every time i see a “leftist” talk about not voting for biden, and thus supporting trump…
I’m sorry, it’s probably considered some sort of a smug European truism by now, but I have to say it. There is no left in the US two-party system. It’s right or center-right, that’s the choices you have, a giant douche or a turd sandwich.
used to be… now it’s fascism vs. center-right
More like right wing fascism vs neoliberal fascism.
This isn’t true in a global sense, nor is it true in a practical sense. There is a left in America, but it is tiny and rarely successful. Most liberal democracies are to the right of American Democrats at the global level on most issues. Every country has drifted rightward over the past half century, so the US isn’t unique.
Is it really center-right? I think it is more far right and facist extreme right. Atleast when observed from scandinavia
There is but you have to think of each party as having sub-parties within them. There aren’t external coalitions between parties but internal coalitions within the parties.
So a guy like Bernie Sanders is left, though not technically a Democrat, he caucuses with the Democrats effectively creating a coalition. There are many members within the Democratic Party that are also left wing, and others that are center, and others that could be considered right wing.
The Republicans are similar, but have an internal coalition with the far right MAGA faction. Which causes them a lot of problems.
The primary system is effectively a run off system which is used to determine a final two candidates to vote for in the final election. This system is old and has some bizarre traditions and has vulnerabilities to there being a third party spoiling everything.
Obviously it’s a crusty system that developed without planning, but the the Presidential election it’s not that dissimilar to France’s run-off system, just takes more time. And the legislatures having coalitions between people with different politics happens everywhere, it’s just happening within the parties and requires people to vote in primaries to get more representatives that have similar views to their own to make up a greater percentage of the coalition (which also happens everywhere).
In fact having coalitions within a party gives people more information when voting. If I’m voting for one of a dozen parties I don’t have a say over how a coalition is formed after an election. Someone declaring which coalition they intend to be a part of before the electorate votes gives the electorate both a say as to which individual they want (via primaries) and which coalition they want (in the general election).
Agreed in the general election.
Strong disagree for primaries.
I live in a red state so it doesn’t make any difference who I vote for. I’m not voting for Biden because I don’t want to support the Democrats and my vote doesn’t matter anyway. If I lived in a state where it mattered then I would probably vote for Biden because he’s not Trump.
Please still vote though! At least rest of the way down the ballot. The more local the office the more weight your vote has. Plus there is legislation to vote on. Sorry if you were already planning to, this was also more for anyone who agreed with the sentiment and will stay home.
Agreed. Local candidates and referendum votes are often more directly impactful to local communities.
Things like legalization of weed, protection of abortion rights, and ranked choice voting usually show up as referendum votes. And when it comes to how homelessness, police, financial aid, schools, etc. in your area are managed, that’s all local politics.
Exactly!!! Locally they are trying to recall a school board member for basically being liberal. Mask mandates, covid policies, some sort of race related class or club… you know the real egregious stuff. That’s really where conservatives are more active too.
If Biden wanted my vote he could simply stop supporting genocide. Really quite a low bar for him to clear.
There’s “holding your nose” and there’s voting for someone actively aiding a genocide.
there’s “administration aiding a genocide, but also doing so because they’re being lied to by israel, who also has a massive propaganda campaign to manipulate americans into supporting them…”
versus
Project 2025 and their plans of a fascist dictatorship right here, complete with a genocide of trans people and hispanics… and muslims… AND a continuation of supporting israel…
oh and aiding russians commiting genocide in ukraine.
voting trump in won’t save palestine, and it’ll make it soo so much worse
This is the stance I really don’t understand. You do know that if Trump wins, even the limp-wristed calls for constraint go away? That Trump will actively encourage and endorse the genocide? That things will get measurably worse for the Palestinians?
I really do want to understand how people who hold this particular position think not voting for Biden will improve the lot of the Palestinians. Please, enlighten me.
I won’t vote for someone who’s pro genocide. It’s pretty simple.
People who aid and abet genocide don’t get my vote.
Biden’s not changing course, so he clearly thinks he can win just with the votes of people who are okay voting for a pro-genocide candidate. That’s his call to make.
Sorry for the delayed response.
This year, it’s a choice between a person who’s funding a genocide while applying (admittedly limited) political pressure to restrain Israel, and a person who’s publically stated that he supports the genocide and thinks it isn’t going fast enough, and who would increase funding to increase the speed of the genocide.
By not voting for the former, you are implicitly endorsing the latter (saying, he’s just as hood as the former), and are culpable if he is elected - the definition of moral evil includes inaction. Sitting this one out because you like neither candidate is a moral evil, since one candidate is categorically worse (genocide-wise) than the other.
Biden has agency here. He could very easily get my vote, but chooses not to. He’s making conscious decisions with expectations to how people will receive them. That leaves us with two possibilities, which I alluded to earlier:
- He cares more about genocide than winning the election.
- He thinks he can win without the anti-genocide vote.
If it’s 1, I don’t want him as my president. If it’s 2, he’s not expecting my vote and nor shall he get it.
Do you really believe not voting for Biden deceases the likelihood of genocide in Gaza? Because the alternative seems so much worse in every way, both for Gaza and so many other massively important issues
And I’m sure letting trump have an easier time getting elected will make things so much better.
I would recommend talking to your local representatives about the current situation and how important it is to you and expressing how you may support other people running against them if they don’t support a ceasefire.
Local elections are really important.
I used to know a poli-sci researcher who was trying to take a big-data look at the success and failure of revolutions, taking in variables like “how many demonstrators rallied against the government?” “How many dissidents were disappeared by internal security forces?” and even things like “how many bullet holes are there on the buildings around the main protest venue in the capital?”
I asked him once if he’d discovered the secret to a successful revolution, and he just grimaced at me.
Even the American and French revolutions weren’t successful
American here, asking genuinely: how was the American revolution unsuccessful? My understanding is that the goal was to make the British go away, and that they did accomplish that in the end. What am I missing?
The goal wasn’t to make the British go away, the goal was to have representation and more than half of the people in the colonies weren’t even for the revolution. This is why they dressed up as natives for the Boston tea party so they could blame that shit on the natives.
The support of independence wasn’t much till Paul Revere demonized the Boston massacre into being much more villainous than it was.
The colonies kinda got what they want in revolution with the articles of confederation but with the rise of the federalists the US was created as a V2 of the British empire.
That’s a take
I don’t see how history is a take. I literally wrote papers in college about this.
Most of history is made up of stories.
We can tell different stories of history and many even conflicting ones can be true, but they don’t all have the same weight in their impact to the course of events.
Yeah just like how Paul Revere made up the story about the Boston massacre to sell papers.
North Korea 2024
People don’t seem to realize, as it becomes easier to automate and maintain oppressive systems, the more scarce that democracy will be. Ask Russians.
The Luddites were right.
Trying to switch the term Troglodyte with Luddite makes your comment even more ironic. The British government ultimately dispatched 12,000 troops to suppress Luddite activity, and as Lord Byron denounced “I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey; but never, under the most despotic of infidel governments, did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return, in the very heart of a Christian country”.
It isn’t the technology, it’s how it’s used, and authoritarians are being much quicker on the uptake because of the iffiness of democratic infighting that has also been unable to topple, suppress, or even stop the power of authoritarian states from growing.
Authoritarianism is extremely vulnerable to natural disasters, ask Syria. Climate change will ultimately being about the collapse of all authoritarianism because there simply won’t be enough excess to support hierarchy. The question is if we will be smart enough to being about that change before material conditions force it to happen.
Accelerationism is literally foreign propaganda, and has its roots in a few European leftists that had their views hijacked as a way of pushing radicalisation to status quo liberals.
It’s literally nonsense, and the equivalent of Christian Zionism / eschatology in that it’s a set of incredibly harmful, baseless beliefs that advocate for mass misery in the name of vague hope of an accelerated magical delivery of human kind to a new era of happiness and joy.
It’s necessary to hold two truths: liberalism always leads to fascism and accelerationism does not prevent fascism. So one should both delay the inevitability of fascism by participating in liberal democracy and do everything possible to make liberal democracy unnecessary as quickly as possible before the collapse.
The thing that can be especially hard for some people to understand is that not everyone experiences fascism at the same time. It’s not a switch. It’s a decline. Some people have been expecting fascism for decades or generations now. So people will be at different places in terms of interacting with the system. We are all trying to survive. We need as much time as possible to build a resistence movement, but, at the same time, no matter what compromises we get via electoralism those can be destroyed instantly if we only rely on the state to protect them.
You’re trying to read too much into this.
When the state doesn’t work for enough people anymore, it collapses into fascism. It always does. Unless it collapses to foreign forces of course.
Accelerationism at this point is merely an argument for liberals to convince people who are not fascists to support their liberalism as a lesser danger.
It won’t work. Liberalism will have to do something, not the people who don’t believe the bullshit anymore. And interestingly, throughout history, liberals always choose fascism over anything else that would remove them some power.
So don’t pretend it’s up to the leftists to choose. You, the liberals, did this to the world. Time to open your eyes.
Liberalism is responsible for this fascist doom, not the left. That’s not only true for the US. That’s also true for all of Europe. Liberals vanquished the left. Now is the time to fight fascism. That’s what you earned. The left will fight. Will the liberals do it?
Accelerationism at this point is merely an argument for liberals to convince people who are not fascists to support their liberalism as a lesser danger.
You make me mad. You make me mad because you’ve deluded yourself into believing fatalistic death cult BS, willing to drag other people down with you. Liberals might be deluded and wrong, but you’re honestly worse. Liberals are more open minded than you, more hopeful than you, and believe in building a popular coalition. I don’t care if you recognize capitalism is bad, you’re not helping anyone do anything about it.
“Eat shit and die” is what I’m hearing from your empty justifications for inaction. I’ve barely started living my life, and you’re saying “it just needs to end. Sorry. Nothing to be done.” I like my life, unlike you apparently, so I’m going to reject your ideas emphatically.
Fuck your opinion. Just like fascist dribble, it deserves no respect.
You don’t understand. I did not deluded myself to anything. I abandoned a system that’s working against so many people.
The question is not for the left whether to support liberals or fascists. The question is for liberals whether to support socialism or fascism. It’s the people in power who get to choose. And liberals are in power for so many decades that they have no excuse for the shit we’re in now.
The system is broken, fucked, dysfunction, shitty, and unacceptable. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s better than openly genocidal fascism. I might die under Democrats; I will die under Republicans.
We inherently lack freedom of choice on most things. You don’t choose the class of your parents. You don’t choose your gender, sex, attraction, neurotypicality, ethnicity, race, culture, or access to learning as a child. You have to play the cards you’re given.
In a purely descriptive sense, Republican control will result in every bad thing that would happen under Democrats, plus all the promises they’re making about LGBTQ genocide, absurd deregulation, removal of every social program, invading Mexico, targeted prosecution of political threats, and mandatory fascist propaganda in schools. Those are just some of consequences id Republicans win.
The cost of the 2nd amendment is thousands of deaths from guns every year that wouldn’t have happened without it. 2nd amendment advocates constantly ignore that consequence. If you try to show it to them, they mentally cannot perceive it. They ignore the costs and live in the delusion that they get a free lunch. A lot of conservative logic hinges on ignoring “externalities,” that they don’t personally have to deal with. They love talking about basic economics, but their supposed worldview cannot accept it.
Even the cynical conservatives are often living a delusion. They recognize the direct pain they cause to poor people, but they fail to recognize the long term cost of their behavior. Encouraging global fascism has the adorable effect of increasing the risk of global conflict. Just as most liberals ignored the fascism that capitalism leads to, fascists ignore the serious war that nationalism leads to.
Modern war between nations cannot be won by the participants. Liberals aren’t much better on this front, nor are many socialists for that matter. The reality is that we need deescalation or everyone might lose. We don’t just need to not accelerate, we need to slam on the breaks. The odds are stacked against success, but fueling the fire is joining the global death cult that fascists and liberals are unwittingly leading.
In short, you’re thinking small like humans are designed to do. Humans are dangerous, so not trying to exploit them isn’t just morally right, but prudent.
I’m not fueling any fire. It’s already burning, and voting for liberals is what fuels the fire.
You’re talking about US politics. Isn’t the situation dire already? Republican already are indirectly supporting Russian war, fomenting civil war, and destroying people rights. Are you telling me that media are overstating all of this? That the situation is fine actually and it can go like this for many more years yet?
How did it got better with Biden in 3 and a half year?
It would have been worst is always the predicament of the liberals. Everything else is worse. There is no alternative. But it’s a dead end. And we’re on the wall already.
Supporting the liberals is fighting those who want to make a better world. It’s supporting fascism.
And to get back to the subject : not voting is a right, and it is the only vote that doesn’t support fascism.
You can choose to commit suicide. It is an option. That doesn’t mean you should take it.
So you’re actually the desperate one if you think that not voting this election is committing suicide.
Yes. I am desperate to live. That’s a virtue, not a vice.
At the end of the day, you just have an inaccurate view of reality. You’re motivated by anger to think prolonging liberalism isn’t worth it because it’s a shit worldview that should be destroyed. I agree that it sucks and should be replaced, but I recognize that empowering fascism has no real upside. It doesn’t matter what liberalism “deserves,” as blame is only useful in guiding us to real justice. Mechanically, what is the best strategy for minimizing harm and maximizing well being?
![Accelerationist [RULE]](https://files.catbox.moe/052f42.jpeg){kind=link}