While Education and Organizing is building the parts for a new engine the rest of the year.
Counter point: If centrists had forced RBG to retire OR had they codified Roe into law in 2008 when Obama held the WH and the Democrats had the House and Senate… abortion would still be legal coast to coast.
I’ve held my disgusting leftist nose to “vote for the lesser of two evil” for two decades now. Shaming voters for having serious qualms with the Democratic Party’s inaction on important issues isn’t a good look for… the Democratic Party.
Good thing I dont identify as a Democrat then.
Finn here. You guys can’t let Trump win. Gaza will be even more fucked than now. Ukraine will be fucked, which will lead to all of Europe being fucked. Your own country will also be more fucked than now. I hate Biden too, but Trump will be a total nightmare.
How many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote FOR something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?
Hunter S. Thompson, 1972.
50 years.
Bernie would’ve won.
When corporate lobbyists completely control the only two viable parties, then voting is rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.
If Democrats had ever done anything to fight fascism instead of just enabling it literally for generations, we wouldn’t need to defend abortion.
Edit: also, of course a liberal uses a car analogy. How much more accurate could you get than to relate the democratic party to a thing most Americans are forced to use against their will, that kills their children and destroys their future… With an incredibly racist history and only slightly less racist present.
I am genuinely interested, how were cars brought about through a racist history?
Is it strictly through the creation of interstates that cut through major cities (mostly colored neighborhoods)? Or are there more nefarious reasons?
That’s one big part of it, though there are other examples. The deliberate building of overpasses too low for buses to go under, stopping poor black people from getting to the beach by bus, is another well-known example.
Yup https://www.aclu.org/news/racial-justice/racism-by-design-the-building-of-interstate-81 https://www.kqed.org/news/11943263/americas-highway-system-is-a-monument-to-environmental-racism-and-a-history-of-inequity https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/11/10/robert-moses-saga-racist-parkway-bridges/
There’s a whole two Behind the Bastards episodes on Robert Moses.
And none of this talks about how highways allowed building suburbia, and how that’s ultimately just an extension of manifest destiny.
I get the sentiment, but I don’t owe anyone a vote. Voting for the lesser of two evils is one thing when it’s someone useless like Obama, but the “good” option is balls deep in a genocide and destabilizing the world in his allegiance to another country. Not voting for the senile genocide guy is the least I can do.
I’ll be the first to say it sucks. Despite busting the railway unions his NLRB was doing good shit. It really really sucks.
Okay, but not voting for Biden is effectively a vote for Don Cheeto, and I guarantee you his Israel policy will make Biden look like a saint.
And if it makes you feel any better rumor has it that Biden is getting near the end of his rope trying to work with Israel. Last I heard he hasn’t talked to Netenyahu in over a month now after a particularly nasty phone call. Wouldn’t be surprised if his tune changes before the election and he starts attaching some pretty heavy strings to any further Israel aid.
In 2020, after Bernie was kneecapped by the dems, one of the state dems got on our organizing discord and said something to the effect of “sorry guys, but don’t forget to vote dems”. I voted Biden and got this. I got a party that refused to govern, who let a single rogue dem stop trillions of dollars worth of programs for what was it, a year?
I respectfully reject the framing that a non-vote for Biden is a vote for Trump. At literally any point, the dems could have chosen a different way. Hell, they could’ve just NOT eliminated the primary in all but name, but no. They’ve chosen the undemocratic, unproductive, detremental path we’re on. They refuse to own their fuckups, blaming them on conspiracy theories and an American populace that doesn’t understand the great things they’re doing. They don’t deserve votes and, I’m sorry, but I don’t owe them shit for what little they’ve done. We don’t know what comes of this in the end. Maybe Trump does win, maybe it’s so grotesque that it snaps people in the other direction (cope).
If they lose, it isn’t my just fault. It’s also theirs, mostly theirs. They’ve worked long and hard to repress the left. So I’ll be here, comfy in my bed on election day, completely repressed.
(And yeah, they are leaking that Biden is an old annoyed boy with Netanyahu. But that’s just because they know Biden’s committed path is so unbelievably unpopular, but also they don’t want to do anything about it, so they “leak” that our senile boy is thinking reeeeeally hard about all this. The US hold ALL the cards here, and every day this goes on is a day Biden is choosing not to do anything about it. So I don’t think him not talking to Bibi for a month while still offering unwavering support is a sign of progress)
nicely done
Well said.
Okay, I could write an essay response to that but I’ll keep it simple:
Is Biden better than Trump? Which leader will we be more likely to make positive changes under?
If you think they’re the same, you are a fool. If you think Biden is better but don’t vote for him, you are voting against your own interests. The spoiler effect basically means elections are more about which guy you don’t want to win rather than which guy you do.
I get it, I don’t like picking between bad and worse either. Doesn’t mean I’m not going to get out there and do my part to make sure worse doesn’t win.
It would also still be legal if the Democrats had pursued any of the early obvious corruption, especially the Mueller report, instead of waiting for an election to replace an obviously corrupt man.
Eventually voting against corruption is not a sufficient check on corrupt power.
Copying and pasting my own comment from another thread:
If you want leftists to vote for dems, despite dems pissing on leftists at every possible chance and yelling at leftists to fall in line, I’ll show you how.
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Point out that voting will never, ever, ever move the democrat party to the left. You cannot vote the party harder to the left.
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Point out that Republicans are going to remain fascists.
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Point out that voting third party is a spoiler vote and will result in fascists winning.
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Point out that the actual way to move to the left is to unionize and organize at the grassroots level, to apply bottom-up pressure on the top.
The answer is not to pretend that Biden is anything other than a Neoliberal Capitalist. Leftists will correctly point out that Biden is still a lukewarm neoliberal maintaining the status quo, and feel further alienated by being told they should love him anyways. That just encourages voter apathy.
Additionally, this meme is wrong. Leftists voted, it was the centrists and moderates that didn’t. Hillary wasn’t appealing in any way, so only the people who really cared voted. Hillary still won the popular vote, she just lost the electoral college, and Trump succeeded in riling up the fascist base. Do not blame Leftists for not falling in line for an extremely unlikable candidate, they did regardless. Blame Hillary for doing jack-shit to energize the base.
I think a lot of us are just scared right now. I know I’ve made some reactionary comments to people attacking Biden from the left out of my own sense of fear, and I’m a cishet white guy with a good paying job. I’m also a father of 2 daughters (one of whom may not be cishet, they’re still figuring that part of themselves out). I feel sick to my stomach when I think about the Palestinians, and I feel sick to my stomach when I think of them inheriting a ruined planet, getting shot at school, needing or wanting a safe medical abortion at some point and a million other things that a vote for Biden is my only way to protect right now. I wish we had a more European-style, coalition-based party structure here, but we don’t yet.
There are some powerful stereotypes about the Republican party being more homogeneous and the Democratic party being a big tent with lots of internal strife. The saying goes, “Republicans fall in line, Democrats fall apart.” That and the unreliability of polls and all of those polls showing Trump way ahead mixed with the shit Project 2025 is talking about…its a lot, and it’s scary. I think that’s where a lot of the browbeating of leftists is coming from…the fear that a lot of them won’t vote at all or won’t vote for Biden and what the likely outcome of anyone besides Biden means…which is Trump.
Yep, that’s why I gave a guide on how to properly talk to leftists. I’m about as left as they come, and will begrudgingly vote for Biden, because I understand just how pointless trying to vote America to the left is. Every major concession from Capitalists came from revolutionary pressure, such as the Civil Rights movement.
It would also help to acknowledge the people who voted for Biden in the 2020 primaries are selfish pieces of shit who intentionally voted against progressive and leftist efforts. Attempting to gaslight us into thinking “we’re on the same side” when in fact these people intentionally fuck us over is ridiculous.
It’s certainly entitled, and I think a lot of it comes from liberals not understanding that both fascists and liberals have candidates that represent their views, but leftists do not. They lack the experience of having to settle for a lukewarm Capitalist and actually having to touch grass to attempt to fix things, while both Liberals and Fascists just have to vote for their respective parties.
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Reminder that someone online arguing that you shouldn’t vote for Biden because of whatever pet grievance is either a Russian agent or an idiot playing into their hands
If people think an “evangelical” is going to handle the conflict in Gaza on the side of the Palestinians better than Joe Brandon they are sorely mistaken and/or misguided. 45 wanted a straight up Muslim ban ffs.
Evangelicals want this conflict, because in order for Jesus to come back and rapture them, the mosque on the Temple Mount must be destroyed so the temple can be rebuilt, which is step one of their prophecy. That’s the real reason they pretend to care about the Jews.
They truly believe this is their end times, and worse, a few years ago their perfect red cow they’ve been waiting for these thousands of years was certified; if that cow dies before they get the chance to sacrifice it to rebuild their temple, they may have to wait another thousand years.
It’s a death cult and they’ll kill us all.
And how quick all these Hamas and Houthi cheerleaders forgot Ukraine too. A country that would not exist anymore if Trump had won 2020.
Yeah, I’d rather deal with someone who enables Israel’s bad behavior instead of someone who not only cheers it on but offers to help make it worse. There’s at least a snowball’s chance of convincing the enabler to stop enabling.
look, I can understand the argument that you must vote for the most effective way to contain an evil. It’s a good solid argument.
However it starts taking damage almost immediately when:
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The plan to fight the evil is using the most disliked president in recent history to win a popularity contest.
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They pre-emptively destroy any and all opportunities to find a better candidate to win the popularity contest against the evil.
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They refuse to debate anybody just like the evil they want to defeat. Making it impossible to verify they’re the one for the job.
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They forcibly re-schedule the primary schedule to delay any signs that this plan might be a terrible idea.
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Their age is seriously in question, their mental acuity is in question, and they also decide to dodge being in a completely unscripted environment for two hours while standing.
Certainly with all this you can at least understand why someone would rather vote third party, because this Biden option is not making me feel any safer.
At what point can we stop pointing the finger at the voters and start pointing at the guy they’re “supposed to vote for”? Is there a point we can ever point that finger at Biden? Or is it like Trump,where we need to vote for him “even if he were to shoot someone in the street”?
It works better when you have an idea of what the President actually does and what direct action would mean.
Almost everything we would want to do is at the local or regional level. Want higher density housing? Your mayor and city council control that with no say from the President. Better public transportation? Same, though the President can try convincing Congress to pass grant funding for it. More and better bike lanes? Same thing. Get rid of anti-homeless architecture? All city level stuff.
School lunch programs? State government can stop it if the wrong people are there. Expand Medicare? Same. Better rail networks? Same. Ban gay conversion therapy? All state government.
Foreign policy is the one thing where the President does have a lot of control. That’s actually the exception. I like Biden’s approach on Ukraine–getting most of Europe to go along with sanctions at all, especially after Trump destroyed our soft diplomatic power, was amazing. His approach on the Gaza conflict is far less amazing, to put it mildly. Other than foreign policy, the position is mostly advocacy and horse trading around funding priorities with Congress. Soft power for the most part.
A bad President, especially combined with a bad Congress, sure as hell can stop the local agenda items, though. Pull the grants for cities to implement public transit. Pull Medicare expansion entirely. Don’t provide school lunch program funding at all. Put judges in power who rule arbitrarily in favor of conservatives with no care for precedent.
What voting for Biden is for is to make sure the federal government doesn’t overrule things built locally and regionally. That’s it. The rest needs direct action on the part of all of us at different levels of government.
Is there a point we can ever point that finger at Biden?
Point fingers all you want as long as you vote to keep the rapist, insurrectionist, self-admitted wannabe dictator out of power.
Yeah Biden is only the first one so 1-3 = 2 so he’s good candidate
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Reminder that not everyone who disagrees with your guilt tripping self righteous nonsense is a Russian bot. Some of us actually use critical thinking and can see a pattern that must be broken.
Yeah? Like our devotion to repeatedly voting in neolibs like Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden has had nothing to do with tilting the political spectrum to the far right?
I’ll probably pull the lever for Biden, but I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t. Based on the results of recent decades of leftists holding their noses to vote for the neolib, even if Biden wins something much worse than Trump will arrive just in time for the 2028 cycle.
“Pet grievance” is one of my new favorite euphemisms for genocide.
Voting does nothing other than reform the capitalist regime. It doesn’t matter whether this cycle’s presidential figurehead is blue or red. Give it a few decades and you’ll see how the US will still be sowing death and destruction across the world, as it always has. The presidential race that liberals get so rabid about is nothing more than kabuki theater.
US: “Vote for the lesser evil.”
Europe: “Vote for the party you want and have them still be represented either as a coalition majority or during crucial votes where every party matters.”
US is more like “vote against the guy you don’t want in charge”
But people did vote for Hillary, IIRC, she won the popular vote by like 3 million votes.
So it wasnt a lack of voting that gave trump the presidency and repealed abortion rights. It was the mecanisms and institutions that are part of your electoral process and that only seem to exist in order to dilute your democracy (e. voting districts, electoral college) that gave trump the win.
Perhaps people would be more willing to vote if their voices were actually heard.
Well no. Hillary was a center-right candidate. If she wanted votes from progressives or left-wing voters, she knew exactly what to do. But she threw those votes away, relying on rhetoric like this post. We all saw it happening, and she did it anyway. What if she had pushed for universal health care, or unions, or campaign finance reform, or gun laws, or against wars? It would have been an exciting election.
Except that the left actually did show up and vote for her. Anyone who cares enough about politics to call themselves “left” is not likely to sit out an election, and third party votes didn’t make the difference. Bernie supporters overwhelmingly showed up for Hillary. That shouldn’t have been surprising since Bernie campaigned harder for her than she did for herself.
It’s every day apolitical Americans who stay home and cost the Democrats elections, and the reasons why are clear. Democratic political strategies are intended to be vacuous and put the electorate to sleep. The establishment doesn’t want to win an election then have the voters actually expect them to do something with the office.
The left has been telling the establishment what’s going wrong for decades. Campaigns that actually speak to the people win elections. The Democrats would rather just shoot the messenger.
This. Every single time the democrats have power they do nothing to cement any kind of progressive or moderate holdouts when inevitably the Republicans win an election. They lost the Supreme Court, they watched the Republicans bend the rules, break the law, try and overthrow the government, and here we are. Biden has had the presidency this whole time and has done precious little to actually push back on anything the Republicans have done. Too concerned with appearing civil and considerate to actually hold senators accountable for their words and actions. If Trump wins this election, he will smile and shake his hand as he transfers power to a literal fascist dictator.
I think that a lot of people have an overblown concept of what Democrats can get past Republican obstructionism, and nebulous concepts like “holding senators accountable” are pretty useless.
The way Democrats get policy past the goal is to inspire the electorate to fight with them. That is where establishment Democrats fall flat. Far from being ready to use an energized electorate, they are actually afraid of one. Their campaigns are literally designed to soothe the American spirit to sleep. That worked when the middle class felt secure, but not anymore. We don’t just want competent administrators who can keep things running, we want reformers and visionaries who aren’t afraid to shake things up. That scares the shit out of the establishment.
Trump was a molotov cocktail aimed at DC, and Biden was a response that said “we don’t hear you, go back to sleep.”
In regard to abortion the outcome certainly would have been different had she won the election. Trump put 3 anti-abortion and strongly right wing justices on the Supreme court directly leading to this outcome.
Obviously like other mainstream Democrats there’s a ton to be desired in policy, but the whole point of this post is that it is still important to vote even if it’s the lesser evil.
If Hilary hadn’t been a pile of shit doing private speaking engagements for billionaires that were so hush hush that they set up massive white noise generating speaker systems, people would have voted for her.
if Hilary had set a fucking foot in some of the states she lost, people would have voted for her.
if Hilary didnt make stupid fucking comments, people would have voted for her.
Maybe if you stopped blaming voters, and blamed the shitty fucking candidates, someone less awful would have run, and won.
Blame the DNC. They’re the one cramming shitty candidates down our throats. If OP is right, and voting for president is just changing the oil, it’s like getting charged $2000 for Dollar General oil.
Stop blaming voters. Field actual, progressive, leftist candidates. I am fucking sick of voting for right wing, war hawk Democrats to “save democracy.” We aren’t saving anything, just watching stock market addicted octagenarians kill the country slower than the other team.
My private and professional perspective as a trans woman and political scientist if there is low voter turnout this next election:
I feel your pain. The ability to disengage and not engage with the political process is the height of privilege, especially when the right wants to do as much harm to trans folk as possible.
