Former democratic party activists are organizing Muslims and Arab-Americans in Swing states to vote against Biden with the demand that he support a ceasefire in Gaza.
I’ll allow them a little bit of electoralism this time.
Former democratic party activists are organizing Muslims and Arab-Americans in Swing states to vote against Biden with the demand that he support a ceasefire in Gaza.
I’ll allow them a little bit of electoralism this time.
I can agree Joe is a genocider and still vote for him instead of trump*.
Trump is happy to apply his genocidal ideals to his own countrymen. Biden, less so - mostly directed outward/foreign. If my vote has influence on this matter, even slightly, who am I going to choose?
Moreover, I’m not pretending my vote is some sacred gift I can only give to the most perfect candidate. Rather, I am happy if my trash vote can negate a even more-trash vote.
* I predict being the_dunk_tank material and I accept my fate.
Also I want to say, I am really trying to understand this. even if I say wierd/bad faith/something stuff it’s an accident and I want to understand the point of view of “anti electoralism” – if that’s the right term.
I can’t. It should be an easy red line to have
Maybe this is what’s hard for me to understand about the anti-electoral stance. From what I’ve gathered in this thread, my vote is simultaneously completely worthless and inffective, yet also the most precious thing I should only give to the most worthy.
I’m having a hard time figuring out how to word this comment to sound less snarky, but I am legitimately interested in your thoughts on this dichotomy. Or if you think this is not a good interpretation of your+other commenter’s comments, I’ll be happy to be corrected. Thanks.
I think of it like this. In an ideal society (or at least vaguely functional political system), your vote would and should be precious. Yet in our shithole nation, this precious thing of yours is forced to be given to one of two genocidal evils.
is the face of a party who pretends like they’ll take your vote and do something useful. Stand up for minorities, do something about climate change, maybe reduce the mass social murder in this country, or just do fucking anything at all. Yet time and again, they only make things worse. If your vote is precious and should only be given to the most worthy, why give it to a racist, senile, sex offending, warhawk?
And we all know that to vote for anyone other than the two candidates is a useless gesture, accomplishing nothing. So in practical terms, voting in this nation is voting for one of
this guy’s two masks. Why fucking bother?
Edit to add-
Why? Why the shitting fuck would you decide “This genocider is deserving of my vote”. That is a physical manifestation of your thought that this man should lead our country. You’re not just passively thinking it, you’re taking an active step to make sure that happens. If a daycare was trying to choose between John Wayne Gacy or Albert Fisch to be its director, it would be fucking insane to give it serious thought and then vote on one of them. You should demand to know why this is the choice in the first place, and not shrug and vote for one of them like a browbeaten little b----
It’s pretty simple, if your vote is for a ‘lesser evil’ that is a negative choice proposition, hardly worthy of the word ‘choice’ or ‘democracy’. Two bad choices are still two bad choices, even if one is marketed as slightly less bad. The entire Dem strategy for like decades now has been this prisoners dilemma proposition. They never provide federal protection enshrined in law because that would take away the leverage of this strategy. The only way to break out of this pattern is to really threaten it directly by not acquiescing to it like good little liberals. That is why you have cognitive dissonance over this topic. The social pressure of ‘lesser evil’ is so deeply embedded in the liberal worldview that any questioning of it is adjacent to being a terrible right-winger.
The cultural war divide benefits Dems, so they do everything to perpetuate it instead of reconciling it. You need to comprehend this to have a realistic understanding of US political economy.
I can acknowledge all of that, and understand it intellectually, and still see that a vote can reduce the speed of encroaching facism.
Trump lost Georgia by 11k votes, Bush won Florida by 537 votes – sometimes meaningful things do happen with relatively tiny margins and if they can be swayed in a preferred direction, I’ll take it.
How is this a threat? This is, I think, core to my failure to understand your position. To me that sounds like giving up and giving free rein to continue rolling back abortion rights, lgbtq protections, etc. This sounds completely irrational to me so if I’ve misunderstood you (or others, or this position in general) I am happy to be corrected on my assumptions. Thanks!
show me where any of this has stopped or slowed under Biden please. that is the issue.
give your vote away to a party that does not fight for these things but only uses them to receive your vote because you have no other option. that is the problem with continuing to vote for them without any real commitments or guarantees that they will do anything material to make things better or even stop the rightward momentum. if you can’t understand that, then you should really learn more about political history.
The USA is not a victim of encroaching fascism. The USA was fascist before it was even founded. Everything you can be that is “fascistic” was done by white European settler colonists before the Third Reich did it. Gas chambers, concentration camps, eugenics, wars of extermination, etc.
The Democrats aren’t against this stuff. Ruth Bader Ginsberg relied on and reinforced the reliance on the Doctrine of Discovery for the legal basis of the USA. The Doctrine of Discovery is part and parcel of the religious decrees that demanded European settlers murder, rape, enslave, and break every non-European they came across.
The USA is the reservoir of fascism. In Mein Kampf, Hitler explicitly details how the program of the USA was what he wanted to emulate and apply to the Slavs. His entire leadership team studied the USA to base their program on it, everything from apartheid to propaganda.
The USA ruling class supported the ride of fascism in both Italy and Germany. When the USA finally entered the war it wasn’t to end fascism it was to stop the growth of communism. The USA collaborated with the Vatican to bring Nazis to safety all over the US sphere of influence. They created NATO and staffed it with Nazis. They worked with NATO through Operation Gladio to reinforce and support Nazi partisans all throughout Europe.
Every time a vote comes up in the UN to condemn the glorification of Nazis, the USA votes against it.
Fascism is a Euro-settler phenomenon. It predates the US. It was perfected in the US. It emerged in Europe from the reservoir of the US. It returned back to the US when it failed to defeat communism. The US maintained it the entire time.
The idea that fascism is encroaching is a lie. It’s always been here. The only solution is revolution.
Biden has Trump beat on deportations, police funding, military funding, and he’s completely unwilling to stand for abortion right, trans rights, and debt forgiveness
And now he’s a genocider, so what actually are we supposed to be afraid of from Trump? At least with Trump most of the media and 50% of the establishment will oppose him, unlike with Biden where the 90% of the media backs him and 80% of the establishment cosigns his genocidal ideals
I fear Biden and his ilk more than I fear Trump and his incompetent clown show, because at least with Trump I can be confident most of the country will oppose him
I can’t even be confident that so-called “leftists” will oppose Biden, because here you are arguing we should vote for a man who’s committing genocide
I’m not going to defend Biden or dems in general, but part of your point that I want to address directly is this:
While he and other dems are “unwilling to stand”, they are also not actively working against those or certain other causes. If everyone who believes in these causes chooses to not vote because they’re not being addressed, republicans will win and do their damndest to stomp all over marginalized groups even more. This is why I vote (against them).
Oppose him verbally, sure. But that has no effect, and actually sometimes emboldens him and other R’s as they do stuff to “own the libs”. Why is opposing him like this good, but opposing him with my vote bad?
I think my stumbling block in trying to understand this POV is that I do believe there is inherently a difference between voting for someone and voting against someone else. I’d rather not freely cede anything to those I consider to be worse. I understand you may see the outcome as “the same” and for some people, it is. But I do believe that there are people where a difference between the parties exists and is important in their lives.
To address your last point, I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything, certainly not against their conscience. I’m trying to understand why walking away from elections is (or at least seems to be) the general consensus amongst this community.
Thanks for your thoughts.
Why did you zoom in on the “completely unwilling to stand for abortion right, trans rights, and debt forgiveness” part, but completely ignore the “Biden has Trump beat on deportations, police funding, military funding” part? BIDEN IS DOING his damndest to stomp all over marginalized groups, even more then Trump when it comes to those specific areas of contention
Also not being willing to stand up to republicans in terms of abortion rights IS the same thing as “actively working against those or certain other causes”, in fact false alliance is worse than outright hostility, because it confuses and disarms marginalized people who look for allies
Really? An entire country with every liberal and leftist org united against Trump and the only opposition would be verbal? And I thought I was a doomer
Because your vote strengthens the Ratchet Effect, as we’ve seen with Biden’s rightward shift
If the person you’re voting FOR is doing the same or worse things than the person you’re voting AGAINST, then your politics are frankly incoherent and insincere, and you’ll end up valuing the lives of certain people over the lives of others, and at that point you might as well just become a republican
That’s relatively straightforward. Elections are a distraction, they redirect energy into a form the political order can digest without changing. The more you invest in them the less you are putting into alternatives that are more useful. Vote, if you want, it might do marginal good in an infinitesimal scale, but agonizing over voting is playing into a system that exists to funnel all your energy into itself.
I guess this is where I’m lost. They mail me ballots, I fill them out and mail them back. It’s almost the least I can do. If every person opposed to fascism did the same, I believe fascism’s encroachment would be slowed.
I don’t know what you mean. Democrats keep winning by the numbers. Fascism is still encroaching. It’s been encroaching my entire life, and Republicans have won the popular vote once in that time. People do vote. And this still happens.
I’m not telling you not to, I keep saying it’s fine to do if you feel like it. So is watching a movie or getting a snack at 3 in the morning. You do you. But don’t act like it’s fixing anything. It clearly isn’t. That’s why you get to keep doing it.
That should be true. Its totally sound reasoning. Except the system in the US is designed to frustrate popular will and facilitate minority rule. Individuals simply voting their conscious will never solve anything within this system.
Liberal democracy and the spectacle of the election, is a perfect vehicle for the rise of fascism, but it actively hinders what is needed to stop it
Even if it’s designed to “frustrate popular will”, isn’t not voting frustrating that will even further? That just seems to be playing into their hands.
To me, the question is accentuated further when considering those people who willingly give up their suffrage which many others fought and died for. And further with the sentiment of “If voting didn’t do anything, they wouldn’t try to stop certain people from doing it”.
I can’t shake any of that when the barrier is so low and the stakes can (occasionally) be so high.
You should be embarassed to have written this. Withholding votes is only a strategy when you are able to vote. A person with no access to food cannot go on a hunger strike.
Also, the saying that you are butchering was originally “If voting could change anything, they’d make it illegal”.
Yes, I understand that - for the most part I am trying to understand the general consensus around here that “voting is silly lib behavior”, so we as I understand it we are inherently talking about people who are able to vote, and the general recommendation that they should withhold their vote. If you want to include people who are not allowed to vote in a certain jurisdiction, I feel like that is a different conversation that I might not be equipped for (not to say I am feeling very equpped for this whole convo in the first place ;p ). But I’m happy to hear your thoughts regardless.
Yes, I’m aware of that as well, others have riffed on it (or butchered, sure) to suit themselves and I was aiming for one of those variants I’ve heard in the past. Since it’s a pithy aphorism, I don’t find one particularly more true than another, nor that any should necessarily be taken literally. (I did say the “sentiment of” and I don’t mind sticking with it)
Cheers
While you will get different responses, generally the consensus is “Voting for dems as well as worry about voting on a personal level is silly lib behavior” Voting for a third party and being involved in some organized effort to extract concessions are both fine.