But it has to be really gentle and honest. Many people on YouTube already have gotten the message.
If on the other hand there is a true uniparty, then we are doomed. People have to select more honest candidates in the primaries on both sides to have any chance.
I know it sounds trite, but I fully believe that a big cause of the current situation is the broken election system in the US, which has made it practically impossible for any new party or independent candidate to establish themself.
Yes, there are the die-hard MAGAists, but I think a lot of the votes that brought the win for Trump were really protest votes against Biden. The reasons were varied, but I think anger about the continuing inflation and the Biden admin's Middle East policy were two big issues.
With a different system, this could have empowered a third party candidate, maybe Jill Stein or (a hypothetically independent) Bernie Sanders. But here, the election was presented like Discworld's "you always have a choice": Vote Harris, i.e. "ignore all problems and continue as before" or jump into a pit full of spikes.
The populace chose the pit full of spikes.
As in ballot access restrictions and how the two big parties collude to keep other candidates out of the presidential debates? Or the low turnout for primaries? Or how voters don't pay enough attention to local races?
And yet the two main parties here do feel the need to collude to exclude third other parties. Which demonstrates that they see third parties as a legitimate threat.
And third parties can get enough vote share to tip the outcome ("if only all those people hadn't thrown their votes away, my side would have won!"). Which means they're not the non-entities that theory suggests they are.
And parties aren't static, but have to adjust to match the electorate. There isn't a static steady-state to eventually reach.
And if you've seen discussions about the Democrat party in the US being a "big tent" party that's hamstrung by needing to appease moderates or the Republican party needing to kick out various extremists to gain legitimacy (why yes, most of the discussions I see do come from people on what we call the "left" here, how could you tell?), they sound like there's something similar going on to what I see in discussions about countries with proportional / parliamentary systems having to form coalitions post-election. Ie there's the same sort of coalition-building going on, it just happens before rather than after and isn't explicitly made legible in the labels candidates use for themselves.
The spoiler effect means you don’t need collusion to explain the results. Both parties are enormously incentivised to stamp out and subsume ideologically-near competitors. If they don’t, the other party wins.
Canada and the UK have first-past-the-post too, yet lack the hard two party system the US has.
One factor is both Canada and the UK have much stronger regional identities than the US - some Americans talk up how strong American regional identities are, but the US has nothing comparable to Scotland or Quebec.
Another factor is the parliamentary system encourages stronger party discipline, which leads to more parties having narrower definitions, compared to the two big tent parties in the US who have such weak party discipline, the party leadership has very little control over its elected officials.
The greater significance of primaries probably also contributes - although in recent decades Canada and the UK have started copying that institution, but still to nowhere near the same degree. A strong primary system weakens a party’s self-control and internal cohesion, and hence promotes it becoming a bigger tent that helps further further entrench the two party system.
Look at the current split of the UK right between Conservatives and Reform - such a split would be far less likely in the US, because the Republican brand is so vague and generic it is much harder for a renegade right wing party to succeed (and the same applies on the left)
> We're stuck with it for now.
One advantage the US has, is electoral systems is mostly a state-level decision, even for federal elections. In most other federations, the voting system used in federal elections is a federal competency. And with 50 states, it only takes one to introduce reforms. But, while there has been some experimentation with alternatives, by and large American states haven’t used their competency to carry out electoral reform. I suspect that is because Americans are fundamentally conservative-in the sense of resistance to change, even self-identified progressives in the US tend to focus their energies on changing certain key issues, and on other issues will let the status quo be.
Inflation had largely been contained, and top including conservative ones economists agreed that Trump's plans were terrible for inflation
Biden was a competent president who brought real positive change.
Harris like Biden actually had a plan for non revolutionary but real gradual change to improve things. Trump promised to destroy stuff(if you actually listed to the meaning of his words) and promised unicorns if you didn't
Also, the period where Biden was President may have been competently run (subjective) but Biden himself was not competent when running for re-election so running on his record didn't really work.
Harris wasn't Biden but, despite what VPs say, they don't get much credit (from voters) for their administrations accomplishments. In fact, VPs tend to get the worst assignments (Border Czar) to take the heat off if the President which they usually fail at (because they were set up to).
People saw Harris as the worst part of the previous administration who was selected by committee to be their candidate.
People bought into far right populism, what’s new ?
Joe Biden's record is Biden's and Harris' responsibilities under the Biden administration was not positive. Let alone questions about her emphatic statements attesting to his mental capacity right up until the emperor had no clothes on national TV.
Unsurprisingly, people were not enthusiastic about being given a candidate who struggled nationally and was widely considered a bad candidate, right up until she was the candidate. Harris is and was a horrible candidate. Everyone knew it, even Democrats.
Democrats spiked the football on fourth down when they were losing with 30 seconds left.
Whatever people want to say about Trump, apparently Democrats didn't find him enough of a threat to democracy to put up a candidate that had a chance to win.
1. Overturn citizens united. (get money out of politics)
2. Rank-choice voting. (get extremists out of politics)
3. Remove cap on House of Representatives (washington only wanted 1 rep per 30,000 people... we're currently at 1 per 750,000...) (get lack of representation out of politics)
4. Mandatory voting / national holiday.
e.g. at its core, people are not being heard (or even worse, feel like their voice doesn't matter) and vested interests have fully taken the wheel.
What you need is political action: organization, protests, strikes, infiltration, and targeted exercises of power. And, most importantly, discussion and coordination, especially among people outside your ideological bubble[0]. This is how you assert your democratic power. Get off social media and make friends[1].
The uniparty thrives on an antisocial politics where the majority of people don't vote, most of each party's voting support is gimmies[2], and elections are decided by inches. That is, when people show up to vote and then just disappear from political life for the next 2 to 4 years. Ironically, the MAGA hats are better at democratic exercises of power, even though the end goal of their thought leaders is to dissolve democracy.
You have to keep in mind that if there's two people in the room, Trump is telling them three different contradictory things. The MAGA coalition is stronger than, say, the "everything's fine" DNC one, but it's still full of contradictions that can't be reconciled. Actually listen to what the MAGA hats are saying - instead of getting into apoplectic fits over the dog whistles they spout - and you can start to spot the cleavages.
Here's some examples of how that could work:
- Do you have a neighbor that works for the government who got that weird Elon Musk fork offer e-mail? Maybe slip them a copy of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual.
- Are you in a terrible workplace? Get to know your co-workers. Find time to talk with them when the boss isn't watching. Plan shit.
- Take any opportunity you can to get to know people who work in service. Economic stratification and the lack of third spaces mean there are precious few opportunities for the "middle class[3]" and the rest of the working class to socialize and co-mingle.
- If you have family members who have their head in the gaping maw of the MAGA cult, point out the contradictions between what they want and what Trump is doing. Don't try to disprove Trump with facts and logic. Just plant the seed in their minds.
What you want is to build multiple overlapping coalitions of people who are willing to fight for their democratic rights in whatever way they can.
[0] This means hold off on the purity tests. Those are for you, not your friends.
[1] To be clear, I am not ruling out all computer-mediated communication; merely the kind of communication that is designed as a substitute for socialization. This means less political Twitter, Mastodon, or Facebook; and more IRC, SMS, or Discord.
[2] In game design, gimmies are the portion of your score, tokens, or performance, that must be played for, but can safely be assumed to be taken by one player at the start of the game. This would be the person who's voted D or R all their life no matter who or what is running.
[3] "Working class but in denial about it"
Or maybe instead of focusing on destruction, go speak in favor of good policies?
Lying to people that the only way to win is to destroy anyone they perceive as the other team sounds like an excellent way to make sure that everyone loses.