this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2026
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If you’re always on the defence, you are losing long term.
Voting might stop a problem from getting worse, but it’s not a viable solution to fix the underlying issues that require real systemic change to occur and that cannot happen from inside the system.
So vote, do all you can to stop it from getting worse. But remember that to fix it you need to fight for a revolution.
You can fight to install progressives at the local level while voting defensively at the national level. Local progressive movement are not only a LOT easier to pull off, but will help create widespread acceptance of progressive ideals as they get good outcomes. Then you expand to the state level and house, then the senate, then you're well positioned to push for a progressive in the presidency.
See: Zohran Mandani, Katie Wilson...
Next could be Nithya Raman?
These are good examples of what it takes, however, including primary participation and grassroots activism. In addition, the NYC mayoral featured ranked choice voting.
In other words, Duverger’s Law can’t simply be ignored in FPTP systems like those of the US, and anyone who suggests otherwise (like saying you should vote non-strategically to defeat the MAGA opposition) is either terribly ill-informed or, more likely, is working for the opposition.
duverger's "law" is literally a tautology and has no predictive power at all
The name is a historical artifact of his 1950s phrasing. It’s a tendency theorem with scope conditions.
Cox, Riker, Lijphart, and Clark+Golder have all reformulated the law as a conditional strategic-equilibrium claim.
that’s a lot of ink spilled for “literally a tautology”
This is true, but it's also important to be aware that if all americans ever do is vote then things will never improve. It's important to vote still, but it can't end there
Yeah, but also, things would get better faster if we only focused on getting more people to THAN IT WOULD if we only focused trying to get people who dont take other actions to do so.
Yeah, people seem to forget history. Often institutions become so sclerotic that the only way forward is to work outside of them. Look what it took to defeat slavery in the US. Slaveholders had co-opted both major parties. Abolitionists tried for decades to work within the existing two party system, voting "lesser evil" election after election. In the end, this strategy failed at ending slavery. It took the founding of a new party, the Republican Party, to really make progress on abolition. It ended up leading to the Civil War, but slavery would have continued for another generation at least if abolitionists had just kept voting defensively election after election.
"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave."
So you're saying they just stopped voting for a few elections and let the bigots have free reign for a few elections? Or did they keep voting for the lesser evil in the mean time? Because that's what this discussion is actually about, and your example doesn't seem to apply.
No. They didn't vote lesser of two evils. You need to get out of the headspace that the only option is to vote for one of the two parties. That's an ahistorical viewpoint. They just voted Republican until their candidate won. The Republican party was only founded after "voting for the lesser evil" failed after decades of trying. This is what I mean when I say people need to learn their history. We've been in this situation before, and our ancestors did not escape it by voting for the lesser evil.
We live in a two party system. We're going to have two parties. However, the parties themselves are not eternal. We'll always have two parties, but which parties those are can change. And often it's easier to completely swap out parties than to reform one from within.
If you want to create a new party in the US, the only way to do so is to destroy one of the existing parties. Namely, that means making the other party completely electorally nonviable.
Imagine if the most liberal 20% of the electorate simply refused to ever vote for the Democratic Party again and switched over to the DSA. Yes, that would mean losing for a few cycles. But again, history shows that sometimes you have to put up with pain now for a better future later. Centrists will slander this as "accelerationism," but this isn't really that. You're not hoping things get worse before they get better. You're just recognizing that the only way to create a new party is to destroy an old one. Politics becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you make one of the existing parties nonviable, then a power vacuum is created, and the whole electoral alignment shifts. If leftists completely abandoned the Democrats, the Democratic party would completely collapse. It would go the way of the Whigs. When a party dies, the electoral coalitions realign. And they would realign around the old Republican Party and the new DSA or other chosen party.
I know this is hard. But really, this is just learning from history. Yes, it means you sometimes lose ground in the short term to gain ground in the long term. And that is hard. It's painful. But compare that to what we've been doing instead - hoping to gain ground in the short term while losing even more in the long term. Voting for Democrats now is just voting for the lock on the ratchet. They have no real desire to change anything. At best you get a temporary reprieve from creeping fascism, while nothing changes in the circumstances that lead to the fascism.
The Republican Party was formed in 1854 and Lincoln was elected president running as a republican in 1860.
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Nah. We got LGBTQ+ marriages without a revolution. Civil Rights got better for a time. You're going to have to give examples in the last 20 years where a revolution worked. Meaning, the government wasn't taken over by an authoritarian and/or military leader.
To be fair, both of those were won with plenty of violence and took decades to accomplish.
The first Pride was a riot started most likely by a black trans woman who refused to be grabbed by the cops during one of their usual roundups of gay people and threw the first punch (brick to the face?) that set off a brawl across the whole area. IIRC, 100 cops were injured in the fight. But it still took nearly 50 years for gay marriage to be completely legal in the US. 1969 was when Stonewall happened, 2015 was the Supreme Court ruling (and that can be repealed at any time, like they did with abortion). Even the first state to officially write it into law, Massachusetts, only happened in 2004.
MLK Jr credited the Black Panthers being armed and willing to do what he couldn't as a major part of why he had the success that he did. And his protests were already illegal, risking possible prison time for those involved if they weren't done very carefully. And even after 10 years, Civil Rights laws were only written after a week of riots and billions of dollars in property damage sparked by his murder. 10 years of protests, but it took less than a week for the laws to be drafted and signed into law when entire city districts started to get burnt to the ground.
However, revolutions can be cultural as well. Gay marriage is a great example with actual polling numbers to present. By the time that the Supreme Court ruled on it, polls said that the country was equally split on the issue while as of 2021 a full 70% of the US apparently supports gay marriage.
Widespread riots gave us the Civil Rights. Crack open Wikipedia for a minute on that champ.