Stay vigilant for the next phase where the fascists start attacking the voting infrastructure to manipulate/discredit the results of future elections. People like this don’t willingly give up power, nor do they care about what voters want
I celebrate the performance, but the BJP is still the plurality party. Unless a left wing coalition can form a majority (and I’m not nearly familiar enough with any parties outside the BJP and INC) Modi will still be the prime minister just with vastly reduced power.
I’d qualify this less as “fighting” and more “stopping the bleeding.”
Tl;dr: they voted
This article was about what strategies and campaign messaging the opposition used to sway voters, and your takeaway from the article was ‘they voted’?
I’m not convinced you read it.
American and European Leftist heads exploding right now
BuT mUh ElEcToRaLiSm!
“jUsT vOtE” wasn’t the solution. It required the opposition parties to work on getting those votes. If the democrats in the US wanted to learn a lesson, it’d be that they shouldn’t just lean on “sure we suck ass but trump is worse!!”
This excerpt is key:
First, voters punished Modi for putting his Hindu nationalist agenda ahead of fixing India’s unequal economy. Second, Indian voters had some real concerns about the decline of liberal democracy under BJP rule. Third, the opposition parties waged a smart campaign that took advantage of Modi’s vulnerabilities on the economy and democracy.
Note the first point hitting on the economy. Democrats have gone with “actually everything is great and you not being able to afford things is just your feelings”.
Modi won, so you’re basically saying “Democrats should try harder but they’ll still fail.”
That’s what happens with complacency. There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done to dismantle the fascist machine, but it requires sustained full commitment and effort from the opposition. Think about how bad things were with george w bush. Democrats were able to seize that opportunity to get in and do some good things, but they were mostly fine with the status quo and this is what gave us trump.
I think maybe rethinking tactics is in order because what people are doing isn’t working and doing it harder won’t make it work. That’s what I was trying to suggest.
We’re in full agreement here and that was my point when I argued against the “just vote” talking point. Democrats need to change their tactics and apply pressure using what works. Currently their only tactic is pointing out “we’re not trump” and they’re putting their full force behind that tactic and it’s not working (or at least not well enough to enact meaningful change). One key problem is how we get democrats to change their tactics and clearly “just vote” isn’t cutting it because they’re not fazed by threats to withhold votes, so it’s not like they actually care if you vote for them beyond getting them into office. It does nothing to change democratic party policy.
They elected him. That’s gonna show him.
It’s absolutely incredible to me that people still seem to believe that having democrats win in the US would be a good thing. Republicans are evil, democrats are evil. Maybe try something that’s not evil? If your entire democratic system is choosing between two evils maybe it deserves to be completely dismantled? Maybe there’s no way to vote for that to happen?
Oooh ooh I know, we refuse to vote for his opponent because this is so tiresome that we have to do this every election / because his opponent isn’t everything we wanted to have in terms of forward progress / because that’ll show the system as a whole that we want better candidates and things will finally move forward as a result / etc
No? Because I have been assured that that is the answer
Authoritarians only have to win once
