Treating Bernie Bros and SJWs as interchangeable is a new one to me (overlapping, I suppose, but I remember some quite rabid anti-SJW Bernie Bros and visa versa), but I’ll grant you that both camps get hit with the keyboard warriors when they’re online, regardless of how active they are in meatspace.
And I’m less trying to defend them as I am calling out the absolute futility of trying to do activism beyond visibility and outreach campaigns online, and judging someone’s political efficacy based solely on their online output.
If we want to build movements that actually, y’know, have political power to do something, it takes a lot more offline work (even if the online work can shine a light on good offline work)
Well, what I’m talking about- and always have been- are the people urging everyone not to vote- while pretending to give a shit about things happening in other countries. Those using the suffering of other people as a platform to get people to not vote- either because thy are so misguided and ignorant about how things work, or are actively trying to work against democracy.
Regardless of the reason- not voting doesn’t fix the problem. Regardless of the term “SJW” or whatever you wish to call them- THEY are who I’m talking about.
You realize that voting alone is very nearly politically irrelevant? Especially if your vote is reducible to an anonymous voting bloc? That most of the work that goes into making your vote mean something happens well before election day? Like, just voting on election days, no matter how many off-year election cycles and special elections someone votes in, if they aren’t participating in an political movement that is properly reflective of their vote, then their share of political power is merely given over to someone else. The places where someone’s vote has the most impact are the places where they’re treated as an afterthought.
Like, consider the electoral college, and how the votes break down in most urban areas (which tend to be where most Internet users live). The margins in most urban areas tend to be very much in Democrat favor, so spending all your resources to win a few more votes (or even stop a small amount of votes being lost) does not actually result in very many, if any, additional EC votes. You could focus exclusively on a presidential race for unpopular candidates and pour all your effort into that for marginal value.
Or you could realize the top of the ballot is of limited value and in fact can be severely abridged by the down ballot races if overlooked(if we need reminders of “Vote Blue No Matter Who”'s shortcomings, please reference Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema), and realize that browbeating people into voting for a particular candidate instead of getting people engaged about things they care about is a way to burn out your political powerbase.
If you get real fancy, you can even realize that losing a particular election is mitigatable by on the ground action, and building political structures that don’t rely upon the government to do all the hard work and never be out of the political favor of the party in power.
Cool. So not voting is still not going to bring change either. So…
We can agree to disagree. I’m not down with debating the topic where it’s required to read walls of text that are mostly irrelevant to the point.
Not voting is NOT going to create the change these idiots want. Period.
End of story.
