J
It's wild that people still follow or respond to the fascists' social posts. Like, I couldn't even tell you what they are or how to access them.
To me, the fash are a voiceless, faceless, meaningless and amoral horde of beasts. There is nothing they can say that is worth my ears perceiving it. The watts necessary to process their nonsense are energy I could better use shitting in their eyes.
I guess the eternal modern USian argument in politics is: if you vote for Democrats, do you get a seat at the table?
In my experience, the answer is 'no', at least for leftists, queer people, poor people, and trans people, most of the time.
I still vote because it takes minimal effort and I no longer value it as a measure of anyone's affirmative intent.
Was the political progress sui generis, or was it driven by the outside efforts?
We live during a time when the value of a vote is near to nothing, if only because politicians don't actually care what the people want; they have their own constituents, and they are not *us*.
No politician will change substantively unless they believe their power is on the line. Default voting in a duopoly is just us giving our power away.
Set aside moral considerations.
Is voting for lesser evil *effective*, is the question you should be asking yourself.
If you've been paying attention, the answer is obvious.
Just in case (sigh) it's NO.
At some point, folks like me who voted lesser evil despite knowing better had to reckon with the fact that despite voting for lesser evil - or maybe *because of it* - greater evil won. And when you had that moment of reckoning probably determines whether or not you voted for Harris.
Now it's other "lesser evil" folks turn: you've gotta realize that your actions are 100% not effective at preventing harm, because Trump *is still free*.
He broke strikes, ignored environmental disasters, and let his FDA run off the handle. His "signature legislation" was classic tax policy BS that passes for "regulation" under Democrats
Now, was he nominally "better" than Trump? Sure. Why not. At a certain point though, does it matter if you only sniped the toddler in the head, not the head and heart? One is less than the other, but you'd have to be a little deranged to think they're different
Biden, for example, killed 3x more people than Trump re: the pandemic. But people are like "he said the right stuff! he got the scientists to say stuff! wheeee" and the numbers just don't register in their heads.
Biden started the logging of protected lands. Biden started leasing protected land to oil companies. Biden deported and denied asylum to more people than any previous President. Biden committed crimes to send weapons to Israel.
I guess at this point when I encounter "lesser evil" advocates, I'm torn between sharing what Hannah Arendt thought of lesser evil, and showing that the "lesser" is so minuscule that it's hard to find, if it exists at all.
In modern US politics, we confuse aesthetics with substance so frequently that it's no wonder there are still people who think "lesser evil/harm reduction voting" is an effective or even necessary way to run anything
I don't even think it's transparent that trans people or immigrants would have it better under a Harris administration. After all, the Democrats voted mostly en masse for Laken Riley, which as a law is pretty much a nuke dropped on due process and oversight of law enforcement, and their attitude toward trans people has been indistinguishable from their attitude toward queer people in the 90s: ew, but I guess I'll let you vote for me.
The white moderate has such a sanguine attachment to the police state (as long as the right people are running it, natch) that it's probably an unvarnished good when they learn a hard lesson about what police are and why they exist.
This No Kings protest will teach everyone who goes that police are not there to "protect and serve", but to suppress the people and guard the ruling class. I, for one, welcome my newly radicalized compatriots
One can hope that child rape and sex slavery are still something we can all condemn together.
What I fear is that Democrats won't pound this in the way it needs to be pounded in:
If Trump is in the files, they need to call him an "alleged pedophile" at every opportunity available. When MAGAs get angry, Dems/Libs need to smirk and say "I didn't realize you supported pedophilia, Speaker Johnson"
Every issue needs to be Epstein.
It's kind of our earlier discussion: a scheme to eliminate big donors doesn't work if you fudge it just a *leeeetle* bit for these specific big donors.
A loud support of unions doesn't matter if it comes and goes depending on what the consultants say.
EDIT: I think Democrats are addicted to default votes and have literally forgotten how to get affirmative ones. That's why absent a completely re-do of their leadership, I struggle to see the party doing any of this.
I agree with this.
IMO, the real issue then is one of credibility: Biden breaking the railroad strike harmed the Democrats far more than they acknowledge. That New Palestine happened weeks later, and they spent weeks trying to bury the story (despite the *black mushroom cloud* lol) just highlighted how wrong Biden was.
Democrats need consistency, and they need to enforce loyalty in the party ranks. WE know they can do that, because they *routinely* do it on the left.
I think this is a distraction because political leadership is about so much more than legislation, which is something Republicans have understood since Reagan and something Democrats haven't understood since JFK and RFK were assassinated.
The real missed play here isn't "immigration legislation"; it's calling out GOP lies about the impact immigration has on the country. It's acknowledging and celebrating our reliance on migrant workers. It's supporting their unions.
I have literally written essays on why the ACA was, in the end, a net negative for healthcare in the country, but this will have to do for this forum:
1) The ACA made assumptions about good faith on the part of the insurance companies that have proven to be naive
2) The resultant regulatory framework looks like it was written by industry consultants, and probably was
3) So today, millions "have" health insurance, but...
Friend, I'm telling you that neither of those bills was leftist, or sufficient.
You're saying "well, they made our extraordinarily brutal and evil system slightly less brutal and evil", and that's true-ish.
Like most Democratic "compromises", they gave away the long term for very minor and transient short term wins. I can't name a bill that did more, because the US is notorious for not doing *anything*. So kudos, I guess?
If you think ACA and Build Back Better were "major left policies" I have some shocking and disturbing news for you.
What do you do about the fact that Democrats don't have any credibility at all? That's the problem I can't find a solution for.
When a Democrat promises something good around policy, I literally sneer. It's like watching Trump call himself a "mega genius" or something: so transparently false that there isn't even a breath of time when I think "maybe they actually will-!"
Multiply me by 100 million voters, and that's your problem right there