One of the more unfortunate things I see online are mainstream liberals arguing with clearly marginalized people (trans folks, people of color, etc) about how they NEED to vote, and if they don’t, they’re going to face some consequences for it (subtext...
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One of the more unfortunate things I see online are mainstream liberals arguing with clearly marginalized people (trans folks, people of color, etc) about how they NEED to vote, and if they don’t, they’re going to face some consequences for it (subtext: they deserve it).
This is not the path to electoral victory. Accusing them of being privileged for not voting is not helpful, and when it comes from a clearly privileged person to somebody who isn’t it’s farcical. Nor does it help to explain “the stakes” to somebody who feels those stakes so much more acutely.
But on top of being insulting and deeply patronizing, it’s a colossal waste of time and a way to pretend that you’re accomplishing something. People who are oppressed should be allowed to vent online without being vote-scolded. Just let them process? Let them be? Democracy will not be saved because you picked a fight with somebody who’s clearly going through something.
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Before anybody licks their chops and decides to vote-scold me: I’m voting, leave me the fuck alone.
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@zeblarson to be honest, I find ALL sides of this extremely weird. What usually gets blamed once we move past individuals is a two party system atrophied to a least common denominator by the same forces of institutional erosion happening society wide. I wish, though, that we'd also turn a lens on progressive 'influence' 'strategies' that are basically a) I'm taking my marbles and going home b) I am threatening to take my marbles and go home c) yelling at individual people for being insufficiently mission committed.
I don't see ANY of this as the influence strategies on the right, and while a lot of rightward strategies are damaging, illegal, and not things I want to copy, ours honestly kind of suck, impacts wise?
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@jnl @zeblarson I think part of this is just inherent in the ideologies. Conservative thinking is fundamentally hierarchical; it's about falling in line and knowing your place. So conservatives are temperamentally more amenable with trimming their individual sails to keep themselves comfortably within the larger coalition.
Liberal ideology is more individualistic. Individualism has a lot of benefits. But it makes running a political coalition much harder, because the people within it view compromise as a sort of moral failing, a betrayal of the thing they joined the coalition to affirm.