Exactly. It was a douche and a turd sandwich. Refusing to vote because “they’re a turd sandwich” is simply saying “I’m okay with the douche”. It’s a 2 party system. There are no good candidates. Only one that’s marginally better than the other. Not voting is tacitly voting for the worst one.
Not a USAmerican, but by that logic:
Are Kamala, her party and her supporters who couldn’t get those people to vote for Kamala also responsible for the increased suffering?
Are they responsible for the people not being convinced that the suffering would be lesser under Kamala?
Did Kamala and party show significant effort and good faith to woo those people?
Or was it the 99% Hitler vs 100% Hitler thing? Asking since most online discourse I saw on it here in lemmy was like that, where they’re saying Trump would be worse, instead of saying that Kamala would be better, de-escalate stuff etc.
If that’s how they place the blame, then that’d be cool.
But other than that, in reality, it lilely seems to become a blame game, where they don’t want to look at why they lost the trust of the folk who they are blaming.
Though, I’m just seeing online interactions. Maybe offline interactions ae much more decent and useful.
The Dem establishment will obviously blame anyone but themselves. That’s what establishments do. That’s why, assuming there are still free and fair elections in America in two years time, left wing voters in the US need to start planning now how they’re going to primary out every last establishment Dem who thought that leaning right was the answer, and replace them with people who do believe in real progressive politics.
It won’t work everywhere. It can’t. And some of those people will inevitably get caught up in the machine, or turn out not to be what they claimed. Reality is messy. But get enough of them in and you can make a real difference. The mid-terms are the American left’s opportunity to do what the right did in 2010.
But at the end of the day none of this matters, because we’re just two outsiders pontificating over another country’s politics. Despite how deeply those politics affect the whole world, there’s nothing we can actually do about it, other than focusing on what we can do in our own back yards.
I was gonna write something but I just started to rumble half way through, so I’ll just leave this very nice comment from another user that will answer probably everything that might be confusing you into your current position :
The DNC learned nothing from 2016. It is the definition of irrationality to do the same thing twice and expect different outcomes.
Bernie could garner huge crowds and massive support by campaigning on the basis of policy that has mass appeal, such as universal healthcare. Kamala chose not to do this because she prioritised business as usual over stopping Trump.
You say “things will get worse under Trump”. That’s true. But things got worse under Biden/Harris after Trump’s first term as president - environmental policy, the border camps, reproductive rights, trans rights, cop city, the genocide of Palestinians etc. So when you say “we must vote for Kamala or things will get worse” that line of reasoning is at best unconvincing and at worst it betrays the 4-year state of amnesia you have lived in because you are so politically detached from the consequences of your voting.
Telling people to protect democracy—the system where you vote for the candidate who best represents your political values—by voting for a person who in no way represents your political values in order to save democracy is tortured logic.
No, I’m not an accelerationist. Me advocating for people not to vote for Kamala Harris is not an accelerationist position because we should not be giving a mandate for a genocide, climate change, and civil rights-eroding accelerationist by voting for them.
How many delegates did Harris win in the last primaries? How many did she win in the primaries to get her to run for president this time? Is this what you claim as your democracy?
When I list a number of legitimate grievances with Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s regime and issues with Kamala’s election platform, none of which have a single thing to do with her race or gender, and you respond by calling me racist or misogynistic it drives home how little you are willing to listen to my political concerns and how intransigent your favoured party is. When you act this way and then tell me that people have to vote for Kamala in order to push her left while you yourself are unwilling to even acknowledge the fact that Kamala’s platform has serious issues, it signals to me that there will be no shifting left on anything. I already knew this fact but you have done an exceptional job of inadvertently teaching other people this lesson.
When entering into negotiations with someone, it’s a uniquely terrible tactic to hand over your one state-sanctioned bargaining chip before making even one single demand.
You are chasing the DNC to the right and one day you will wake up and wonder to yourself “How did I end up all the way over here?” I’m not following you into that marsh but you’re welcome to go into it yourself, just don’t get upset at me when I point out what you’re heading into and don’t get angry when I refuse to blindly follow you.
Kamala Harris is the only thing that can stop fascism. Kamala Harris cannot do anything to protect reproductive rights, trans rights, Palestinian lives, the lives of Marcellus Williams and Robert Robertson etc. because she is powerless to do anything about it 🫠
Kamala Harris said she would “follow the law” regarding trans people. She was angling to become the primary lawmaker in the US. Not only does this show a lack of whatever libs care about like “leadership” but it shows how cowardly and detestable she is because she understands the law and she is willing to follow it but not when it comes to things like international law, only when it’s laws that she can use to hide behind while trans people are subjected to further oppression through legislation that strips them of rights.
Historically, fascism has never been stopped at the ballot box. You being convinced that this is possible does not sway my opinion on any matter aside from my estimation of your political awareness and your ability to achieve change.
You had four years (eight+ if you count Trump’s regime and the lead-up to it in this calculation) to “stop fascism”. What did you do in this period of time? Did you push Biden and Kamala to adopt policies which have mass support? Did you do anything except go to back to brunch?
When you accuse me of not organising irl, when you say that I’m not doing anything:
I’m not about to dox myself
I’m not going to make a laundry list of the things that I have done w/organising and activism just to impress (?) you, especially not when you’ve already told me that I haven’t done anything
It’s a huge self-report and it’s obvious that you’re projecting
You alienate others by telling them “I do not recognise your efforts and everything that you have done is unimportant in my estimation”
You aren’t entitled to others’ votes. Stop pretending that you are.
We aren’t splitting the so-called left, Kamala Harris did that all by herself.
You have no red lines. There is nothing that could make you not support Kamala Harris and we know it. Telling people to drop their standards and ignore their conscience to vote for Kamala is a fatal strategy and you killed her campaign by deploying it.
Selective invoking of people of colour to advocate for Kamala was ridiculous and disgustingly tokenistic. Yes, Angela Davis is smarter than I am. Telling me that I’m stupider than her and so I should take my political cues from her with regards to electoralism is a losing argument and it’s low-key ableist became you’re arguing that the person who lacks intelligence also has a commensurate lack of political virtue. Historically speaking, very intelligent people have had absolutely atrocious politics. Also people like Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas are almost certainly a lot smarter than I am. It would be wrong of me not to defer to their superior intellect and their politics, isn’t that right?
You say that democracy is going to be strangled in its crib and that fascism has come to town. You are maybe posting about this online in your echo chamber and that’s it. You do not take politics seriously, not even your own, yet you demand that I take your politics more seriously than you yourself do. There are things that I am doing right now to avert this trend in politics. There are things that I would do if fascism proper had seized power, none of which I would post about online. We are not the same. Enjoy your brunch though.
Almost all of your arguments for voting for Kamala Harris (aside from the “it will stop Trump” argument which, in retrospect, appears to be a dismal failure) also apply to reasons for voting for Trump. “You can push them left”, “By voting we will get a seat at the table”, “Voting third party or not voting at all is a wasted vote”, “We have to vote this way to protect the country”, “Politics is about comprise - you cannot expect them to be your perfect political candidate”, and whatever hold-your-nose-and-vote arguments you trot out. Did you ever stop to ask yourself why it is that you do not find these arguments for voting Trump to be convincing?
Last time Trump got elected you were brutally vindictive. You took glee in the thought of people in red states and marginalised groups suffering due to policy and things like natural disasters, regardless of their politics or how they chose to vote. You were excited to tell these people that they were going to get deported and put into concentration camps. You will do it again this time too because you have learned nothing. November came and these people you targeted with your vicious schadenfreude remembered. They aren’t going to forget how effortlessly you abandoned them and how you wished the worst suffering and ill-fate upon them.
You said that a non-vote or a 3rd party vote is a vote for Trump. We have been shouting from the rooftops that Kamala Harris is fundamentally unwilling and incapable of stopping Trump. History vindicates this position; Trump managed to win the popular vote while Harris underperformed by millions of votes, even compared to Joe Biden. Thus your support for Kamala Harris was therefore support for Donald Trump’s presidency. Congratulations on getting the candidate which you campaigned so hard to get elected.
I don’t care about the US. America must die and if Trump is to be its undertaker then I am relieved to hear it. What you have done is to accelerate the destruction of the US. If I were cynical about achieving my political objectives, wouldn’t have said any of the above. If I was an accelerationist I would have been pushing for all of the things that you’ve been pushing for instead of pushing back against them. I would have even gone so far as to furnish your side with more poisoned chalice arguments (I do this with the far right, I exactly know how to do it). Instead I’ve been defending your political project against your own excesses and self-defeating narrow mindedness. You are right in the fact that I am your enemy but you are wrong to oppose me because you are a far greater enemy to yourself than I could ever have the stomach to be. You won’t listen to a word of what I’ve said because you refuse to learn and to reflect.
A cynical person might argue that my strategy is to oppose you in the knowledge that this will make you react by becoming more deeply entrenched in your position, encouraging a sort of siege mentality in you, so that you see any criticism or difference of opinion as being an existential political threat that must be eradicated as a means to create more disaffected people to radicalise out of bourgeois democracy. This is not my intent. If things improve for the proles and the marginalised because of what I argue for then that’s a win for my political objectives. However I can’t control your actions and if you choose to respond by taking a hatchet to your precious liberal democracy then, likewise, that’s a win for my political objectives. Which way, western man?
So, it was worth Trump getting a second term in order for you to maintain your moral purity?
Listen, fuck Harris and every other Dem who failed to condemn the war in Gaza, they all deserve to burn in hell for that.
But did you really get what you wanted out of this?
Exactly. It was a douche and a turd sandwich. Refusing to vote because “they’re a turd sandwich” is simply saying “I’m okay with the douche”. It’s a 2 party system. There are no good candidates. Only one that’s marginally better than the other. Not voting is tacitly voting for the worst one.
Removed by mod
Not a USAmerican, but by that logic:
Are Kamala, her party and her supporters who couldn’t get those people to vote for Kamala also responsible for the increased suffering?
Are they responsible for the people not being convinced that the suffering would be lesser under Kamala?
Did Kamala and party show significant effort and good faith to woo those people?
Or was it the 99% Hitler vs 100% Hitler thing? Asking since most online discourse I saw on it here in lemmy was like that, where they’re saying Trump would be worse, instead of saying that Kamala would be better, de-escalate stuff etc.
Yes, they are morally culpable too. Even more so than the people who refused to vote for them.
That’s the thing about ethics when you actually apply it in reality; someone else being wrong doesn’t mean you’re right.
If that’s how they place the blame, then that’d be cool.
But other than that, in reality, it lilely seems to become a blame game, where they don’t want to look at why they lost the trust of the folk who they are blaming.
Though, I’m just seeing online interactions. Maybe offline interactions ae much more decent and useful.
The Dem establishment will obviously blame anyone but themselves. That’s what establishments do. That’s why, assuming there are still free and fair elections in America in two years time, left wing voters in the US need to start planning now how they’re going to primary out every last establishment Dem who thought that leaning right was the answer, and replace them with people who do believe in real progressive politics.
It won’t work everywhere. It can’t. And some of those people will inevitably get caught up in the machine, or turn out not to be what they claimed. Reality is messy. But get enough of them in and you can make a real difference. The mid-terms are the American left’s opportunity to do what the right did in 2010.
But at the end of the day none of this matters, because we’re just two outsiders pontificating over another country’s politics. Despite how deeply those politics affect the whole world, there’s nothing we can actually do about it, other than focusing on what we can do in our own back yards.
Increased suffering?
How can their suffering be increased more than it is now?
Israel is already getting everything could have ever wished for. There is nothing trump could do to make that worse.
There were other reasons to vote for Harris, but this wasn’t one.
I was gonna write something but I just started to rumble half way through, so I’ll just leave this very nice comment from another user that will answer probably everything that might be confusing you into your current position :
The DNC learned nothing from 2016. It is the definition of irrationality to do the same thing twice and expect different outcomes.
Bernie could garner huge crowds and massive support by campaigning on the basis of policy that has mass appeal, such as universal healthcare. Kamala chose not to do this because she prioritised business as usual over stopping Trump.
You say “things will get worse under Trump”. That’s true. But things got worse under Biden/Harris after Trump’s first term as president - environmental policy, the border camps, reproductive rights, trans rights, cop city, the genocide of Palestinians etc. So when you say “we must vote for Kamala or things will get worse” that line of reasoning is at best unconvincing and at worst it betrays the 4-year state of amnesia you have lived in because you are so politically detached from the consequences of your voting.
Telling people to protect democracy—the system where you vote for the candidate who best represents your political values—by voting for a person who in no way represents your political values in order to save democracy is tortured logic.
No, I’m not an accelerationist. Me advocating for people not to vote for Kamala Harris is not an accelerationist position because we should not be giving a mandate for a genocide, climate change, and civil rights-eroding accelerationist by voting for them.
How many delegates did Harris win in the last primaries? How many did she win in the primaries to get her to run for president this time? Is this what you claim as your democracy?
When I list a number of legitimate grievances with Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s regime and issues with Kamala’s election platform, none of which have a single thing to do with her race or gender, and you respond by calling me racist or misogynistic it drives home how little you are willing to listen to my political concerns and how intransigent your favoured party is. When you act this way and then tell me that people have to vote for Kamala in order to push her left while you yourself are unwilling to even acknowledge the fact that Kamala’s platform has serious issues, it signals to me that there will be no shifting left on anything. I already knew this fact but you have done an exceptional job of inadvertently teaching other people this lesson.
When entering into negotiations with someone, it’s a uniquely terrible tactic to hand over your one state-sanctioned bargaining chip before making even one single demand.
You are chasing the DNC to the right and one day you will wake up and wonder to yourself “How did I end up all the way over here?” I’m not following you into that marsh but you’re welcome to go into it yourself, just don’t get upset at me when I point out what you’re heading into and don’t get angry when I refuse to blindly follow you.
Kamala Harris is the only thing that can stop fascism. Kamala Harris cannot do anything to protect reproductive rights, trans rights, Palestinian lives, the lives of Marcellus Williams and Robert Robertson etc. because she is powerless to do anything about it 🫠
Kamala Harris said she would “follow the law” regarding trans people. She was angling to become the primary lawmaker in the US. Not only does this show a lack of whatever libs care about like “leadership” but it shows how cowardly and detestable she is because she understands the law and she is willing to follow it but not when it comes to things like international law, only when it’s laws that she can use to hide behind while trans people are subjected to further oppression through legislation that strips them of rights.
Historically, fascism has never been stopped at the ballot box. You being convinced that this is possible does not sway my opinion on any matter aside from my estimation of your political awareness and your ability to achieve change.
You had four years (eight+ if you count Trump’s regime and the lead-up to it in this calculation) to “stop fascism”. What did you do in this period of time? Did you push Biden and Kamala to adopt policies which have mass support? Did you do anything except go to back to brunch?
When you accuse me of not organising irl, when you say that I’m not doing anything:
I’m not about to dox myself
I’m not going to make a laundry list of the things that I have done w/organising and activism just to impress (?) you, especially not when you’ve already told me that I haven’t done anything
It’s a huge self-report and it’s obvious that you’re projecting
You alienate others by telling them “I do not recognise your efforts and everything that you have done is unimportant in my estimation”
You aren’t entitled to others’ votes. Stop pretending that you are.
We aren’t splitting the so-called left, Kamala Harris did that all by herself.
You have no red lines. There is nothing that could make you not support Kamala Harris and we know it. Telling people to drop their standards and ignore their conscience to vote for Kamala is a fatal strategy and you killed her campaign by deploying it.
Selective invoking of people of colour to advocate for Kamala was ridiculous and disgustingly tokenistic. Yes, Angela Davis is smarter than I am. Telling me that I’m stupider than her and so I should take my political cues from her with regards to electoralism is a losing argument and it’s low-key ableist became you’re arguing that the person who lacks intelligence also has a commensurate lack of political virtue. Historically speaking, very intelligent people have had absolutely atrocious politics. Also people like Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas are almost certainly a lot smarter than I am. It would be wrong of me not to defer to their superior intellect and their politics, isn’t that right?
You say that democracy is going to be strangled in its crib and that fascism has come to town. You are maybe posting about this online in your echo chamber and that’s it. You do not take politics seriously, not even your own, yet you demand that I take your politics more seriously than you yourself do. There are things that I am doing right now to avert this trend in politics. There are things that I would do if fascism proper had seized power, none of which I would post about online. We are not the same. Enjoy your brunch though.
Almost all of your arguments for voting for Kamala Harris (aside from the “it will stop Trump” argument which, in retrospect, appears to be a dismal failure) also apply to reasons for voting for Trump. “You can push them left”, “By voting we will get a seat at the table”, “Voting third party or not voting at all is a wasted vote”, “We have to vote this way to protect the country”, “Politics is about comprise - you cannot expect them to be your perfect political candidate”, and whatever hold-your-nose-and-vote arguments you trot out. Did you ever stop to ask yourself why it is that you do not find these arguments for voting Trump to be convincing?
Last time Trump got elected you were brutally vindictive. You took glee in the thought of people in red states and marginalised groups suffering due to policy and things like natural disasters, regardless of their politics or how they chose to vote. You were excited to tell these people that they were going to get deported and put into concentration camps. You will do it again this time too because you have learned nothing. November came and these people you targeted with your vicious schadenfreude remembered. They aren’t going to forget how effortlessly you abandoned them and how you wished the worst suffering and ill-fate upon them.
You said that a non-vote or a 3rd party vote is a vote for Trump. We have been shouting from the rooftops that Kamala Harris is fundamentally unwilling and incapable of stopping Trump. History vindicates this position; Trump managed to win the popular vote while Harris underperformed by millions of votes, even compared to Joe Biden. Thus your support for Kamala Harris was therefore support for Donald Trump’s presidency. Congratulations on getting the candidate which you campaigned so hard to get elected.
I don’t care about the US. America must die and if Trump is to be its undertaker then I am relieved to hear it. What you have done is to accelerate the destruction of the US. If I were cynical about achieving my political objectives, wouldn’t have said any of the above. If I was an accelerationist I would have been pushing for all of the things that you’ve been pushing for instead of pushing back against them. I would have even gone so far as to furnish your side with more poisoned chalice arguments (I do this with the far right, I exactly know how to do it). Instead I’ve been defending your political project against your own excesses and self-defeating narrow mindedness. You are right in the fact that I am your enemy but you are wrong to oppose me because you are a far greater enemy to yourself than I could ever have the stomach to be. You won’t listen to a word of what I’ve said because you refuse to learn and to reflect.
A cynical person might argue that my strategy is to oppose you in the knowledge that this will make you react by becoming more deeply entrenched in your position, encouraging a sort of siege mentality in you, so that you see any criticism or difference of opinion as being an existential political threat that must be eradicated as a means to create more disaffected people to radicalise out of bourgeois democracy. This is not my intent. If things improve for the proles and the marginalised because of what I argue for then that’s a win for my political objectives. However I can’t control your actions and if you choose to respond by taking a hatchet to your precious liberal democracy then, likewise, that’s a win for my political objectives. Which way, western man?