Edit: new and improved image, now with 100% less support! Used my expert photo editing skills to change “supporting” to say “voting for”
I’m going to copy /u/kiniz0r’s comment from a few months ago because I think it’s extremely perceptive and accurate:
People have a fucked-up understanding of voting in the US. You are not voting for the person you agree with. You are voting for the person you’d rather negotiate with.
If you actually care beyond the aesthetics of whether you did the cool thing or not, you have to think about the function of what you’re doing and not just whether it feels good.
Your political choices shouldn’t be performative, they should be as effective as possible in the present.
You do the best you can with what you have.
My favorite analogy is that voting is like taking the bus, just because it doesn’t drop you off in front of your house, doesn’t mean you’re better off walking.
Idk why people think negotiation starts after voting happens
We’re negotiating right now, this is the negotiation.
Absolutely, but the negotiation also continues after the voting happens, so it’s probably worthwhile to vote for someone who can be negotiated with.
I’ve talked to a bunch of people who were barely of voting age in 2016 and who treated their first voting experience as an edgy popularity contest, who didn’t think about anything other than the presidential race.
Then Roe was overturned and they were like ‘Ohhh. I get it now.’ And then it was too late.
I also hear from people who are just coming into voting age saying similar things. Biden isn’t doing enough about Isreal (as if he has the power to unilaterally stop the fighting), and they seem completely unaware that Congress, not the president, controls most things. This is not (yet) a dictatorship.
But they’re planning to vote like it’s a horse race. Sorry Buttercup, but that’s not how this works. Biden is at least sane. The entire right is not. Please for the love of humanity, please don’t lock us into fascism because you think Biden is too old or whatever. I agree, we should have better candidates – nobody seems to be mentioning that trump is only 3 years younger than Biden, which at their age is nothing – the fact is these are the two we will be choosing from. There is no third option in this system, and no amount of protest votes will change that. It’s just a fact.
I would vote for Biden’s corpse before trump and the fascism he openly calls for. If you wouldn’t, you need to learn more about this system and processes before casting your vote. It shouldn’t even be a question.
The bigger issue is the whole system behind voting, not the symptoms that we call our candidates.
You understand the president you vote for is only part of this right? We could elect Bernie and we still wouldn’t have healthcare in 4 years without a blue congress.
What is Biden supposed to have done in the last 4 years about healthcare on his own? The changes on requirements for prior authorizations is a big help for many but things like that are about as much as he can do without Congress.
You understand the president you vote for is only part of this right?
I’ll point you to Henry Cuellar down in the Texas Valley. He’s one of the most consistently right-wing Democrats in the House, he’s in a Safe Dem seat and has been since the district was packed with Dem voters during the 2006 Tom DeLay lead redistricting ratfuck, and every time a progressive primary opponent sticks a head up he gets millions of dollars in party to support to bail him out.
This is the fundamental struggle with “You just have to support Biden and then figure shit out downstream”. Guys like Biden and Clinton and even Kerry and Gore have created this perpetual undercurrent of conservativism in the party, such that every election becomes a “Bad Democrat v Worse Republican” all up and down the ballot election after election after election.
And because they can command these enormous sums of money and vast media influence campaigns from their position as leaders of the party, we keep getting these turds jammed up in our plumbing for decades - Manchins and Sinemas and Feinsteins and Gillibrands - who actively undermine everything in the official party platform with their concern trolling.
Even if Biden wins, another four years of a glorified insurance lobbyist who gave Strom Thurmond’s fucking eulogy is not going to benefit anyone young, colored, or queer who still cling to faith in the party. He and his team are going to keep putting up these turds like Merrick Garland and Anthony Blinken in the bureaucracy and backing a team of mummies for the next Congressional election and doing everything they can to kneecap anyone under 40 with the gall to challenge someone in a primary.
We don’t get to vote for “better” in the US. We get to vote for “less worse” or “more worse.” But not “better.”
Better takes ages. Massive organizing. And probably some violence on someone’s part. But you don’t get to vote for “better” in this country.
As evidence: We’re the only country that needed a war to decide that slavery was wrong.
And voting in LOCAL elections, which way, way too many people ignore as not important. We can actually have “better” in a lot of those elections, if people would pay attention. People started paying a lot more attention where I live after a council member skipped 3 straight months of meetings but still had time to go to campaign events, and we realized that there were serious issues with several council members who all voted for conservative bs in lockstep. We managed to flip enough seats that it’s now a 5-4 Democrat majority so the mayor can’t just force through her pro-oil & gas nonsense at every turn, and the new members actually give a shit about the community.
My dad is a local official and he couldn’t stop some giant, ugly, car-brained development from going in. He could only vote for the least bad one. Which is still terrible.
So, no, I don’t think even local elections get us “better.” But “less worse” is still worth voting for because it honestly doesn’t take that much time.
They do though? It would be much easier to mobilize on a smaller scale and build up. ike I’m sorry that happened to you but some places are getting better. A few areas have ranked choice which I think is a step forward. Do don’t gone up hope and keep trying to make things better
As evidence: We’re the only country that needed a war to decide that slavery was wrong.
Uh. Pretty sure that’s not even close to true.
Okay, Haiti, too. But I don’t really count that because it was a slave revolt.
But most of Europe just passed a law saying it was illegal.
Most of Europe didn’t have any significant amount of slavery to ban. Even then, there was considerable resistance - France abolished slavery during the French Revolution (a time of civil war, if you will remember), then reimplemented it, then abolished it again. Most of Latin America abolished slavery only with wars of independence; many of them not even then, having civil wars of their own during which the issue was resolved. Brazil had a coup over abolishing slavery, much of Africa and the Middle East retained the institution until stripped of independence (via war) during the colonial era… the list goes on.
Wars over slavery are presented any time there is a powerful slave-holding elite in a post-Enlightenment society.
While Europe just reformed and compensated the slavers with money, at least we fought a bloody war to end the slavery menace, bringing the emancipation cause to the forefront of the world. Albeit Reconstruction was sadly misused but at least some good was done for the world.
Didn’t European countries invade several African kingdoms and tribes and brought emancipation to their slaves?
Goddamn if this ain’t the truest thing I’ve read in weeks. Just an addendum, slavery has never gone away. It built the foundation of this country and continues to be the reliable and cheaply paid engine that drives it. Slavery exists, it just has been frosted in corpo speak and glitter to fool the masses.
Where do you believe slavery still exists in the US? Can you give an example of humans being owned by an individual or company and forced to work for no wages in 2024?
Sure: in prisons that are disproportionately filled with minorities, as is explicitly allowed in the amendment.
We don’t get to vote for the best option because we don’t have ranked choice voting.
We will always be voting for the lesser of two evils because we are afraid of throwing our vote away on a third party or lesser known candidate.
If we had ranked choice voting, we could actually vote for people we like instead of voting against people we don’t like.
It would open the doors for so many new politicians to stand a chance against the ones who simply have the most name recognition.
I’ll go further: actually bothering to talk about some of the positive things that happened under his presidency will be necessary for him to win.
If progressives, leftists, antifascists, etc. can only manage to offer a “I guess he’s not a literal pile of shit so maybe I’ll consider holding my nose and voting,” there’s no permission structure for Enlightened Centrists™, Never-Trumpers, or even tired Democrats, to turn out. Trump voters are mad as hell. Lots of them really think the election was stolen from him. They’re going to turn out.
We need more than holding your nose.
The child tax credit cut child poverty by possibly as much as 46%. Biden’s campaigning on bringing it back to stimulus levels. That’s money in the pockets of people who need it the most.
Biden tried to forgive student loan debt. Conservative judges blocked him. Re-elect him so he can keep appointing judges and finding new ways to fight against more bad decisions like this.
Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act may include some of the most impactful climate policies ever enacted by any American congress since the creation of the EPA.
There are "yes, but"s for each of those points I made but my argument is simple: you don’t get to make more accomplishments if you don’t talk about the ones you made already.
This hasn’t been a perfect administration, we’ve never had one. But he damn sure hasn’t done nothing when it comes to some of the most important political issues of our time.
It’s weird that there’s been so much accomplished but so little talk about it. I only ever hear them listed at the end of a Brian Tyler Cohen video.
To me the issue stems from DNCs reluctance to whole heartedly accepting a progressive platform. They think skating by sipping progressive lite is appeasing the “moderates.” When really there are no moderates left to think of. If you are even considering Trump you are full right. No question.
It’s hard to give credit to a party that will trip over its own dick to compromise on every single policy.
Can you please list something he actually did rather than “try”? Because otherwise people should just “try” to vote for him.
The only thing I remember is breaking the back of the railroad strike (most pro union president btw).
I listed two already and others have listed more, but I’ll take your comment as if it’s in good faith anyway and link to:
more information about the Inflation Reduction Act
Which is both a huge investment in infrastructure and climate initiatives and also pretty poorly understood by most people.
And to make a bigger point: on the left we have an intrinsically harder job than the right does, since their argument is that government sucks and then they prove it by working in it and doing a shitty job.
It’s hard for government programs to work effectively, even when they have huge popular support. People with money and power always want them to fail. It means our results sometimes aren’t pretty, and aren’t perfect. But if even we shit all over them at every possible turn, how do you expect average voters to think any different?
Which is both a huge investment in infrastructure and climate initiatives and also pretty poorly understood by most people.
This sentence represents the DNC’s approach to politics so well and why they fail to connect with many voters. They approach politics inversely, coming up with policy and trying to invent/convince a politics around it, so they need a brand to sell their policy basically which Obama was so perfect at. You see this with the former Obama staffers Pod Save guys a lot. They constantly plead with their audience to realize why something like public healthcare isn’t a realistic policy, or why some policy that connects with very few is actually the best thing for you. This is also just the general DNC-sympathetic approach in the media coverage, “here’s why, despite you struggling with increased economic uncertainty and material stresses as a result of our decaying economic system, your life is actually better because of Biden and the DNC.”
Inversely you have the GOP who shamelessly accept any and all public politics to the point of absurdity. Trump is like the inverse-Obama where instead of a political brand selling policy, he’s parroting back the politics that people present him with as if it was a “yes, and” improv exercise. And they effectively take that public fear approach towards Trump from the Democrat-sympathetic media and flip it around, “your life didn’t significantly change under Trump despite this insane reaction to him,” which for many Trump supporters actually connects.
So average voters, they don’t care about policy or some political argument, most American’s aren’t engaged in politics at the online level. They vote based on how much they personally connect with a politician or by circumstance. The DNC fails to approach politics this way and desperately wants to find more Obamas to perform the function they require for their approach to work, vs the GOP who offer up anything no matter how ridiculous or absurd and contradictory.
Shameless plug for ranked voting.
Score voting is better, but any voting system that allows you to express preference in a way that doesn’t flush your ballot down the toilet is infinitely better than the garbage we have.
Me personally, I’m a fan of the Schulze method, but we take them as we can get them.
Not wrong
What I like most about this meme is that it implies that supporting the Biden won’t exactly lead to a good outcome for you either, but at least it’s not as immediate as getting the Trump again.
Biden is the lotion you apply to soften your skin so it can, once removed, make capitalism pretty.
Capitalism can’t be pretty, it’s more like sunscreen. Prevents your skin from dying quite as quickly, but it’ll get there eventually.
