this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2026
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So you're saying they just stopped voting for a few elections and let the bigots have free reign for a few elections? Or did they keep voting for the lesser evil in the mean time? Because that's what this discussion is actually about, and your example doesn't seem to apply.
No. They didn't vote lesser of two evils. You need to get out of the headspace that the only option is to vote for one of the two parties. That's an ahistorical viewpoint. They just voted Republican until their candidate won. The Republican party was only founded after "voting for the lesser evil" failed after decades of trying. This is what I mean when I say people need to learn their history. We've been in this situation before, and our ancestors did not escape it by voting for the lesser evil.
We live in a two party system. We're going to have two parties. However, the parties themselves are not eternal. We'll always have two parties, but which parties those are can change. And often it's easier to completely swap out parties than to reform one from within.
If you want to create a new party in the US, the only way to do so is to destroy one of the existing parties. Namely, that means making the other party completely electorally nonviable.
Imagine if the most liberal 20% of the electorate simply refused to ever vote for the Democratic Party again and switched over to the DSA. Yes, that would mean losing for a few cycles. But again, history shows that sometimes you have to put up with pain now for a better future later. Centrists will slander this as "accelerationism," but this isn't really that. You're not hoping things get worse before they get better. You're just recognizing that the only way to create a new party is to destroy an old one. Politics becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you make one of the existing parties nonviable, then a power vacuum is created, and the whole electoral alignment shifts. If leftists completely abandoned the Democrats, the Democratic party would completely collapse. It would go the way of the Whigs. When a party dies, the electoral coalitions realign. And they would realign around the old Republican Party and the new DSA or other chosen party.
I know this is hard. But really, this is just learning from history. Yes, it means you sometimes lose ground in the short term to gain ground in the long term. And that is hard. It's painful. But compare that to what we've been doing instead - hoping to gain ground in the short term while losing even more in the long term. Voting for Democrats now is just voting for the lock on the ratchet. They have no real desire to change anything. At best you get a temporary reprieve from creeping fascism, while nothing changes in the circumstances that lead to the fascism.
The Republican Party was formed in 1854 and Lincoln was elected president running as a republican in 1860.