And I’m being serious. I feel like there might be an argument there, I just don’t understand it. Can someone please “steelman” that argument for me?

  • TheFriar@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    Think of voting this way:

    Signing your name to a candidate/psrty and what they’ve done/signaled they will do.

    A lot of people can’t stomach a candidate who has been courting the neocons and softening their previous mildly progressive stances from the last time dems had a primary and the progressives were showing up in numbers. Everyone got in line and the debates were about M4A, erasing federally held student debt, raising the minimum wage, etc. Sanders single handedly dragged the party to the center (technically more “left” than they were) in 2016/2020 and the dems responded by po’mouthing like they cared about those issues, but then circled the wagons and kicked those voters to the curb.

    The party has shown over and over again that they don’t give a shit about working class people, those of us that want real change. They want to maintain the status quo. Which is progressively more hostile capitalism.

    Signing your name to that constant move rightward is unthinkable for some. And understandably so.

    And that’s before we even discuss the ongoing genocide in Gaza funded and armed by the US. While this administrations representatives in the UN and in any official capacity constantly run defense for the genocide.

    Plenty of people could not fathom putting their name on that tragedy.

    None of this means that republicans aren’t fuckin neofascist shits. But…how many times have the voters left of the dems been told to eat shit and vote blue because the other guy is worse? WHILE CONSTANTLY COURTING THE RIGHTWING VOTERS WHO MAY HAVE FINALLY GOTTEN SICK OF IT?! Kamala literally said she would be different from Biden by having a Republican in her cabinet. WHAT.

    With everything going on, this party said, “yeah, fuck all that. Let’s see if we can grab anyone to the right of us.”

    I got sidetracked, but this is the thing. It’s not binary, because geopolitics isn’t binary. The worlds issues aren’t binary. But a binary choice is all we’re given to make.

    Just…what. And neither of those two choices was actually going to solve the problems. One was maintaining the problems while one was the problems plus more problems. That’s not an attractive choice.

    We all get that trump is much worse. But everyone else needs to understand how sickening that shitty choice was for anyone with a conscience about what’s going on in Gaza, what’s going on with their neighbors. Signing on for more of the same was completely unthinkable for some. That has to be understandable if we are ever going to change things.

    We’ve been on the road we’re being forced down now as long as I’ve been around. And the road just keeps going forward. The dems’ proposal is “maintain the course.” The republicans’ was “mash the gas.”

    Some people couldn’t stomach going any further down this road. That’s not making a choice to mash the gas. Because the world is not binary.

    But you and everyone else posing similar questions is saying “how could you vote for mashing the gas by not wanting to continue down this road?? :(“