And I’m being serious. I feel like there might be an argument there, I just don’t understand it. Can someone please “steelman” that argument for me?
I’m not saying that in the US system, at the presidential level, the loss of one of the two main parties doesn’t ensure the victory of the other. I’m saying that that doesn’t matter to a regular individual who is eligible to vote. That person only gets one ballot and their choices are what is printed on the ballot as well as leaving some or all of it blank.
This one or the other correlative is actually the purview of the campaigns. They have the power to sway enough votes to matter by adjusting their messaging, strategy, and, for the incumbents, actual policy. Instead of looking at what they were up against and eschewing the status quo, the Democrats decided to make the following threat to voters: give us permission to keep exterminating Palestinians or the other guy might take away your various rights here at home. The continued massacre of Palestinians wasn’t their only demand, but I’m just trying to stay on-topic. It’s darkly humorous that the voters who made the choice to acquiesce to that threat ended up morally compromising on genocide for a candidate that apparently was going to lose anyway.
For a final time, this is still repeating the fallacy of Denying the Correlative. The only options available were Dems or GQP facists. There were no other options. Choosing to not vote or vote third party was a choice to not oppose facism. Full stop.
“Genocide” or “no genocide” were not options of any statistical possibility. The only possible outcomes were Dems, who at least made half-hearted statements of opposing, OR GQP fascists who want genocide to occur at a much larger and faster scale in more places and prevent anyone from removing them from power while openly stating their intent to oppress all LGBTQ+ people domestically and abroad (foreign aid will be contingent on oppression), women, non-christians, and political opponents.
Outcomes are factual, measurable things. Moral purity dick-measuring contests have no impact on reality or human suffering. Your moral purity means absolutely fuck all to those of us who have already lost people or have friends and family on suicide watch because of people too high on their own egos to care about how their choices impact others. I’m sure that it was extremely moral to hand over the entire government of a nuclear power to fascists on a silver platter, without even pretending to offer resistance. Hey, at least you can sure off your gargantuan morality-peen, right?
Why don’t you or anyone using the “morality” excuse for not opposing fascism call up The Trevor Project and explain to them how it’s really for the greater good that you chose to allow the election of those with intentions to murder and oppress those that they are trying to save? I’m sure they’ll be overjoyed and applaud the size of your morality-peen.
Please relax. I don’t claim to have special moral purity or whatever. Opposing genocide just seems like an obvious baseline. Besides, from the perspective of the individual voter (or eligible non-voter) there were no options of statistical possibility. The election was going to go the way it did regardless of what you or I decided to do with our single ballots. The voters who compromised on genocide got nothing except self-imposed damage to their minds and souls. The only way it would have gone differently is if the Democrats ran a better campaign with a different platform and probably with a different candidate.