It is hilarious that liberals have actually appropriated the rhetoric that saying “actually, both sides are wrong” ends up favouring the “evil” side, but they continue to apply this maxim to the USSR and Nazi Germany. An inability to realize that what makes this maxim ridiculous, in the latter case, is that, in fact, it was the Soviet Union that ended fascist barbarism, while the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are two cogs in the same bellicose, anti-democratic, imperialist machine. As long as the choice is reduced to “blue vs. red” (a fake contradiction), the freedom of the human race will remain, at best, a distant dream.
But perhaps what irritates me the most is the overly pedantic use of Jim and Pam memes.
I’ll join in with the real criticism but first I want to say that the Lemmy meme itself is just garbage. It wouldn’t even have been funny or appealing back when the Jim template was new.
Okay so Western liberals, who are largely incoherent and confused people, are manipulated into following this line. It’s not some organic realization of the liberal ideology that voting is inherently good. There have been many liberal projects that gladly attacked voting and voting access, such as the United States liberals for most of their existence. They restricted it to white landowners at first and wrote about it like it as a duty, like a burden that must be taken on by good, self-sacrificing landlord men.
The idea of just voting as an inherent good that means the Bad Guys lose is a product of data-driven political campaigning that follows the exact line of thought as this meme. Democrats figured out that they did better if they could get people on the fence about voting to turn out, that that particular demographic was favorable to them. So they started including it in their campaign strategies, pushing “neutral” campaigns to just vote, not even for any particular thing or person. They pushed it through their usual channels in the media and various PR groups until it caught on as a way to be positive about allegedly important political issues without actually taking an explicit position on them. Republicans figured out the same thing and acted in the opposite direction, always pushing to implement voting hurdles for the demographics that are less helpful for their own campaigns.
The real problem here is the flattening of politics that you mention. These are liberals being led around by PR campaigns and deeply cynical campaign strategists that tell them politics is only how you personally cast a ballot for Red vs. Blue and that your way of wielding power is to do as you’re told for Blue. The idea that they should organize to make demands themselves is against the PR and campaign strategists’ interests of getting these propagandized people to tick the box for the candidates they are pushing and so they offer many rationalizations for why you should not organize to demand more, not withhold your vote, think beyond one election at a time, or, oh deary me, operate outside of the confines of bourgeois electoralism to flex political muscle. They have no theory of power or achieving goals beyond this lazy goading from on high.
On the plus side, this stuff is so stupid that we can easily provide correct framings and provide off-ramps for these incoherent liberals. Go ahead and let them vote, it literally doesn’t matter if they do something as an individual. But teach them the limits of bourgeois democracy, the distance that always exists between what is necessary for liberation and what is actually on offer by capitalist parties, teach them socialist theory. Get them to come to a meeting with your org. This is our actual burden as socialists: to become sufficiently educated to cut through false liberal talking points and redirect discussion to correct thinking and collective action.