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?
Think of voting this way:
Signing your name to a candidate/psrty and what they’ve done/signaled they will do.
A lot of people can’t stomach a candidate who has been courting the neocons and softening their previous mildly progressive stances from the last time dems had a primary and the progressives were showing up in numbers. Everyone got in line and the debates were about M4A, erasing federally held student debt, raising the minimum wage, etc. Sanders single handedly dragged the party to the center (technically more “left” than they were) in 2016/2020 and the dems responded by po’mouthing like they cared about those issues, but then circled the wagons and kicked those voters to the curb.
The party has shown over and over again that they don’t give a shit about working class people, those of us that want real change. They want to maintain the status quo. Which is progressively more hostile capitalism.
Signing your name to that constant move rightward is unthinkable for some. And understandably so.
And that’s before we even discuss the ongoing genocide in Gaza funded and armed by the US. While this administrations representatives in the UN and in any official capacity constantly run defense for the genocide.
Plenty of people could not fathom putting their name on that tragedy.
None of this means that republicans aren’t fuckin neofascist shits. But…how many times have the voters left of the dems been told to eat shit and vote blue because the other guy is worse? WHILE CONSTANTLY COURTING THE RIGHTWING VOTERS WHO MAY HAVE FINALLY GOTTEN SICK OF IT?! Kamala literally said she would be different from Biden by having a Republican in her cabinet. WHAT.
With everything going on, this party said, “yeah, fuck all that. Let’s see if we can grab anyone to the right of us.”
I got sidetracked, but this is the thing. It’s not binary, because geopolitics isn’t binary. The worlds issues aren’t binary. But a binary choice is all we’re given to make.
Just…what. And neither of those two choices was actually going to solve the problems. One was maintaining the problems while one was the problems plus more problems. That’s not an attractive choice.
We all get that trump is much worse. But everyone else needs to understand how sickening that shitty choice was for anyone with a conscience about what’s going on in Gaza, what’s going on with their neighbors. Signing on for more of the same was completely unthinkable for some. That has to be understandable if we are ever going to change things.
We’ve been on the road we’re being forced down now as long as I’ve been around. And the road just keeps going forward. The dems’ proposal is “maintain the course.” The republicans’ was “mash the gas.”
Some people couldn’t stomach going any further down this road. That’s not making a choice to mash the gas. Because the world is not binary.
But you and everyone else posing similar questions is saying “how could you vote for mashing the gas by not wanting to continue down this road?? :(“
I love your road / mash the gas analogy. Great work I’m gonna steal it!
Hah please do!
The moral argument that one should not vote for someone who has been and continues to provide massive material support to a genocide is as clear as day.
But considering the alternative to Harris, it doesn’t seem as clear as day to me.
The thing about moral principles is that they are inflexible. Think about it like the draft during Vietnam. Some people refused to go fight because of moral principle. A common argument against them was “if you don’t go, someone else will go in your place”. Soldiers still go, and the immoral war continues whether you participate or not. I would not go to fight in an immoral war, and I will not politically support a genocide. I know it will happen anyway, but you cannot make me participate. I refuse.
The moral argument against voting for Harris doesn’t imply that one has to vote for Trump instead.
That’s the fallacy of Denying the Correlative. In the FPTP system, there were two choices and only two.
To an individual voter in a large electorate the idea that a Harris loss would ensure a Trump victory isn’t relevant except as an excuse to vote immorally for Harris, the genocide candidate. The only moral choices were to abstain or vote for an explicitly anti-genocide candidate.
Oh. That’s alright then. The people who have already lost loved ones and the impending victims of fascism, like the Palestinian and Ukrainian peoples who are now destined to be wiped from the globe, will understand that you refused to do anything meaningful to prevent it because you value your own sense of moral purity more than other human beings. /s
No. Choosing to enable the greatest possible harm was not a moral choice.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
That’s you. Great work.
“I voted for the genocide lady in the hopes of rewarding her and her party with four more years in the White House and blocking anyone who hasn’t had a material role in the Palestinian genocide .” That’s what you sound like. You cannot morally justify voting for Harris unless you can justify her ongoing role in the genocide. No one else running for president came close to playing such a role and, of course, there’s nothing immoral about abstaining.
Anyway, I’m just answering the OP. One does not have to vote on the basis of morality. People make immoral decisions all the time. It’s just easily understandable why many people wouldn’t cross that line.
You cannot morally justify voting for Harris unless you can justify her ongoing role in the genocide. No one else running for president came close to playing such a role and, of course, there’s nothing immoral about abstaining.
Your reasoning is utterly bunk and, again, Denying the Correlative. The choices were D or R. Status quo and attempts to softly change 70 years of foreign policy was the Dems. Full-blown genocide of the Palestinian and Ukrainian peoples, ending democracy, LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights, minority rights, labor rights, and any action to combat climate change was the Reps. There were no other choices possible in the FPTP system. None.
We’ve seen that non-voters allowed rightward shifts in the Overton Window for half a century, rejecting every bit of statistical data that showed this to be the case. That’s done now. Selfish desire to feel morally pure has permanently altered humanity’s course for the worse, accelerating atrocities and climate collapse.
The choice was “try to reform the status quo” OR “drastically increase global human suffering and oppression of marginalized groups”. The “genocide or not” was nothing but propaganda to help the far-right win so that they can play out their doomsday cult’s fantasies.
The best argument I came across went something like this: if we show the Democratic Party that we’ll accept something as horrible as genocide as long as the Republicans are worse, then we’ve completely surrendered our agency as voters.
Powerful statement. It was the most coherent, rational, well thought out explanation I’d seen. It didn’t come off as a condescending lecture on morality, either. I actually considered their argument for a couple days, but ultimately, I decided it wasn’t strong enough to risk another Trump administration.
- Step 1: take a conflict your nation did not start
- Step 2: tear your party apart over a conflict your nation did not start
- Step 3: lose the electoral fight in your nation to trump
- Step 4: ensure the war in that other nation is decided in the way your side did not want it to go
- Step 5: call Joe Biden a genocidal maniac
Maybe I don’t want the people who think this is a valid course of action on my side, since they will sabotage my side. If there is a next election, I want these folks ejected from the party and gone. They can vote for trump if they want, because that’s essentially what they did.
Israel is an arm of the US, Gaza is a proxy war. American presidents bear direct responsibility for the genocide
It is a stupid fucking statement. “If you aren’t perfect on every single issue, then we won’t vote for you.”
For me: Voting represents support for both the process and the government that results from that process. By voting you are essentially expressing that you submit to the electoral process as the sole means for the exercise of political power. Even if you don’t like the results, you’ve agreed to accept it because the rules are more important than the results.
Some obvious problems with that: What if the process itself isn’t fair in the first place? We don’t really get to choose our leaders. We get presented with a set of options which are acceptable to capitalists and are asked our opinion on which we like more. You could write multiple books on the ways the US electoral process has been structured to disenfranchise people and reduce the impact they can have on their government, but fundamentally it comes down to the fact that the government doesn’t represent people and that’s a feature, not a bug.
So we end up with a pair of awful candidates who both have done and will do more awful shit. If the election randomly fell out of the sky without context, sure, you could argue about one being technically better than the other. But it didn’t. It’s this way for a reason. It’s this way because people are willing to cede their expression of political power to it despite the fact that it’s clearly unaccountable to them.
Voting is just supporting the system that’s deprived us of any real democracy while normalizing fascism to protect itself. Voting is a fairly low information form of political expression. You don’t get the choice to be like “Oh I’ll begrudgingly support this candidate, but this this and that are things I don’t like and want them to change.” You get two boxes. Each one represents EVERYTHING the candidate stands for plus the implicit choice of accepting the process in the first place.
If people want things to get better, they have to organize and take real, tangible actions rather than just begging capitalist politicians to do stuff for us every 2-4 years. People should be doing this regardless of who’s in office, but let’s put a fine point on it: People are worried that Trump is gonna be fascist, take away people’s rights, and end democracy. Are you just going to accept that because he won the election? Are the rules that bind the process more important to you than the results? If not, you should be willing to do what it takes to stop him instead of chastising that people didn’t show up to participate in a sham of an electoral system.
For what it’s worth, I actually did go to the polls to vote specifically on an equal rights ballot measure in NY. At least that has a semblance of direct democracy. There I’m explicitly saying “I support this policy specifically” instead of supporting a candidate who just says they support those things while also doing awful shit. It passed, so that’s nice. If anything I’m more pissed at Californians for voting against a measure to END SLAVERY than I am with people who didn’t want to vote for a person currently engaged in supporting a genocide.
I’m curious where this notion comes from:
By voting you are essentially expressing that you submit to the electoral process as the sole means for the exercise of political power.
Do you? Does voting necessarily mean that you can’t also express political power in other ways? Sure, it’s true that most voters don’t really engage with politics outside of the major elections, but that’s got nothing to do with them being voters, many Americans don’t even engage with the elections at all. Why would it be the case that participating in voting means you submit to the electoral process as the sole means of exercising political power? In fact this seems easily disproven by the fact that most political power in this country is exercised by the capital class, but those people still vote.
Even if you don’t like the results, you’ve agreed to accept it because the rules are more important than the results.
Is this actually a condition of voting? What sets these conditions? Are you talking about the social notions of ‘civility politics’ or ‘decorum’ that liberals are so fond of? They’ll try to hold you to those standards regardless of whether or not you vote.
For what it’s worth, I agree with you broadly that there are serious problems with the electoral system, capitalism, the United States, whatever. I also agree that chastising nonvoters is also counter productive. I also agree that voting is probably not going to get us the broad systemic changes that we need. I just don’t really understand the argument that voting somehow precludes one from also doing the actual organizing and activism work we need.
There’s a philosophical and a practical side to this:
Philosophically, the core of a democratic system is the peaceful transition of power. The idea that you won’t just try to force your will over people with violence and will respect the will of the populace. This is a fine principle in a proper democracy with a fair process and political outcomes that fall within acceptable ranges. If you wanted more money for the trains and someone else wanted more money for the busses, that’s a disagreement you can live with. And if the voting system is set up so you had equal chances both to introduce topics/candidates and vote on them, then great. By accepting the election and not trying to go outside the system to get your way, you keep the peace and allow for that process to be a viable vehicle for change.
If this is a requirement for democracy, then the converse is that if a system isn’t fair and produces unacceptable results (eg, Nazis and genocide), participating in it merely legitimizes it. Obviously nothing physically stops you from organizing, but symbolically you’ve shown that you view the system as the sole legitimate way to exert political power and garner authority. And people will then turn around and say you should vote instead of doing xyz actions. “I don’t agree with your methods.”
On the practical side of this: people put a lot of time, energy, and political capital into supporting candidates in these elections. It eats up the public bandwidth, crowding out other forms of political participation. In addition, once someone works hard to get their candidate elected, there is an impulse, an incentive, to defend them. The people who said to suck it up, vote for Biden, then push him to the left turned around and chastised leftists for protesting over things like the continued anti-immigration policies or the support for Israel’s genocide. US electoral politics is a team sport. People get psychologically invested in their team. They don’t like it when you criticize their team. This makes them resistant to change even on policies they nominally support. I think encouraging people to maintain that emotional investment in elections is harmful. It hinders organizing efforts. It hurts attempts to build class consciousness because it gets people to think about their fellow workers as the enemy and capitalists as potential allies. And the corresponding obsession with 24 hour news cycles turns politics into a TV show. Trying to talk to libs about any history older than like a week ago or maybe at most a presidential term is impossible. If it wasn’t on their favorite TV show it doesn’t exist.
We need to be drawing people’s attention to actual types of political participation. Elections don’t just distract from that, they make people think they’re doing the right thing. It’s a release.
All that said, that’s not to say there’s never value in any part of the electoral system, it’s just very limited. Bernie’s attempts at running were part of what got me more engaged in politics and shifted me from being a progressive-ish lib to being more of a socialist. Important to that though was not just the policy platform, but the structure and messaging of the campaign promoted the importance of mass political participation. I ended up meeting some local socialist groups in the process of going to campaign volunteering. However, most of the time and energy still went into the election only for the system to block us at the end and Bernie to give in. Tons of hours of volunteer time went into doing little more than getting people to sign ballot petitions. We weren’t getting those people into a union or a mutual aid group or anything. We basically just tossed our energy into the void.
Consider how you’d go about exploiting the opposite case.
If people will always vote for the slightly-less-worse candidate, then you only ever have to be slightly-less-worse than the opposition. You can sleaze right up to them and be almost as corrupt and evil as they are, so long as there’s just a little bit of extra sleaze sticking out that you can point to as the worse alternative. And you can farm the shit out of that, because then the other side never has to improve either - it’s an anti-competitive duopoly, where they both agree to only compete over surface details, not their overall horribleness, leaving them free to sleaze right up to the fucking-monster end of the spectrum.
Presumably a percentage of people refused to enable that behaviour, and said that slightly-less-genocide is a bridge too fucking far.
They made it plain from the outset that if the dems wanted to play chicken on this, the dems would lose. That they were not to big to fail, that daddy wouldn’t bail them out this time; put down the bombs or you’re getting kicked out for real.
The morally-correct choice would have been for the dems to stop supporting genocide, especially with so much at stake.
There’s this huge narrative that’s been consistently pushed that the actions of politicians are beyond accountability, sent down from on high like acts of god, and that moral responsibility lies only with the voters; that it’s meaningless even imagine any obligation for the ruling class to try and be good enough to vote for.
You know, the way the fossil fuel lobby found ways to shift the blame onto the consumer instead of themselves. The way the opioid manufacturers did the same. The way the gun manufacturers did the same. The way plastic manufacturers did the same fucking thing as well. We’ll act however we fucking well want to, and if you don’t like it, that’s literally your problem.
Oh no, you can’t hold us accountable now, it’s the worst possible time. It’s too soon to have this conversation, how can you be so insensitive, can’t you see there’s a highschool full of dead kids?
Somewhere, sometime, people have to say enough. And they did.
Because most haven’t I will actually answer the call of the question. Voting is perhaps the most important way one can voice their opinion. And carries more effect than most words the average man or woman can utter.
The largest argument against these types of stances is that it will create a spoiler effect. This usually operates on the premise that a vote to a candidate is owed and not earned and or that it is impossible to achieve a different outcome besides one of the two establishment candidates. This second premise being the results of people who decry voting 3rd party as useless based on a restriction with no physical or legal basis imposed on our society by our society. There’s nothing stopping people from electing anyone else on the ballot.
If you can acknowledge that we as a society have this power the idea of accepting a lesser evil is weakened. If you vote for a lesser evil you perpetuate the broken system you hate. In your example Gaza, if someone feels that the issue is so important it merits a principled stance how can they not take the stance?
It’s a matter of pragmatism vs principles.
This strategy worked right into the hands of the greater evil. One day you might see how this was the evil strategy.
Not voting for someone who is aiding and abetting genocide is morally correct, it’s not complicated.
If genocide isn’t a red line for you, what is?
So you didn’t vote for anyone for president?
Stein and Kennedy were only on ballots to help Trump win, and he is even worse on Palestine than Harris.
So you didn’t vote for anyone for president?
I’m not American, if I was I would have voted for Stein though.
So in the US “democracy”, if you vote for any party other than the Democrats, you are voting for the Republicans ?
Since voting for both the Democrats and the Republicans is the same as supporting fascism ( unless you want to make me believe that supporting Genocide is not fascist ), I guess it is easy to understand why many people chose not to vote.
But I guess a fascism that pretends to be democratic is better in your eyes than one that is explicit. In my opinion none of the two deserve any support.
Also imagine how full of themselves the Democratic party elite must be to run the VP of a president that people see negatively on both foreign policy (Gaza) and the economy ( a lot of people see their financial situation as worse off after Biden’s 4 years). And Kamala H. literally aligned herself with Biden on everything !
There was no reason to vote for her other than “she is not Trump”. She gave no hope to the electorate for a better future, and for this reason people didn’t show up and vote for her.
A vote for Stein or Kennedy instead of Harris is like voting Republican since they are spoilers that have said they want Trump to win and only criticize Dems for genocide, which makes their purpose clear because Trump has said he wants more genocide.
Voting 3rd party for president is like not voting at all. It doesn’t send any signals to the main parties like it would in a system with more than two parties. Well, in some cases it would send a signal that their spoiler candidates worked out.
And yes, she failed to get an increase in turnout because she ended up just being more ofnthe same by cozying up with Cheney and not focusing on progressive policies.
In other countries fascist get elected as well, it is not just a problem of the system itself ( don’t get me wrong, it is also a bad system, but it is not the only problem ), the big problem is that the Democratic party ( and a lot centrist parties in Europe as well ) are not electable.
People don’t want them, the Democrats don’t represent the average working person. It is not the fault of the people for not voting for them, the Democratic Party is not their party.
And since this centrist parties invest billions in every campaign to make every leftist party look unelectable ( and this happen with every voting system ), there is no big leftist opposition.
Obviously other countries with better electoral systems have it better than the US, but that is not where the problem starts and ends, it is just a small piece of a much bigger puzzle. After all everyone here knows what happened with Bernie, he was never going to be allowed to actually run.
The centrist parties fear the leftist ones much more than a right wing one, because they represent the same interest, the same people. That’s way they allied with old Republicans, that’s who they are the party of.
It is only the fault of the Democratic Party for loosing this election. They actually showed the people that they didn’t care about them. And probably a lot of US citizens already felt that they didn’t, so this just confirmed it for them.
Also not that many people gated for Stein or any other 3rd party candidate. They just didn’t vote, because the still believe what the Democrats told them about voting for 3rd parties never working, so they were left with nothing and just did nothing.
And you should hold Harris much more accountable for doing the genocide right now, rather than keep telling me about Trump. I know Trump wants the Genocide as well, but Kamala is already doing it, so to me that is not an alternative.
And if the Democrats don’t learn from this election, I don’t think they will win that many elections in the future. And honestly, they don’t deserve them, this is just a 100% Hitler (D) against 101% Hitler ® sort of situation.
After all, if they aim at right wing voters, why should right wing voters vote for them rather the the traditionally right wing party of the Republicans. People should really stop alienating non-voters / 3rd party voters when they are the only one that dont want to support Genocide. Really says a lot about the US.
But now I just started to rumble so I’ll end the comment here.
People don’t want them, the Democrats don’t represent the average working person. It is not the fault of the people for not voting for them, the Democratic Party is not their party.
This is fucking hilarious.
Dems do represent the working class. They are the ones who promote and occasionally pass minimum wage increases, worker safety laws, the ACA, funding for FEMA, social supports, and a ton of other things that positively impact the working class and 98% of the population.
The Republican party actively works to destroy all of those things so they can guve the wealthy tax breaks while lying about whether the working class will benefit.
The problem is messaging. Republicans are great at lying and riling people up, the Dems suck at propoting the positive things they attempt and occasionally succeed at.
And you should hold Harris much more accountable for doing the genocide right now, rather than keep telling me about Trump. I know Trump wants the Genocide as well, but Kamala is already doing it, so to me that is not an alternative.
You know Trump wants more and you are blaming Harris for what Biden is currently doing because she didn’t explicitly state she wouldn’t do a complete 180 and stop support entirely.
That is like saying pooring gasoline on a fire is an alternative to not putting it out. I guess that is an alternative…
You are deeply unserious.
You defense of Harris for not being like Biden, when she explicitly said she supports Biden policies, must be a bad joke, because it is not funny.
Also saying that the Democratic party supports the working class, while they are refusing to update the minimum wage, helped break some strikes and keep financing the military, like never before in history, instead of doing any sort of welfare, must be a belief born out of pure fantasy.
Since I’m tired of responding to comments, I found a great video published today on why Kamala lost, it focuses a lot on the economics and the messaging of the Democratic Party.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSBi0m5xCJs
He shows a lot of main stream sources in the video so that shouldn’t be an issue for you.
If you want to read an interesting comment written by another user that answers some of your positions, I’ll copy-paste it here:
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The DNC learned nothing from 2016. It is the definition of irrationality to do the same thing twice and expect different outcomes.
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Bernie could garner huge crowds and massive support by campaigning on the basis of policy that has mass appeal, such as universal healthcare. Kamala chose not to do this because she prioritised business as usual over stopping Trump.
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You say “things will get worse under Trump”. That’s true. But things got worse under Biden/Harris after Trump’s first term as president - environmental policy, the border camps, reproductive rights, trans rights, cop city, the genocide of Palestinians etc. So when you say “we must vote for Kamala or things will get worse” that line of reasoning is at best unconvincing and at worst it betrays the 4-year state of amnesia you have lived in because you are so politically detached from the consequences of your voting.
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Telling people to protect democracy—the system where you vote for the candidate who best represents your political values—by voting for a person who in no way represents your political values in order to save democracy is tortured logic.
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No, I’m not an accelerationist. Me advocating for people not to vote for Kamala Harris is not an accelerationist position because we should not be giving a mandate for a genocide, climate change, and civil rights-eroding accelerationist by voting for them.
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How many delegates did Harris win in the last primaries? How many did she win in the primaries to get her to run for president this time? Is this what you claim as your democracy?
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When I list a number of legitimate grievances with Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s regime and issues with Kamala’s election platform, none of which have a single thing to do with her race or gender, and you respond by calling me racist or misogynistic it drives home how little you are willing to listen to my political concerns and how intransigent your favoured party is. When you act this way and then tell me that people have to vote for Kamala in order to push her left while you yourself are unwilling to even acknowledge the fact that Kamala’s platform has serious issues, it signals to me that there will be no shifting left on anything. I already knew this fact but you have done an exceptional job of inadvertently teaching other people this lesson.
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When entering into negotiations with someone, it’s a uniquely terrible tactic to hand over your one state-sanctioned bargaining chip before making even one single demand.
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You are chasing the DNC to the right and one day you will wake up and wonder to yourself “How did I end up all the way over here?” I’m not following you into that marsh but you’re welcome to go into it yourself, just don’t get upset at me when I point out what you’re heading into and don’t get angry when I refuse to blindly follow you.
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Kamala Harris is the only thing that can stop fascism. Kamala Harris cannot do anything to protect reproductive rights, trans rights, Palestinian lives, the lives of Marcellus Williams and Robert Robertson etc. because she is powerless to do anything about it 🫠
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Kamala Harris said she would “follow the law” regarding trans people. She was angling to become the primary lawmaker in the US. Not only does this show a lack of whatever libs care about like “leadership” but it shows how cowardly and detestable she is because she understands the law and she is willing to follow it but not when it comes to things like international law, only when it’s laws that she can use to hide behind while trans people are subjected to further oppression through legislation that strips them of rights.
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Historically, fascism has never been stopped at the ballot box. You being convinced that this is possible does not sway my opinion on any matter aside from my estimation of your political awareness and your ability to achieve change.
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You had four years (eight+ if you count Trump’s regime and the lead-up to it in this calculation) to “stop fascism”. What did you do in this period of time? Did you push Biden and Kamala to adopt policies which have mass support? Did you do anything except go to back to brunch?
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When you accuse me of not organising irl, when you say that I’m not doing anything:
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I’m not about to dox myself
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I’m not going to make a laundry list of the things that I have done w/organising and activism just to impress (?) you, especially not when you’ve already told me that I haven’t done anything
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It’s a huge self-report and it’s obvious that you’re projecting
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You alienate others by telling them “I do not recognise your efforts and everything that you have done is unimportant in my estimation”
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You aren’t entitled to others’ votes. Stop pretending that you are.
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We aren’t splitting the so-called left, Kamala Harris did that all by herself.
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You have no red lines. There is nothing that could make you not support Kamala Harris and we know it. Telling people to drop their standards and ignore their conscience to vote for Kamala is a fatal strategy and you killed her campaign by deploying it.
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Selective invoking of people of colour to advocate for Kamala was ridiculous and disgustingly tokenistic. Yes, Angela Davis is smarter than I am. Telling me that I’m stupider than her and so I should take my political cues from her with regards to electoralism is a losing argument and it’s low-key ableist became you’re arguing that the person who lacks intelligence also has a commensurate lack of political virtue. Historically speaking, very intelligent people have had absolutely atrocious politics. Also people like Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas are almost certainly a lot smarter than I am. It would be wrong of me not to defer to their superior intellect and their politics, isn’t that right?
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You say that democracy is going to be strangled in its crib and that fascism has come to town. You are maybe posting about this online in your echo chamber and that’s it. You do not take politics seriously, not even your own, yet you demand that I take your politics more seriously than you yourself do. There are things that I am doing right now to avert this trend in politics. There are things that I would do if fascism proper had seized power, none of which I would post about online. We are not the same. Enjoy your brunch though.
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Almost all of your arguments for voting for Kamala Harris (aside from the “it will stop Trump” argument which, in retrospect, appears to be a dismal failure) also apply to reasons for voting for Trump. “You can push them left”, “By voting we will get a seat at the table”, “Voting third party or not voting at all is a wasted vote”, “We have to vote this way to protect the country”, “Politics is about comprise - you cannot expect them to be your perfect political candidate”, and whatever hold-your-nose-and-vote arguments you trot out. Did you ever stop to ask yourself why it is that you do not find these arguments for voting Trump to be convincing?
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Last time Trump got elected you were brutally vindictive. You took glee in the thought of people in red states and marginalised groups suffering due to policy and things like natural disasters, regardless of their politics or how they chose to vote. You were excited to tell these people that they were going to get deported and put into concentration camps. You will do it again this time too because you have learned nothing. November came and these people you targeted with your vicious schadenfreude remembered. They aren’t going to forget how effortlessly you abandoned them and how you wished the worst suffering and ill-fate upon them.
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You said that a non-vote or a 3rd party vote is a vote for Trump. We have been shouting from the rooftops that Kamala Harris is fundamentally unwilling and incapable of stopping Trump. History vindicates this position; Trump managed to win the popular vote while Harris underperformed by millions of votes, even compared to Joe Biden. Thus your support for Kamala Harris was therefore support for Donald Trump’s presidency. Congratulations on getting the candidate which you campaigned so hard to get elected.
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I don’t care about the US. America must die and if Trump is to be its undertaker then I am relieved to hear it. What you have done is to accelerate the destruction of the US. If I were cynical about achieving my political objectives, wouldn’t have said any of the above. If I was an accelerationist I would have been pushing for all of the things that you’ve been pushing for instead of pushing back against them. I would have even gone so far as to furnish your side with more poisoned chalice arguments (I do this with the far right, I exactly know how to do it). Instead I’ve been defending your political project against your own excesses and self-defeating narrow mindedness. You are right in the fact that I am your enemy but you are wrong to oppose me because you are a far greater enemy to yourself than I could ever have the stomach to be. You won’t listen to a word of what I’ve said because you refuse to learn and to reflect.
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A cynical person might argue that my strategy is to oppose you in the knowledge that this will make you react by becoming more deeply entrenched in your position, encouraging a sort of siege mentality in you, so that you see any criticism or difference of opinion as being an existential political threat that must be eradicated as a means to create more disaffected people to radicalise out of bourgeois democracy. This is not my intent. If things improve for the proles and the marginalised because of what I argue for then that’s a win for my political objectives. However I can’t control your actions and if you choose to respond by taking a hatchet to your precious liberal democracy then, likewise, that’s a win for my political objectives. Which way, western man?
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But, given that Trump will very likely be as bad or worse, why give him the chance? Just to be able to make the statement?
Because the standard for Democrats is perfectionism, but the standard for Republicans is “That’s just Trump being Trump.”
In other words, they didn’t think it through, they got suckered by propaganda.
Don’t worry. Trump won. You’ll hear a whole lot less about Gaza and genocide now.
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The arguments are as stupid as you guessed.
These are naive emotional people who are dumb as fuck. I know so many in my life and it’s like arguying with a brick wall.
Children still believe we live in a black and white world, democrats are in power now, genocide is happening, they will not vote for them. The concept that both will finance the genocide but another will be much worse is not something they can understand.
You have others that want to intentionally punish democrats for not doing anything. Great in the meantime, Trump will provide a full carte blanche to Nettanyahu in the middle east, he will continue what he’s doing, annex everything without any limits. They were partying in Israel after Trump won.
A third group wants the system to break down because they think if you’re a post collapse society, they will be able to build their utopia.
Yes as dumb idiots living in la la land.
Before I start let me note that in the end this particular group of people didn’t affect the election. Harris is on the way to losing all swing states. Her failure is much deeper than Gaza policy. Blaming anti-genocide voters for this is just copium.
With that out of the way, you can divide people with this position into two groups: Arab Americans and everyone else. Arab Americans are people who are feeling the genocide firsthand. So, obviously, they tried to appeal to the Harris campaign and get them to move from Biden’s position on the topic. The result: They were either ignored or antagonized by Harris. That led to the abandon Harris campaign in Michigan and elsewhere. Harris considered those people acceptable casualties in her failure of a campaign, and so they were burnt out and the momentum behind the Uncommitted movement and others turned from “let’s save our Palestinian brothers” to “fuck us and Palestine (because let’s face it, that’s basically what Harris was saying)? Then fuck you too”. Harris thew them under the bus and was thrown under the bus in turn. Maybe not very logical, but a very predictable reaction. Harris treated Arab Americans with just that much contempt, and then she and her enablers had the gall to tell the people attending a funeral every other day to “shut up and vote for her”.
Now as for everyone else, it’s a more simple instance of taking a stand against a politician for doing something you cannot accept. Now there is a pragmatic idea here that if you allow the DNC to get away with this they’ll think supporting genocide actually wins elections, or that their electorate are such pussies that it doesn’t matter what they think. Add in the goal of pressuring Harris to drop that policy that was important at the start of the Harris campaign and of course the idea of not wanting to vote for genocide and this was the result.
Of course it’s not all 100% logical, but there is logic here beyond “omg bad guy I no vote”.
in the end this particular group of people didn’t affect the election.
Source for that statement?
Look at the votes that came in?
Kamala got 20 million fewer votes than Biden. You don’t think a significant amount of those weren’t related?
So, I’d say that looking at the votes means that it did have an effect.
Trump got a bajillion more votes than Kamala.
We have both cited the exact same number of sources.
What are you talking about? I’m the one that asked for a source, lol.
Some told me tO LoOK At tHe ReSUltS… so I did.
She lost before Michigan finished counting. She could’ve won Michigan and she would still lost. Source: Subtract 15 from Trump’s EC votes.
What margin did Trump win Michigan by?
I don’t understand your point. I’m not talking about Michigan. I’m talking about the country.
What margin did Trump win the country by?
How many voters didn’t vote due to the genocide?
How many voters didn’t vote due to the genocide?
About 20 million?
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You’re wrong that it didn’t impact the outcome. MI flipped to Trump directly because of the uncommitted movement. Slotkin won the senate race, but Trump won by a narrow margin. Independent votes and low turn out siphoned off enough to make that happen. Low turn out also directly impacted the results. PA is a different story, but low turn out was true there, too
You’re wrong that it didn’t impact the outcome. MI flipped to Trump directly because of the uncommitted movement.
I mean maybe (I haven’t seen the turnout numbers as opposed to protest/non-voters) but the point is that Harris lost before Michigan even finished counting. She could’ve won Michigan and she still wasn’t winning this, is the point.
Low turn out also directly impacted the results. PA is a different story, but low turn out was true there, too
I mean yeah, because the DNC pushed an unelectable candidate whose position was a mix of “nothing will fundamentally change”, wishy washy non-promises and right wing positions. I doubt even 10% of the 15 million in reduced turnout came from Uncommitted and similar movements. The DNC blew it; it’s that simple.
Michigan and Wisconsin, 25 electoral points. You can’t just lose swing states like she did.
Pennsylvania absolutely over biden economic policies. Screaming the economy is doing great! I wouldnt change a thing! While people struggle to afford groceries isnt going to win you an election.
Now that the election is out of the way, maybe I can continue talking about this. I held my tongue during the past months, but I think now is a good time to think about this result.
While the result is unfortunate and disappointing, there are sides to it that aren’t all that bad. They pushed towards the right, pandering, and now the voters told them that this isn’t a winning strategy. I think it helps setting them straight for the future.
I think you put it very aptly. Of course it would’ve been best if Harris had won, but at least now we can think about it from a neutral perspective: Had she won despite all the right-pandering and genocide-enabling stances, it would either send the message that pandering to the right works, and the progressives are, indeed, either too small a group to listen to in the future too, or too much of pussies to listen to in the future, too — they’ll toe the line no matter what kind of shitty positions you take.
At least now they know that a change is needed. It’s almost unthinkable to lose to such a weird fascist populist that barely behaves cohesively. They did, by ignoring the progressives. That means something. At least it ought to.
Things don’t often change unless things hurt. If doing shitty things keeps working, nothing changes. But when things hurt, it opens some eyes at least. Forces re-evaluation on everyone’s part.
But that being said, this fucking sucks. Despite all the reasoning we can do to make it feel a bit better, this really should not have happened.
They played this exact same game in 2016 and lost and yet they learned nothing. What makes anyone think they’re going to learn something this time? The DNC needs to be destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up to be a proper left party instead of this bullshit center-right garbage that they pretend is progressive or left.
EDIT: And I still held my nose and voted, because I will in fact take anything over fascism.
2016 was easily dismissed because trump was a surprise candidate they weren’t prepared to deal with, Hilary was disliked, and she still won the popular vote. None of those excuses apply in 2024
There will be no more elections, do you guys not listen to what Trump says? The only way to have elections again would be a civil war and guess what, the fascists are the majority so fat chance of that happening
Over our dead bodies friend. See you at the polls like always.
do you guys not listen to what Trump says?
Yes that was one of the many outrageous claims he made.
Who knows which things he will actually try to do, let alone what he’ll succeed at doing.
Even with the house, senate and supreme court tilted right, I don’t see them succeeding on abolishing elections.
Well that’s naive. That has happened in many other countries before, and guess what the USA is not any different from them, so
I’m not hopeful. I’ve already seen centrists and pundits saying that Harris lost because she’s “too progressive” and that Dems need to move further right.
Given Dems’ track record, I’m dreading 2028 is going to be JD Vance versus fucking RFK Jr. or Joe Manchin. At least the only silver lining out of THAT shitshow will be seeing the Democratic Party completely implode after completely alienating their voter base to become a carbon copy of the Republican Party (while Repub voters just keep voting R) and hopefully pave ground for an actual progressive party replace them, but that will hardly offset the horrors of 8 years of unrestrained fascism (assuming the left wins in 2032 🥲)
It’s not Gaza. It’s that the Dems are a party of the riches. They don’t represent the poorer anymore. When you have this political shift, you open the doors of the far right.
Now Gaza burns faster. Congrats 3rd party fuckers.
Literally all of the third party voters could have voted a straight Democrat ticket and it wouldn’t have affected a single swing state. Third-party voting was down by about 60% versus 2020.
Maybe not for the popular vote, but in individual districts that were close, it could have. Also, the constant talk for sure influenced some to not bother voting at all due to not having a perfect candidate choice.
60% less than the last presidential election. The one Biden won.
Stop blaming third parties for the Democrats’ failure to build a coalition within its own party.
- Due to the failings of the electoral college system, my state was almost guarenteed to vote the same way as it has for the last 30 years
- I did not strongly agree with either party/candidate
- I dispise the current two party system that both major parties are incentivized to maintain
- Voting for a third party who is incentivised to push for change via ranked voting and other methods does aid them even if they don’t win
If my state was likely to be contested, I may have voted differently. Voting for a third party in my case however had a greater impact than fighting or joining the tide of my state
Voting third party is fine. Protest voting is acceptable, though this result still fucking sucks. Strategic voting doesn’t have to be the default choice.
Anybody that did NOT vote, thinking it would be any sort of protest, is completely idiotic. Self imposed disenfranchisement only forfeits your own ability to say anything about the results.
