Thirteen Things Democratic Party Voters Need To Understand

This applies to the establishment left in capitalist nations all over globe but since I live in the US, I'm directing it as the Democratic Party voters. I'm going to provide logic and reasoning for each statement. I'm not expecting any of them to agree. I just want them to understand the logic of those not voting for a center right party, even if they support the progressive wing if that party, which is still right of center; the left doesn't run in or support the Democratic party. Liberal Harvard Professor Eric Beerbohm's theory said voters have a duty not to vote in complicity with injustice, even if it means voting for a candidate that won't keep you company and might lose. While he is also against abstaining, he does imply or lead one to infer that if the only options are to be complicit with injustice, not voting and possible rising up are the proper courses to take.

1. Protecting privilege and comfort in your country does not justify supporting your party or country while they commit crimes against humanity around the globe.

Our logic: liberal politics runs on a trade, material comfort domestically in exchange for silence or active support on what the state does abroad. Healthcare, wages, social programs, all conditional on not asking what pays for them. Our reasoning is that comfort bought with complicity in bombing campaigns, coups, sanctions regimes, and arms shipments isn't a neutral good, it's a bribe, and taking the bribe makes you a participant, not a bystander. This is a first cause point. Everything else on the list follows from rejecting the idea that domestic benefit offsets foreign atrocity.

"The workingmen have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got," Karl Marx

2. Maintaining your country's global rankings is not more important than letting your nation weaken to end global terrorism.

Our logic here targets a specific liberal anxiety, the fear of American decline, GDP rank, dollar hegemony, "leadership" on the world stage. Our reasoning is that a huge amount of what maintains those rankings is extraction, military presence, and coercive economic policy that produces the exact conditions that get labeled terrorism, resource wars, proxy conflicts, destabilization campaigns. If ending that machine costs the US its ranking, that's an acceptable and even necessary cost, because the ranking was never legitimately earned in the first place. We're directly answering the "but American decline is dangerous" objection before it's raised.

"Let us consider the position of an oppressor nation. Can a nation be free if it oppresses other nations? It cannot," Lenin.

3. Not enacting governmental change if people suffer more initially is not better than increased short term suffering to obtain long term relief.

Our logic is a transition cost argument, standard to any revolutionary or structural change position. Our reasoning is liberal incrementalism treats any near term pain from change as disqualifying, which functionally means the current system, which already produces constant suffering, gets protected by default because it's familiar rather than because it's less harmful. Our reasoning says the comparison isn't "some suffering versus no suffering," it's "concentrated temporary suffering during transition versus permanent distributed suffering under the current arrangement." Refusing change to avoid the first isn't compassion, it's choosing the second and calling it caution.

"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters," Federick Douglass.

4. Choosing any type of evil over long shot options is not pragmatism but instead defeatism and complicity in evil.

This is aimed directly at "lesser evil" voting logic. Our reasoning: pragmatism is supposed to mean choosing the option most likely to produce good outcomes given real constraints. Calling the choice between two harmful options pragmatic, when a third option exists but is dismissed as unwinnable, is a category error. It's not pragmatism, it's resignation dressed up as strategy. The word choice matters here, defeatism names the psychological function, giving up before trying and rationalizing it as realism, and complicity names the moral function, actively picking harm because it's familiar and low risk. This ties into what Eric Beerbohm's theory said; Beerbohm the liberal Harvard professor, because liberals know better, they just choose to act against our best interests.

"Citizens have a duty to vote to avoid complicity with injustice. On this view, representatives act in the name of the citizens. Citizens count as partial authors of the law, even when the citizens do not vote or participate in government," Eric Beerbohm.

5. Retaining some type of capitalism is not better than going full anti-capitalist socialism.

Our logic rejects the "regulated capitalism is good enough" position common in Democratic politics, welfare capitalism, Nordic model references, tax the rich but keep the system. Our reasoning, capitalism's core mechanism, private ownership of production extracting surplus value from labor, doesn't stop functioning because it's regulated, it just gets managed more humanely on the surface while the extraction continues. Partial reform doesn't remove the mechanism, it just slows its worst symptoms temporarily until deregulation swings back, which it always does. Full replacement is the only way to actually end the mechanism rather than manage its side effects.

"Through the scientific study of the class struggle throughout history, Marxism has established that the evils of capitalism cannot be done away with without the conscious overthrow of capitalism by the working class.

Therefore, the first duty of genuine communists is to fight for the class independence of the workers’ movement. This includes the need to expose and resist all attempts to bind the movement to the capitalist system and its institutions, like the bourgeois state..." Revolutionary Communist International.

6. When it comes to laws and policies, if people don't agree, there's always enforcement to make people comply domestically and every American knows that if the US really wants someone to comply they'll use sanctions, blockades, military force, and regime changes international. Saying there's nothing that can be done is defeatism.

Our logic exposes a selective helplessness. Our Reasoning is the US enforces domestic law through police, courts, and prisons without hesitation, and enforces its will internationally through sanctions, blockades, coups, and invasions without hesitation. Capacity for enforcement clearly exists and gets used constantly. So when someone says redistribution, decommodification, or structural economic change "just isn't possible" or "there's no mechanism," that's not a factual claim, it's a political choice to not use tools that already exist and are used for other purposes daily; your hypocrisy removes the excuse.

7. We should be pushing for equitable egalitarianism, meet everyone where they are and try to lift them all up simultaneously and immediately, not specific sectarian political identities individually gradually over a long drawn out process.

Our logic is a direct rejection of identity politics as a sequencing strategy. Our reasoning is liberal politics tends to address group harms one constituency at a time, on its own timeline, often trading one group's urgency for another's patience, "your issue after this election cycle," "your rights once we secure the coalition." The reasoning here is that universal material uplift, healthcare, housing, income, done for everyone at once regardless of identity category, addresses the shared root cause, economic precarity, faster and more completely than sequential identity based campaigns that keep people divided into separate lines waiting their turn.

"All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority," The Communist Manifesto.

8. Basic needs are a right and should be decommodified, not incentivized or subsidized.

Our logic draws a precise distinction that liberal policy usually collapses. Our reasoning is subsidies and incentives still treat housing, healthcare, food, water, education, healthcare as commodities bought and sold, just with the government softening the price. That preserves the market relationship and the profit motive behind it. Decommodification means removing these things from the market entirely, they're provided as a right, not purchased, subsidized or not. Our reasoning is that as long as basic survival is mediated by a price, however discounted, it's still conditional, and rights aren't supposed to be conditional.

"Society will take all forces of production and means of commerce, as well as the exchange and distribution of products, out of the hands of private capitalists and will manage them in accordance with a plan based on the availability of resources and the needs of the whole society. In this way, most important of all, the evil consequences which are now associated with the conduct of big industry will be abolished," Engels.

9. It's not "we need to give due process before deporting and strengthen border security," nobody's illegal and borders should only exist to help define areas on a map.

Our logic answers two separate liberal talking points with two separate rejections. Our reasoning on due process, you can't owe due process to a category, "illegality," that shouldn't exist as applied to a human being in the first place, because migration criminalized by the state is a legal fiction manufactured to produce cheap, exploitable, deportable labor, not a real crime. Our reasoning on border security, enforcement focused borders exist to control and exclude people, which serves capital's interest in restricting labor movement while capital itself moves freely. Reducing borders to cartographic markers, not enforcement zones, removes the mechanism that criminalizes movement in the first place. To quote two indigenous minds:

"We are all indigenous people on this planet, and we have to reorganize to get along," Rebecca Adamson.

"Because we are all guests on this land—nobody owns her" (mother earth), Selena Mills.

10. Changing laws and suing to keep third parties and independents off ballots, while changing primary rules and ignoring primary candidates is also making fraudulent, it's not just gerrymandering to keep the mainstream establishment parties from winning.

Our logic is an internal consistency call out. Our reasoning, Democrats apply words like gerrymandering, voter suppression, and election fraud exclusively to Republican tactics, while running structurally comparable plays against their own left flank and against third parties, ballot access lawsuits against Greens, mid cycle primary rule changes, superdelegate structures, coordinated consolidation around preferred candidates. If procedural manipulation to lock in a preferred outcome is fraudulent and anti-democratic when Republicans do it, it doesn't stop being that because Democrats are the ones doing it. Institutional capture through legal and procedural manipulation, removes their exclusive claim to the "protecting democracy" framing.

"The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them," Lenin/Marx.

11. Communists and socialists are not the enemy and you cannot find bipartisanship with fascists. Fascists are the enemy and bipartisanship can be found with socialists and communists.

Our logic redraws the political map along a materially accurate axis instead of the liberal left-right axis. Our reasoning, liberal politics treats "bipartisanship" as center ground between Democrats and Republicans, and treats leftists further left than liberalism as fringe or dangerous, "tankies," extremists, unserious. Democrats and Republicans are both capital aligned parties, meaning the real ideological enemy is fascism as a stage of capitalist collapse, and the actual coalition partners against that enemy are socialists and communists, not the other capitalist party.

"Comrades, fascism in power was correctly described by the Thirteenth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital," Dimitrov.

12. Passivism, peaceful protests, voting, and reform are not the only solutions. Proportional violence including revolution should always be an option on the table.

Our logic rejects the idea that legitimate political action is limited to sanctioned, state approved channels. Our easoning, voting, protest, and reform are tools that operate within a system controlled by the people you'd need to remove from power, which means the system defines the limits of its own challenge. Historically, every major redistribution of power, abolition, labor rights, decolonization, required force or the credible threat of force at some point, reform alone didn't produce them. Proportionality is the operative word, it's not advocating unlimited violence, it's rejecting the premise that violence is categorically off the table regardless of what peaceful methods fail to achieve.

Let me give four quotes by MLK, to assist me.

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it."

"And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? ... It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity."

"For you see, true peace is not merely the absence of some negative force. It is the presence of some positive force. Peace is not merely the absence of tension. It is the presence of justice, and the peace that existed at that time was a negative peace, an obnoxious peace, devoid of any positive meaning."

13. Yes, Republicans have identity protective cognition, they do take money from foreign governments, they do support fascist and supremacist groups, and they match the points, characteristics, and qualifiers laid out by Britt, Eco, and others, but so do Democrats. And some of you openly admit that it all comes down to how actions, rhetoric, and policies get interpreted. What's funnier is some of you, in trying to recruit people to vote for Harris, said "both parties share the same fascist foreign policy, that's not going to change, I'm concerned with..." or asked, "is it worth not voting for a potentially fascist, dictatorial party, and letting a potentially fascist dictator win?" Again, you know what your party is. Whether it's the same, less severe, or worse than the Republicans is debated depending on the subject.

Our logic is an admission trap, using your own words against you. Democrats support Azov and act like, because it merged with the Ukrainian military, its members are no longer Nazis or supremacists, but it's okay because the enemy is Russia. Then there's the number of them taking money from AIPAC and J Street, but it's okay because "Israel is our greatest ally." And bankrolling genocide was okay because they weren't Trump, and could be asked to stop after the election. Our reasoning: identity protective cognition or cult mentality, foreign money, alignment with fascist and supremacist groups, and matching the standard checklists (Lawrence Britt's 14 characteristics of fascism, Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism features) are all things critics correctly assign to Republicans. Our point is that none of those diagnostic criteria are exclusive to Republicans. They're structural features of both capital-aligned parties, and Democratic voters and organizers have, at moments, said so themselves.

Your own statements trying to recruit us make our arguments. The first, "both parties share the same fascist foreign policy, that's not going to change, I'm concerned with," was your voters conceding the foreign policy point entirely and then pivoting to domestic concerns as the tiebreaker, which means the "fascist" label was never actually about fascism as a structural analysis. It was about which harms the speaker personally prioritizes. The second, "is it worth not voting for a potentially fascist dictatorial party," is even more damning because it's phrased as a live, undecided question, meaning the possibility that the Democratic Party itself is fascist or dictatorial was on the table for the person asking it, not dismissed, just outweighed by fear of the alternative.

Our reasoning is that the severity comparison between the two parties is not settled fact. It's a debate that shifts depending on which subject you're looking at, foreign policy, domestic surveillance, carceral policy, corporate capture, and Democratic voters know this, because your own recruitment rhetoric has accidentally admitted it, and still does on occasion. It's documented that the people we're arguing against have already said it out loud when they thought it was a persuasive move rather than a confession.

I'll be honest, genocide is the crime of all crimes. Congo, Sudan, that's the US indirectly supporting it. Palestine, that's blatant, and if anyone looks at the word "holocaust" in Merriam-Webster's dictionary, it meets every entry. Gaza is a historic event, it's genocide, mass death, they were bombed and burnt to ash and rubble, and they were sacrificed for the Greater Israel project. That's all four entries under that definition. And that's not making light of the event from World War Two. Both parties are guilty of crossing that red line and bankrolling genocide openly. Whether the Democrats are a moderate fascist variant or a full variant like the Republicans is contested, but when we say the Democratic Party is Blue MAGA and the Republicans are Red MAGA, that's not up for debate. Together, the two MAGA divisions have a monopoly on the US, and the corporate government they've controlled for over a hundred years has an imperialist stranglehold on the planet.

"Up here in the North, you have the same thing. The Democratic Party don't do it, they don't do it that way. They got a thing that they call gerrymandering. They maneuver you out of power. Even though you can vote, they fix it so you're voting for nobody. They got you going and coming. In the South, they're outright political wolves. In the North, they're political foxes. A fox and a wolf are both canine, both belong to the dog family. Now, you take your choice. You going to choose a Northern dog or a Southern dog? Because either dog you choose, I guarantee you, you'll still be in the doghouse. This is why I say it's the ballot or the bullet. It's liberty or it's death. It's freedom for everybody or freedom for nobody," Malcolm X.

"The development of fascism and the fascist dictatorship itself assume various forms in different countries, depending on the historical, social, and economic conditions, on the national peculiarities and the international situation of the given country. In some countries, mainly where fascism does not have a broad base among the masses and where the struggle of the various groupings within the camp of the fascist bourgeoisie itself is quite strong, fascism does not immediately resolve to liquidate parliament and leaves a certain legality to the other bourgeois parties, as well as to the Social Democracy. In other countries, where the ruling bourgeoisie fears the imminent outbreak of revolution, fascism establishes its unlimited political monopoly either immediately or by increasingly intensifying terror and repression against all competing parties and groupings. This fact does not exclude, on the part of fascism, at the moment of a particular aggravation of its situation, attempts to broaden its base and, without changing its class essence, to combine open terrorist dictatorship with a gross falsification of parliamentarism," Dimitrov. 

"Firstly, it is not true that fascism is only the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie. Fascism is not only a military-technical category. Fascism is the bourgeoisie’s fighting organisation that relies on the active support of Social-Democracy. Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism. There is no ground for assuming that the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of Social-Democracy. There is just as little ground for thinking that Social-Democracy can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie. These organisations do not negate, but supplement each other. They are not antipodes, they are twins. Fascism is an informal political bloc of these two chief organisations; a bloc, which arose in the circumstances of the post-war crisis of imperialism, and which is intended for combating the proletarian revolution. The bourgeoisie cannot retain power without such a bloc. It would therefore be a mistake to think that “pacifism” signifies the liquidation of fascism. In the present situation, “pacifism” is the strengthening of fascism with its moderate, Social-Democratic wing pushed into the forefront," Stalin.