Polls are meaningless when nobody answers the phone and/or they call people who don’t actually vote. Kids today know to shut up and beat the shitbags at the polls. We are collectively punishing the Republicans for 40 years of attacks against our society.
Dang I didn’t notice that before. I was polled once and they only asked me what I thought of my current elected officials not who I planned to vote for.
'No rational person would believe a word Robert Kagan says about anything. He has been spewing out one falsehood after the next for the last four years in order to blind Americans about the real state of affairs concerning the invasion which he and his comrade and writing partner Bill Kristol did as much as anyone else to sell to the American public.' - Glenn Greenwald, Salon.
Kagan is one of the shitheads that got us to this point. He's now concern-trolling us about how we shouldn't bother opposing Trump.
At this point, I think it’s advantageous for anyone who is set in their decision to lie on polls and say you’d vote for the opposite candidate in the hopes of making that side complacent and light a fire under your side.
Obama was also “losing” at this point before his re-election
Obama was about 46% and trending upwards at this point, Biden is 37% and trending downward. This is a pretty nice visualization of historical presidential approval ratings plotted with Biden’s. Takeway is while other presidents have tanked way harder (Nixon, Dubya, HW), Trump and Biden are basically tied for historical unpopularity on a consistent basis. Biden did hit mid 50s as he came in to office where most presidents get a bump, Trump didn’t even reach 50.
Nationally, Democrats have been beating polls by 9+ points at the ballot box since Roe v. Wade was overturned.
It’s really surprised to me how quickly this dropped from political discourse and analysis. We’ve had several off year elections and the midterms now where Republicans have underperformed. Polls have largely seemed to miss this trend.
There’s a lot of reasons to be hopeful right now. Republicans can’t control their messaging on abortion, and it’s very clear voters are unhappy about bans. Yet, Republicans in the House are only barely aware of it, and in the Senate you’d think they hadn’t seen any results at all. Tuberville’s continued hold for abortion reasons, while voters have made it clear anti abortion advocates can go fuck themselves, is remarkably visible. I don’t think it’s a mistake that Republicans are signaling they’ll bypass him if he doesn’t budge. Elections a month ago make it clear it’s a millstone around their necks.
We have an advantage to capitalize on, but it only matters if we press the advantage. We have to show up en masse to the election.
Just because he’s a neocon piece of shit doesn’t mean he can’t be right. Also, dude, Glen Greenwald is no fucking saint either. That guy is a certified scumbag. At least with Kagan there’s a chance that he actually believes his bullshit, whereas with Greenwald, we know he’s an intellectually dishonest grifter.
It’s a good piece and I think the analysis is largely accurate. But there’s one thing I think Kagan missed: Trump isn’t the only would-be dictator who could take power. He lists DeSantis and Haley as the closest competitors to Trump within the Republican Party, but he doesn’t point out that even if, by some miracle, one of them becomes the party nominee, they would assume the very same dictatorial powers Trump is threatening to wield. Neither of them is going to defend democracy when offered the reins of tyranny, and both could easily hold power for decades. Trump maybe has a single decade at most.
The problem isn’t simply Trump wanting to be President for Life. The problem is that the path has been cleared for any Republican to assume that role the next time one is elected. Project 2025 won’t work for Trump only. The next time we have a Republican President, expect it to be the last time we have a fair election.
Not to run interference for those shitbags cause most of them are just as evil but I wouldn’t say they all equally threaten democracy. For one I’m not sure their base would allow a woman to be dictator lol even if she won due to institutional fuckery
No, none of the other GOP candidates have anything even remotely like Trump’s grip on the base. Without that none of the above can happen. Trump got where he is through a long series of steps that Kagan details in the piece. There is no world in which some other candidate steps in and immediately plugs into the same kind of power that Trump has amassed as a result of Republican cowardice. Every one of them would have to start over with consolidating power in a party that’s swarming with amoral power-hungry grifters.
Trump isn’t the only would-be dictator who could take power.
honestly I think only trump has what it takes to form the cult of personality necessary to take over. he's got the charisma to entrance 35% the country. DeSantis is more temperamentally fit to be the lieutenant you send in to do massacres than a figurehead leader
It’s hard to understand for a non American, how it can be a Race between these two and only these two. This two party system seems so absurdly stubid. Not that we have it figured out anywhere else much better, but still.
If we had Ranked Choice voting, we’d likely have a much more diverse candidate pool. It’s not a perfect solution, but it is better than what we have now
It’s technically NOT a two party system. However the two major parties so dominate, that it’s rare for a third party candidate to get elected to any major office.
I think the biggest difference is we’re not a parliamentary system that encourages coalitions. Whoever wins, wins.
The bigger issue with third parties is that none of them actually bother to run anyone at a local or state level. If they started to grow their power and voting base normally, bottom-up, they’d have a lot more success than just sticking up a Presidential also-ran every 4 years and maybe a congressperson here or there.
a left party should 100% be running aginst democrats in any race where they can get more votes than the republican cannidate. think big city local elections and safe blue state rep/federal house seats
Or they’re accelerationists who think a dictatorship will wind up in a civil war, and the “true” society, whatever their concept is, will be able to rise from the ashes.
"Governments come and go. […] After Hitler, we come to power! It will once again be the German republicans who will have to clean up the mess. We are preparing for that day!"
Karl Hölterman, the leader of the democratic militia „Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold“, 1933
Ah yes! Enlightened Centrist and Libertarians. They will always vote GOP no matter how horrible the candidate is with some shit reason to not vote Democrat. OR they will vote for some numbnuts third party candidate with an equally shitty reason.
Unfortunately, there are few leftists that push the same narrative, too. And all because Biden (or Obama, or Hillary) are not the pretty pony they think they were promised or something.
Point of fact: Clinton’s centrists were so upset that they didn’t get their very first choice in 2008 that they formed a PAC to try to get McCain/Palin elected. And they’ve been screaming “no matter who” ever since.
I have no special affinity for either of the Clintons. However, it cannot be denied that there is a certain type of leftist (often very loud, and probably the minority, thankfully) that behave like petulant children when they don’t get their pretty pony, whoever that is.
Don’t get me wrong - I’d like that pretty pony, too. I just realize that even if people don’t love Hillary, she’d still be better than OJ (Orange Jesus) and so once the primaries are over, voting for donnie to really stick it to the man, or sit out, or vote for some completely unserious party like the Green Party is not really teaching anyone the lesson(s) that the people stamping their feet think they are.
OJ represents a very existential threat. Just because he flubbed the RW agenda the first time around doesn’t mean he won’t succeed in destroying America if given another chance.
LOL, I only vote for them because I have to. What is the realistic alternative? Unless we have something like ranked choice, voting for Green or staying home or writing something in is just a vote for Republicans.
So, I’m constantly belittling myself? I am not 100% ecstatic with the Democratic Party and never have been. Thing is, I recognize what an existential threat the Republican Party has become. In the general, the choice is you either support the Democratic Party (warts and all) or you are essentially supporting this threat to the country.
I wish it were otherwise, but wishing won’t make that so.
I wasn’t aware I was running someone’s campaign. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to question what kind of motives people have if they don’t get behind the Democratic Party in the face of a very radicalized Republican Party that will apparently cast aside all democracy in their will to power. And who have members in their base that constantly talk about civil war and murdering other citizens.
Primaries? Sure, of course. During the general, though? There are only going to be two actual choices.
I think that Democrats appear very weak right now because they’re not taking the drastic steps that are needed in order to fix a lot of the existential threats that America faces.
I truly believe that we cannot engage in capitalism as we are currently and still hold on to the planet in the face of global warming. And I don’t see anyone in US politics or even global politics willing to make the drastic changes needed to literally save for the planet.
So no, I don’t really think they’re doing what they need to be doing right now, and it’s disheartening.
indeed. weak "left" candidates leave the door open for fascism the world over. how the fuck do you tell people to "hold their noses" and expect that to work? like really, think about it for a minute. I'm mad because these idiots are ruining our country. a progressive candidate would both be a safer bet to win vs. trump and some reforms would sap fascism of it's power, yet we're stuck with candidates like clinton and biden for no good reason. disappointing if they win, and less likely to actually win
Too many Democrats are to be sure. But not all democrats. Sanders and others have shown the way to fix this. The biggest issue is that we need younger people involved and running. In my state many Republicans run unopposed for several offices. As bad as it sounds. I would reflexively vote for any Democrat over a republican knowing nothing about either of the two.
We’re already seeing the beginnings of that with various candidates, but I agree that we need it to happen more rapidly.
The issue, in a twist of capitalist fuckery, is that running a campaign is massively expensive, and the barrier to entry is often too high for the people who should be running for office. Thankfully, there’s orgs helping with that, but it’s still an uphill battle.
They can be. At the state and national level to be sure. But even with zero budget, running someone against a Republican vs letting a Republican run unopposed. We’ll win infinitely more times just by trying. It should start with smaller offices. And work up from there.
Also, outside of presidential election years. We should donate to a group or groups that back and fund Democrat opposition to Republicans locally. Even if we have to make those groups ourselves. At the national level they’ve largely given up on many states. So donating to them often does little at home.
Democrats need a new younger bench. And this is a way to fix both the age and fash friendly issues at the same time. Perhaps then we can start to address things like getting money out of politics etc.
Sanders lost both primaries due to Millenials and Zoomers being so allergic to turnout that they even turn their noses up at their own guy in the primary.
This is easy win territory for young voters, the gap between current performance and just matching their share of the general population alone would push the DNC significantly to the left, let alone if they started showing up with the easy dominating share they could take if they spent half the effort turning out for the cause that they do painting signs and tweeting about it.
Rigging it by actually turning out for those instead of throwing a tantrum that the other voting blocks who don’t agree with them didn’t do the revolution for them?
The left’s perennial problem, “well why didn’t you fucking vote in (X previous election or primary) then?”, every time they try to blame it on something else, it flows back to some other primary or general they also vote striked or protest voted in.
The narcissist’s prayer is a fucking Mayan calendar style political prophecy to the white left and doing even the barest minimum in the way of political participation
Bernie had the primary win stolen from him alright, by on paper allies who have to be dragged kicking and screaming to do literally the first thing you should have to prove you did to be allowed to talk shit.
Every single one of you fuckers I see ranting about rigged primaries is just some flavor of Jean Paul Marat wannabe who fantasizes about being able to literally sit but naked in a bath tub all day and pass judgement upon the enemies of the revolution for everyone else to carry out for you.
problem is your thinking lead to us getting to this point in the first place. y'all should have learned candidate quality matters in 2016 and it's your fault if biden loses because he was your idea in the first place
Don’t vote Democrat, vote third party I hear! Me, I’m like well with first past the post voting this is impractical and could help empower fascists to take over, but let’s see what options we got.
/opens box of third party candidates, before gently closing it and walking away
Yeah no, Biden still best option, these guys are nutters. It makes sense though, a sensible candidate would run in the democratic primaries, rather than hurting their own purported causes by running in the general in a first past the post election. It’s why you saw Bernie Sanders, an independent, running in the democratic primary, and not out there helping to siphon votes to fascists by running as a third party in the general against Biden.
Anyways, let’s focus on continuing to empower politicians that want to improve our voting system (usually has been democrats, though with an exception in Alaska). This starts at the local level, but we’re getting more and more federal offices now with ranked choice voting. Once you have that, then better quality third party candidates will follow, knowing they can fairly safely run without harming their own causes.
Biden can be the best option for you, and it can still be imperative that we vote third party. If you think the dems and repubs are ever going to give up FPTP, you’re insane.
State ballot access is a big deal that can impact local elections as well.
They all ran before the 2020 election, people mainly liked Biden. (I voted Bernie). The time to get a better candidate than Biden was then, changing things up would be a huge risk for Democrats and would help Trump (R’s can’t easily say Biden is insane and take their away their rights, unlike a new candidate which they can say is the bogeyman). This is the exact same reason Trump ran basically unopposed for his 2nd term, its generally the best idea in the US’s system vs picking another candidate. If you care about how “bad” Biden is, then vote in the next general and help out the best candidate.
The DNC believes anyone too progressive will get stomped in the general election
Don't forget, Dems would be conservatives in most other countries. As much as I hate to say it, I'm not convinced most of them aren't just as beholden to corporate interests as R is.
OR
Probably a little of both of those actually. Also, maybe a dash of - boomers are going to control our politics until a bunch more boomer voters and boomer politicians die of old age.
They can and I wish they would, but it’s too late this election. Anyone else would have two weeks or so to get on the ballot and get name recognition and get people to like what they’re doing. Not really sure that’s possible.
Ok, I wrote it before OP edited it. Either way, I wrote it first when it said Biden should stop being president and now it’s been edited to say something else.
unsourced images on a random post in the fediverse
Bottom right of the image literally reads: “List source: whatbidenhasdone.wordpress.com”
The site isn’t as thorough with sourcing from there, but they have a blog post with various sources cited, and their twitter account is full of sources for their claims.
Funnily enough, I already noted in my comment that the wordpress site didn’t cite as well as I’d like. They do however have a number of sources for many of their claims (I outlined where you can find those, if you’re interested).
The Inflation Reduction Act was a big deal internationally, but I feel like you and I have already talked about it, so I don’t want to rehash it.
For everyone else’s safe, I’ll just say that even though it isn’t enough, Biden still achieved a historic level of funding for sustainability with the IRA, to the point that it forced European countries to pass similar legislation so their green energy companies could still be competitive with US green energy companies. I would’ve preferred to see legislation like this 15-20 years ago, but the second best time is always the present.
The man has kept plenty of campaign promises. Pretending he’s done nothing for the American people at every level is just dishonest. People have the right to express bullshit if they choose, and I have an equal right to call it out.
Is Lemmy really loading whole images when loading a site, even though I can’t enlarge them without actually going to actual image source? What a good way to waste data.
I do worry that Biden will lose though. He was far from a popular candidate to begin with and his support of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians has made him even less so. In many ways the best outcome might be for him to die in office prior to the election or for him to lose the primary. It would hurt the Democrats to have a non-incumbent running, but possibly less than running Biden. The real wildcard though is if Trump will even end up on the ballot considering his legal issues.
he's giving weapons to a fascist regime that's starving out millions of people in a ghetto where every hospital has been bombed, along with several refugee camps
We need to behave as if it’s a real possibility, even if you feel optimistic about next year.
Party leadership should also be doing this and doing what they can to win voters. Instead, the only message I’m hearing is “if you breathe so much as a word of discontent, it’s because you’re a Russian troll who wants Trump to be dictator for life.”
It would hurt the Democrats to have a non-incumbent
If Biden were not on the ballot next year, the Democratic candidate would be Kamala Harris. No mainstream Democrat would challenge her in 2024, the optics would be horrible.
I feel like in most cases “the incumbent croaked” would suffice as an excuse to get some names on the board, also, maybe Kamala turns out to be the second coming of LBJ, so we’ll get some pretty good social programs everyone’s gonna forget about eventually, some significant expansions in civil rights, but also entanglement in an unpopular conflict, venturing a guess I’ll say defending Somalia Eritrea and Djibouti from invasion by Ethiopia.
Israel is unpopular enough, but being on the side of a dictatorship and a failed state that tries to force its control onto a breakaway that self governs at least better than its former fellow countrymen, all in the name of international law and order, feels like the kind of conflict Kamala would be involved in, and that folks would have misgivings over, most because “why are we sending our troops to defend a dictator?” and that select group everyone loves spouting off how you should withold from voting over it because something something respecting national sovereignty as well as the clear results in favor of independence in a fair referendum run by Ethiopia is colonialism just like how not letting Russia eat neighbors because something something little russians is colonialism.
I feel like in most cases “the incumbent croaked” would suffice as an excuse
Primaries aren’t run by excuses, they are run by rules. There are state laws regarding who can get on a ballot, Biden/Harris qualified, and Whitmer did not. Which means that when the primaries roll around, Biden/Harris will be on the state ballots, and Whitmer won’t. Which means that throughout the primary season, Biden/Harris will be racking up delegates who are loyal to Biden/Harris.
If anything happens to Biden at this point, his delegates will vote for Harris at the nominating convention. Why? Because they were chosen specifically for that purpose. You only get to be a primary delegate for Biden/Harris 2024 if you are a strong supporter of both Biden and Harris. Specifically if you support them a lot more than Whitmer, Newsom, etc. If you have doubts about either Biden or Harris, then the Biden/Harris campaign will find someone else to be a delegate. All this means Whitmer has no chance at becoming the nominee as long as Harris is still around.
As for the rest: yes, Harris might be a great president. But most people who want a different Democratic candidate do not realize that she is the only alternative for 2024.
The way that talking point gets pushed unusually hard by an unusually dedicated few using the same stupid arguments looks an awful lot like the kind of psyops campaigns I’d see when I was on Reddit during the Trump presidency.
The real long term solution is changing how we vote. Star Voting or some form of Ranked Choice. That’s how I respond along with fairvote.org so, in case some impressionable soul happens along, they aren’t taken in by such silliness. I encourage others to consider doing something similar.
My Roman Empire is remembering how the shitheads screamed and yelled denying responsibility on the day Dobbs came down.
Was grocery shopping with my grammy and had to pull the most hemmeroid passingly determined poker face in history to not break out into cursing them and their obvious waste of what privileges they live with to be in the position of treating this like it’s teaching the DNC a lesson.
Fucking Priv Shit Vote Karens, every last one of them, “Take me to the party’s manager right now or I’ll let the fascists take away even more of your rights!”
it's because of people defending biden's atrocities. like, there's more than one person you can run, and most of the options could poll better vs. trump.
This is stupid fear-mongering horse s*** that ignores all the steps Americans are taking to fight against Trump being elected, and ignoring that they voted him out 3 years ago.
You’re on the internet. Censoring yourself makes you look childish. Just cuss. Also, it’s not fear mongering. The GOP has announced their intentions if they win.
If you read the article, the author is not saying Trump winning the general election is an inevitability, but that him winning the nomination is inevitable and so is his rise to dictatorship if he wins the general. He never says Trump winning the general is guaranteed, and allows phrases that part as, “he could win the general”. All of those things are true baring unforseen circumstances.
Also, honestly that sentence would have been a lot funnier not censored.
Right, and instead of presenting the facts in an entertaining and sincere way, he writes a deliberately false and misleading title and article that bolsters conservatives and is intended to scare liberals.
Please point to where the GOP has said they intend on installing a literal dictatorship. Please remember how many executive orders President Biden signed in his first 90 days in office as well.
By talking to his TDS supporters, inciting them to try an insurrection, long before January 6th 2021, but especially on that day. By pressuring election authorities to overturn legal results. By directly demanding Mike Pence to not ratify the results, and claiming the he even could do such a thing.
Why the justice system of USA hasn’t placed him in federal prison yet is anyone’s guess. Perhaps he’ll be there some day, but I will be less surprised if he escapes justice altogether.
If your biased opinion refuses to acknowledge these facts (which don’t care about your feelings!), I don’t think we should talk any more.
nothing here has been proven. you yourself said that. facts dont care about your feeling right?!
The process of proving a thing in a judicial sense is different from proving it in a scientific sense. The judicial process relies on the prosecution making their decisions on what to pursue, and then how well they handle it in court, how the judges react to it, all these icky and unreliable human things. The scientific truth is about … truth. It’s the latter type of fact that doesn’t care about your feelings. The judicial truth cares about at least somebody’s feelings, and quite a lot.
I’m talking about the scientific kind of truth. Absolute truth. And that absolute truth is that Trump obviously tried to instigate an insurrection. This is obvious if you just read the transcript of his speeches, and the facts we know about on how he tried to influence the results. Knowledge on whether he did it by evil volition or by his personal incompetence only exists inside his head, if even in there anymore.
Whether he goes to prison as he deserves to relies on how well the court system works. How funny is it that Trump supporters were calling for Clinton to go to jail in 2016 for no reason and now Trump is facing actual reasons?
Notice no one has actually answered the question, nor have they addressed the EO’s. How do you rule like a dictator in a representative republic? Sign more EO’s than any other pres had prior, totally wiping out everything your predecessor did. Last I checked nothing’s been proven that “TRUMP” caused, ordered, or even suggested your little so called “insurrection”. Saying something doesn’t make it true. But keep trying.
Polling is bullshit, but to the degree that it isn’t, it isn’t looking great. This isn’t some guarantee that Trump will lose. The boomers that vote republican do so EVERY election. The people who vote against them aren’t so reliable in comparison.
I think that is a bridge too far for many reasons. First off I hate the Cheeto. He is a mudstain on used panties from a crackhead pornstar.
However, we have Hitler in recent history. We have many forms of media that they did not have to see how it’s going with everyone else. And let’s not forget that Hitler was smarter than Trump ever will be.
I don’t glorify Hitler lightly. He was a force that needed to be stopped and so does Trump. But that is were the comparison ends. Nazis became so huge because people were afraid of what would happen to their family if they didn’t. Here we will fight the morons back. Stop giving this man so much power and admiration. He’s a conman. A shitty leader. And a dumbass.
I didn’t call Hitler a genius. I called him smarter than Trump. Trump copies him. He at least (for the most part) came up with the strategies to inspire the changes in Germany. Even though they were shitty as fuck.
Fair enough - you didn’t. But calling him smarter than Trump is still a stretch. Hitler wasn’t very smart at all. You don’t have to be smart to serve the interests that puts you in power… which is the only real function politicians serve at the end of the day.
Fortunately for the US, it’s actually very difficult to be a dictator in the White House - the US president is a cog for those “interests.” He takes his orders from them and not the other way around. That’s why Trump became so ineffective once he stepped into the White House and became isolated from his adoring MAGA crowd.
Non English speaker: inevitable means it will happen no matter what. They way i see it, its used wrong here correct? It should maybe have been ‘increasingly realistic’ or maybe ‘increasingly plausible’ but inevitable assumes that voting for someone else won’t stop it from happening
One of the many examples of how English is manipulated and massaged to mean whatever you want it to mean. A more accurate phrase they should have chosen is “increasingly likely”.
The author isn’t the most self-aware… Robert Kagan was a Republican strategist until 2016, he’s an interventionalist neocon, thinks the GOP “lost it’s way” rather than contributed to this by design.
I agree. I think that if Trump is elected and puts an end to democracy as we know it, but it won’t be a dictatorship of Trump, alone. Trump is but a mortal man. And whoever replaces him will be worse.
Technically, I’d say “increasingly inevitable” is a meaningless phrase. “Inevitable” is an absolute - an outcome either is, or is not, inevitable. Like they say, “you can’t be a little bit pregnant”, outcomes cannot be a little bit inevitable, or somewhat inevitable, or mostly inevitable, so the degree of inevitability cannot be increasing.
However, I think most native English speakers would not think twice about it, and would read it as something like: “a Trump dictatorship is approaching inevitability.” That’s how I read it, at least.
As a Canadian, I can absolutely understand how someone less informed in politics and (rightfully) angry at the political establishment would vote for Trump in 2016 just to flip the bird to Hillary. Americans need to understand why he won to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
You have to understand that most people don’t pay that much attention to politics. They see a woman who embodies everything they hate about the US government establishment, and they see a guy who is raging against said establishment. If Dems had let Bernie win Trump would have been crushed.
Americans need to understand why he won to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
It’s been estimated that 13% of Trump’s voters were Obama voters. The degree to which this impacted his victory is debated, but this group is almost invisible in the way Trump is understood in the popular discourse, which is almost entirely determined by… Trump’s own spectacle of rhetoric and the feedback it generates. The degradation of civic institutions and disenfranchisement is a major factor, experiencing this while you’re exposed to political marketing like, Kamala Harris doing a happy and smiley scripted bit where she tells children if they’re “authentic” they will succeed, not only does that not connect with the reality of people’s struggles but it’s a slap in the face to them.
After seeing how the super delegates worked against Sanders, and how blatantly undemocratic our process of selecting candidates truly is, a lot of people fell into the trap of “fuck it, burn the world down then”. I know a lot of people reacted that way when the Republican party’s obvious rigging of the 2012 nomination worked against Ron Paul even though the votes were tallied in some states that he was the actual victor, but the derailment of his campaign by announcing Mitt Romney as the winner did enough damage…even though the Republican party chairs for several states had to resign due to the obvious false declarations and ignoring of the votes counted in primaries happened.
The real problem is the lack of confidence in our democracy and the rampant apathy that works against constructive progress.
After seeing how the super delegates worked against Sanders
Especially because he was almost guaranteed to win against Trump, but they know where the money comes from and decided to go with Hillary, who was historically unlinked as a candidate. I think this ought to have demonstrated that real change cannot come from within the Democratic party and that they are not willing to be the left party people wish they were, they’re part of the downward spiral. (And yes they’re better than the GOP, always have to get that in for the concerned voters out there.)
lack of confidence in our democracy
It’s funny how this idea of “free and fair elections” has recently come up in such a historically corrupt system, it’s true that elections today are better than they’ve ever been in this respect, 2008 onward were incredibly tight on this. Seems like people forget how the 2001 election was stolen. Historically it’s almost a joke how bad they were. It was routine for busses to drive around picking up people and dropping them off at voting stations in exchange for a bit of money. It hasn’t even been 60 years since everyone in the US could vote! At first you basically needed to be a landowner and even produce from your land to be able to vote. The men’s suffrage movement was like a century before women’s suffrage.
I’m really glad you mentioned some of the progress, while it’s not ideal, it does remind me that we ended the Gilded Age, and we can continue to confront the robber barons of our time. In US history we’ve already had a few near misses where we almost went the road the Romans did by giving a wealthy person absolute authority. We have to stay aware and be ever vigilant.
I was working at this business owner’s home. Smart, genuine, kind guy in his mid-40s with a beautiful “nuclear” family. He said he was going to vote for Trump because his sister in law worked at one his properties and she spoke well of him. That was it. That’s how a seemingly respectable upstanding well-to-do member of the community chose the president of the United States. Or, at worst, that was the reason he felt compelled to tell others.
My in-laws voted for him twice. They are pro-life, and that’s all that matters to them. Otherwise they support progressive policies like single-payer healthcare. But when it comes to abortion, they will vote for a literal anti-Christ to make it illegal. Funny that they are Catholic.
If murder was legal, and somebody who was known to have committed murder was running, and you were confident that person would make murder illegal, and you were convinced that their opponent (who may have never committed murder themselves) would actively encourage more murder, maybe even pay poor people to commit murder, which candidate would you vote for?
Trust me, we’ve tried to reason with them. It’s maddening because they are otherwise mostly reasonable people, just ignorant politically and scientifically.
They kind of are, no college education and they don’t take the time to self-educate. Their support for single payer healthcare is something that both me and my husband have been working on with them for a while. I don’t think they are completely lost - they never showed the kind of hate I’ve seen from other Trump supporters. So I’ll keep trying.
There are plenty of organizations out there working to make sure this doesn’t happen. You could sing up for one of them instead of spreading doom and gloom on the internet. The change starts with you.
There are literal hundreds. You can google “ways to get involved with elections” and you will get so many your eyes will water. I’m so tired of people acting like this is impossible to do and then complaining about how nothing ever changes. Go phone bank. Go canvass. Go talk to people.
In other words… just more of the same stuff that allowed fascists all this power in the first place.
Do tell… where were you when antifa was actually doing something about fascism in the streets a few years back? Heckling from the sidelines like a good little liberal, perhaps?
And how far did they get? What meaningful legislation came from it? Protests are needed but so are all kinds of other action. Feel free to sit on the sidelines and spread doom and gloom because elections aren’t important, apparently.
The laws favor the fascists, liberal - they even have a fascist institution to enforce it… the police.
If you think you can vote fascism away I don’t think you really realize what fascism even is. How far the fascist element (the fascist element that is so thoroughly entrenched in US society that you and your fellow liberals even consider it “normal”) gets depends on how threatened the political elites and their corporate benefactors are by the prospect of working-class revolt - an electoral process means nothing to fascists or the capitalists that fund them.
Vote for whomever you wish. But if voting - or getting others to vote - is the only thing you are willing to do to oppose them, it means you are not prepared to do much at all.
Actually if you go by percentage Trump basically won nobody new, he just picked up more votes total because vote by mail made the poles more accessible to more folks who would have voted for him anyways.
What changed was that people weren’t fucking around and voted solidly against him, giving Biden an absolute majority of the popular vote.
There are graduating seniors in high-school this year. That group of unregistered voters needs to be coaxed to register, and vote. They need easy, step by step directions. They need to understand their new power of citizenship. They can be tried as adults. They should know who the sheriff is. They should know its an elected position. They need to learn this shit, and most likely it’s not gonna happen in school. Please ticktock or whatever. Make it viral.
I live in a country where everybody who is entitled to vote, gets a vote in their mail box and a dedicated place where they can go and vote. They can even send in their votes before hand or vote in the local library.
I don’t see how one side or the other or any can benefit by low voting percentages
Republicans are currently making it harder for left-leaning populations to vote, by closing polling stations in urban areas or opposing vote-by-mail. Automatic voter registration is being actively resisted. That is “why”.
Voter registration became a thing in the 1800s to limit the voice of immigrants, adopted state by state.
Oregon first, and about a dozen other states since, have made registration automatic when you get a driver’s license or state ID.
Central registered of all citizens with ID-number. I’m pretty sure your nation has it, as does mine. So the government knows where you live, and where you can vote. If you move these things are automatically updated. So it’s easy to make sure everyone can vote in the “correct” ballots ect.
As with Napoleon, who spoke of the glory of France but whose narrow ambitions for himself and his family brought France to ruin, Trump’s ambitions, though he speaks of making America great again, clearly begin and end with himself.
As the author keeps comparing Trump to Napoleon and Hitler, I can’t help but wonder if maybe the US is due a conflagration. At what point do we admit that the American experiment returned a null result?
In the cases of France and Germany, the answer was violence. Oppression has never been defeated with pacifism. If history is our guide and conservatives are our oppressors, soon we may have to make some very difficult life and death decisions.
Conservatives have already embraced violence as part of their ideology, which I think makes the path out of their oppression more clear.
“As an ex-Indian civil servant, it always makes me shout with laughter to hear, for instance, Gandhi named as an example of the success of non-violence. As long as twenty years ago it was cynically admitted in Anglo-Indian circles that Gandhi was very useful to the British government. So he will be to the Japanese if they get there. Despotic governments can stand ‘moral force’ till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.”
the choice of weather there will be violence isn't ours to make, the conservatives have made it for us, and they chose violence. our choice is to resist or concede to fascism. conceding won't make the violence stop, it will only make it worse and don't let anyone convince you otherwise
I think it’s more that human societies are very rarely stable across 3 or more generations. The US has had a number of major crises through its history, it’s definitely due for another. Repeating the dead line about a failed experiment is kind of needlessly deaf to that history.
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