Sorry this is kinda political. Is there an asklemmypolitics group this would be better for? I’m hoping not to get into the libs vs progressives political debate we see everywhere on here… Just want to know what people are actually looking for.
Sorry this is kinda political. Is there an asklemmypolitics group this would be better for? I’m hoping not to get into the libs vs progressives political debate we see everywhere on here… Just want to know what people are actually looking for.
Non-US guy here. I don’t get why there’s a choice whether to vote for him or not, when you know the alternative is Trump.
It’s clear Biden isn’t a great option, and there’s probably plenty of reasons not to want him. But is any of those reasons gonna get better in the next 4 years when his opponent would win?
What makes it clear that Biden isn’t a great option? It really annoys me that such a progressive administration in a very divided government is somehow not measuring up to the ever changing goal posts. The only perfect candidate to vote for is yourself, everyone else is a compromise.
The goalposts aren’t changing, for Leftists Capitalism itself is unacceptable and genocide is off the table. Biden meaningfully moving against either would garner more leftist support.
Like his many attempts to push back against corporations? Or do those not count?
What attempts? Minor pushbacks certainly count, but don’t actually threaten Capitalism.
Tens of thousands of dead kids, and he’s sending more bombs.
Mass graves of people buried alive with their hands bound, and he’s vetoing resolutions against Israel in the UN.
Bombing food trucks and the crowds surrounding them, and he’s making excuses for them.
Famine set to kill most if not all people in Gaza, and he keeps sending bombs.
For real, we’ve got the first openly pro-union president, we expanded NATO, student loan forgiveness, actual infrastructure funding, the first administration to openly push back against Israel during war time, all of that in only 4 years. He is the most effective president of my lifetime and I am happy to vote for him again.
Unions oppose/opposed NATO, especially autoworkers. Still more of a pro-union administration than we’ve gotten, I’ll give you. Not sure if putting a “pause” on sending 300 or so bombs to Israel 6 months into a genocide after we’ve sent several thousand or more since it started and vetoing Palestine’s full acceptance into the UN counts as “pushing back” against Israel
Are you thinking NAFTA? I’m not sure unions have much of a position on NATO.
Not everyone wants to vote strategically. Giving a candidate your vote is a form of endorsement. If I was a US citizen, I’d vote for Biden, and try to convince all my friends to do so, too. But I also understand the people who can’t bring themselves to vote for a guy supporting a genocide, no matter what the alternative is.
They’re basically saying “fuck it, if the system won’t give me a choice to vote against genocide, then I’m not participating in that system.”
No, this is a lie they tell themselves. Not voting isn’t not participating, because participating means making a choice for who will be president, and doing nothing is a choice. Not voting is equivalent to saying “I don’t care” or “I like both candidates equally”. People who don’t vote are participating, they’re just saying that they don’t care who gets elected.
The problem is, not voting is as far as they’ll actually go towards “not participating in that system”. They still want all the benefits that they get from the system.
So it becomes less of a politically motivated action and more of just a tantrum.
That’s what irks me the most, when people act like abstaining from an election is a grand act of protest that will change things for the better. I understand the reluctance to vote, but that should never be accompanied by a reluctance to act.
Vote for the mediocre guy who won’t stop funding a genocide abroad, or don’t vote and watch your rights get stripped, the EPA get demolished, and the funding for Israel increased.
This is no longer an election about voting for the candidate that makes you feel good about your choice, it’s a vote for our own collective survival.
If people have this view, then they should be even more concerned about a Trump second term. I’m sorry, this is unacceptable and it’s exhausting seeing it repeated on this platform. It shows a clear lack of understanding on how we’ve made progress in this country and a concerning misuse of emotion over critical thinking.
Modern governance has always been an uphill battle. Don’t throw away progress, as little as it may be. It’s still progress and gaining an inch every day is almost always better than going back a foot. It may take years to get that inch.
If we want change, start local and work up. Campaign for the people who see the world the way you do and fight for them. Organize. Not voting is by far one of the dumbest and most un-American thing you can do.
Yes, obviously stopping Trump is the priority. But, that’s not the point of the question. Imagining Biden actually did have to earn your vote, what would he need to do?
That attitude only leads to worse and worse candidates in a spiral to the bottom
Wrong. What leads to worse and worse candidates is the United States’ stupid ass voting system. That needs to be fixed.
A step into the right direction would be to not vote for the one party which massively profits from that.
That’s assuming there will even be candidates in the future.
In previous elections, I would have agreed with you, but Trump has already tried to destroy democracy once. I honestly don’t think that democracy will survive a second Trump term.
Few of the shitty things Trump was doing have actually stopped under Biden.
Kids in cages?
Reproductive Rights?
Student loan debt?
Trans rights?
Edit to add: A point in Biden’s favor was the Inflation Reduction Act which included some teeth to chase tax-dodging billionaires but Biden’s boner for genocide convinced him to remove all those to pass an “aid” package for Israel
What if the “democracy” we think we have is actually just oligarchy putting on a show… And the only way to really get a democracy is if we fight for it, and Trump gets the fight going faster so we can get to democracy faster? Just a hypothetical, not advocating for this. Obviously a violent revolution would suck, especially considering the US was literally designed to make peaceful revolution relatively easy, but I think those designs have been crushed at this point… By the oligarchy
How exactly do you think authoritarianism will lead to a collapse, and how will that collapse lead to democracy somehow winning out? Allowing fascists to take over just means we now live in a fascist society. When Germany turned fascist, they didn’t magically break up and become a shining example of democracy. It took serious external pressure for that to happen. Revolutions usually just change the power structure among those who were already in power-- they don’t suddenly grant power to the little guys. Even if, by some miracle, the US went full Nazi and didn’t just stay that way but somehow immediately collapsed, and hundreds of thousands died in a giant civil war and/or WWIII, and we don’t nuke each other off the face of the planet so hard it’s unrecoverable, you expect democracy will be the result? Why? How can you be sure?
TL;DR: Voting for a fascist won’t cause a collapse and a collapse won’t result in democracy, with any degree of certainty.
PLEASE actually think these things through instead of just throwing out ideas like this, because if people start to actually believe this we’re going to be in an INCREDIBLY dangerous situation (moreso than we already are!) and the entire world will suffer for it.
What if a revolution in the US caused a global economic collapse?
We tend to think of potential revolutions in the same way as the US Civil War, or the French or Russian revolutions. The problem is that a civil war would be much more like the British Civil War, and most people know very little about the French or Russian revolutions.
A Revolution or Civil war wouldn’t have 2 times. It’d have a dozen. We can’t agree on what the future of the country should be now, how would we in a Revolution? There would be Revolution, counter-revolution, a civil war where the sides shift every 6 months. And you know how other countries try to influence us now, with Russia interfering with elections and China manipulating companies? That’s with the full strength of the Federal government attempting to stop it. Now they’d get to do it with an extremely vulnerable, fractured country.
Add on to that that those other revolutions involved world powers, but in a far less connected world wide economy. The fall of the US looks less like the French Revolution, and more like the Bronze Age collapse.
I think it’s too soon to write off the US as irredeemable without revolution. The last time we had a brush with Fascism taking over the country, we got FDR and The New Deal. If we can avoid this brush with Fascism, we might get another chance at turning things around.
We’ll end up Balkanizing, then we can try again for something better
I feel like Bernie was our shot at a new FDR… And the establishment was able to quash that. I hope we can still do it, but it feels like there’s very little hope for a non violent way to get to actual democracy
There’s a good chance you’re right.
Heard it all before, you will hear it again
If we’re right I hope you step up to accept your blame in this
That sounds like it has to get worse before it can get better. Having trump would create motivation to improve things for getting a better candidate next election, something like that?
Doesn’t sound like a great option either. It’s not like there’s a ‘good’ option, just a ‘slightly better’ one.
That’s not how it works in practice. When a candidate wins, they’re established as a benchmark for what’s popular. This means candidates are more likely to be close to their position, but a bit left or right. This is called the “Overton Window” and it establishes what people talk about politically on the national stage.
When Trump got elected, he started expressing opinions about LGBTQ people, vaccines, etc. Everyone was then forced to argue around those points for 4 years. When Biden was elected, we started talking about unions, corporations, Israel and Palestine, etc. If you take a look at the EU, they’re talking about things like corporate gatekeepers, universal healthcare, and banning Nazi rhetoric.
By electing people who are progressively more and more to the left of the current democratic candidate, we can shift the Overton Window to begin talking about things like housing, UBI, corporate monopolies, etc. But it’s a gradual process, so we have to be persistent but accepting if it doesn’t all happen immediately.