To me, it feels like not voting Biden/Harris because they're not progressive enough is like refusing to put out a house fire because the electrical system shouldn't have shorted in the first place.
1. No shit, and
2. Let's put out the fire right now while we still can.
I totally 100% agree that Biden/Harris is not the ideal ticket for anyone, but it's the ticket we have and our best chance at saving us from an authoritarian idiocracy.
Let's get out of this emergency, then figure out what we do to achieve real change.
Because if we keep up this energy, and we outflank conservative Democrats from the left in our local and state elections; if we keep pushing for defunding the police and universal basic income and the Green New Deal, it WILL happen.
We don't stop fighting for the world we want.
We're going to be able to use our progressive influence to keep pulling Biden and Harris left, and we'll have a strong foundation of state and local reps to enact these measures where we live if not the entire country.
This will not be fixed overnight.
After all, what's happening NOW didn't happen overnight. It's got the weight of decades of concerted effort behind it. Racists and bigots have been running this table for hundreds of years. It didn't stop because we elected a Black President; it's not going to stop with Bernie.
Of course I want Sanders and Warren to be the standard-bearers of the DNC, but we've got Biden and Harris. And that's frustrating. I agree. Booooooo.
But there is not a magic bullet to fix this. We can't elect one perfect candidate and solve this mess in a single Administration.
No matter WHAT, we fight. And we keep fighting. We don't stop just because Biden is in office. WE. KEEP. FIGHTING.
Because a functioning healthy democracy demands the informed engagement of its people. We never stop building the world we want.
@jakebe I agree with all of this.
Step one: thoroughly destroy the fascists controlling the undead husk of the GOP. Step two: drag the dems leftward. Step three: let the corporate centrists reform the GOP back into a pre-Nixon party that we can actually cut deals with again. The math won't allow that to happen out of order.
Meanwhile get redistricting reform and ranked choice voting at the local and state levels and work upward.
It's going to take time and passion and focus, dedication and compromise and failures, to get this done. I know we're impatient and scared and tired. But our democracy is an enormous, surprisingly fragile thing.
We need to understand that none of this happens overnight.