I'm "not enthusiastic" about Biden, in the sense that I'm not enthusiastic about genocide or weak-willed liberal politics-as-usual or continuing Trump's immigration policies or refusing to use the power of the presidency to do fucking anything, but please, lecture me about how young people need to realize that it's this or fascism. I'm sure that'll move the needle.
I cannot stress highly enough that it's not that young people (of which I am not one, by the way) aren't "enthusiastic" about Biden. It's that they're fucking tired of being told that it's this or fascism so shut up. What happened to the idea that a politician had to earn their votes?
Rather than lecturing young people about the consequences of their "lack of enthusiasm" or you can join them in being fucking pissed off that Biden is doing sweet fuck all to earn their goddamn enthusiasm. And if you think that's not a problem, how about the fact that he's losing Black people? Or maybe you think it's racist to criticize Black people for their lack of enthusiasm? How about Muslim Americans?
The Democrats seem to think that they've got a lock on the youth vote, the Black and brown vote, and women, and they don't need to do ANYTHING to earn that goddamn vote. That's not lack of enthusiasm. That's lack of representation.
And anyway, "not enthusiastic" is news-media-speak for "pissed off about his policies," not, " ultimately not going to vote as harm reduction." So miss me with your moralizing screeds about how young people need to be enthusiastic about a politician who has shown almost no concern for them. I'm not fucking enthusiastic about voting as harm reduction either, but I'm going to do it because as you so love to point out, it's this or fascism.
@intransitivelie I don't think "enthusiasm" has ever marked any part of the Biden phenomenon. We are voting to live. He's protected health care access, moved the needle on student loans, and he's holding the line against a full blown coup. It sucks. but it's important to remember democracy isn't about being happy. It's about trying to live with people. I'm tired of listening to people complain about having to press the button that says, "Yes, I'd rather live than die, please."
@pawsplay
I'm not arguing with you, but "largely maintained the status quo" isn't a powerful incentive. That said, my complaint should not be taken to mean that I think people shouldn't vote for Biden. My complaint is more that some folks seem to think that, atop an already weak campaign, they should pile moralistic screeds about how young people don't get it and should be enthusiastic about it. It's not a good idea. It's just going to further turn young people off.
@intransitivelie I will be moralistic about it, but not because I expect people to be enthusiastic about Biden. They should be enthusiastic about their own agenda. Even under the best circumstances, you won't get a dream candidate. Even Sanders, a Vermontian democrat with social democrat leanings, is the closest thing I've ever gotten to a candidate for me, and I was turned off on many occasions by his white socialism.
@pawsplay
I guess I think that, "Holy shit young people, I completely agree that he's a piece of shit, but please vote for the shit sandwich rather than Hitler because, ya know, Hitler," is a better approach than telling them they don't understand that voting is harm reduction. I think you can educate young people that voting is harm reduction without being moralistic about it. I totally agree that we're not voting for our ideal candidate but rather choosing our opponent, essentially, but lecturing young people about enthusiasm (and I'm not accusing you of doing this, merely speaking of other things I've seen) isn't teaching them that.
With respect I think there's two things missing here.
The first is that the most important cause to most young people (based on survey data) is climate change, and when it comes to climate change Biden is not harm reduction. He's mouthing platitudes while subsidising the oil industry and keeping cars on the road. He's intentionally not doing the things needed to ensure that multicellular life, y'know, survives. The difference between him and Trump on this vital issue is that Trump refuses to mouth the platitudes, and in fact enjoys gloating about his refusal to mouth the platitudes. But whether a liberal apologises to you while you're being boiled or a fascist gloats at you while you're being boiled is not a material distinction.
When people describe Biden as harm reduction on this point, what they're saying is that they value the aesthetic of leadership over the substance; and this is something I hear a lot when I talk to younger comrades. They aren't stupid or naive. They think we are. I suspect they're right.
The second thing is that as a French comrade said to me recently about her country, it's not a vote between liberalism or fascism, it's a vote between fascism now or fascism later. A lot of people breathed a sigh of relief in 2020 because they thought Trump was defeated forever. A lot of those same people are now panicking over Trump in 2024 and urging people to vote against him. What are they going to do in 2028? Trump could live another twenty years, and if he doesn't then there are many others behind him. America isn't set up for continuous one-party rule. What have the Democrats done in the 2021-2025 era to defascist-ify the Republican party or the Supreme Court or Fox News? What have they done to make permanent one-party Democrat rule realistic? What have they done to weaken the police and enable revolutionary anarchists like myself to storm Washington DC overthrow the government? These are the questions that actually have to be addressed, and they're hard questions so they haven't been addressed.
So far, each election has just pushed the issue off into the long grass. A fresh coat of paint on rotting wood. The kids aren't stupid. Many I talk to understand that within their lifetime fascists will win an election, and their elders seem to not understand this except as a series of unrelated short-term crises.
I suspect that much of the reason why older people get angry at younger people for not caring is that younger people do care, a lot, about these points; but these are not points which the older people have answers for.
@passenger boy, you sure can spin a yarn. How did you miss the money Biden put towards climate change? He's the first president to do so, and the first president to actually give it any effort!
Just because it's not perfect, doesn't mean it's not good. Leases are not the same as drilling. Do you have an idea what hay the Republicans could make of him canceling all the leases? Try practicality.
I'm super worried about climate change. It basically occupies virtually all of my waking hours.
No, it's not good. Specifically it's not good enough. It's not practical either. Climate science reports indicate that we are going to miss even the chance to mitigate moderate damage and head for severe, and potentially apocalyptic, consequences.
An actually practical solution would be to take all the cars off the roads. All of them. Forever. Within the next few years. Yes, this would make people complain, but it would make their grandchildren survive. And then do the same with the meat industry and the military.
If the response to this is "but if we tried to do that we wouldn't be able to win elections" then that isn't a defence, it's an admission that electoralism is not a suitable solution for the problems that society currently faces; and that's exactly the position that many people, especially young people, are coming to today.
@passenger@pawsplay
I'm not arguing that voting for Biden is harm reduction for Palestinians, for instance, but in the main. I completely understand the desire for a candidate who does something on climate change, but paying lip service to the problem is still better and harm reduction when compared with not only not paying lip service to the problem but actively accelerating it.
I guess what it boils down to, as far as "harm reduction" goes, is twofold: firstly "harm reduction" does not mean anything but that. Literally, it's in the name: harm is occurring, but by voting for the lesser of two evils you reduce the harm that occurs. If you don't think that a vote for Biden is going to harm the world less, I don't really know what to tell you. I fundamentally disagree. Doesn't mean I'm enthusiastic about it. Harm reduction is putting a bandaid on a sucking chest wound as opposed to stabbing the patient in the chest again. That's all it is. I'm unhappy about that, but that's all it is.
Secondly, to address your other point, I agree that all we're doing is kicking the can down the road a ways, but unless you've got a better idea, I'm going to advocate for continuing to kick the can in the absence of a better idea. We can kick the can, distasteful as it is, and also do other things, but if you can't vote yourself out of the situation, you might as well vote for harm reduction purposes while you organize. I'd rather be doing my revolutionary planning under a Democratic president than a Republican one, when the chips are down.
If this is coming off as moralistic, I don't intend it to be. I literally want to tell kids, "This totally fucking sucks and I'm sorry, but please, I'm begging you, hold your nose and kick the can. I myself, my family, my friends, will be in material danger if Trump wins. We are much less likely to be so if Biden does. That's my brutal calculus. But even if that's not true for you and yours, I'm begging you to think of people you don't actively have to care about and vote for harm reduction." That's my elevator pitch.
I think your questions are absolutely valid, and I think part of harm reduction is kicking the can down the road enough that those questions can be addressed, though can-kicking is insufficient to make sure they are actually addressed. I also agree that voting for Biden is not even the ideal way to kick the can. But realistically, it's the way we have. I think the messaging to young people needs to reflect both those things. It isn't likely to increase enthusiasm, but it's respecting their agency and their concerns in a way which I don't see much of from the campaign itself or from the talking heads.
I won't lie: I'm terrified of next year. I'm so angry with the Democratic establishment and Biden in particular. I support actions above and beyond voting to attempt to get us out of this hole; in fact, I believe them to be necessary and vital. But I'm still going to beg people to vote harm reduction, even if it might not seem to them to be harm reduction at all. The country may not survive regardless, but it is much less likely to survive, and far more likely to fail more quickly, if Trump is elected next year. I will always take fascism later over fascism now if those are my two options. Later can be fought. Now is happening whether we fight or not.
I thought about what I was going to say as a reply, and ultimately once I woke up I decided I didn't want to give you a hard time. Your initial message - a criticism of the "vote Biden or it's your fault" narrative - is ultimately the right tone IIRC, and the modification you make to it is a good one.
Now we just need to get the blue crowd to use your message instead of the one they're currently using. How hard can that be?
In the end, I think the right argument to make is to concentrate on revolutionary anticapitalist and antiauthoritarian messaging, stressing that revolution is not only a possible solution but an easier and more pragmatic one than working within the system; and then at the end say "hey, as well as those months of organising we should also spend an hour voting, because Biden would be a better oppressor to struggle against than Trump." That's absolutely true, and is very important, but it needs to be emphasised that that one hour voting is not a replacement for the months of revolutionary organising, and we shouldn't spend more wordcount on it.
Those sentences were too long but you know what I mean.
If I don't think a politician is going to push for legislation that will vastly improve my life and lift me up out of poverty (make me happy) then I'm not going to vote for them.
And there are different kinds of happiness.
For example, when Trump was president, not a day went by that he didn't say or do some stupid shit that made me laugh out loud.
I've gotten none of that with Biden. I can't even laugh at the horrible shit he does.
And I honestly think he's been worse than Trump in hugely significant ways. (Reversing all the covid relief programs enacted under Trump caused illness and homelessness and poverty and thousands and thousands of deaths. He was #GenocideJoe even before Gaza)
@CosmicTrigger@intransitivelie I can't conceive how Biden is worse. Trump almost toppled American democracy, and it's a hard climb back from that. He still might.
@CosmicTrigger@intransitivelie It's an aspiration, and if you don't think it's something worth fighting for, I don't even know what there is to talk about.
@CosmicTrigger@intransitivelie In any sane universe, Trump and Biden would both lose the populate vote in 2024, but logically, one of them has to prevail. I'm still hoping that Trump's problems will lead to an "enthusiasm" decrease for a few people who voted for him last time.
All I know is that as a rape victim, I refuse on principle to vote for anyone credibly accused of rape for any reason.
And if I told someone that in real life, and they told me I needed to vote for Biden anyway, I would probably be arrested for attempted murder shortly afterwards
If you've never met truly enthusiastic Biden people, they are really weird. Utterly bizarre. Often genuinely convinced that anyone who disagrees with them in any way is in fact a Russian spy.
I didn't believe it when people told me about them, and then I met them, and it was weird.
@passenger@intransitivelie My interpretation of what happened at the DNC:
"So where are we going for dinner?"
"We could go to Bernie's."
"You always say that. Anyway, is he even open this late?"
"Clinton."
"Look, I like Clinton okay, but I think we're all tired of Clinton."
Mom and Dad: Look, we're going to Biden's. There's something there everyone can eat.
"Again?"
"Look, if anyone has a better suggestion we can agree on, I'm all ears."
"Fine. We'll go to Biden's."
"Biden's?"
sigh. "Biden's."
@violetmadder@pawsplay@passenger
I hate to break it to you, but we've always sponsored genocide in one way or another. Biden is no different than any other president in that regard. And whomever you choose would go right ahead and sponsor genocide if they won. You basically can't be president without sponsoring genocide.
@violetmadder@pawsplay@passenger
No, but voting for fascism isn't going to help fix the problem, and unfortunately unless you've got a plan to utterly change the system between now and next November, refusing to vote is a vote for fascism. I hate that I have to say that, and I hate that it's true, but that's the reality of the situation.
That's what we've been getting told for more than half a century, and while you go on believing it you're helping them keep it that way.
The parties are not in full opposition. They're a good cop / bad cop tag team. The right fist softens us up until we think the strangulation of the left feels nice. The left fist holds us trapped so the right fist has an easy shot.
@violetmadder@pawsplay@passenger
Friend, I think you fundamentally misunderstand the meaning of "harm reduction." It doesn't mean fixing the problem. It doesn't mean no harm. But I'd rather work on fixing the problem with the good cop in charge than the alternative. That's all I'm doing. I'm voting for good cop so I have slightly more breathing space to try to figure out a solution where neither cop is in charge.
The system ain't gonna change by 2024. So you've got a choice: vote for one or the other. I won't condescend or moralize that choice. It is a terrible one. But we must make it or it'll be made for us, and then we'll just have bad cop from here on out.
That's not a choice. It's a Saw game. And it could be over tomorrow if people stopped playing along.
The good cop is not good. They are not our friend. Fawning on them may buy you a minor reprieve from abuse, but it helps preserve their veneer of legitimacy and helps perpetuate the power structure that keeps us from escaping-- the power structure that has been becoming MORE entrenched over time, as the levers of our supposed democracy are unhooked and reduced to pure theater.
They will lose on purpose as often as they need to, to keep us feeling precarious and scared. They will feed us to the Republicans, on purpose. They deliberately elevated crazed fascists to serious candidates, buying them ads and normalizing them at every turn. They handed the GOP Roe v Wade and the Supreme Court practically with a bow on top.
That's how good cop / bad cop works. They each need each other and play off of each other. It's a fucking scam. They will take the gloves off whenever the whim strikes them, and dancing to their tune won't save you.
Oh-- and harm reduction is for reducing the injuries caused by dangerous behaviors while people aren't ready or willing to quit. Treating this dystopian corruption like an addiction we refuse to kick... is grotesquely funny.
Of course they're not identical. A boxer's right fist is used differently than their left. The good cop plays a different role, using different tactics, than the bad cop. That's how the strategy works.
@violetmadder@intransitivelie@passenger This is a fantasy. The GOP's own left and right hands don't coordinate, and Will Rogers said it best about the Democrats.
The corporations and ultra-wealthy jockey against each other like any other mafias or cartels before them, using political parties like toys in a game, while we get trampled underfoot. They don't have to be well-coordinated, all they do is chase money and power, exploiting any angle they can think of, while trampling us underfoot. Like predators fighting over the entrails of their prey.
@passenger@intransitivelie@violetmadder@pawsplay ...dictionaries are what educated societies have agreed upon where the meaning of words reside. Anything else is simply personal opinion and, thus, not plausible for factual argumentation...
Dictionaries are extremely short and simplistic summaries of the most common usages of words. They ignore all poetic forms, all free expression, all "it makes sense in context", all metaphor, all wordplay. Language is a beautiful and elegant way to encapsulate an infinity of meaning within a finity of phonetics. Wittgenstein said that language is a game we play. A dictionary is merely a small and tame subset of that, and attempting to restrict yourself (or others) to that subset is to necessarily impoverish your own ability to express ideas.
For example, "stonks" is not in OED, and yet saying "stonks" in response to someone is a concise and elegant way of critiquing an argument. It contains a tremendous depth of culturally-contextual information which might take thousands of words to fully expand.
@passenger@pawsplay
I hate to say it but I don't trust anyone who stans pretty much any politician. People aren't supposed to be enthusiastic about voting for politicians. Anyone who is isn't actually worried about policy, they're only interested in celebrity.
Why do you hate to say it? Political stans are weird AF.
I mean, the energy at the Bernie rally I went to in 2016 was insane. There was this feeling that we were making history and that this was a guy who really wanted to change things and help us.
But it wasn't Bernie we were excited for - it was the idea that for the first time in a very long time things might actually get better.
Did Bernie have overzealous stans? Sure. But what the fuck has Biden done to earn fandom of any kind?
I at least understand why the MAGA cult exists. Trump actually delivers what his voters want.
What has Biden delivered other than weak status quo bullshit we could get from ANY corporate fluffer Democrat?
And I don't agree that Trump delivers what his voters want. He delivers what his backers want, but the lives of Trump voters haven't gotten better as a result of his policies. They're looking for someone to stan who says the things they want him to say, but their worship of him is just as counterproductive to them as any other political stan. To say otherwise is like buying into the lie that at least the fascists make the trains run on time. They don't. That's just historical fact.
Yeah, this. I remember the "the storm isn't coming" and "Trump is a cuck" mutterings of late 2020 when the mainstream fascists realised that their hero was actually just grifting them. How quickly they've forgiven him.
@intransitivelie@passenger Exactly. My favorite politician is mostly aligned with my priorities, at least partially not evil, and is afraid of losing the vote of people like me. To me, voting for President is more like hiring a lawyer than it is falling in love.
@pawsplay@intransitivelie@passenger Ah, yes, “voting for president isn’t X, it’s Y”; I like this variant a lot, because it ends with “hiring a lawyer” and all lawyers are scumbags.
Except in your analogy Joe Biden isn’t the competent lawyer with a well-established practice. He’s a public defender who specialized in patent law, who draws his paycheck from the same source as the prosecutor, and he has been instructed by his boss to not waste too much time on your case.
This anology works TREMENDOUSLY well on a secondary level.
Because there are multiple people in this country who have received death sentences in part because of corrupt or incompetent court-appointed defense lawyers.
Some of them have been executed, because the 1994 crime bill (which takes credit for a drop in crime that had started organically three years earlier) cuts off appeals. And who wrote that bill?
@Mrw@pawsplay@passenger
So you'd rather hire the lawyer who is actively working for the prosecution then? Sorry, Joe Biden is awful, but he's not a Republican, nor is my voting for him to save mine and my loved ones' lives an endorsement of anything other than that fact.
It has been said that voting for Emmanuel Macron is hitting the snooze button on fascism: you're still going to have to go there, but you're dragging your feet about it.
My impression is that a lot of people want to not believe the same about Biden: to continue the snooze alarm metaphor, they want to believe that hitting it means that they don't have to go to work. This level of self-delusion is fine with an actual snooze alarm but the metaphor breaks down when you're talking about a superpower collapsing into fascism. At that point it becomes deeply irresponsible to not have a real plan.
Many real plans have been suggested. From stacking the supreme court to disbanding the police to UBI to a general strike to banning the Republican party and Fox News to sending the 82nd Airborne into Florida to help the trans people there, there's plans from all shades of political theory to deal with fascism. Many of them might have worked. The Democrat party have chosen to do none of them and simply pretend that the problem would go away by itself.
I think you're a smart person. I know you know how irresponsible this is on their part. I agree with you that Biden is a bad president but far better than Trump, but that logic falls away if he's not an alternative to him, just a snooze button.
@passenger@Mrw@pawsplay
I will absolutely hit the snooze button on fascism if the alternative is French kissing fascism. Let's not fool ourselves. I have virtually no ability to do anything. I can plan all I want, but it won't change anything, and it won't matter if Trump is reelected.
I'm not going to put words in your mouth, but people believe that they can hold the Democrats' feet to the fire by refusing to vote for them, as if the Democratic Party really gives a damn who is in power. They'll be the last ones up against the wall. Black people, brown people, LGBTQI people, and disabled people are already up against the wall. People believe that we should sacrifice those people to send a message to the Democrats that they won't hear. These people accuse the Democrats of business-as-usual politics? Yeah. That's true. Which means they don't care if they lose this one. And they don't care if marginalized people die. They've made that plain already. They just seem less likely to actively kill marginalized people if they're in power. Less likely. And if those are my options, I'll take less likely over absolutely going to kill marginalized people in great numbers.
You can't threaten the Democrats with refusing to vote. So, you've got to vote for them and then use the breathing room that gives you to enact real change. Do weak-willed centrists view it as a snooze button? Sure. But you're not going to win them over by refusing to vote. I can't stress highly enough that voting is necessary but insufficient. But if you don't vote, you lose, no matter what your plans.
@cakeisnotalie
This is aimed at the young? Because I can assure you, the unenthusiastic young people are not milquetoast diet caviar liberal centrists. If you're talking about the party rank and file, sure, but they've got what they want. I'm talking about the message that people who actually care are sending to young people who actually care.
@cakeisnotalie
Sorry, accelerationalism is a hard no from me. It's bad theory, it doesn't work in practice, and if you think the marginalized are suffering now, just wait until fascists get their way. Plus the people you're so sure are going to go to Hell with you aren't going anywhere. They'll be fine. The marginalized won't. I understand your frustration with the status quo, but I can assure you that things can indeed get worse, and by refusing to vote for harm reduction while working for better, you are enabling fascism, which makes you part of the problem. Full stop.
@intransitivelie@cakeisnotalie Yeah, they’re ranting against Trudeau, who (along with the NDP, full credit to them) has recently implemented a giant step forward in our health care system by expanding it to include dental care, and seems to be working to include drug coverage as well. That flat out wouldn’t have happened under a conservative government. I don’t love every single thing he’s done, but we’ve absolutely seen some good improvements with him.
@cakeisnotalie Means tested with a threshold of $70k household income or so for full coverage, up to $90k for partial. Universal is better, but this is still a huge improvement. The NDP is satisfied with the promises on pharmacare to date, so I’m good with that.
As for things getting worse for me? Regardless of who’s in government, I’ll personally survive, short of a level of collapse that’s vanishingly unlikely within my lifetime.
@intransitivelie Yeah, I've always said this in my criticisms of America, American "democrats," democrat-faithfuls, and Biden.
We don't need to be told, as if we were toddlers, that the Republicans are "worse." We know. It's not going to persuade us to speak positively about Biden (especially if we aren't even American/in America). We especially have no responsibility to pledge fealty to their politicians in their war-machine country that's pillaging our countries and enabling/empowering our countries' fascists and billionaires.
@mahal
Exactly. If he wants me to be enthusiastic about him, he needs to do more than the bare minimum of not being Trump. I'll vote for him, but I'm not going to go around kissing his ass.
The "it's this or fascism" argument is just an escalation of the old "the other guy is worse" argument that I've been enduring for decades. It shouldn't be even remotely surprising that when you vote for the "lesser of two evils," you get . . . evil.
@intransitivelie@benfell the thing is that voting isn't harm reduction. not only because biden has caused more harm during his political career than three trump presidencies could ever cause, but because it legitimizes everything you just said about how one side feels uncompelled to do literally anything and only has to appear to be less harmful.
opt out. don’t vote. spend the energy usually spent agonizing over these decisions to prepare your neighbors for natural disasters, organizing a tenant union, sharing the parenting load with other parents, communal-izing your possessions so everyone benefits from them, start a repair cafe, create a microgrid….
“we can do both” except we can’t and the state of things is proof. we either build truly resilient communities (networks of mutual support, trust, and solidarity—not a group on a discord server) and change the world piece by piece having becoming aware to the reality laid out in the earlier post, or we perish—forever deluding ourselves into believing that the next election will be the one that saves us.
Add comment