this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
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You seem to understand that the vast majority of Americans simply vote for what they see in the media, meaning that only a candidate backed by the media can win, and you seem to understand that we can't shift the media with our current government, but you don't seem to understand that, given those 2 facts, there is no way for us to recreate the phenomenon seen in other countries with a larger proportion of people willing to look outside of their televisions and smartphones.
For a 3rd party candidate to win a modern-day American presidential election, either the media would have to validate them, or tens of millions of Americans would have to, in unison, spontaneously decide not to follow the media that they trust implicitly without question.
the mexican example happened in 2018 and proves that it's possible without attention from the media and the number of people who didn't vote in 2024 because of gaza; but did vote in 2020; as well as 3rd party voters combined already exceeds this tens of millions of american threshold.
the elections last week and the popularity of the no kings protests prove that we're ripe for this sort of change; but we keep repeating this sort of propaganda to such a degree that it becomes self fulfilling prophecy.
we need to change our mindset; not a change in unchanging institutions like the media or the political duopoly.
Oh, so you do think we can overcome the media? I see. From your comment about how most Americans don't even know about Mexico's recent election, much less care, I thought you understood that we're much less tapped into the state of the world than any other country. I wholeheartedly believe that we are far more reliant on the media to do our thinking for us than any other country save for maybe North Korea or China, but even those would be a stretch. I don't think a success in a country like Mexico, whose citizens clearly have the ability to look beyond the media, could be recreated here, in a country whose citizens would rather cover their ears than listen to news from elsewhere in the world.
I agree that we need to change our mindset, but I also believe that the Americans who are already slaves to the media will never change their ways, and so long as they're around, the media will control our elections. We need to wait until those people are gone, and hopefully replace them over time with people who are more mindful of politics. Then maybe we can overcome the government through democracy instead of violence, but even if it works it won't be happening any time soon.
the mexicans didn't overcome the media. mexico's status at the periphery of the global north ensured that enough of them had shitty enough material existences that their protests took on a genuine form and it galvanized the public to try voting for morena instead of pri or pan like they had been doing for almost a century by that point.
in fact: it was social media giving attention to these protests that made the younger mexicans aware that they weren't alone in their suffering and they turned out in droves to vote like they sometimes do in the united states.
"overcoming the media" is another manufactured threshold like that other manufactured threshold of tens of millions of voters and only serves to re-enforce this self fulfilling propaganda when something a simple as basic media literacy will do the trick.
the global north has come to recognize the impact that social media has on the youth and that's why isreal & the united states now have full control over tiktok and why europe is trying to impose age verification mechanisms on social media.
waiting for some mythical time when people stop relying on the media for change to happen is no different than repeating other fallacies like spoiler-voting or throwing-your-vote-away.
it happened in our lifetime under the same conditions and it's living and breathing at our southern border.... for now.
Nobody's waiting. People won't stop worshiping the media if we just wait for them to stop. We have to galvanize the younger generation into being interested and engaged in politics so that they don't become just like the lost-cause bloat of current voters. It's a lot of work, and it will take decades, but yes, it can work. In fact, it's been working. While everyone I know over 50 thinks that Trump is just a normal president, everyone I know under 20 recognizes him as the tyrant he is. Soon those younger minds will outnumber the older ones who think it's still business as usual, but that shift still does need to change for us to have a chance at winning a presidential election with an actual leftist.
Mexico was in a tough enough spot that even the older people demanded better, but life's still pretty good for the baby boomer generation that dominates the American voting pool. They don't have a reason to protest and organize through tik-tok for change, they like their life and want it to stay the same, government and all. We need our younger generation who, like those in Mexico, only see a bleak future for themselves under the current government, and will do what's necessary to change it.
But if we're fixing the system from within the system, that change will only come when one of the 2 parties is indeed leftist. Mexico has a multi-party system, enacted by a government who listened to the people enough to enact that policy, but we don't - without changing the entire system, we'll still need to fix one of the current parties to the point where they put forward a real leftist candidate before we'll see one win democratically. That happens from the bottom, with local elections like the one for Mamdani. Otherwise, we'll need to overthrow the system to see a leader of our country as good as Mexico's anytime soon.
until 2018 mexico only technically had a multi-party system in the same way that the united states also technically has a multi-party system with the green, psl, libertarians, independence, etc. parties; with only the two of the parties overwhelmingly dominating the rest of the parties like democrats and republicans do in the united states. the policies that i think you're referring to were only put in place to give legitimacy to mexican elections and even then they only did it because the americans pushed them into doing it to alleviate criticisms of their support for the pri.
during his first campaign, obama espoused a progressive agenda like amlo did and both politicians proved how effected they were at getting young people to vote, which means that we already know how to get young people engaged. clinton did the same thing back in the 1990's for the united states, so it also means we're pretty good at getting young people to vote whenever we feel like pulling that lever; but we chose to appeal to "moderates" instead because they don't challenge the status quo.
obama's lower second election results proved what happens when you drop that progressive agenda and sheinbaum proves that the youth will reliably come out to support your party if you don't drop that progressive agenda like obama did.
i think you're right in that too many people are too comfortable in their living situations to ever effect change and i also agree that this sentiment is mostly shared by older generations; the same is true to a very large degree in mexico so that's only part of the problem.
however, the change didn't come from fixing the system from within one of the dominant parties; it happened when people ditched the "liberal" party that was co-opting progressive movement like the democrats do in the united states and voted 3rd party instead.
this overton ratcheting effect that the democrats enable coupled with their unwillingness to push back against republican voter suppression is the yin to the yin-and-yang of our political reality and that, along with the self fulfilling third party propaganda is the yang that keeps americans vacillating between democrat and republicans with things continuing to get worse for the world.
the american system's inherent contradictions will be the only thing to degrade people's material conditions enough to vote third party if we don' t change our collective mindset and; by then; the world will be in a very sorry state that i'm glad i won't get to live through.
Damn, I looked into it further, and you're absolutely right. I knew it was an upset win, and when I saw that there were 4 major parties in the election, I dismissed it as a more variable political system, but it's first-past-the-post, just like the US. This will definitely change my thought process on what our chances of making real current-day changes to our political landscape would be. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, and for powering through my hardheadedness.
one of the good things about american propaganda is that it's sometimes easy to spot because so many americans repeat it to each other despite multiple examples to the contrary that keep popping up every other decade or so; maybe i'm getting better at calling it out. lol.
this isn't the first time mexico has managed to shake off colonial control and; if the historical pattern holds; the united states will invade again like it did the last 3 times to force the political situation to change back, as it's done dozens of times throughout the world to other countries. this time however, american soft power as at an all time low thanks to the freedom of information available online (and especially so with live-streaming the gazan genocide on social media) and it's hard power is currently stretched thin due to ukraine, taiwan, isreal, and venezuela at the same time, as well as president that's souring relations with our allies (and fellow colonial masters); so there's a chance that mexico might be left unscathed.
developments like the new ownership of tikok and censorship happening on facebook, reddit, bluesky, etc. and the europeans capitulating to trump's economic and military demands make me pessimistic.
It's so strange to hear this self-defeating propaganda not more than a week after a demsoc was elected mayor of the financial capital of the fucking world after a record-setting billionare spending spree against him.
It's not self-defeatist: Mamdani is a perfect example of the point I originally made about local elections. Yes, if we keep doing voting for people like that in local elecations, we might be able to dig our country out of this hole in a few decades. But he won because the "not into politics" voters don't go to local elections - as far as they're concerned, voting day only happens once every 4 years. If we want to win a presidential election with a similar candidate, we need to replace the entire democratic party with progressives, starting at the lowest level and waiting until they rise up to the top. It will take a long time, and it certainly requires no longer having a country full of people who just vote for their news company's favorite, but it could definitely work.
Mamdani won because a record number of those people came out and voted for him, dumbass.
Yes, a record number for a local election, a huge amount of which were the younger voters who care much more than the "not into politics" boomers.
I think you're confusing "not into politics" voters with 'disaffected' voters. Those are the ones Mamdani won - it isn't as if a flood of young 'into politics' voters popped out of nowhere in new york - those voters have always been there but simply never vote because democrats keep dumping cold water on populist reform.
Correct, and that's what the democratic party is about. We only change that when we've swapped every candidate out from the bottom up. The democratic party had Cuomo. That's who they backed, and it will be who they back every single time. We need to vote in the Mamdanis of the world at the bottom, then in the middle a few years later, then at the top years after that. Then we will get a leftist presidential candidate, because there won't be any centrists left for the DNC to put forward. If even one centrist remains, that will be their candidate, and that is who all of the "not into politics" voters who think Mamdani is going to turn New York into a "socialist hellhole" will vote for.
Lmao, this is just cope my man. Mamdani won against the exact establishment and system of billionaires you keep claiming as the mechanism that will never allow a leftist candidate from reaching popular support
Cope? I'm ecstatic! I'm so glad that we managed to get politically-minded people to rush in under the larger group of "keep everything the same" voters' noses! But to ignore that group, who accounts for the majority of voters in every presidential election, and is the reason 3rd parties never make it even close to being viable, is nothing short of ignorant.
You're misunderstanding the turnout. The record number of voters that turned out are exactly those typical non-voters that you're talking about.
Dems have been hemorrhaging their base because people don't think they do anything for them, and a populist candidate like Mamdani is how democrats bring those disenfranchised voters back.
He is exactly the case in point i'm talking about. Calling those voters 'politically-minded' is the cope.
The non-voters for local elections that I'm talking about are the people who turn up for every presidential election to vote for the people their news show told them to. They're the tens of millions of 50+ year-old people who think Trump is just another republican who needs to be replaced by just another democrat, and the world will be perfect again. Those people don't care about local elections, because they specifically enjoy the current political system, and don't care what new faces enter the political scene.
The people who turned up were the 20-somethings who are politically-minded and are going to change this world for the better if they can keep showing up to polls that the 50+ people ignore.
When voting turnout exceeds expected numbers, we call those additional voters 'low-propensity'. It doesn't matter if it's a national election or a local one - when turnout blows out expectations, that's a high-enthusiasm election. Trying to describe those low-propensity voters as 'politically-minded' seems intentionally misleading, since I can only assume that's based on the fact that they turned out when they were expected not to (i.e. they turned out because they responded to a typically low-turnout election, thus they must be 'politically-minded').
Setting aside the circular definition - any time a candidate is able to turn out more voters than expected, that's a definitionally good candidate by any electoral standard. The question isn't really 'who would non-voters have voted for if it were a national election?', but, 'does this election translate to a national voter base?'. And while that's not something you can easily generalize, Mamdani did run on policies that are resoundingly popular in all 50 states. There's very little reason he wouldn't have performed better-than-average on a national stage given what we know for certain.
All this to say: anyone trying to downplay the significance of an Indian-American, Muslim, Democratic Socialist sweeping an election against one of the most famous political dynasty names in the US, where corporate media across the entire political spectrum were united against him, and where opposition spent tens (if not hundreds) of millions of dollar more than him - and in of all places the financial capital of the world and in a city that was the sight of the most famous terrorist attack conducted by Arab Muslims in the western world - is absolutely coping. That kind of candidate winning in a place like New York would have been inconceivable since at least 2001.
You can deny it as a significant moment of socialist achievement if you want, but you'd be fooling only yourself.