Time is not on our side. In four years, no matter who wins, the rich will be richer, the poor will be poorer, the climate crisis will be worse, and more and more money will be funneled into the military.
Correct!
"Buying time" is not a valid goal, especially not when it comes at the expense of efforts to actually build an alternative.
That logic does not follow. Buying time is an imperative intermediate goal.
In four years, anyone looking to build an alternative is going to face the exact same criticisms you're using now, it will again be "the most important election of our lives" and there's a good chance that the republican candidate will be worse than Trump, and more people will have turned to the right out of dissatisfaction with deteriorating conditions.
Yes, that's the meme. The time to be talking about third parties is not 2 weeks before the election, it's the day after the election, and consistently for the next 3 years. Anyone trying to build an alternative in 4 years deserves the criticism they get. Build the alternative the whole time.
Why on earth should we put off building an alternative when future conditions will just make it worse and harder without removing any of the issues that make you say that right now is "an inconvenient time?" When will it be the right time to start building a third party?
No one said to put off building alternatives. The current alternatives aren't viable, and voting for them not only doesn't help, it hurts. Again, as per the meme, the right time is any time except right before an election without any viable third parties. Buy time in 2024, build in 2025-2027, buy time in 2028, build in 2029-2031, repeat until we have a candidate with Governor/Senator experience and enough of Congress to get past gridlock.
It's precarious enough that I insist on taking a strategy that has a nonzero chance of actually stopping fascism rather than accepting it as an inevitability.
Incorrect unfortunately, your strategy's chance of stopping fascism is much closer to zero than mine. In fact, the strategy you insist on taking actually has a much higher chance of enabling fascism than stopping it.
To get a candidate 3 years closer to being viable, you know you don't have to start over every 4 years. It's going to take several election cycles before we have a qualified third party candidate.
That's a silly thing to do, and not something I recommended. Don't do that. Do promote third parties in local races they can actually win, as well as state elections in solid states where they can actually win. Once you have enough of those to have presidential candidates with actual experience, then, with sufficiently positive polling data, start pushing for a popular third party candidate.
That's going to be at least 3 election cycles though, and if you fill around like this every 4 years it may well be a moot point. What good is a third party if the fascists end elections? Any other strategy is incoherent. Unless of course your goal is to split the vote for the benefit of the fascists, then promoting a spoiler candidate is exactly aligned with your goal.
My strategy is to buy time while we build a functional and electable third party that has the means to change the status quo. Your strategy is to throw away views on a non-functional candidate, and in the process accelerating the fascist takeover.
I'm not gonna nuh-uh-yuh-huh with someone who doesn't understand elections, or the trolley problem.