Thank God, am I right people? We wouldn't want to set the bar TOO high.
I'll see you guys in 2022/2024 when The Republicans retake everything because nothing continues to change and a Republican who will use Trump's playbook (while probably not being the dumbest fucking person in the world) takes over.
But hey, we wouldn't want to accidentally rock the boat a little bit and have Billionaires and Corporations lose a couple bucks.
I mean, this is legitimately all well and good. But what do you do when all you get is the low bar?
Republicans work over time to suppress any votes or opinions that are not their own.
Efforts are continuously made to make myself and others irrelevant. To install people into office who quite literally want to
undo my protections for... reasons. Or legal processes we're still keeping an eye on with bated breath that has
its origins rooted in racism.
Forced to come up with a new system, Georgia created one intended to continue undermining Black voters’ influence. That was the runoff system, whose origins were detailed in a 2007 Interior Department report:
In 1963, state representative Denmark Groover from Macon introduced a proposal to apply majority-vote, runoff election rules to all local, state, and federal offices. A staunch segregationist, Groover’s hostility to black voting was reinforced by personal experience. Having served as a state representative in the early 1950s, Groover was defeated for election to the House in 1958. The Macon politico blamed his loss on “Negro bloc voting.” He carried the white vote, but his opponent triumphed by garnering black ballots by a five-to-one margin.
Groover soon devised a way to challenge growing black political strength. Elected to the House again in 1962, he led the fight to enact a majority vote, runoff rule for all county and state contests in both primary and general elections. Until 1963, plurality voting was widely used in Georgia county elections...
Essentially, Groover wanted to stop Black Georgians from voting as a “bloc” — that is, overwhelmingly for one candidate or party — while white Georgians split their votes among many candidates. In a plurality system, if Black voters were able to keep a coalition behind one candidate, they wouldn’t need the support of many white voters for their preferred candidate to win elections.
The method was popular across the former Confederacy: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas all have primary election runoffs. As the Washington Post reported, just two non-Southern states have runoff rules, and those “almost never matter”
There's one side actively working against me as a person. There's one side who doesn't. Am I supposed to wait for a benevolent third party to come out of the sky to give me everything I hope for in one fell swoop? Should I hold my votes away from Democrats until they can promise me to completely eradicate all prejudice, job inequities, and built an extension to 'the table' that is just as good as the ones everyone else already has a seat at?
Or should I withhold my vote from the Democrats because they weren't perfect... and let Republicans thank me as they try to brazenly remove rights and protections for everyone they don't consider to be apart of the desirables?
In fact, I already know that the Democrats don't have to work hard to get my and other minorities' vote because that low bar was lowered so low by Republicans that just not spitting on us is legitimate forward process. I and many others simply don't have the luxury to wait for a perfect party to come down out of the heavens because the Republicans continually try to pull down that bar lower. So much so that just adjusting to its previously low point actually brings a sigh of relief.
And that's not even getting to the corporate part. I have no love lost for Corporate Democrats. It's why I became a Progressive. But while it might offend yours and my sensibilities, all the things Corporates do for their Business Overlords, they are not actively trying to destroy a segment of the population.
So, yeah. That makes them the lesser evil. Which is usually the only thing that you can hope for when you deal with Politics and Government. We can ask
Che Guevara and his good friend Fidel Castro what happens when lofty ideals meet actual power. Literally half the time, it corrupts.
I get the Low Bar. I get why it sucks that all the Corporates have to say to minorities and women is "yeah, you're people. You're owed a say" and they will get votes. But it also legitimately sucks that it will take legal processes to restore all of the things that Trump and his administration undone (From Human Rights to Environmental Protections).
Malign Corporates for being whores of Capitalism. Have it. But then malign Republicans for their odious tactics just as vociferously for making Democrats the only safe option there is.
It sucks not to have options. I do not have the option to wait for something better. I don't need to win all at once, but I need to make sure that the future generations of my extended family that are going to be born this year will not have less freedoms than I had when I was born into this nation. That will not happen with Republicans in charge.