I heard the cop they sent to go undercover and bust him had too much fun at Race Wars.

Disagree. The GOP was radicalized from the inside via the Tea Party wave of 2010, and while there’s little of value to have come out of that there’s a lesson on how to execute a sort of internal coup within the party system, instead of looking to third parties that are doomed in a FPtP system like America’s or hoping the Democratic establishment “learns their lesson” from a hopefully-brief, violent interlude of fascism. Progressives tried like one-and-a-half times to do things top-down with Bernie and then decided to wash their hands of the whole party, rather than doing to work to elect grassroots progressive candidates like AOC and Mamdani from the ground up, build a bench, and change the fundamentals of the conversation within the Democratic caucus and national apparatus.

The silver lining of what’s happened is that there are finally exciting, charismatic progressive candidates making inroads as the current party establishment twists and fumbles and (probably just importantly) primary voters stop selecting for the status quo and lowest-common-denominator “bipartisan” appeal, but my fear is that it may be too little and too late to stop the disaster.

The problem comes when you’re weighing a protest vote/no-vote against milquetoast corporate centrism, and the outcome should that protest vote sway the election is that the Slavering Fascist Apocalypse-Makers sweep into power, turn any future elections into tightly-controlled farces, and then begin a sweeping range of internal and external pogroms. Voting for the corporate centrists sucks, but from a standpoint of harm reduction it’s the only viable choice. A bunch of people stayed home in 2024 on the logic that by doing so they’d send a message to the Democrats, and as a result America might lose its democracy entirely.

The protest vote logic 100% works when the opposing side isn’t ready to kill you given half a chance, but the American right clearly is, and has been for the last decade, and now the most vulnerable are in the literal and metaphorical crosshairs. You could make an accelerationist argument, that what we can build back up from the wreckage of what’s to come will be better for all (and it might well be!) but history tell us that’s no guarantee – and even then, you have to answer for those who won’t live to see the better days to come, or who will suffer greatly against their will in the process.