not running a pro-genocide candidate to run against another pro-genocide candidate would be a great start.

Are you really suggesting that there isn't a chilling effect on people who want to improve the status quo when they see the party nakedly manipulating the outcome? With this being exactly four years after the DNC nakedly manipulated the system in ways that had since been exhaustively documented, I'd say it massively suppressed the progressive vote, and Warren staying in far too long and splitting that vote before endorsing Biden sealed the deal.

Three election cycles in a row the party has nakedly and unashamedly manipulated things to ensure a donor-friendly candidate. In 2024 there wasn't even a primary, despite everyone knowing Biden couldn't handle another campaign.

At this point anyone who finds the status quo unacceptable and still votes for the Democrats is obviously a graduate of the Charlie Brown School of Field Goal Kicks.

They managed to successfully convince enough progressives that they could, that people just sat down and stopped fighting

Weird way to say got all but the other progressive candidate to drop out, get behind Biden and have the remaining progressive candidate start attacking Bernie

Bernie is absolutely a liberal. Calling him anything else ignores what he actually proposes. He wants to regulate capital, not expropriate it. He wants to blunt capitalism's worst edges at home while leaving the imperial core intact. That is social democracy at best, a liberal ideology. His own platform accepts the basic framework of private ownership of the means of production. He seeks to manage the crisis, not resolve its root cause. That is precisely the reformism Luxemburg critiqued a century ago in the work I already recommended. You really should read it.

Electoralism under liberal democracy is not a path to socialism. It is a containment strategy. The ballot box is designed to channel dissent into harmless rituals that leave property relations untouched. You think stacking votes can overcome capital's structural power. But capital does not rule through votes. It rules through ownership of production, control of credit, domination of media, and monopoly on organised violence. When the vote threatens those foundations, the mask comes off. The courts block, the capital strikes, the media smears, the state represses. This is not conspiracy. It is the normal functioning of the bourgeois state. Expecting otherwise is like expecting a wolf to vote itself vegetarian.

Your entire argument rests on idealist assumptions. You treat consciousness as primary and material conditions as secondary. You think changing minds at the ballot box changes the balance of class forces. That is backwards. Social being determines social consciousness, not the other way around. You mistake the form of democracy for its content. You ignore that the two-party system is a mechanism to limit political competition to factions of capital, not to enable working-class rule. You cite 2016 and 2020 as if they were isolated failures of strategy, not expressions of a system that structurally excludes anti-capitalist politics. You blame the left for "quitting" instead of asking why the electoral arena absorbs and neutralises radical energy every single time. This is not analysis. It is moralising.

I am Chinese, not American. We had our revolution. We broke the bourgeois state and built a system where the vote actually means something because it is embedded in democratic centralism and whole-process people's democracy, not trapped in a ballot box ritual that changes nothing. These electoralist squabbles about which faction of capital should manage the American empire are none of my concern outside of the theoretical interest I take in educating and engaging in dialogue with comrades in a much different situation.

I know it sounds cliché to say "read theory," but genuinely, every idealist assumption you are recycling has been academically addressed and refuted for decades.