- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
Sorry to beat the same drum in a short amount of time, but this is where thinking Biden wasn’t doing enough has led. Perfect being the enemy of the good and all. Explicit calls for ethnic cleansing were at least not on the table with the last administration.
People really didn’t understand how thin the line Kamala and Joe had to walk was. They need financing to win elections they can’t be hyper libs so aggressively or they wouldn’t have help from shitty corporate evil America
Anyone who fell for the genocide joe shit would fall flat on their face in a political world.
How well did that work for them? They had a billion dollar campaign, most of which was utterly wasted on advertising in already-saturated TV markets and pointless celebrity endorsements. Maybe they could have accepted less corporate money, been content with a mere $500 million campaign, and not driven their base away.
I think you mean “how did it work for us?”.
You have to live in this world too. Every person who decided they’d rather let Trump win than vote for Harris still has to inhabit this world and has to watch the shit they ushered into it. Americans who decided they care more about making a point than about the actual material results of the election have that blood on their hands just like the actual Trump voters do.
I think you fail to understand that 2024 was not the anomaly. 2020 was the anomaly. The Democratic Party, as it exists now, is fundamentally incapable of winning a presidential election. They are as incapable of it as the Libertarian or the Green Parties are. We currently have only a single viable party for the US presidential election.
DNC milquetoast centrism has been electorally dead since at least 2012. It failed in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Biden only managed to win in 2020 not because of his platform or message, but simply because of covid. Make no mistake, if not for covid, Trump would have easily won in 2020. They’ve been selling the same slop since Clinton ran in 1992. And the brand is old and tired.
There weren’t actually that many people who wanted to stop the Palestinian genocide but then voted for Trump. The vast, vast majority of the people you saw pleading online for Biden to do something ended up voting for Kamala. I certainly did.
Did Trump make inroads among the Muslim community? Sure. But he also made inroads among the Hispanic community. The anti-trans ads got way more Muslim votes for Trump than Biden’s Gaza policy ever did. The truth is just as plenty of Hispanic voters will vote for an anti-immigrant candidate, plenty of Muslim voters will vote for an anti-Palestine candidate. Palestine is just one of many nations in the Middle East. It’s supremely racist to lump all Muslims together as a single monolith and think all they care about is Palestine.
People were pleading with Kamala to make a change because it was one of the few opportunities she had to actually win the race. The DNC centrism is a politically dead philosophy. A radical departure from past policies was needed to give her any chance of victory. Making a hard break from Israel was just such a chance. It was one of the few slim chances she had to actually pull off this win. People were pleading with her to change policy on Gaza because they were trying to help her win. But she ignored them, and she also failed to make any meaningful change on any other substantial issue. Because of that she lost.
Kamala didn’t lose because of Gaza. She was already destined to lose before Gaza. But changing policy on Gaza was a squandered opportunity that could have saved her otherwise doomed campaign. It was an opportunity to make a clear sign saying, “I’m something new, let’s strike a new course.” But she decided to campaign with Liz Cheney instead. And she secured her place in Hell because of it.
i think the genocide joe libs were a strawman. everyone I know who was basing their decisions on the gaza genocide understood that Trump would be worse, and all of them decided to vote for Harris in the end anyway. If you personally know anyone who did actually abstain their vote over this issue, feel free to prove me wrong.
But to this point, you have to ask yourself: if Dems are doing almost all of the same evil shit as Republicans, but in a friendlier package, what is the point of voting for the Dems? If the billionaires have bought everyone on either side of the aisle, how can I trust any candidate to make votes that are in my best interest? Why should I be forced to vote for one of two candidates that are both bought and paid for by shitty corporate evil America? Trump isn’t an abberation - we got here because Dems refuse to stop playing the SuperPAC game. By refusing to take any action that might scare off donors, they set the stage for our current crisis. They aren’t the ones dismantling our government as we speak, but they ignored all the signs and continued governing as if we are still in the 90s, because none of the heinous shit they vote for actually affects them.
Read that list of executive orders and tell me again how the Democrats are just like the Republicans.
Why should you be forced to pick one? This isn’t some game design decision by the developers of your favorite MMO. You’re forced to pick one because you don’t have the spine to do anything else that can get results.
Are you out there being the change in the Democratic party? Are you out there forcing change with your actions? Are you actually doing something to have a choice between something other than two parties?
Or are you just passively sitting back and complaining that nobody gave you the choice you’d rather make? The level of helplessness in the decision to just let everyone around you suffer because you don’t like the choices that your utter passivity has presented you with is absolutely wild.
This isn’t a game. This isn’t a boycott. This is our planet, our species, and our lives. Real people, likely including yourself, will suffer because you refuse to do anything but wait for someone to come hand you a warm bottle of milk that you won’t turn your nose up at. But you’d rather starve and scream and then say “look what you did by failing to give me the choice I would rather have had.”
Y’all need to wake up.
We live in a world of specialization of labor. That is how civilizations are built. I don’t have to be a blacksmith to know that a crooked nail is a poorly made one. I don’t have to be a doctor to know that a witch doctor is not a real physician. I don’t have to be a politician to know when a politician is utterly failing at their job.
I mean, that’s the conversation we need to be having as a country. Not to toot my own horn, but I warned about this in a column at the turn of the century that became known as my “Spam and kumquats” piece, arguing that if those are the only two things in the store, you’ll eventually think one is your favourite food.
On one hand, you’re not wrong.
On the other, getting a combo of “Congress + Senate + Supreme Court + Administration” controlled by the same people who walk around with Nazi flags, make Nazi salutes, call people “sub-human”, plan mass deportations… kind of goes beyond “shitty corporate evil”.
Damn, it’s too bad the average citizen is who participates in elections and not only political masterminds. I guess nobody could have known to account for that.
Who needs to be a political mastermind?
I remember when it was a foregone conclusion that Nazis were pieces of shit and their ideology deserved no quarter.
I explicitly learned this in fucking elementary school.
I mean, I’ve been homeless for nearly a year and a half and saw this coming. You don’t have to be some political savant.
It takes half a brain cell to look at your options and know the one is far worse for anything you support than another. It takes two brain cells to know politicians are held to their financial benefactors.
If your conclusion is “non voters are just stupid” without examining what in their lives led to them feeling like their vote won’t matter or count (with reason, in some cases) you’re not really doing anything other than venting about losing.
We don’t only live in a nation that is heavily propagandized and with a suppressed vote when Republicans have the presidency, that’s true all the time. Until we fix that and other issues with our political system, a portion of voters won’t be able to be (or have a reason to be) engaged.
So the solution to a society that’s propagandized to the point that people legitimately think allowing Trump to have the white house is ‘no different’ from making sure he doesn’t get it is… not trying to convince anyone that they’ve been misled? Not trying to point out how utterly foolish that kind of thinking is?
Literally just: don’t fight the propaganda machine? Let it happen meekly and quietly? Don’t spend any energy on trying to point out how utterly stupid it is to allow the worse option because you don’t absolutely love the marginally better one that will save lives?
Not sure how you could read my comments and come to the conclusion that I’m ready to just lay down and die ¯\_(ツ)_/¯