Liberal democracy’s assumption that political parties must compete for votes in the same way that businesses compete for customers is a dangerous trap. It reduces voting to a mere transactional choice and erases the participatory vision of self-governance
Had some ‘moderate socialist’ sort on BlueSky link me this article a while back. I was not impressed.
The gist of this article, as I understand it, is that people should stop waiting for parties to start catering to them politically and instead start getting personally involved in their political parties. Which is a load of horseshit. There are an abundance of meaningful forms of political action, and even ignoring the fact that joining the Democratic Party has not yet proven to be one of them, there are always going to be a large amount of people who are unable to or simply do not want to waste years of their lives reforming the Democratic Party from within, and for those people, voting will simply be comparing the negatives and positives of groups that they are not involved with.
In a way it’s a similar kind of idealism to the Twitter leftists who believe all leftists should have read entire libraries of communist literature. The primary difference is that, while unrealistic, it would be an unequivocally good thing for more people to read more communist literature. “Everybody should simply join the Democratic Party” is not only an unrealistic mission statement, but an ideologically flaccid one.
Our new friends fit perfectly here.