Yes, Democrats aren’t even close to the ideal, but putting pressure on the wound is still better than tearing it open so to speak.

This is exactly my thesis on strategic voting. Though, I’d put it as closer to a tourniquet. It stops the bleeding and is life-saving but does not prevent life-changing consequences, like potentially losing a limb in this metaphor. Non-voting/apathy is like just letting it bleed and hoping to survive or at least have an easy death. Anti-electoralism/accelerationism is like not just doing that but also trying to convince others to use up the tourniquet material so that noone has a choice but to bleed out and/or hope that the pile of corpses is placed in the right place to stop the fancy bus.

It fundamentally violates individual agency and uses people as involuntary human sacrifices on, at best, a gamble.

“It’s not about waiting for the bus that’ll take you straight to your destination, which will never come. It’s about taking different buses that take you closer to your destination.”

And that’s a problem. Voting is not the only necessary tool that has been needed. It can, with enough organization and engagement, be very powerful though. It’s also necessary for people to chat with and get positions as the “bus drivers” in order to coax the buses to more friendly destinations. But, that’s not possible without support and the organized far-Left in the West (I’d say that I’m part of the “disorganized” far-Left, both because of my anarchic ideals and AuADHD) has pretty much universally rejected any approach involving subverting the existing tools of power and instead taking the same approach as homeopathic “medicine”, using strategies without evidence of efficacy that rely ultimately on violence, suffering, and destruction, rather than building.

Part of that is understandable as there’s a long history of inflitration of intentional communities and other collaborative efforts, as well assassinations (ex. MLK Jr.). Revolution and positive societal change, however, takes a lot more than just burning things down to actually improve the human condition. A society built on a thirst for blood and vengeance will, as has been seen repeatedly in history, lend itself to instability, vulnerability to hostile influence, internal and external, as well as, you know, the whole mass murder of those that buy into the “correct” philosophy.

An aside: I do, in “conspiracy-theory mode”, suspect that polarizing the Left towards anti-electoralism/accelerationism, both removing them, voluntarily, from the reigns of power and making them unwitting allies is at least an idea that is amplified by the authoritarian Right but anything more than that runs into the wall of plausibility.

The only way we’ll get there is if we grind their coaches to a halt, no matter how many bodies it takes throwing at them to jam up the wheels

And that’s part of my problem with accelerationism (beyond the lack of evidence of efficacy in doing anything more than increase human suffering). It is ultimately engaging in exactly the same strategies that the existing bourgeoisie employ to maintain and expand their power. Namely, treating the poor and vulnerable as expendable tools to achieve their desired end. It’s like the widely memed quote from Shrek “Some of you are going to die but that is a sacrifice that I am willing to make.”

But relying on their blue coloured bus to be against the red coloured bus that both go nowhere is what a defense for Democrats look like. We’d really be better off figuring out how to stop the luxury coaches so we can start shuttling everyone bit by bit, most people don’t even acknowledge the luxury coaches even exist.

Yup. That’s why it’s necessary to invest the time, effort, and energy into turning the bus that doesn’t intend to just run over people for fun into one that actually benefits humanity. It sucks that it requires patience and long-term, multigenerational work but, that’s how making lasting change works and why the far-Right is constantly trying to destroy education and support systems to reduce the people’s ability to have the energy to think critically or affect positive change.