus in their favor BEFORE trying to get people to identify with a label. It’s fundimentally missing the forest for the trees, and ignores the #1 thing that the left is supposedly all about: helping people. How can you help people if you’re too busy telling them that x left-wing ideology is better than y? People don’t really care, frankly. They care if they can make rent. If they can eat. If their kids won’t get shot in school.
And if someone shows up to tell me that “actually anarcho-syndicalism is a marxist-leninism philosophy” you’re making my point. These labels matter very little. And until your favorite label is struggling to make rent, it never will.
Lol hilarious labeling the left who support a livable minimum wage, voting rights, medicare for all, safety regulations, civil liberties, unions, a fair tax system, etc… Radicals
I get the impression that the author doesn’t think radical is a dirty word.
That said, I agree. As another poster said, those policies are progressive, but not radical. Radicals think the system is bad and needs to be replaced by something else. Moderates think it’s working fine or it can be fixed.
AOC is a Progressive, not a revolutionary socialist. The same is true for Bernie. She wasn’t going to be able to do anything besides shift the Democratic party slightly to the left.
Of course she is going to endorse Biden for President, there isn’t anyone competent running against him on the Democratic side. A third party candidate is unlikely to win and would take votes away from Biden, strengthening Trump.
Also, he has done surprisingly well and pushed for a lot of progressive policies. I think she’s right to call out people for saying he has done nothing. And that doesn’t mean he’s beyond criticism (judges are blocking his online immigrant application requirement thank God).
Biden has been such a confusing figure for me. On the one hand he’s supported some horrible things (“fund the police”, continued border camps/deportation, strike breaking, etc) but on the other hand he’s managed to organize some enormous, desperately needed legislation that’s both boring and rarely reported and I only heard about when my sister (a senator’s aid) told us about it:
Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act - $1T bill to be rolled out over 10 years
Inflation Reduction Act - $369B climate investment bill
Student loan forgiveness (blocked by DOJ)
But all I ever hear about is “sleepy Joe” being incompetent and tripping over his words. Dude needs to fire his PR team, because as much as I disagree with him he’s actually really successful at the sort of boring political and financial administration that politics needs to be. Meanwhile, Trump’s been building his cult and will probably win 2024, roll back all that progress, start a mini-holocaust for LGBTQIA+, and become “benevolent” dictator-president for life because Biden isn’t “sexy” enough.
Yeah, it’s going to take Americans voting left-wing. You all are aware, I hope, that more people voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016? Blame them, not AOC. AOC is just doing what any good politician does: fulfilling the will of the people. Not her fault that most of those people disagree sharply with us.
Okay so this is a wild article, but don’t forget she did really actually vote to block a strike. She went out and supported an illegal wild cat strike not so long ago. Still pissed she thought railroad workers weren’t worth that kind of support.
Yeah, I am not exactly sure about her motive. She’s on record from what I found saying RWU said they wanted her to vote that way then RWU said “Like fuck we did, why would we ever be in favor of blocking our own rights?” I have to side with RWU, it doesn’t make any sort of logical sense to ask Congress to stop your ability to do something.
That said I don’t think it means she’s drifting from left to center or that her endorsement of Biden is further proof of that. She’s probably trying to compromise and get backing on other bills from Democrats to try to bring them further left. Maybe I am wrong though, maybe she’s just generally drifting center because she doesn’t want to be progressive left and used the progression left to get to where she is now. Although the Republicans show every day that if you want a seat in congress it’s pretty easy if you sell out your morals.
Do you want to know why the dems didn’t stand behind rail workers? It’s actually pretty simple.
Inflation is out of control, wages are increasing but not at rates that make ordinary workers feel secure. Supply chain issues from the pandemic are lingering and contributing to prices skyrocketing. A rail disruption would have exacerbated an issue that democrats already see as potentially existential.
So what leverage did those workers have? Yes they could fuck up the lives of ordinary people by destroying our fragile supply chains. Yes they could trash the profits of the rail companies. Yes they could pressure democrats to push for a speedy resolution as the politics of this strike would have been a disaster for them. So they played there hand. Turns out dems needed trains running more than another labor win. So they turned their backs on them and still have run the most pro labor admin since FDR.
Politics is messy and tough calls get made every day. Regarding AOC, she is smart, and probably learned in her first week that this shit is hard and there are a million ways to lose by winning. Playing the game strategically and having long term goals is not ideological. It’s just good governance.
As an anarchist, I’d like to repurpose a comment I made a while back to connect with people who are genuinely surprised and disappointed by this development.
Martin Luther King Jr., a very successful reformer who said “freedom is never given voluntarily by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed,” did not seek government position, and gave nothing to politicians who did not concede his movement’s demands. It wasn’t sympathetic civil rights politicians that wrote the legislation that King is famous for inspiring, but the ambivalent and enemies who were forced to concede due to the civil rights movements’ economic and social power. It’s a common trope that revolutionary groups’ sacrifice and achievements are re-appropriated by opportunist politicians whose role should be described as ‘more pliable obstacles.’ For example, Lyndon Johnson in America is celebrated as the civil rights president, when it was King that pulled him kicking and screaming out of the American apartheid. This re-writing of history creates the false narrative that what we need most is more progressive politicians, and that all this rioting and chaos is just the result of fools who don’t know how to work the system.
Politicians like Peter Hain, Bernie Sanders, and AOC should be viewed as window dressing advertising the power of the political movements that put them in place. Because the structure of the capitalist political system, placing and keeping politicians requires much greater sacrifice on the part of the left than it does on the right. Their existence within the political system helps to falsely legitimize it as a diverse forum, while blunting the progressive politicians’ potential as social leaders and draining progressive movements of resources that they could be using on tactics better suited to their natural methods of power.
The most effective method of creating change will always be in the street.
You need both, though. You need politicians that can be shamed into doing the right thing or who will concede on those points.
But you also need protests to be done in a way to push for change rather than be something that can be ignored. King himself switched from marches where police brutality was being filmed to economic action against racist policies. There were boycotts and sit-ins against segregated facilities. King was in Memphis to help a sanitation worker strike.
Marches and merch alone also isn’t going to affect change.
I’m not saying marches alone, obviously; I mean mass mobilization, and all the tactics that makes possible. It’s always nice to have politicians that concede earlier; but it’s not a “need” type of thing. In the past, when people couldn’t move politicians, they raised guillotines. The people always come first, and the minute the leaders of a movement sell out the rank and file for access and clout, they’re playing the wrong game. If you think your political responsibility ends at the ballot box, you’re part of the problem.
The only armed uprisings in the USA that worked were those of white men overthrowing minority friendly governments.
There is this love affair that a lot of anarchists have that collection action and reclaiming the monopoly of violence from the government is all that is needed to get total freedom, but that rarely happens, especially in a democracy.
The ballot box isn’t the only political action, but it is an important one. Politics do shift with sustained voting drives, and it becomes a prelude to further political action. If you can’t convince people to vote in mass, how are you going to convince them to protest or strike?
If you can’t convince people to vote in mass, how are you going to convince them to protest or strike?
I agree. If you convince people that voting is the path to political change, you play into the elite’s hands; but if people are politically engaged enough to protest and strike, voting is an afterthought.
I’m not advocating some violent minority storm congress. I’m saying if enough people agree on change and organize, they can make the edicts of politicians irrelevant. I wasn’t referring to the Jan 6 coup attempt; I was talking about the historical revolutions against autocrats that replaced them with republican systems. The more democratic a system, the less violence it needs to use to rule; and less violence is likely to come back on it during a revolution towards a more progressive system.
Is that what it seems to you? I don’t see that statement in any of my replies to you. And yet I keep correcting your false readings of my statements with further explanation. Are you trolling me?
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EnglishAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent appearance on the Pod Save America podcast had, for me, the feeling of a final disappointment, the kind that’s a little sad but brings a set of quixotic hopes to a close. AOC appeared on the popular Crooked Media show to announce her endorsement of Joe Biden for president in the 2024 election. To deliver that particular endorsement while appearing on that particular podcast — where former Obama-administration staffers define the limits of acceptable left-of-center opinion — was to send a very deliberate message. It was AOC’s last kiss-off to the radicals who had supported her, voted for her, donated to her campaign, and made her unusually famous in American politics, the beneficiary of a wholly unique cult of personality that is now starting to come undone.
The author of this article needs to touch grass.
I get it. I was a new leftist once too. Hoping there was some way I could push the system such that we would reach our leftist utopia before I die. But the reality is harsh. We’re not going to fix this in our lifetimes and we’re going to suffer for it, and that’s okay.
Let’s put political power in where we can and prepare the next generations of leftist to be successful.
A revolution only works when we have agreement on a large enough scale to be successful. We are not there yet. Consolidating ideologies only going to hurt us at this point.
I second what you’re saying. Never let perfect be the enemy of good or good enough.
Four legs good, two legs better…
AOC never really was any different. She just pretended to put on a show. Sadly, her performance was convincing because I fell for it. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Lesson learned.
I preface this by saying that I agree that the Justice Democrats and related have not lived up to expectations, but what I’ve realized is just how foolish it is to think that it would have gone significantly differently. And no, I’m not an electoralism doesn’t work person. Every vote matters, but it also needs to go hand in hand with an active and engaged citizenry.
As long as the democrats can point to the republicans and say ‘vote for us or else!’ then we can only chip away at the ranks every couple of years.
The biggest threat we can pose to them is to start getting voting reform passed, which needs to be done in each state.
To not derail too much:
Personally, I find that STAR voting is the best option, with Approval just behind it. I’ve recently learned that ranked choice is a fundamentally flawed system that still leads to 2 strong parties and weakens election security, so I’m actively trying to push back against it when I see it.
Once we drive a wedge between what can literally be described as a chokehold on our country’s freedoms, we can start to make larger impacts at the federal level. For now we need more people on the ground talking to people about the issues and waking them up to its causes. I’ve found it to be a lot nicer out there than it is online, and encourage everyone to start a small group to canvas. It’s going to take all of us
True, though this is really the major flaw of any single-winner system. Approval would go just the same way.
Huh? I’m afraid I don’t know what this means. There’s certainly no good reason to believe IRV would result in it being harder to secure the ballots that I’m aware of.
There are some flaws of IRV. In some edge cases it can lead to perverse outcomes. Specifically, when you have a three-way race where all candidates are reasonably likely to win, if you prefer one of the more “extreme” candidates (i.e., of the three, not the one politically in the centre), you can be incentivised to vote [1] the central candidate anyway, if that centrist candidate’s voters are likely to be split between your favourite and your least-favourite candidate. But they really are edge cases, and the usual day-to-day makes IRV an excellent system if you’re using single-winner seats. In practice, at least in the elections where I have seen this happen (we use IRV here in Australia, and I happen to live in an electorate where it was a very close three-way race at our most recent election), even though they are a more centrist candidate, they tend to have a very strong preference towards one of the two outer candidates. So the flaw does not often manifest.
STAR, much like any cardinal voting system, has the flaw that it trivially devolves into Approval. If my honest votes are: PartyA: 5, PartyB: 3, PartyC: 2, but I know parties B and C are the most likely to win, I am strongly incentivised to vote PartyB: 5, PartyC: 1 (or 0, if that’s an option). When the right tactical voting choice is that obvious, it’s a system that is far too flawed to give any serious consideration, in my opinion.
As for approval voting, my personal objections to it are very simple: I want to be able to express a preference. I want my vote for my favourite candidate to be worth something more than my vote for my preferred major candidate. In close three-way races it can also lead to some pretty perverse outcomes, and in my experience this is much more likely than the cases where IRV becomes corruptible. My most honest vote might be to approve of PartyA and PartyB, but if I think all three candidates might stand a reasonable chance of winning, my strong preference for PartyA might cause me to think about voting PartyA only. But if I do that, I run the risk of helping out PartyC if they’re closest to the win.
Fundamentally, I just don’t think that voters should be making these calculations. They should be incentivised to vote as honestly as possible, with the only thing they have to think about being what each party’s policies are and how to translate their opinion onto paper. Of single-winner systems, IRV does that the best.
But realistically, single-winner systems are fundamentally majoritarian. They will tend towards a two-party system. Independents and third parties will have some successes (look at the LibDems in the UK, the Greens in Australia, or the so-called “teal independents” in Australia’s most recent election), but there will be a strong tendency towards a smaller number of major parties. This leaves people’s true opinions unrepresented. Multi-winner elections using proportional systems are far, far better. There are a number of options: STV, MMP, Sainte-Laguë, D’Hondt, and more. But what they all share in common is a much lower degree of possible tactical voting, much more resistance to gerrymandering, and a better representation of the breadth of political views.
If you would like to see where I’m coming from on these points you can check out this video that goes through approval, score, rcv, and star and debunks some rcv claims
It’s 3 hours though so trying to condense to a comment is tough but I found the points eye opening
I’ll try to TLDR the election security standpoint, which is covered in the video: Most voting methods can be tabulated locally, like the fediverse you can tally them at the local level and report updates as you go. For rcv every ballot needs to be shipped to a central location for counting. We lose out on local data that can catch errors along the way, and targeted attacks can be made in transit. The sheer amount of votes and the tabulation process in the central location is slow and error-prone. The video gives some examples of how this has already caused issues in the few states that have used rcv so far
To throw out another critique that opened my eyes: we all agree that plurality voting is bad, but in a way, rcv can be thought of as a series of plurality votes. With each round you only are able to give backing to one person, and based on the order of the rounds some very unfortunate situations can occur. So on a fundamental level I think score voting methods are better, where approval is basically a 0 or 1 score, which is why I prefer STAR as a 0 - 5.
The concept of ballot exhaustion in rcv is also not spoken about enough. I think most people believe that its okay to vote your conscience for first because your next votes will count, but that simply is not the case for many people under rcv. This is also covered in the video
To your point about proportional systems, I think they have a place in our system, and proportional STAR is part of equal votes “package” of methods (also mentioned in the video :D)
In the real world this is pretty achievable with IRV, most of the time. Because most of the time it’s fairly predictable who will be the two-candidate-preferred. Even in the absense of that clarity though, you can provide local first-preference counts for reduce the likelihood of errors occurring.
I’ve done work for the AEC and my state’s equivalent, ECQ before. The way we count votes is very simple and provides a useful early indication of the count so that the result is known on the election night in most cases, with official counts produced over the subsequent days in a central location. The first step is to separate all ballots into their first preference and count that up. That result is recorded and reported back to headquarters. Then, on a per-electorate basis, you are given the names of the two candidates the AEC (or ECQ) believes are most likely to win. Rather than doing the full step-by-step runoff, you jump straight to these two candidates, splitting the ballots into which of those two candidates is ranked most highly, and provide a count back to headquarters.
In most cases this assumed two-candidate-preferred result works, because the top two candidates have more than 2/3rds of the votes between them, so they are guaranteed to be the winners. If that’s not the case, then you can do the full elimination back at headquarters. Or you could adapt the system and have each booth provide a 3-candidate-preferred result, assuming the top 3 candidates achieve three quarters of all votes; again, if this proves not to be correct, headquarters can perform a full count and runoff.
This is true. It results in the flaws I described in my previous comment. But as I mentioned, it’s really more of a theoretical problem that I have not seen arise in practice. It’s not at all hard to construct an example of it, where a left (A), a centrist (B), and a right-leaning candidate © are standing for election, and you as a leftist could conceivably help C by voting A ahead of B instead of the reverse, if a lot of B voters choose to second-preference C instead of A. If you’ve got a situation where that happens, that’s a very real flaw.
But no system is without flaws. And I have seen in the real-world that this does not actually tend to matter. Replace “A” with “Australian Greens”, “B” with “Australian Labor Party” (who call themselves centre-left, but are in reality a sort of moderate centrist), and “C” with the “Liberal/National Coalition”. Then look at any of the electorates: Brisbane, Griffith, and Ryan at the 2022 Australian Federal Election. In each of these, the centrist candidate’s votes almost all flowed through to the left-leaning candidate. (My point would have also worked if they had almost all flowed through to the right-leaning candidate. It’s only when those votes are split that strategic voting becomes an issue.) It turns out that in the real world, by and large, people who most like one party will share a common belief about which party they like next most.
On a very fundamental level, this is wrong. Cardinal voting systems with a range greater than 2 ([0, 1]) immediately devolve into just 2 options. Unlike IRV, where strategic voting is a rare niche case, in cardinal voting systems (other than approval) it is very obvious how you should vote if you want to be strategic, and it doesn’t just have an effect on situations with a close three-party race, but even in any predominantly two-party race if your 1st favourite candidate is not one of those two parties. (And remember: because we’re talking about a majoritarian system, most races will probably be two-party races.)
So as far as cardinal voting methods are concerned, approval is the only option that’s even remotely viable. It’s really a matter of preference here, because the cases where strategic voting is possible in approval are roughly the same as in IRV. Personally, I think the idea of not being able to say “I like this candidate the most and this other candidate a bit less” is terrible. But it’s a value judgment, and if you don’t think that’s important, approval voting is fine.
Frankly, America is uniquely terrible at running elections. The bizarre use of different digital voting machines in hybrid with physical paper ballots, the way even federal elections are run by State bodies, bizarre limitations around scrutineers, etc. I would not be making any inference about whether a voting system is good or bad based on failures of the process in America.
In Australia, everything is done under scrutiny. When the ballots have been counted at the booth and they’re ready to be sent back to headquarters for the night, they get put in boxes and sealed with tags signed by two employees. When opened back up later, two employees are again involved and they verify which tags have been used. You simply can’t tamper with it.
As a side note, I don’t really like the term “rcv” because IRV is not the only ranked choice voting system. It’s certainly the most popular, but there are other ways of counting ballots that contain ranked choices. Minimax is one great example of a different ranked choice system.
I wouldn’t just say that they have “a place”. Proportional systems are simply fundamentally better than non-proportional systems. It might be a little difficult to see if you’re coming from an American perspective where everything is so intensely two-party. But compare it to the UK which has a bit of variety in parties despite its FPTP, or to Australia with its current IRV. Over 10% of Australians want Greens representation. Only 2.6% do—and that’s after the latest election where their overall vote didn’t go up much, but they got very lucky in winning 4 times as many seats as before. Or the UK, where at the last election the LibDems won 1.7% of seats off of an 11.6% vote count, or the Greens who got 2.6% of the votes for just a single lonely seat (0.2% of all seats). That’s what happens when you don’t have a proportional system, but it only becomes obvious when you actually have candidates from other parties in the mix, so it may not be obvious to an American.
Some things cannot be done proportionally. There’s no way to make a presidential race proportional, because there can be only one winner. But the House of Representatives should definitely be proportional—probably on a per-state basis, although this would have the unfortunate side-effect of making it so that states with just 1 or 2 representatives would have less proportional representation than the larger states. There’s just no good reason to not have a proportional system.
Just to comment on the “devolve into approval”, if I were to vote strategically with a score voting system like star and 3 candidates, I would give my first preference 5 stars, my second 1 star, and my third no stars. This couldn’t be done with approval and in the instant runoff step my full vote would go to either my favorite or second if they made it. And unlike
rcvIRV I was also able to express significant difference between my choices.I’m speaking to what’s being pushed in the US, I am open to look at other versions, but at the same time after fully looking at STAR I’m not sure how much of an advantage they’ll have over it. In the US we’ve already seen vote splitting and tabulation impact the few elections we have here, and some states have reverted to plurality over it.
As a scientist I’m always open to changing my opinion with new information, but STAR performs strongly across many statistical domains so it’ll be an uphill battle for anything else imo.
Right, it couldn’t be done with Approval, and that’s a good thing. Because if you vote that way, you are helping option C to win, compared to if you voted A:5, B:5, C:0, if the final result is a close call between B and C, with A a distant third.
For me, it comes down to game theory. Cardinal systems like STAR perform extremely well if everyone votes honestly. The tick a lot of the boxes of various criteria by which voting systems can be evaluated, like the condorcet criterion, the monotonicity criterion, and the later-no-harm criterion (among others). Whether a given system meets each of these criteria is a simple objective measure, and I think a lot of people make the mistake of pointing to that as a way to say a system is objectively superior. But how important each of these criteria is is not an objective measure, and comes down to subjective weighting.
For me, game theory comes into it because if a voter can easily see how voting dishonestly might help them, they are very likely to do that. Look at how people vote in America today. Almost nobody votes third-party because they know doing so would be more likely to cause harm to their preferred electoral outcome. And when people do vote for third parties, you get outcomes like the Presidential election in 2000 in Florida (and hence, who won the Presidency).
So for me, this is what matters more than anything else. If a system has excellent performance in every other way, but is easy for people to manipulate the outcome by voting dishonestly, I’m going to throw it out from consideration. Especially if that manipulation causes it to become basically like another system, which you could use instead. (In this case, all cardinal systems devolving into Approval.) You can never come up with a perfect system, so you might as well pick the one that is the hardest to deliberately game.
Hottest politician I’ve ever seen
I see we’ve reached the “leftists eating their own” stage of the discourse. You could set your watch to “leftists find someone they love who then dares to compromise on something because that’s how the world works and is subsequently abandoned by leftists.” 🙄
To be fair, I don’t think deBoer is really a leftist, but someone who claims to be leftist to seem authoritative when he shits on leftists, ala David Brooks. He’s a high school teacher with a handful of bad articles and a book that argues people are born dumb or smart and can’t be changed.
As a Democrat, the Democratic party is very much the party of wanting instant gratification.
Newflash, things take longer to get done than 1 or even 2 election cycles…
As always, the radical flank is perfectly happy to leave unimportant issues like “can we help people in small ways now even if helping them in the bigger ways we’d prefer isn’t achievable within the limits of our current democratic system?” And “how do we stop the right-wing fascist takeover of the country?” by the wayside order to focus on the far more critical problem of enforcing maximal ideological purity.
I completely agree. And it’s deeply frustrating too because this is something the right does EXCEEDINGLY well. There’s a lot of ideological diversity on the right (none of which holds up to much rigor, but there sure is a lot of it) but they all agree that step 1 to getting their way is pulling the Overton window further right. Which is true, so while the left quibbles about whether anarcho-syndicalism or marxist-leninism or whatever else is really “correct” the right gets to sway common consensus in their favor BEFORE trying to get people to identify with a label. It’s fundimentally missing the forest for the trees, and ignores the #1 thing that the left is supposedly all about: helping people. How can you help people if you’re too busy telling them that x left-wing ideology is better than y? People don’t really care, frankly. They care if they can make rent. If they can eat. If their kids won’t get shot in school.
And if someone shows up to tell me that “actually anarcho-syndicalism is a marxist-leninism philosophy” you’re making my point. These labels matter very little. And until your favorite label is struggling to make rent, it never will.
Lol hilarious labeling the left who support a livable minimum wage, voting rights, medicare for all, safety regulations, civil liberties, unions, a fair tax system, etc… Radicals
I get the impression that the author doesn’t think radical is a dirty word.
That said, I agree. As another poster said, those policies are progressive, but not radical. Radicals think the system is bad and needs to be replaced by something else. Moderates think it’s working fine or it can be fixed.
AOC is a Progressive, not a revolutionary socialist. The same is true for Bernie. She wasn’t going to be able to do anything besides shift the Democratic party slightly to the left.
Of course she is going to endorse Biden for President, there isn’t anyone competent running against him on the Democratic side. A third party candidate is unlikely to win and would take votes away from Biden, strengthening Trump.
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Also, he has done surprisingly well and pushed for a lot of progressive policies. I think she’s right to call out people for saying he has done nothing. And that doesn’t mean he’s beyond criticism (judges are blocking his online immigrant application requirement thank God).
Biden has been such a confusing figure for me. On the one hand he’s supported some horrible things (“fund the police”, continued border camps/deportation, strike breaking, etc) but on the other hand he’s managed to organize some enormous, desperately needed legislation that’s both boring and rarely reported and I only heard about when my sister (a senator’s aid) told us about it:
But all I ever hear about is “sleepy Joe” being incompetent and tripping over his words. Dude needs to fire his PR team, because as much as I disagree with him he’s actually really successful at the sort of boring political and financial administration that politics needs to be. Meanwhile, Trump’s been building his cult and will probably win 2024, roll back all that progress, start a mini-holocaust for LGBTQIA+, and become “benevolent” dictator-president for life because Biden isn’t “sexy” enough.
Upvoted for having the full article in the description of the post.
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Yeah, it’s going to take Americans voting left-wing. You all are aware, I hope, that more people voted for Trump in 2020 than in 2016? Blame them, not AOC. AOC is just doing what any good politician does: fulfilling the will of the people. Not her fault that most of those people disagree sharply with us.
Okay so this is a wild article, but don’t forget she did really actually vote to block a strike. She went out and supported an illegal wild cat strike not so long ago. Still pissed she thought railroad workers weren’t worth that kind of support.
Yeah, I am not exactly sure about her motive. She’s on record from what I found saying RWU said they wanted her to vote that way then RWU said “Like fuck we did, why would we ever be in favor of blocking our own rights?” I have to side with RWU, it doesn’t make any sort of logical sense to ask Congress to stop your ability to do something.
That said I don’t think it means she’s drifting from left to center or that her endorsement of Biden is further proof of that. She’s probably trying to compromise and get backing on other bills from Democrats to try to bring them further left. Maybe I am wrong though, maybe she’s just generally drifting center because she doesn’t want to be progressive left and used the progression left to get to where she is now. Although the Republicans show every day that if you want a seat in congress it’s pretty easy if you sell out your morals.
Do you want to know why the dems didn’t stand behind rail workers? It’s actually pretty simple.
Inflation is out of control, wages are increasing but not at rates that make ordinary workers feel secure. Supply chain issues from the pandemic are lingering and contributing to prices skyrocketing. A rail disruption would have exacerbated an issue that democrats already see as potentially existential.
So what leverage did those workers have? Yes they could fuck up the lives of ordinary people by destroying our fragile supply chains. Yes they could trash the profits of the rail companies. Yes they could pressure democrats to push for a speedy resolution as the politics of this strike would have been a disaster for them. So they played there hand. Turns out dems needed trains running more than another labor win. So they turned their backs on them and still have run the most pro labor admin since FDR.
Politics is messy and tough calls get made every day. Regarding AOC, she is smart, and probably learned in her first week that this shit is hard and there are a million ways to lose by winning. Playing the game strategically and having long term goals is not ideological. It’s just good governance.
Hey, remember when the author of this piece falsely accused a political opponent of sexual violence in an attempt to discredit him? I remember!
As an anarchist, I’d like to repurpose a comment I made a while back to connect with people who are genuinely surprised and disappointed by this development.
Martin Luther King Jr., a very successful reformer who said “freedom is never given voluntarily by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed,” did not seek government position, and gave nothing to politicians who did not concede his movement’s demands. It wasn’t sympathetic civil rights politicians that wrote the legislation that King is famous for inspiring, but the ambivalent and enemies who were forced to concede due to the civil rights movements’ economic and social power. It’s a common trope that revolutionary groups’ sacrifice and achievements are re-appropriated by opportunist politicians whose role should be described as ‘more pliable obstacles.’ For example, Lyndon Johnson in America is celebrated as the civil rights president, when it was King that pulled him kicking and screaming out of the American apartheid. This re-writing of history creates the false narrative that what we need most is more progressive politicians, and that all this rioting and chaos is just the result of fools who don’t know how to work the system.
Politicians like Peter Hain, Bernie Sanders, and AOC should be viewed as window dressing advertising the power of the political movements that put them in place. Because the structure of the capitalist political system, placing and keeping politicians requires much greater sacrifice on the part of the left than it does on the right. Their existence within the political system helps to falsely legitimize it as a diverse forum, while blunting the progressive politicians’ potential as social leaders and draining progressive movements of resources that they could be using on tactics better suited to their natural methods of power.
The most effective method of creating change will always be in the street.
You need both, though. You need politicians that can be shamed into doing the right thing or who will concede on those points.
But you also need protests to be done in a way to push for change rather than be something that can be ignored. King himself switched from marches where police brutality was being filmed to economic action against racist policies. There were boycotts and sit-ins against segregated facilities. King was in Memphis to help a sanitation worker strike.
Marches and merch alone also isn’t going to affect change.
I’m not saying marches alone, obviously; I mean mass mobilization, and all the tactics that makes possible. It’s always nice to have politicians that concede earlier; but it’s not a “need” type of thing. In the past, when people couldn’t move politicians, they raised guillotines. The people always come first, and the minute the leaders of a movement sell out the rank and file for access and clout, they’re playing the wrong game. If you think your political responsibility ends at the ballot box, you’re part of the problem.
The only armed uprisings in the USA that worked were those of white men overthrowing minority friendly governments.
There is this love affair that a lot of anarchists have that collection action and reclaiming the monopoly of violence from the government is all that is needed to get total freedom, but that rarely happens, especially in a democracy.
The ballot box isn’t the only political action, but it is an important one. Politics do shift with sustained voting drives, and it becomes a prelude to further political action. If you can’t convince people to vote in mass, how are you going to convince them to protest or strike?
I agree. If you convince people that voting is the path to political change, you play into the elite’s hands; but if people are politically engaged enough to protest and strike, voting is an afterthought.
I’m not advocating some violent minority storm congress. I’m saying if enough people agree on change and organize, they can make the edicts of politicians irrelevant. I wasn’t referring to the Jan 6 coup attempt; I was talking about the historical revolutions against autocrats that replaced them with republican systems. The more democratic a system, the less violence it needs to use to rule; and less violence is likely to come back on it during a revolution towards a more progressive system.
You keep seeming to add to what I’m saying that voting is the only way to get political change, which I haven’t said.
Is that what it seems to you? I don’t see that statement in any of my replies to you. And yet I keep correcting your false readings of my statements with further explanation. Are you trolling me?
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