codenamecesare:

A while back I made a political post that began: “If the right wing had set out to neuter the left in the US, they hardly could have done it better than by spreading impossible-standard purity-test bullshit among young progressives.” and ended “I’m not saying that conservative infiltrators spread purity-test standards and encourage progressives to turn on each other. I’m just saying that the outcome is the same as if they did: eternal self-sabotage for the left, permanent minority rule for the right.” It’s had a few hundred reblogs, so here’s an update.

Since I wrote the original post on December 3rd of 2017, it’s increasingly come out that not just Trump, but the NRA and likely other right-wing forces have been receiving illegal money and propaganda support from Russia. This includes Russian trolls and bots posing as progressives on Tumblr in order to sow division and chaos on the left, using social media to erode support for Democrats. So I should have said conservative infiltrators spread those purity-test standards and encourage progressives to turn on each other: I would have been right.

Quick test to find out whether you understand the Russian propaganda issue well enough. Do you understand why “Russian adoption” is a (barely concealed) code for lifting sanctions that have kept wealthy Russian criminals from accessing billions of money they squirreled away in the US? Are you aware that Congress voted overwhelmingly to toughen those sanctions, and Trump has simply refused to enforce that veto-proof law? If you live in the States, you need to know who Sergei Magnitsky was, because this is affecting your life every single day. Cheat sheet: Sergei Magnitsky was murdered by Russian oligarchs for investigating their corruption. The US responded with the Magnitsky Act, which has frozen billions of dollars in Russian assets that they’d stolen from their own people and hidden in US financial institutions. Since then, those oligarchs have spent millions trying to influence US politics to get their frozen stolen assets back.

And look how well it’s worked! Progressives online have picked up those corrupt billionaires’ propaganda talking points and continue to perpetuate them. They’re always talking shit about the Democrats, claiming that it’s their own fault they don’t win elections because they’re not left enough. But bizarrely, the answer to this problem is never “Support a primary challenge from a more progressive candidate,” which is the tactic that the GOP has been using successfully to push their party rightward. Instead, the online progressive’s answer is almost always: just complain, just keep spreading negativity, just stay home. That’s how you can tell it’s bullshit.

Progressives, pushing left means putting your shoulder to the wheel and pushing. You have to vote in every election and pick the most progressive candidate every time, even if “most progressive” doesn’t meet your perfect standards. You have to prove the votes are there to support the positions you want. You can’t say “Hey Democrats, I won’t support your baby step left with my vote, but if you jump leftward off this cliff, I’ll totally catch you!” If you support progress, you have to support even small progress. It’s fine to loudly remind people that you expect more! But ffs, take what you can get.

If the only party that comes close to your beliefs keeps losing, that’s your loss. The Green Party isn’t going to suddenly get their shit together and save you. You have to keep voting, even when that means choosing the lesser of two evils, because if you don’t, the worst evil wins. And right now, the worst evil is trying to make sure that even if a truly ideal progressive candidate did run, it wouldn’t matter how many votes they got, they’d still somehow lose the “election.”