Fuck this strawman, every single (voting age) gen z person i know has already talked about voting in this election. Even if it’s just voting for “not trump”. When one candidate is actively claiming they will operate as a dictator “day one”, you have a lot of incentive to vote. Especially when you haven’t already been living with crushed dreams for decades.
“The logic of not voting for Joe Biden in 2024 is that the Democratic Party is supposed to be accountable to young people and diverse communities.”
Such an adorable take. I used to think they were accountable, too. That they gave a shit what I thought and would do things that I approved of, or have a good reason not to. That voting actually sent a message.
Give this kid another decade and he'll be as hopeless as I am.
Then there's this guy:
“[I’ll say], ‘Hey, you want to buy a house after college, right? You want to have a good-paying job after you graduate, right? You want to be able to have access to health care?”
I really don't think voting is the best way to get these things. Especially when Democrats never talk about access to health care, just health "coverage."
What voting for Biden will get you is more boring government. That's about the only thing voting will get you that you actually want.
This kid actually gets it:
And then there’s the Electoral College. For Lillian, it’s difficult to feel like her vote matters in a state that has gone blue since 1980 and a rural county that generally swings red. "The whole [voting] thing is a symbolic gesture,” she says. “If we had a more direct voting system, I would participate more. The Electoral College is scum.”
Want people to think voting matters? Make their vote actually matter. Outside of swing states votes for president just become meaningless statistics, especially since you don't need the popular vote to win the election.
Will the silence be loud enough to create actual change in how the Democratic Party approaches the youth vote in future elections[?]
Dems not talking about healthcare is kinda not true is it? The US has the ACA and coverage means expanding who has access to the ACA and at what tarrifs.
The ACA was supposed to have a public option. But the health insurance companies got Lieberman to kill that. Now whenever I hear a Democratic politician talk about health care it’s about making sure everyone has “coverage.”
Pay very close attention when you hear them talking and you’ll hear it. But people don’t need health insurance, they need health care. And the coverage Dems keep pitching often gets between people and care.
If you listened to Democratic politicians you'd think everybody loves their health insurance company and wants to have one. I just want to go to the doctor when I get sick and not go bankrupt. I want people with chronic conditions to get the things they need without fighting a company they're paying hundreds of dollars a month to.
Health insurance is a rent-seeking industry that massively inflates our health care spending while making that care have worse outcomes. But Democrats keep insisting we want health coverage and not health care. When someone asks them about health care they immediately use "health coverage" in their response.
Its infuriating and I hate that I have to vote for these people.
How has he been unable to move the needle on student loan forgiveness when substantial amount of loans have already been forgiven and more are in the works? Not being able to forgive 100% of them counts as being 100% unable to do any of it?
The improvements that have been made apply to a TINY minority of people and even in that group, they may not qualify. On top of that, continuing to ask people to pay isn’t REALLY “forgiveness” now, is it?
“The SAVE option reduces the monthly federal student loan payments for undergraduate borrowers from 10% of discretionary income to 5%, and shortens the timeline to forgiveness for those with small balances from the usual required 20 years or 25 years. Those who took out $12,000 or less in their undergraduate or graduate postsecondary studies get any remaining debt erased after just a decade.”
So:
We’re still going to ask you to pay, you just have to pay 5% of your income instead of 10%.
If you took out student loans less than $12K (who DOES that?) the debt can be erased after 10 years instead of 20 to 25 years.
That’s not forgiveness. That’s not what people are looking for.
Pretty much. They’ve been litigating the issue and doing what they can within the constraints they have, but apparently it amounts to nothing to entitled people.
Well yeah, conservatives are screeching lunatics who are incapable of rational thought. It’s great that most supporters of the Democrat party are critical of its many, many shortcomings and failings. I don’t think the issue is that Dems demand “perfection,” it’s that we want to see change. In my mind, erasing small pockets of student loan debt is one of the worst ways to invigorate your base, because the only people who are excited by that are the ones who just got their loans forgiven. I’m sure those people view Biden’s efforts as very successful, but you can certainly understand why all the ones who haven’t had any forgiveness think the program is a failure.
Maybe, just maybe, if instead they were trying to systematically make higher education more affordable by changing regulations, thus reducing the need for federal student loans in the first place, people would be more generally positive. To my knowledge, there has been no work in that space by the Biden administration.
In my mind, erasing small pockets of student loan debt is one of the worst ways to invigorate your base, because the only people who are excited by that are the ones who just got their loans forgiven.
Centrists in his own party didn’t want debt forgiveness. Kept arguing that the President couldn’t forgive student debt via executive order. Biden listened to progressives and forgave student debt broadly, like you and I both want. The Supreme Court shot it down, using arguments that centrists helpfully spent months providing them. If Biden had acted like most Democrats at this point, he would have given up forever on the issue, announced he tried, and dusted off his hands in satisfaction of a job not done.
Biden didn’t do that. He moved on to forgiving what he could using the methods at his disposal. He didn’t give up. He’s done what I would have expected from an actual progressive in the same circumstances. Not gonna lie, it helps that it was blocked by the illegitimate conservative Supreme Court. Debt forgiveness has not been blocked by Biden’s own party (for once. yet.), but I suspect that’s due more to lack of opportunity than anything else.
In any event, I do not fault Biden on this. He did the right thing and continues to do the right thing.
It isn’t just Gen Z. My own parents are tired of the bullshit, lesser of two complete won’t do fuck all for Americans and are talking about opting out of 2024 because they don’t want an old guy doing not a lot of them in middle America but don’t want to vote for a criminal racist either.
That was a fun conversation about how you don’t have to like the old guy, I don’t really either, but fuck me if you’ll roll over and let a literal fucking Nazi in the office by not voting for ineffective.
It’s definitely not the majority but having spoken with my cousin and his friends I get it. Why even bother voting things aren’t getting better so why try? Voting for the best of the worst is just defeating as you know you’ll still be working 2 or 3 jobs just to put food on the table. Plus people literally can’t afford to take time off to go vote they need the money. Some of them are trying to support their sick parents or even kids.
This logic would apply in past elections, but when an authoritarian fascist is banging at the door everyone has a responsibility to actively hold it shut
As a leftist, it’s important to accept that the Dems will never, ever, ever move to the left unless there’s massive grassroots organization such as Unionization and Socialists winning local elections.
People who abstain from voting as protest, however, still think ironically that voting is anything other than loss prevention. If everyone sits out and protests, literally everyone on the Dem side and Trump wins in a landslide, and Trump manages to keep elections for 2028, the Dems still won’t move to the left.
That’s why voting as a leftist is about loss prevention, rather than gaining material change. The movement leftward comes from upsetting the entire 2 party process by flipping the table itself. Mass Unionization and taking of key seats is exactly how you (non-violently) upset the process and force concessions or enable third party to be theoretically viable.
Until then, however, any leftist not voting Dem in the federal election is sorely misguided.
When the left sits out, the right wins. And when voters sit out, parties leave them behind. Political parties will chase likely voters every single time, and if you’re not a voter, your opinion doesn’t even register to the leaders of this country. How even could it, if you don’t participate?!
I guess it’s just easier to blame the boomers for the state the country is in, comparing to bothersome things like exercising your right to choose. Kids. Go figure.
Young people need to reconsider how much worse things will be for them specifically, if Trump gets back in office and appoints more judges, etc. Young people have more time left to suffer in this life than most of us.
Young voters are going to make both parties hate them like we did when we voted in Obama. That was a great time. Watching dems and cons alike be low key racist for 8 years was such a huge reveal.
There’s a Gen Z kid that I was talking to who said she liked Trump because he’s so funny and crazy, and that was literally as much as she knew about him, just the stupid antics. I was horrified, like, “You’ve got to be kidding?” I hope I did a good job explaining how bad he was for the country, but sometimes I wonder about the kids today. Get off my lawn.
How politically aware were you at 18-20-something years old? All I remember from my first vote was Bush sounds like a cowboy, and I'm not into cowboys. Gore was the familiar one, and he and Clinton didn't seem too bad during my childhood, so I voted for him. I was way too busy trying to get high and laid to think much deeper than that. I'm sure today's kids are still into that, plus the added stress and depression of growing up in this modern world. I am so glad social media and a constant connection weren't a thing until I hit adulthood.
I didn't realize the consequences of someone's vote until we invaded Iraq for....reasons. I too thought it was a game that would never affect me personally.
I was extremely politically aware when I was 20. I was involved in activism and political organizations and all that stuff.
And that's where I met the leftists, and like every leftist, I found them extremely annoying. So no more political activism for me now, just... you know, voting the right way and getting into the occassional argument with fashy friends and family, like normal people do.
I see your point, though. People tend to think nobody gets convinced of anything because they are set in their ways, but the normies just get the vaguest echoes and politically active people just don't get a good view of what's going on.
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