Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
Democrats are going after Jill Stein with surprising ferocity this election cycle, with their favorite line of attack being that the Green Party doesn’t win elections.
At an appearance on the radio show The Breakfast Club with her running mate Butch Ware, Stein was slammed by host Angela Rye over her ongoing feud with celebrity congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“The one thing that AOC has done that you haven’t is win some elections,” Rye said.
This line was later picked up by AOC, who tweeted, “Nobody needs talking points to know Jill Stein hasn’t won so much as a bingo game in the last decade and if you actually give a damn about people, you organize, build power and infrastructure, and win.”
We’ve been seeing this “hurr hurr you don’t win anything” attack line from liberals against the left more and more lately. There’s a meme that’s become popular in shitlib circles this year featuring a left-punching rant by the YouTuber Contrapoints about leftists who attack the Democratic Party, saying, “They don’t want victory. They don’t want power. They want to endlessly ‘critique’ power.”
And it’s so obnoxious. It’s like yes, you win elections under the current system by being a warmongering corporate whore. That’s the problem the real left is trying to address. Duh.
Yes, those who align themselves with the Democratic Party win elections. But then what do they do with that win once they’ve won? They commit fucking genocide. They start wars. They kill the ecosystem. They repay favors to the donor class at the expense of everyone else. Republicans also win elections, and then do these same things.
If the current system means you will lose elections unless you are loyal to a murderous, ecocidal, exploitative and tyrannical power structure, then is the problem really losing elections, or is the problem the current system? And how much of a “win” are you even capable of in such a system if you actually care about making the world a better place?
It’s like that old joke. A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, “this is where the light is.”
Sure the Democratic Party is where the light is, but it ain’t where the keys are. You can spend your whole life getting the “win” of being where the light is, but it will never get you the keys of peace, justice and a healthy world. Democrats going “hurr hurr, you never win anything” are standing under the streetlight boasting about how easily they can see the ground and making fun of the poor saps out there crawling around in the darkness where the keys could actually be.
Some of the worst people in the world have won elections. It’s not enough to win, you’ve got to do good things with your win. Democrats do not do good things when they win, they do profoundly, shockingly evil things when they win. This is a problem, and the real adults in the room are trying to fix it by changing the system which is responsible for it.
The task of changing a profoundly corrupt and abusive system won’t look like a lot of wins at first. At first it will look like anything else would look when a very small group of people with no power go up against a vastly larger and stronger power structure. The idea is that by fighting you spread awareness of the fact that conditions are unacceptable and that a better world is possible, and the more eyes open to this reality, the more hands there will be to help in the fight.
It’s still early days, and wins are still very few and far between. But at least it’s a fight, instead of the direct perpetration of tyranny and abuse that’s on offer from the Democratic Party.
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I was truly impressed by the erudition and quality of Butch Ware's arguments -- compare this quality gentleman with the VP mediocrities Walz (D) and Vance (R) and it tells you what you need to know about the duopoly. They give us the cream of the crap every four years, then find the emptiest of arguments proffered by the emptiest suits (AOC) to criticize folks of genuine substance like Stein and Ware.
It makes me sad to see what AOC has become. I didn't think she'd become a defender of genocide.