I tend to think this is a case of mistaking results for progress.

I'm not onboard with the idea that the left is free of conspiratorial thinking and bad, partisan heuristics. That's clearly not true but we don't have anything even close to the same animating thought process as the MAGA right.

Why is that?

Is it because we're just so gosh darn smart? We're just so much better educated than everyone else that we're above petty things like reactionary thinking?

No.

It's because we engage in what people sneeringly call "purity politics." We don't settle for "this is all we could get." We sacrifice smaller victories, even when they prove to bet setbacks in the short term, for more tangible and meaningful longer term successes.

Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders are victories but not in the way you're presenting them.

They're victories in the sense that they're a vindication of everything the anti-electoral left has been saying for literally centuries - you cannot tear down the master's house with the master's tools. You will never be allowed to change things from within existing power dynamics. Our political system is just that - a system. Systems that perpetuate themselves over time have mechanisms to maintain homeostasis and, just like biological systems, the pressures of natural selection weed out systems that can't maintain that.

Setting aside the fact that Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie are iffy leftists at best, they show why it's important to cut off your nose if that nose is getting in the way.

Pursuing bad ideas because you're too scared to take a step back is how you end up drowning at the bottom of a QAnon well.

The left is able to take that step back. Liberals are not. Conservatives are not. The right is absolutely not.

I genuinely believe that 2024 could be our last legitimate election.

You absolutely do not believe that nor does basically anyone else who's saying it.

I don't want to discount or diminish the emotion behind it, fear and anxiety are legitimate emotions and there's concrete reasons to feel that way. No one is lesser for recognizing a scary, uncertain situation.

But if you genuinely believe 2024 could be your last election that would necessitate some other rational actions. They may not be good actions but they'd be rational.

On the low end, flee the country. There's literally hundreds of places to go. Sure, it'd be expensive, your quality of life would probably drop, it'd be hard...but you'd be out of a place that you believe is turning into a totalitarian state. You'd be free. Millions of people have fled their homes before with nothing to set up in unknown lands to escape a tyrannical government so it's not an irrational choice or impossible to do.

On the high end, violence. I don't advocate for that nor do I even think it would be particularly effective but it still boils down do "what is your freedom worth to you?"

But you're not doing any of that. Almost nobody is, because the people hand-wringing about the impending dictatorship are not people who would be seriously impacted by it. Put a pin in that.

"But there are things you can do that aren't run or fight!"

And those things are only things you do if you believe they can work and they can only work if the system that supports them works. Protests, elections, campaigning, voting, public pressure - that only works when there's a functional civil society in place. If there's a functional civil society in place, that means we're not staring at the abyss of a societal collapse into totalitarianism.

Totalitarianism isn't like breaking a bone - you're fine and then there's a sharp pain and now you're not. It's more like cancer. It takes time, there's symptoms, there's treatments if you catch it early, but it progresses slowly until it eventually kills the patient. It's not like the day of Trump's inauguration someone flips a switch and it's now a dictatorship.

So with that in mind, there are few roads we can see:

1. Our civil society is strong enough to weather one hapless amoeba being in charge by either rejecting him at the ballot box or, if he's elected, resisting his efforts to push us into totalitarianism.

2. Our civil society is not strong enough to weather one hapless amoeba being in charge and he pushes us into totalitarianism.

Option 2 means we're at a point beyond which systemic processes either won't process change fast enough or just won't work at all. In the cancer metaphor, it's pumping someone full of cancer drugs when they're already Stage 4. You might slow the progression and buy a few weeks or a month but their toast no matter what you do. There's nothing left but to keep them comfortable and make plans for what happens after they die.

Option 1 indicates that we've caught it early enough that there are interventions that can be done that will probably work. Worrying and stressful, but not "the end."

All of which is an incredibly long winded way of bringing us back to "2024 could be our last legitimate election."

If it is our last election, either because Trump wins and becomes a dictator or loses and a civil war gets sparked, that's an Option 2 scenario. You don't stop dictators with votes, if you could they wouldn't be dictators. "Our last election" means that civil society has decayed to the point at which we can no longer fight off the infection of authoritarianism in which case the only thing left to do is radical systemic change (which, tbh, seems unlikely) or the aforementioned "fight or flight."

But you're talking Option 1. You haven't fled (that I'm aware of) and you're not fighting. I'm way too self-centered and lazy to go back combing through posts but my guess is you're advocating people vote, campaign, pressure, etc - the kinds of things you do when you think civil society will back you with a good enough pitch.

Cancer drugs for Stage 4. Why?

Back to that pin because my working theory is...it doesn't actually matter to you that much. I don't think it seriously matters to most people making this argument. The vast majority of them are people who wouldn't seriously be impacted under even a Trump dictatorship. It would kinda suck, sure, but they're not the people facing potential state consequences.

"We care about the people that would be hurt!"

In the abstract, sure. You care about trans kids, black people, immigrants, political dissidents, women, etc in the sense that you don't want to hurt them or want them to be hurt but you're fine feeding into a system that depends on hurting these people.

Democrats care about women...except they didn't codify Roe v. Wade when they had the chance. Democrats care about trans people....except they're fine feeding into a culture war that's having tangible negative consequences for trans people in red states and not extending any meaningful federal protection to them. Democrats care about black people...except they gleefully pour money into a carceral system that disproportionally targets black people. Democrats care about immigrants...except when they need to score points on "border security" and end up parroting Republican rhetoric and supporting Republican plans for it.

And when those of us on the left point all this out, we get told we're playing purity politics or that we're utopians or naive.

My assertion is that you and the people carrying the "2024 is the last election flag" are using that as a cudgel to rally support for Democrats because the idea bucket is otherwise empty. Voters are more and more dissatisfied with Democrats, pushing back more, demanding more concrete action...and they're not getting it.

A key part of the Democrat strategy has been, for the last 40 years, "we're not as bad as the Republicans" and have always used the Republicans as a way to measure how bad they can be. As long as they are one step up, they can play that card. The problem is that card isn't working anymore because people are seeing the material effects of the "we only have to try this much" and it's a pretty bleak picture.

So you can't entice people to vote for you, you can't induce them, you can't convince them, what's left?

As the Republicans figured out in the 70's, you scare them. The Republicans chose the culture war as a way to maintain fear in the electorate.

Democrats have chosen fear of right-wing authoritarianism. It has the advantage of being real but when you treat it more like a guard dog than a genuine threat people start to get upset with you for feeding it and not getting rid of it.

Hospitals are military targets? Refugee camps are military targets? People just walking down the road are military targets?

The US supplied bombs have been targeted at military targets, with at least 50% military casualties.

Israel's own data doesn't even support that and Israel is notorious for just making up numbers.

Considering Israel is actively striking cities inside Syria and Lebanon with no declaration of war right now and doing so under US auspices, I have to ask why we're a part of that worse situation.

Organized executions of hundreds of thousands of civilians would be simple in an area as densely packed as Gaza.

Dropping US supplied bombs is a lot easier and that's already happening.

Israel has been taking steps to ensure that casualties are as low as possible

Considering how wildly indiscriminate we've seen the IDF be, I find that difficult to believe. Especially considering this "war" has shattered records for civilian casualties as a share of total loss of life.

There are so many ways this situation could get exponentially worse than it is now.

Such as? The things you've cited are already functionally happening.

While obviously I can't tell the future and I'm not going to accuse you of being insincere, but statistically speaking I feel pretty confident in betting you're not going to leave.

Statistics indicate that most people don't end up moving.

I just want to say thank you and acknowledge you for being one of the first and only people to see that dynamic.

Given what happens when Democrats win, that actually makes a degree of sense.

I would, however, disagree on the point that they weren't persuadable Biden voters. I can only concretely speak for myself as a leftist but, peripherally, people in the leftist circles I know who've stated they won't vote for Biden were open to that possibility before Gaza, as was I.

I don't like Biden for a range of reasons but, on October 6th, you absolutely could have made the case for me that another term of Biden was preferable to another term for Trump.

Now that I'm being told the cost for that is genocide, I'm out.

The point is the situation is Palestine is functionally as bad as it can get. The next few steps get a bit "death camp-y" and I would pay good money for someone to write me a paper explaining how Biden's shoveling weapons and money into Israel somehow stopped that whereas Trump doing the same thing would greenlight it.

I'll ask you the exact same question I've asked to the 50 people who've said the same thing to me every time I mention this - what does worse look like?

There's already a genocide, we're already proactively supplying weapons to the people carrying out genocide, we're defending the people committing the genocide to the degree that we're risking a wider regional war.

How exactly does that get worse?