cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/32949307
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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Any good quotes from speeches, books, articles, etc
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My reading of this is that he was in favor of participating in elections, but to disrupt, not to win.
I think this is overstated. If we participate without a credible chance to win -- just to disrupt -- we're not going to attract many people. That creates a risk of getting disconnected from the masses, as well as a risk of not adequately testing our ideas against reality. We've had plenty of miniscule, insular leftist campaigns that have achieved little -- what we need is something with at least the potential to become a mass movement.
Leftist campaigns have to both run on platforms that would be genuinely disruptive and play the game well enough to have some real shot at winning.
That's complicated when major parties sue to keep leftist candidates off the ballots in states/provinces/territories that have real potential to swing the status quo.
Every path to something better will be at least that complicated, likely more. Working around legal challenges is part of "playing the game well enough," and even a loss can radicalized people. How many people were radicalized by the coordinated dropout/endorsement to juice Biden's campaign in the 2020 primary? And that wasn't even some dubuous procedural issue, it was just libs being organized and hostile to the left.