I understand wanting to divest entirely from a political system that has consistently failed to deliver.

Dropping out and focusing entirely on local survival for your immediate community is... kind of a legitimate take in these times?

But I can't do that. I can't leave people who live in places where they don't have the local critical mass to protect one another to face even worse conditions for some kind of revolutionary future that may not come in their lifetimes.

I don't believe that opting out will chastise the people in power now and force them to give us better options (not talking party, but the social classes that benefit from current conditions); on the contrary, it'll help them consolidate more power.

The Democratic party is a rickety-ass dam with a shitload of leaks and a bad design that incorporates sacrificing a certain proportion of the people to be just a little more friendly to the petite bourgeoisie than the GOP. I in no way want a dam like that.

But it's hard to make a better society when people are being violently swept away by a deadly flood.

I would love to be able to wholesale replace the Dems with something actually good. But I'm not going to get that by trying to hold them hostage to my more progressive demands.

What I'll get is a failed dam, i.e., an even more powerful GOP and all that we know that entails.

Creating acceptable political choices for ourselves means starting from the ground at the local level and working the change outward from there.

That's how the right took the GOP to fascist extremes while ensuring that it still wields disproportionate political power.

Yeah, it's going to be a long, hard, unglamorous slog. Call me a bourgeois or whatever, but I personally don't think taking people to a point of abject desperation so that a literal revolution can create massive disruption at the cost of enormous suffering and death is desirable.

I know who's going to bear the bulk of the suffering and death, and I know the chances that any revolutionary success will be allowed to stand.

"Being forced to choose the lesser of two evils vs. saying fuck the American political system" is a childish framing.

The question is: how many am I willing to sacrifice on top of those already being sacrificed as we make a system capable of giving us what we want?

We don't have to give money to left-of-center politicians just because they're viable. We don't have to volunteer for them. We don't have to support our current political system. TBH it's legit to decide that time and energy is better spent on direct action, organizing, support.

But we can vote for the people who will produce less death and misery over the next 2 years, 4 years, 6 years without squandering any of those resources.