I make a distinction between “responsibility” and “blame”:
- Responsibility is when your choices have contributed to the outcome.
- Blame is a responsibility for a bad thing.
If the candidate you supported won, you share in the responsibility for it - but not in the blame because from your point of view there is no blame because it’s not a bad thing.
That’s still nonsense, the point of view doesn’t matter. If I rob a gas station then I’m still the person to blame for the gas station being robbed, regardless of whether it was a good thing or not from my point of view. That’s simply not what the word means.
That kind of blame is useless when trying to prevent gas station robberies. You need to blame the robbery on something the people who don’t want the station to be robbed could have done different, so that they could do it differently next time. Putting the blame on the robber, in this context, won’t do any good - the robber know exactly what they could have done to prevent the robbery (which is quite simple - just refrain from doing it) , but they won’t do it because they want to rob the store.
Let’s pretend, just for a moment, that the point of the public discussion of the elections is to try and affect their results. You conclude the if Trump gets elected, it’ll be the fault of the people who voted for Trump. So you go to Trump voters and try to convince them that if Trump gets elected it’d be their fault but they can change that if they act now and refrain from voting.
Say you’ve managed to convince them that this is the case. Will it affect their behavior? Will they say “I was going to vote for Trump because I want him as president, but now I realize that this would mean it’s my fault he gets elected so maybe I shouldn’t”?
On the other hand, if you manage to convince a non voter on Biden’s side that it’d be their fault if they don’t vote and Trump gets elected - that’s potentially another vote for Biden, and enough of these can change the outcome.
That kind of blame is useless when trying to prevent gas station robberies. You need to blame the robbery on something the people who don’t want the station to be robbed could have done different, so that they could do it differently next time. Putting the blame on the robber, in this context, won’t do any good - the robber know exactly what they could have done to prevent the robbery (which is quite simple - just refrain from doing it) , but they won’t do it because they want to rob the store.
Again, what you’re saying here is fundamentally absurd. If the robber was not to blame, then it would be unjust to punish them. This isn’t how words work, or how society works, or how anything works. You’re being completely unreasonable.
Your problem is that you’re assuming that the robber’s actions, or the Trump voter’s, is completely immutable and out of your hands, while everyone else’s are something you can control. Neither of those are true. You have no more ability to get me to to vote Biden than you do to get a Trump voter to change their vote. As usual, every argument that claims “if you don’t vote for Biden you’re supporting Trump” rests on the assumption that you’re entitled to my vote, which is simply not true.
