- cross-posted to:
- onguardforthee@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- onguardforthee@lemmit.online
The NDP leadership race could be turning into a nail-biter with no clear winner in sight. But it’s unclear if Canadians are tuning in.
But according to party insiders, three are likely bets to become leader: Heather McPherson, Avi Lewis and Rob Ashton.
The kind of thing I want to avoid is strategic voting. I don’t care if I lose fair and square, that’s how democracy works, but the practice of throwing your voice in the trash for a fake sense of “strategy” is garbage at every level. Besides, people say they do it to avoid the Conservatives so obviously they don’t want conservatism, and yet their idea of defense against is to vote in people who don’t call themselves conservatives but who enact incredibly similar policies.
“Can’t form government” is such a cowardly excuse, too, because yea if you refuse to support the ideas you believe in nothing will ever happen. And then the next election it’ll be worse, because people see the lack of support from the last time. It becomes a pattern, and here we are. In 2021 the NDP got over half the votes that the Liberals did even with strategic voting so there’s clearly lots of support. Combine them and the Liberals and you get a population that at least believes itself to be largely left of center so actually piss off.
That is a very slim margin, and a whole lot of voters are fence-sitters who might vote left or Conservative. If the Liberals were the NDP… well, Trudeau was not set to win. Because people hated him, and wanted something to his right “for a change”.
You mention the pattern. The pattern is a pendulum swinging back and forth. If you think it’s been waiting to go hard to (one’s specific version of) the left all along, that’s unscientific. The only actual control activists can possibly have is the pace and distance with which it swings.
If someone can’t decide between the NDP or the Conservatives then we are well and truly completely fucked as a country. The NDP are a bigger change from the Liberals than the Conservatives and they actually seem to give even the smallest fucks about the regular citizens. If someone goes Conservative “for a change”, despite their governments always having been bad, then again we’re fucked because those people are too monumentally stupid for our society to ever actually function. They’re also showing what parts of the Liberals they liked and didn’t like, i.e. which parts they would give up and which they wouldn’t, and that they were really just conservatives the whole time.
The pattern is we’re fucking stupid.
Well, we agree on that, basically.
Coincidentally, there was a lot of orange-blue swings in Ontario this last election. Factory workers who vote anti-establishment more than one away or another politically. See also how UAW in the 'states has pulled in behind Trump and his tariffs, despite literally being a cross-border union at one point.
How do you individually live a good life in such a crazy world? I admit, the IRL activism stuff I do still feels like trying to piss out a forest fire.
The working class slinging in behind conservatives is one of the reasons I know we’re so stupid. Conservative just have to put on a cowboy hat and say some lies and these morons go right along with it. Helps they have a lot of mutual racism, sexism, and homophobia, of course.
Living a good life for me is playing music and D&D and shit, it’s separate from the rest. That said, things getting better make mean not having as great a time as we want. I’m in a pretty privileged situation so I don’t want to act like I’m some kind of hero but I’ve also been without a job for almost two years and am still willing to take the risks necessary for the longterm health of the country. Getting better is not often comfortable.