[alt text: a screenshot of a tweet by @delaney_nolan, which says, “Biden/Harris saw this polling and decided to keep unconditionally arming Israel”. Below the tweet is a screenshot from an article, which states: “In Pennsylvania, 34% of respondents said they would be more likely to vote for the Democratic nominee if the nominee vowed to withold weapons to Israel, compared to 7% who said they would be less likely. The rest said it would make no difference. In Arizona, 35% said they’d be more likely, while 5% would be less likely. And in Georgia, 39% said they’d be more likely, also compared to 5% who would be less likely.”]
So so so many people keep pointing at Trump and saying “But he’s the worst/we’re all doomed/holy shit you need to vote blue no matter who” and comments about “perfect being the enemy of the good” so we should hold our nose and support Democrats.
I feel like I’m the only person who remembers how hyperbolic we all were about Mitt Romney or John McCain being existential threats to democracy. South Park literally made fun of everybody at the time pointing at how running such a divisive campaign let them distract the public from their real goal of stealing the Hope Diamond (obviously). How many of us would BEG for Romney at the top of the Republican ticket at this point?
So sure, Trump is the threat now. When are we supposed to stop rewarding mediocre neoliberalism then? If it wasn’t 2016 or 2020 or 2024 then when? Trump will eventually die and some new Republican will take his place as the leader of the party. EVERY Republican will be the next existential threat and we’ll be scolded and told to hold our nose yet again and vote for the Democrat. If someone can tell me the “end date” where I don’t have to choose between the lesser of two evils, I’d love to know when that is.
I don’t blame other citizens for voting how they do. Everyone has to decide for themselves their red lines for support and in the privacy of the voting booth who they want to support. I do blame Democratic leadership for not learning a single lesson from 2016 about hand picking candidates and browbeating everyone into thinking that’s OK.
When are we supposed to stop rewarding mediocre neoliberalism then?
When neoliberalism is consistently beating fascism.
OK, how do we know we’re “beating fascism” and can back off? What stops Democratic leadership from arguing that the most boring ass middle of the road fiscal conservative Republican on the planet is “Trump 2.0” and must be stopped?
I don’t disagree on what you said at all, but so much of this is a war of messaging and marketing. If an amorphous “leadership” just keeps arguing the Republicans are all fascists regardless of what their actions/deeds/etc…actually suggest, how then do we push back on that narrative without being called a Russian plant or Republican sympathizer? In an age of clickbait, outrage manufacturing and people isolating in their own news spheres, it’s super easy for those with power to just lie and stay in power.
They made their decisions and you made yours. If you decided that we’d be better off with Trump, that’s on you. Own it.
Putting Trump in office makes Gaza worse. He’s promised us as much. Maybe you proved a point to the Democrats, and maybe you didn’t. Maybe now they’ll lean even harder to the center. Who knows. That’s a gamble you took, and you made steep sacrifices to make that gamble.
Gambling with someone’s life to make a political point does not make you their ally.
No, it can be more than one person’s fault. It’s Harris’s fault, and it’s also the fault of the people who decided fascism was an acceptable alternative to capitalist liberalism.
I mean, you could try to understand what led people to that POV, and then build a coalition with those people so we can win next time. Or, we could just sit here and point fingers at each other til the end of time while the GOP continues to court more and more voters to their corner.
I’m all for being angry about this. It’s the day after the election, I’ve been anxious all day. It sucks. But let’s point our ire at the correct people: the Republicans that voted for Trump, and the Harris Campaign that did a piss poor job of courting undecided voters.
There is no next time. Don’t you understand? The people who hated Harris more than they hated fascism, voted in a dictatorship. The goal from here isn’t to win the next election, it’s to get our trans friends out and start a revolution. Trump’s reign will only be ended by violence. We aren’t getting centrists’ and moderates’ help with that. They are the enemy. They are the complicit citizens of a nation we are going to war with. Some of them will try to stop us, and we need to be prepared to kill them.
Fuck that, I’m blaming every single person that didn’t vote for Harris
I mean, if you’re referring to the people that voted for Trump, I’m right there with you. It’s absolutely mind-boggling that a rapist and convicted felon won the popular vote.
I steadfastly refuse to accept an apology on behalf of single-issue voters. Those abstentions and/or third party protest votes got us here. Anyone who refused to coalesce around (or at least hold their nose and vote for) the biggest “not Trump” candidate was failing to see or even acknowledge the bigger picture and larger threat. And now we all have to pay for that.
The electoral votes in a state go to the single candidate with the most votes. “Not Trump” was not a candidate. Furthermore, a third party candidate was never going to win. So, I will absolutely blame these so-called “allies” as I find them to be worse than the people who voted for Trump (at least they were honest about what they were doing).
I sincerely hope there is a future election where they have learned something from this. In the mean time, good luck everyone.
In the Weimar Republic, the Social Democrats (SPD) were the largest party as late as 1930, and had control thanks to a coalition with centrists.
In 1931, the Communists of Germany (KPD) – who had long taken offense at the compromises of the SPD – caucused with the Nazis to topple the Prussian government and remove the SPD from power, believing that Nazi rise would accelerate the collapse of capitalism and would trigger a “German October,” a proper communist revolution that would eliminate the Nazis and solve the shortcomings of the SPD.
On April 1, 1933, the Executive Committee of the Communist International stated:
Despite the fascist terror, the revolutionary upturn in Germany will inexorably grow. The masses’ defense against fascism will inexorably grow. The establishment of an openly fascist dictatorship, which has shattered every democratic illusion in the masses and is liberating the masses from the influence of the Social Democrats, is accelerating the tempo of Germany’s development towards a proletarian revolution.
They were… incorrect. Their gamble cost 85 million lives, and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced back to the knock-on effects of the war. Accelerationism is creating a monster to defeat an enemy you cannot, then being startled to discover you can’t defeat the monster either, and then blaming your original enemy for the product of your own hubris. No matter how you justify it, no matter what issues drive you, refusing to find common ground and build coalitions against the fascists helps nobody but the fascists.
