"if you convince people that there's no difference between a blood thirsty dictator and a dedicated leader who is human and thus unable to solve every problem, the dictator wins."
I find it useful to treat political parties as vessels rather than static organizations.
“The Democratic Party is useless.” <- Certainly sometimes true but it doesn’t give people a path to accomplish anything and just leads to “The Dictator wins.”
“[Specific Democratic Elected Official] is useless. Vote for [Primary Opponent Who is Promising to Not Be Useless] in the primaries.” <- This is how you get a better opposition party. (This is how Mamdani ended up as Mayor of New York rather than Cuomo.)
If you want to improve things, you shouldn’t be driving people towards “do nothing.”