For example, Civil War would be so much better than a theocratic neofeudal minority regime controlling power for decades to come.

Actually all you need is this one. The people already agree with you. You just have to figure out a way to get 80% voter turnout in urban areas. People act like this is some impossible task, but they give up too easily.

Is this the story of how JFK turned the nation around on civil rights?

I am so embarrassed that I mistook you for someone advocating violence!

This country was founded on a revolution against a tyrannical government.

One of the most positive stories in the United States history is the story of a well-known violent anarchist group:

From a piece in The Hill:

Up this only 15% and you would probably never lose the presidency.

The last time we had a major voting rights crisis, direct action was a big part of the solution along with federal legislation. Go out and get people registered to vote. Start with your friends and neighbors.

Voting Rights Act of 1965
https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=100

I mean literally, drive them to the ID office, help them get the documents, help them get their felonies released, do whatever it takes.

I'm an idealist, but I'm hoping we can thread the needle between totalitarianism and civil war.

Civil war isn't happening anyway. That happens when the military splits. You don't get a civil war in the US unless both sides at least have mortars and rpgs if not tanks and F-16s.

The protest spectrum runs from a million people holding hands and singing We Shall Overcome to 1968 civil unrest.

The current Civil War is being fought mostly with memes and information. Going out and organizing campaigns and building real things is how we win. We build a real alternative to this neoliberal technocratic bull****: A Democratic Socialist future for all.

Like, there is something to be said that the middle class is collapsing and we are descending rapidly into fascism and authoritarianism while unemployment is at 5%, a 20-year low.

This country has been at "cold Civil War" since 1877, possible further back than that (1820s? Earlier?). This new brand of Trumpism is definitely bringing it all out to the surface, but it's been here this whole time. The original Civil War was never properly put to rest. The idea of emancipation was never truly realized, even to this day.

Zapatistas had a lasting victory to a degree in a civil war and they only killed like 3 people. (51 Zapatistas killed and about 350 civilians - mostly indigenous/zapatista)

LOL exactly

Yeah, then we killed off the natives and used slave labor to build it. The last year proves we are the same people.

Yeah. Probably for me and electoral politics, the most effective thing would be to participate in something like this in Dana Rohrabacher's district. He's the Republican in Congress closest to me.

https://twitter.com/KumarAGarg/statu...75429472743424

Not confident about this one. 13 of the 30 largest cities are in places Democrats already dominate (CA, NY, MA, MD, IL, WA, OR).

6 are in Texas and presumably if you got 15% more generic, random turnout you're still going to get a lot of Republicans in these places, even in cities, such that you don't flip Texas. The gap is pretty large.

So, like every modern election, then, the turnout Democrats would need are in Columbus, in Philadelphia, in Jacksonville, in Detroit, in Denver, in Charlotte. Cities that can tip a state either way. ~2/3rds of America's largest cities don't qualify there and are either in a deep Republican stronghold (Texas) or in very Democratic states anyway. I agree 15% more turnout in those specific cities in competitive swing states would go a long way to making that mythical blue wall stuff from 2016 a reality, but that's just another way of noting the curiosities of America's electoral college system that a few specific places have huge, undue influence while others have much less.

Rich people hogging all the labour. Damn their industrious hides.

Cute.

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/...litics.doc.pdf

I don't disagree with anything you are saying, but some of the more common post-election analysis has been that Dems need to appeal more to rural and suburban (AKA white) voters. But there's no need to convince anyone. The people are already convinced, but they just don't vote.

If only 20% of eligible voters in big cities vote, then that tells me that get-out-the-vote efforts are fundamentally broken. A new approach is needed and everything that passes legal scrutiny should be considered. Tech and big data can only help so much here--you need people in the community to change their attitudes towards voting. You need organizers who know about the science of motivation. Learn how to nudge people into the behavior that you want.

People will always think that the candidate sucks and the government sucks, but that doesn't matter if you can get them to think that the act of voting is a good thing.

Also, even a weekend protest carries a relatively significant risk of landing you in jail. (I'm considering even 1% significant in the mind of the average protestor, given their average weekend carries a .000001% risk.) That means a non-zero chance of being held overnight, no showing for work on Monday with no advance warning and possibly getting fired... IMO the most productive protests would be Friday night and Saturday morning, leaving the most turnaround time to get back to normal by Monday morning no matter what happens.

This is a clever idea, I like it. Like, what if we set one up for the first Senator from X state (Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, etc.) to cast a vote for a single payer healthcare bill, first Republican Senator to cast a vote against Trumpcare, etc. If it's a tie, they chop it up. This could actually have a pretty big impact if it got big enough - which I think it might.

Granted, the right would frame it as buying votes - as if that's not what the Koch brothers have been doing for years. Also, there's a chance it could be illegal or would need to be phrased differently.

I'm not sure which thread I posted it in, but I think that in the longterm, the Democrats should look at creating a policy platform that boosts the population of Sun Belt cities. Las Vegas nearly doubled in population from 1990 to 2000 - going from a little over 250K to a little under 500K. If you added 250K people to Phoenix, and the new residents went 70-30 for Clinton, she'd have won Arizona. The Sun Belt is already experiencing a lot of population growth, and I think you could potentially bring Arizona, Texas and Georgia into play within 20 years. So I'm talking Phoenix, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Dallas, Houston, Austin, New Orleans, Birmingham, Atlanta, Tampa, Orlando, etc...

I think a platform for drawing tech jobs to Sun Belt cities would be hugely +EV, and actually a good policy too to create some jobs in regions and cities where some of the out of work blue collar folks might be willing to live (you could give zero/low interest government loans to out of work folks who are relocating for a job or to start a business - with some requirements on the entrepreneurial loans).

So it could be framed as helping people transition into new jobs, be coupled with training programs, and have the added benefit electorally of better distributing some of the coastal liberal votes, especially from the next decade of college graduates.