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You used the word “electoralism” as a pejorative. In my experience, that is associated 100% of the time with being opposed to voting in elections.

Elections work until a country votes in a dictator who destroys all the checks and balances, and then they stop working. That's how it went down in the Weimar Republic, that's how it went down in post-Soviet Russia, and, well, [gestures broadly].

Go check my comment history if you want -- before the election, I was very emphatic about the importance of voting for Harris, and fucking kept my mouth shut about even valid criticism of the Democrats that could harm that goal. But it's not before the election anymore, is it?

Circumstances change, and when they do, our arguments and tactics have to change with them if we want to succeed (or indeed, if we want merely to not be crushed under the heel of jackboots). In February 2025, talking about voting is basically irrelevant, with the sole exception of keeping "pound some fucking sense into the Democratic Party before the midterms" on our to-do list (just on the off chance the process hasn't been completely subverted by the fascists by then). But everything else on that list has fuck-all to do with elections.

There's a huge gulf between what we're doing now (e.g. ranging from complying like Hakeem "what leverage do we actually have" Jeffries, to today's 24-hour economic boycott), and the sorts of actions that would actually be necessary to defeat the MAGAs. That's the reality us Americans are living in right now, whether we like it or not. The sooner we get through our stages of grief about it, the better off we'll be.

If you have ideas for what to do now, I’m all ears. Protest sounds good, strikes and boycotts sound good, spreading truth and standing up for the forces of “2 + 2 = 4” sounds good, but that’s about all I can think of that I think will take things in the right direction, and it all doesn’t sound likely to succeed any time soon.

Let's see: I'm from lemmy.world, you're from ponder.cat, and we're talking in quokk.au... what are the governing ToS and rules, again? I need to figure that out before I can answer.

Maybe I'll put it this way: if you buy into the narrative you were taught in school about MLK and Gandhi and whatnot, think again. What your teachers didn't tell you is that "peaceful" movements like theirs only ever succeeded because they were able to present themselves as the moderate alternative to a radical flank, and those radicals were the ones who had done the work of shifting the Overton window.