SkepticalButOpenMinded
It really doesn’t go both ways. The winning presidential candidate needs to get the most votes, and most US voters are not progressive. They’re moderate, or indifferent.
I don’t know how you could say that about HRC and Sanders. That’s not even a hypothetical: they literally had a head to head match where, to my huge disappointment, HRC won. Protesting HRC helped elect Trump, and obviously that hasn’t been good for progressive interests or democracy.
Yes, progressives who stay at home for the general election do not understand US democracy. The US has a 2 party FPTP system, not proportional representation. Unlike multi-party parliamentary systems, we usually have to vote for a compromise, not our top choice. If you don’t vote, you don’t “send a message”, you simply forfeit your political power. If Republicans win, and keep winning, then that’s a signal for Democrats to shift right, to try to win back the median voter.
I hate the argumentative strategy of criticizing candidates for being political “losers”. Rightwingers do that all the time. By that logic, progressives also had “loser candidates”, since many fail in the primaries. I personally don’t think Sanders, for example, was a “loser”, even if he lost in the primary.
Yeah exactly. Most people don’t live “in the tech world”. Maybe people like you and I have moved on faster than the general public. I doubt most people are reading about controversial Chrome tracking changes and YouTube disabling ad blockers. But maybe they are? I remain genuinely uncertain.