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Honestly, I don’t think this rhetoric is helpful anymore. As vile and disgusting as it is, we don’t have a viable anti-genocide option. We need to pick our battles. I’m pretty left-leaning myself, so if you’ll indulge me, this is why I feel compelled to grudgingly vote for the Democratic ticket.
Biden is a garden variety conservative corporate stooge, which has basically been the best case scenario ever since Reagan killed the New Deal. The billionaires that control this country aren’t going to allow an administration that pushes back on imperialism and empire. Thus, we never get a chance to elect someone who’d actually stand up to Israel. Just look at what happened to Bernie. I voted uncommitted in the primary because I was furious about the genocide, but, electorally, that’s about all I can truly do. The first past the post system actively punishes people who vote third party, and not voting against Trump is not an option for me. I’m a trans woman. I do not have the luxury of ideological purity. I have to vote for whomever the Democrats put up because Trump will institute a dictatorship that could very well have me put to death. After the “Supreme” Court’s decision to allow immunity for presidents, I am even more convinced that the Republicans cannot ever be allowed to take power again. If the U.S. goes fully fascist, its influence will be as such that the current right wing wave in the West will be like a tiny ripple.
I hate the position we’re in. It sucks. This country has been so utterly inundated with anti-left propaganda that people think liberalism is far left. We should be organizing and radicalizing everyone we can, 100%. I’m hoping that this late stage capitalist hellscape we’re living in will help with that. But, even then, it’s going to be a painfully slow process. We have six years olds being forced to swear that they won’t betray the country every morning at school. Few people ever seem to stop and think just how fucking weird the Pledge of Allegiance is. When people are that indoctrinated, it’ll take a Herculean effort to get them to realize they’ve been lied to their whole life. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing, but we’re not going to be able to snap our fingers, elect a president from the Green party, and everything will be all better. It doesn’t work like that. Change comes from the bottom up, by changing hearts and minds. People won’t like to hear this, but we need to be patient until our efforts bear fruit.
So, we need to buy time. Failing to thwart Trump’s dictatorship pretty much only leaves the last resort, revolution. Biden is too milquetoast to order purges. However, Trump will have no scruples cracking down on his “enemies”. With how open we all are on social media, it would be trivial for someone in control of the three letter agencies to find us all. If this were a normal election, I’d be fine with people voting their conscience. I get it. I’d love to vote for the Socialist ticket. But I have to engage with the world as it really is. I had to set aside my idealism in favor of pragmatism.
American elections, in a nutshell, come down to this. Turnout. Motivate your voters to go to the polls en masse, and you win. There just isn’t that many swing voters, especially in an election like this where both candidates have been President. The reason this has been catastrophic for Biden is that appearing to be old and out of touch tends to depress enthusiasm. Combine that with the short memories of the voters and you’ll have people not bothering to vote because “both options are bad”. As we get further and further from Trump’s presidency, people’s memories start to fade, they think to themselves, “oh, he wasn’t THAT bad, we had more money back then.” There’s also lots of people who haven’t heard about Project 2025, aren’t paying attention to Trump saying that he’ll be a dictator on the first day, etc. They will naively think to themselves that it can’t happen here, that the U.S. is somehow special. Biden’s margin of victory in some of the swing states was minuscule, and that was at the height of Anything But Trump sentiment. We absolutely cannot afford to have anyone stay home. Maybe some of the post Roe effect will help spur turnout. I don’t know. But presidential elections are unfortunately just a popularity contest. I really do think we need to see if there’s someone charismatic that we can roll the dice on. Because “Not Trump” won’t be enough, and that’s pretty much all Biden ever had going for him.