#electoralism

The US is not a secretly leftist country laboring under the two-party yoke. The US is a centrist nation with only a few issues the Democrats can win on.

Abortion? Absolutely. Americans have overwhelmingly turned away from the pro-life agenda. The pro-life movement exists now only as a pet project for Republican elites.

Open borders? Fuck. No. The US is a country that fucking hates immigrants. Even our immigrants hate immigrants. You will never, not in a million years, win on open borders. Until recently, you wouldn't ever have been able to win on abolishing ICE. It's only because ICE has publicly become Il Duce's blackshirts that people are turning against it.

Taxes on the rich, especially if paired with lower- and middle-class tax cuts? Yes. Obviously. Even Republicans increasingly think there's an unfair wealth disparity in this country, and American voters will literally never say no to lowering their taxes.

Trans rights? Nooooooooooo. Absolutely not. Fox News has rotted the brains of most of the boomers in this country and Gen Z men are basically the Hitler Youth at this point. I know it sucks, I hate it too. But this country is not friendly to trans people. If you wanna help trans people in this country, you have to vote for the fucking Democrats. The Democrats right now are in the top three major political parties in the world on trans rights, despite how unpopular it makes them. Let me repeat that. The Democrats have been enacting protections for trans people despite the fact that doing so is against their own electoral self-interest. Literally no president has done more for trans people than Biden. If you wanna see how bad things can get for trans rights, just look at the British Labor Party. Biden was actually enacting good protections for trans people, and Kamala would have done even more extremely quietly because, again, this country fucking hates trans people.

Gay rights? Yes. Absolutely. Even the Republicans know overturning gay marriage would get them massacred in the polls, which is why even most of their influencers don't even bother.

M4A? At this point, absolutely the fuck not. If you wanted M4A, you should have voted for Hillary in 2016. Americans will never accept M4A if it looks like the next administration will just gut the whole thing and leave everyone with nothing. Or, worse, start doing fun things like restricting abortion access. The private healthcare system fucking sucks. Everyone knows it sucks. But it does create a buffer against government interference whenever you stupid fucks let the fascists win again.

Palestine? No. No. Absolutely not. Look, this country does not give two shits about foreign policy. Foreign policy, if opposed by literally any other issue, will always lose, even if literally every American agrees with your foreign policy stance. If you wanted to help Palestine, you had to vote in the woman who said she wanted a ceasefire and then protested the fuck out of her to make her keep that promise because Democrats listen to protests. Republicans do not.

Abolish or defund the police? Fuck no. The police are part of American civil religion. You will never get a majority of Americans to support that. If you want to make any kind of progress, you have to push for reform. Taking the police out of situations they shouldn't fucking be in in favor of crisis resolution officials is feasible. Abolition is not and probably never will be.

Any kind of actual socialism? Don't make me laugh. Americans already hate liberals even though they usually agree with them because they've been conditioned to believe that liberals are whiny limp-dicked cucks that everyone hates. Americans fucking despise socialism because our government spent decades on endless Cold War propaganda that made this country instinctively associate socialism with hating freedom. American civil religion strikes again.

What's more, Americans are capitalists. They just are. They don't want the government to nationalize Walmart. They rally behind slogans like "Support small businesses." They want to get rich and think that doing so is possible under the current system despite all evidence to the contrary. They think capitalism creates "Jobs, jobs, jobs." We are a country of temporarily embarrassed millionaires and nothing you say or do will change that at least until 2075. If you want to push leftism, you need to go after the kind of leftism this country supports i.e. unions. Americans love unions. They love the police unions and the firefighters' unions and the teachers' unions and the steel workers' unions and the auto unions. Go unionize your local Starbucks or Amazon warehouse. Don't run on nationalizing Ford.

I still stand by my belief I’d rather have a democratic administration than a republican one, sure. But man, the difference is becoming increasingly slim, and the ship is sinking fast. I don’t believe the democratic party can be reformed. It’s built of the exact same rot. Two sides of the same ugly, bloodthirsty coin. Irreparable damage has been done to the legislative and judicial system of this country and it’s time to DEMAND BETTER. its time to BUILD SOMETHING BETTER. Gavin “Basically a Republican” Newsome sure as fuck isn’t going to save us and I can say I would rather step on a rusty nail than give him my vote. We deserve better. You deserve better.

She deradicalized us, she got canceled, she came back…now what?

In post-Gamergate YouTube, Contrapoints was the most influential voice in pushing back against the dominant discourse. During the first Trump presidency, she exposed Internet-born fascism so that people could identify it and avoid it. She explained the ins and outs of transgender life to a cisgender audience. She deradicalized people from their hatred. In 2019, she was canceled. In 2020, she urged people to vote. She helped the younger generations make the jump from fascist to liberal, from conservative to progressive, from cis to trans. In 2025, when fascism has returned to the mainstream, she is nowhere to be seen. Her influence lingers, but she has increasingly less imitators, and her personal presence in the YouTube platform is gone. In an era where the jump from liberal to leftist must be done, should we be done with Contrapoints? 

First off, this text should not be considered a motivation to harass her on any platform. This is a discussion of the ideas for which she advocates. It should not be interpreted as permission to leave mocking or insulting messages on her social media pages. This is why I’m referring to her by her stage name and not her civilian name. Viewer discretion is advised.

1.

It is true, Contrapoints is a liberal. She made it clear with her video “Voting”, and she made it irrefutably clear in her video “Envy”. Even earlier she confessed that she wanted to be bourgeois all her life, that she resented how she spoke about revolutionary theoreticians in her university days, and caricatured leftists with her character Tabby. Also, since at least 2018, particularly in her appearance at the XOXO Festival, she has said that it is not fair that she be seen as a representative for all leftists and for all trans people, and she’s right. It is unfair that she was held to an unreasonable standard of perfection that was completely projected onto her by her incipient audience that saw in someone who discussed basic facts about fascism and Marxism the Leftist Prophet of their generation. What happened to her is what happened to the Beatles: they never intended to be the biggest band in the world or to change the landscape of music in their image, they just wanted to be a rock band, and the overwhelming fame was something that no one would be able to withstand. I also think about the most emotional scene of Pixar’s Up, when the protagonist reveals, defeated, “I never asked to be involved!” It is unfair that an undiscerning audience put these monumental expectations on a single person. Contrapoints never wanted to lead any revolution, or even to be a major voice in political opinion. She just wanted to make her videos, about whatever topic she wanted. And we, the audience, have the obligation to respect that. 

2. 

It is a bit tragic to see how someone with such intelligence could be so shortsighted. She recently made the following post, which she promptly deleted:

“How much of the intra-left divide on here is basically an argument between American and non-American leftists? Where non-American leftists see the US as an evil empire that deserves to descend into a fascist hellhole - and maybe so. But that goal conflicts somewhat with the interests of American progressives…”

She almost reached an epiphany there. She almost realized that the luxuries and privileges enjoyed by the American progressives all come at the cost of the people of the rest of the world, and solidarity with the wretched of the Earth would mean losing all those privileges, so she has to make a choice of the side on which she will be. 

3.

Contrapoints is a self-declared democratic socialist, which is the politically correct term for “liberal”, and her strategy for changing the world is electoralism. However, the stringent American electoral system makes electoralism very flimsy and flawed for people to put their entire faith, to stake their entire lives, on it. Every poll projected a Democrat win in 2024 and lo and behold, they lost. The science of prediction was demolished with one hit. Certainties are no more. Everything that is solid melts into air. If there is any reason as to why the mild and disappointing party lost to the hardline opposition, it’s because the liberals are unpopular. The Democratic Party, which cannot even be described as reformist, is deeply unpopular and does not have the trust of voters. There are two options for the electoral liberals: either keep losing elections at the cost of the citizenry, or make a new party. The response from American electoralists to this is that a third main party is impossible, that the system was designed for two only, that it would take too much effort and time (meh meh meh). This is only a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course, a new party would have to start winning local elections in order to later contend in federal elections and see any sort of long-term success. For the sake of efficiency, a third major American political party would be most popular if founded and led by a former Democrat with few scruples, similar to how the current majority party MORENA of Mexico was founded by AMLO and is now in its second presidential term under new president Claudia Sheinbaum, and it has a majority in Congress, even though AMLO was a former PRI member for many years before trying his luck with the rarely successful and now defunct PRD, until he finally started his own party. You may say this is just part of the illusion of democracy. What good would a party filled with former Democrats be in the American electoral system? If you’re on the political left, you see an issue, but if you’re a liberal, you don’t. Of course, part of the success of MORENA, which by all means is still neoliberal, like every other major Mexican party since the mid-eighties, is doing actions and gestures that keep the people happy: raising the minimum wage, transport and transit infrastructure, pension funds, scholarships, minor aid to the public education and healthcare sectors, banks for low-income citizens, the return of small plots of land to indigenous communities. Despite all of these nice sounding things, and they are quite good, MORENA is still very deserving of criticism, like any center-left, center-right party. Their increased militarization of public spaces and making of court judges and justices into electable positions are the biggest examples of unpopular policy. But that is another problem. What matters is that you cannot obtain new results by doing the same thing over and over, an adage misattributed to Einstein says. If your only political strategy is electoralism, and your liberal option is unpopular, then you must be done with the Democratic party, or your respective liberal party of your country, and be done with Contrapoints. 

I stopped talking about Contrapoints because all her meaningful politics boil down to electoralism. And if that doesn’t work, there isn’t a prescription to an alternative. Contrapoints will scold anyone who argues otherwise. She will claim that the political left is the actually unpopular faction. While that is debatable, it’s also demonstrable that Democrats are unpopular, seeing how they lost this last election, and quantitatively the opposition in power is also unpopular. From the example of a comparable democracy from before, we can see that what is actually popular is policy that benefits citizens, that benefits people, especially the least protected. Neither major party in America is primarily concerned with benefitting people, so a third party with such a mission would just wipe, just clean up, and win in a landslide. Democracy is just false hopes, but anyone who can play the game will get the electoral victory that electoralists so desperately wait for, as if it were the second coming of Christ. Who is more utopian then? Those who want capitalism and the State gone? Or those who want the party that ignores citizens to finally notice them and rule over them on their behalf? 

4. 

Those of you who are the most fervent advocates for it are often the ones who make me most doubt its effectiveness. You make me want to stay home from the poll.

You who so strongly advocate voting so often do very little else to improve the world. Many of the loudest shouting “vote! Vote!” Will do almost nothing once their candidate is in power. You tell us “vote for the lesser of two evils” and then, you forget that they are evil.

I do not want trump to be in power. I will probably vote for Biden. But part of me says “at least when trump was president, these liberals acknowledged something was wrong. At least then, they hated border patrol. They listened when I said something was deeply, truly wrong.”

I would like to be allies with you. I would like to be building the same future. But so many are convinced that as soon as they put a democrat in office, they are done with the work until next election. There is so little interest in actually protecting trans kids, or fighting for abortion, or helping migrants, or stopping genocide; So long as you can feel comfortable, feel at peace, because you think your soul is cleansed by having voted for the “lesser” option.