Where a vote is cast matters. You can cast a protest vote for president in states like California or Idaho. You probably shouldn't cast a protest vote in a state that doesn't have such a regular electoral margin. There is often room for influence down ballot as well.
Gotcha, but. The whole point of a protest vote is to influence other people. Doesn’t that influence cross precinct boundaries these days?
The only effect of any protest vote is to tell your friends. Hasan had a lot of friends. Arab communities in Michigan had a lot of friends. Never-never Trumpers had a lot of friends.
I personally believe that a personal political strategy should have a conscientious goal, cognizant of the effects of its action.
There’s no separate moral universe where you preserve your ideals by helping elect an autocrat from the other side.
I was under the impression that the intent of a protest vote was to make a statement that the voter does not like the options presented.
A voter should weigh the value of their statement vs the value of voting for the lesser evil. In a state like mine, where the results of the next three presidential elections could be predicted with accuracy today, a statement seems to have more value to me; if I lived in a battleground state, it would be different. I have often voted in presidential primaries where the candidate was already selected; again, I value my vote for the lesser evil much less than a statement.
> you preserve your ideals by helping elect an autocrat from the other side
Harris was an authoritarian, but not an autocrat. People got sick of ever-growing bureaucratic authoritarianism, but made the mistake of thinking the problem was the bureaucracy rather than the authoritarianism. So now the bureaucracy has been smashed and we are left with autocratic authoritarianism.
Protest votes are stupid, but even stupider is chanting vote harder when clearly you aren't able to vote your way out of the death spiral.
Its been comical watching broken systems fall over themselves to accommodate trump while people pretend that they just need to vote for people who will maintain the broken systems instead of abusing them.
If you didnt spend the last 12 years tearing down your broken system and replacing it, you support all this bs. Eventually someone was going to get past the election, into the cockpit of the machine and press all these fucking buttons.
Not only did americans vote for the chimpanzee twice, they never got rid of all the buttons.
"Elections have consequences" you guys are meant to be the demonstration of how an armed populace responds to tyranny. But until I see you guys actually do anything about it, its just proof that more american values are completely worthless.
I'm not American, thus I had no vote in the election, nor do I like Trump for a number of reasons.
However, enforcement of immigration laws has been one of the biggest parts of his election platform, if not the central part(build the wall, etc).
I imagine his voters are happy to see some action being taken.
The protestors could really do with some better optics, destroying property and waving foreign flags is just going to increase approval for military action.
If the protestors had instead marched peacefully with American flags, it would have been a much better PR win.
> However, enforcement of immigration laws has been one of the biggest parts of his election platform, if not the central part(build the wall, etc).
If you pay attention, you will notice that immigration policies have nothing to do with what's happening in the US, and at most they are a pretext.
The Trump administration is rounding up and transfering people, including US citizens, to prisons in third world countries they have no connection with. They are doing this without due process or legal basis. They have attacked and threatened judges who can and did opposed these actions. Lately the Trump administration is even threatening elected officials, including governors, with imprisonment.
Now you are witnessing the Trump administration illegally mobilizing both a state's national guard and the armed forces against its own citizens.
At one point anyone has to ask themselves if this is really about immigration at all.
I'm so tired of hearing this type of thing. "If the protesters would simply protest correctly, then I would respect them."
News flash. The opposition is always going to say something like this to set an impossible bar for the protestors. This type of thinking undermines all protests, protects the status quo, and basically boils down to victim blaming.
Not to mention you can always have false flag operatives undermining a movement.
And yet, we can all choose what kinds of protests we do and don't support and respect.
It's true that the opposition will say that even the best most peaceful protest is bad. But sometimes people broadly will agree with them, and other times they won't, and that depends on what's actually going on.
Do you really think MLK Jr. didn't want to punch those cops in the face that were beating people at his marches? But he had emotional IQ, discipline, and effective organization. The current crop lacks all of that and the results are showing it.
Go look at news coverage from the period, he was denounced as an agent of chaos and blamed for riots all the time. Read history, not the anodyne postcard version of it.
His behavior at his marches is well documented. He wasn't setting anything on fire or throwing rocks at police. One way brings the American center to your side, the other pushes them away. Those who ignore this do so at the peril of their own causes.
Yes, the parent's point is that despite being restrained as you describe, the establishment still tried to paint MLK as a provocateur. Which speaks to my point that the status quo faction is always going to frame protestors this way in order to undermine them.
Yes and the videos of his peaceful marches and the brutality of the police ended up discrediting the establishment propaganda against him and bringing the American center to his side. It's the most historically successful strategy in activist history, but no one wants to do that because it doesn't feel good in the moment.
What good is a "PR win"? Nobody would have even heard about it if they'd marched peacefully, and if they had it would have changed nobodies minds, and otherwise changed nothing. The issues for which a simple march can have any influence at all on are the ones for which the powers that be don't have strong feelings on, where they can be swayed by seeing public support for the issue. Trump has well past dug in his heels on illegal immigration, and has a large base that backs him on it (as you recognize); a fully peaceful protest would have accomplished absolutely nothing.
There are issues worth rioting over. Maybe you don't feel that illegal immigration is one of them, but you should at least understand the logic of a protest, and why sometimes becoming violent is necessary to accomplish anything.
It's relevant to mention that the trigger for these riots was federal agents administratively detaining people who are in the country illegally. These are not new federal immigration laws that Trump has passed; in fact, they were enforced thoroughly by the Obama administration, as well.
Trump is purposely manufacturing a crisis because he knows his opposition is taking a losing position. Polls have been very clear that voters want the government to enforce immigration laws. Maybe not in Los Angeles, but nationally, the left is taking the losing side of this issue.
How does a raid only target people who are here illegally? How do agents determine the identity and status of the person they're grabbing in a factory or school?
The idea is absolutely farcical. Plus, we know for sure that these raids have taken people mistakenly.
It's extra bad when the government's official position is that they can't get someone back from the foreign prison they're sent to. The threat to all citizens is clear; that's why they're resisting. "The left" may lose in the mainstream media but it's clearly the correct side of history.
Not to mention, that in most of the videos I’ve seen about detention of “illegals” - “ICE agents” look like a bunch of thugs. Facemasks, no identification features, they never introduce themselves, etc.
It’s clear since the election - Trump administration will use violence without any due process. Sort of Catch-22.
If you resist the indiscriminate purge of what Trump considers “illegal immigrants”[0] - military will be called to suppress the protests with some sort of never ending “emergency situation” established giving him full dictatorial powers.
Or he will just do the purges without resistance and achieve same goals.
“Protest voters” and democratic leadership have a lot to think about right now.
[0] lets not forget that you can be a US citizen and you can still be purged
> How does a raid only target people who are here illegally? How do agents determine the identity and status of the person they're grabbing in a factory or school?
This has been done for decades and has very established standard operating procedures. Do you think immigration raids started with Trump? This has been going on since the 1950s and there is established legal basis and agency procedures specifying exactly what the agents can and can't do, along with repeatable methods for verifying identity and legal status.
And I don't think anyone understands how deeply the destruction runs, even if he is stopped today.
Take his budget proposal for example. It explicitly called for the complete de-funding of TRIO programs. I have worked with multiple TRIO programs at multiple institutions over the years. While I am hopeful that the congress will institute funding for them, but the damage is done. People who have worked for these programs for decades are leaving, because of the uncertainty. These are career professionals who have helped THOUSANDS of kids make a better future. Further, TRIO programs are historically an entry into higher education for first-generation and low-income students not just in terms of being served by the programs, but also being employed by them. Every TRIO program I've worked with has been staffed by low-income first-generation folks. Without this entry into higher education, we will lose these voices in postsecondary education. People start with TRIO then move into hard dollars and off of grants, spreading their experiences across a campus.
The damage is done and we'll be feeling it for longer than my children will be alive.
Subsequently, the thing that really caused my immediate family (hardcore republican) to turn off of Trump was actually his most recent budget proposal and the hearings associated with it. They saw that he was cutting programs that help rural areas more than urban areas and feel betrayed. It takes everything I have in my to not just say "I told you so".
Finally - and completely disconnected, if you want to know how full of shit this administration is - The Secretary of Education said out loud that the (1)TRIO programs were out-of-date, that (2)schools needed to find other ways to recruit students, and that (3)there was no way to measure their success.
(1) TRIO has decades of research supporting their most effective models, and is a thought leader in student support and success for at-risk youth. The current trend of "pathways in higher education" that is sweeping the US is literally just a TRIO model.
(2) TRIO programs are explicitly banned from being used as recruiting tools for their host institutions if they are hosted by a college/university. It is illegal.
(3) TRIO programs submit an annual performance report with multiple measures of success. Any inability by ED to find proof of TRIO effectiveness is because they are incompetent in analyzing the data, not because the data doesn't exist.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of democracy. In a democracy you cannot vote your self a dictator. A democracy has democratic institutions such as courts and different branches of government, or systems in place which prevent any one individual from misusing their power, or grabbing more power then they have been handed from the electorate.
In a democracy people can vote for the Devil him self, and the Devil him self would become the president, but there are institutions which prevent him from instituting his demonic policies.
Elections have consequences, but if those consequences are the loss of rights, then you never lived in a democracy to begin with.
History shows that to simply not the case.
Individuals are bringing down democracies all the time. Especially presidential democracies are super vulnerable to this because the president has outsized power compared to the other branches of the government.
> Elections have consequences, but if those consequences are the loss of rights, then you never lived in a democracy to begin with.
So I guess these folks who live in a "real democracy" according to you just have the good government fairy swoop in when the people vote in a dictator.
At the end of the day, a democracy is just people, all the way down. It doesn't matter what laws you've written down, what courts you have, what procedures you've developed. If enough people stop believing in the enforcement of those laws, or court orders, or governmental norms, there is no deus ex machina.
Modern democracies have stuff like free press, strong legislative opposition, and unions which will mount an effective resistance when faced with a tyrant.
Both Italy and Argentina elected a pretty dictatorial rulers, but neither successfully removed any civil rights from their citizens as a result, as the democratic institutions mobilized an effective resistance.
As a comparison to the USA, in a healthy democracy, the protests we are seeing in LA would not be spontaneous and organically arise from normal everyday people, but they would be called for and organized by unions, civil rights organizations, opposition parties, etc.
EDIT: Thinking about this further, the lack of participation from unions, human rights organizations, opposition parties, etc. during the anti-ICE protests, is much more common in unambiguous dictatorships like Russia or Iran.
> This is a fundamental misunderstanding of democracy. In a democracy you cannot vote your self a dictator
Self-coups are a thing, and the best person to subvert a democracy is one who already wields considerable power within one. History is replit, unless you're doing the no-true-scottsman shuffle on the topic of democracy - if so, carry on.
The true Scotsman fallacy is not relevant here because the modern concept of democracy is a constantly evolving term. The modern democracy includes stuff like civil liberties, equal rights, human rights (including minority rights), and protections from tyranny. Many of these (particularly human rights) only arose in the post World War II era. Now coups do indeed happen, but those are the result of an entity overpowering the democratic institutions, not the result of people voting them selves a dictator. If the people vote them selves a dictator, then obviously at least some of the democratic institutions which are supposed to protect those rights were insufficient, or altogether absent.
Sensible modern democracies will have those features, but they're no more part of the definition than having seatbelts and airbags is part of the definition of what a car is (I guess the model t is the equivalent of ancient Athens here?).
I‘m not concerned with the definition of democracy, if it can even be defined. I‘m simply concerned with the modern concept of democracy, which includes stuff like civil liberties, minority rights, and—relevant here—protection of these rights from tyranny.
I don’t think our analogy is valid. A car is just a car, and the concept of a car has not changed since its invention. The modern democracy has been constantly evolving from its inception (I’m sure democratic societies existed even before ancient Athens), but nobody would consider a democracy from the 1800s a democracy if it existed today. Heck even USA would not pass until the civil rights era of the 1960s.
Not saying this is the case, just maybe challenging your premise as an absolute.
Let’s say someone is genociding, and the election opponent says “I want to also genocide, but harder and smarter.” Your moral obligation is stronger against the incumbent?
Is it because the incumbent is already complicit and the other guy might not be as bad? I don’t understand the moral logic of the possible absolutism here.
Shouldn’t the imperative be to reduce suffering? How does getting the lesser evil out of office help the situation?
