Every fucking presidential candidate will continue the US policies that have been in place for decades. That includes Jill Stein, Cornell West, anybody. They will all continue to supply arms to Israel, because no president is going to revolutionize the entire US political system.
You don’t stop genocide by hopes-and-dreams voting for an incompetent candidate who has no chance of winning, thus securing the presidency for the party that promises more genocide. That’s how you make the problem far, far worse.
You wanna stop genocide? Start with your Representatives and Senators and convince them to forbid the president from taking military action without a formal declaration of war.
“Incompetent” is a stretch. No chance of winning, perhaps, but that’s only true because the two major parties continue to work together to make it true. Colluding with a fledgling fascist dictator to lock out other competition and then smirking about “wasted votes” maybe be stabard operating procedure but it shouldn’t be.
Trump is a monster. Biden is not a good person. Let’s kick then both to the curb and agree to support someone who isn’t an objectively terrible person.
You’re right; incompetent is a stretch. Some of them probably are, but others are just… I don’t know, out of touch with reality? And others are probably there knowing they will lose, but showing up anyway just to make their presence known for one reason or another, whether naive idealism, or cynical attention-grabbing.
I’d love to kick both Trump and Biden to the curb, truly. Well, a little farther than the curb for Trump. But the only way to do that is to change the way the system works. There is no scenario where a) it is realistically possible to elect a 3rd party candidate, and b) a 3rd party candidate, if elected, would have the ability to make any meaningful change to the system.
Remember, we’re talking about changing election law here. And who is responsible for changing laws? Not the president. It’s the legislature.
If we want something like a viable Green Party or Libertarian Party or whatever, we need to focus on the legislature, not the presidency. If we want to eliminate FTTP winner-take-all elections for the presidency, we need to focus on the legislature, not the presidency.
And believe me, I do want all of that. Which is why the puritanical grandstanding about protest votes by people who don’t seem to understand the fundamental rules of US government is so painfully frustrating. If people were half as passionate about actual politics as they are about arguing badly about politics on lemmy, change would be possible. Instead, they are bamboozled time and time again, like clockwork, every four years by political insiders who feed them the notion that a protest vote that help the worst possible candidate is the most meaningful action they can take.
Yep. What’s truly disappointing is that the voters in one of those major parties are extremely comfortable being complicit in genocide et al. It is entirely within their power to demand that their own party field someone less terrible… but they do not for reasons that only make sense if one looks at the process as one that values winning over all.
I agree that the system is broken. But the process that favors the two parties need not be used to field terrible candidates. THAT part of the process is 100% the responsibility of those who vote for those parties. If the candidates are terrible, then the blame for that rest solely on their shoulders.
Biden has a terrible history of friendship and collusion with racists, bigots, etc. Currently, he’s a genocide apologist. I would LOVE it if the Democrats fielded someone I could get behind. It’s not about one issue, it’s about asking for a bare minimum level of humanity. “Not a bigoted genocide apologist” should not be a stretch goal.
