In 2000 I voted for Ralph Nader. I despised the corporate-friendly Dem Party.

Nader had no strategy to win or to build political power.

The Green Party still has no viable strategy.

Organizations like @JusticeDems do have a viable strategy. It's working.

Let's be serious.

People's candidates like @AOC @CoriBush @JamaalBowmanNY @IlhanMN @RashidaTlaib @AyannaPressley @PramilaJayapal @SummerForPA @RepFiedler @NikilSaval @rick4westphilly @shannaforPA and many more are winning seats up and down the ballot across the country.

We're just getting started—we're not going to win every race. People's candidates like @BernieSanders @Booker4KY @JCisnerosTX @AndrewGillum and others came close to winning, and they worked with people's movements and organizations to build long-term power along the way.

We're getting ourselves organized into a force that can wrest the helm from the old guard. It's the only electoral path available at this moment. We know it can work because we just saw the Tea Party and Trump do it with the GOP...

It's wild how the Tea Party and Trump took over the GOP and then won the Presidency running on an agenda that excited their core base but that remains quite unpopular/extreme.

Imagine what we can do running on an agenda (e.g. #MedicareForAll) that already enjoys popular support.

I get the abstract conceptual appeal of a third party. I wish we had a system that allowed for third parties to be viable.

But study your context. That's not the system we have here. It hasn't worked. It won't work.

Unless you're moving to a nation with a proportional representation parliamentary system, or you're capable of organizing a successful Constitutional Convention to restructure our system of representative government, third parties are not viable in the US at the national level.

Instead of building a dead-end third party proper, we have to build an organized faction that treats the Democratic Party not as an impenetrable monolith, but as a contestable terrain. That's exactly what @AOC, @justicedems, et al are doing. That's the path.

And if you believe we need more revolutionary change than what an electoral strategy alone will ever deliver, that doesn't excuse electoral abstentionism. If we aren't leading the insurgent tendency in non-revolutionary times we won't magically become leaders come the revolution.

I wish I had an up-to-date piece to tack to the end of this thread. In lieu of that, I wrote this in the summer of 2016 after Sanders had lost the nomination. Sadly we're in a very similar position with the presidential election and the points still apply. https://medium.com/all-of-us/we-want-a-political-revolution-first-we-must-defeat-fascism-a9df032f87d6

While we're depressingly in a similar place with the Presidential contest (Biden vs Trump), we're in a much stronger position with 1) all the congressional & statehouse seats we've won these past few years and 2) the organizations and bench of skilled campaigners we've developed.

P.S. Stay tuned for my book on this, F*ckers at the Top ( @StrongArm_Press 2021)