A over third of eligible voters did not vote.
The couch was a more viable competitor than either candidate.
There was more than could have been done to represent voters’ interests.
However fault is not binary. There’s plenty of people and even events that take some portion of the blame.
1 ) public ignorance is a widespread social force not a personal character fault that happens to individually affect the majority of the population.
2 ) This attitude of moral contempt is actively repellent to the people we need to reach out to, who do not subscribe to your premise. A lot of people don’t think they are fascists - they are wrong, but they’ll still look at you funny unless you can do a damn good job of making the argument. The Dems couldn’t, the media couldn’t, and nobody is watching it anyway. WE have to do it. Make better arguments and reach out to people instead of circlejerking and making our opponents arguments for them.
I think those two statements are about two different things: on is about blame, the other is about course of action.
People who voted for fascists got duped/are into fascism, but you still have to convince them to chose otherwise because what is the alternative?
Yeah, this is the correct comment. We can’t control voters, but the Democratic party can control itself, and we can exert influence over it. Blaming voters can only work as a sort of stress relief, but it isn’t useful. It doesn’t put us in a position to win the next election. If anything, it probably does the opposite and makes those people hate us.
Yeah. Voters is an abstract. It’s like hating the weather. No you hate rain, because it makes your hair frizzy.
We hate the voters cause now we have a fascist and it’s easier to blame them and remove any further introspection or thoughts from your mind but it does nothing at best and more likely ends with a bunch of people hearing you talk down about others and thinking you are an asshole, which won’t get more to your shrinking side.
So we must do what we can do and unfortunately it means the Democrats need to work on themselves. We have to be ready for the rain cause it doesn’t care that we hate it.
Both can be true
No.
If you must vote and vote for the “correct” party then you don’t have a democracy. Either we exercised our democratic responsibilities this year or we lost our democracy a decade ago and we’re just now finding out about it.
Either way, lesser evil voting is not a democratic ideal.
If you must vote and vote for the “correct” party then you don’t have a democracy.
“Democracy is when I like the choices my fellow citizens make, and if I don’t like it, it’s not democracy”
Holy fucking shit. This is “Democracy is when GOOD, and non-democracy is when BAD” level reasoning.
You beat that strawman, go on. I heard it talk shit.
“If my practical choices are reduced by the preferences of my fellow citizens, it’s not real democracy”
Go on, tell me about how it’s only democracy if your preferred candidate is within striking distance of victory.
Nope that’s not what I said either.
Nope that’s not what I said either.
If you must vote and vote for the “correct” party then you don’t have a democracy.
Considering that the discussion was not in the context of Aussie-style forced voting, nor legally restricted election choices, but in that voting for anyone other than the Dems in this election was the action of a total cretin, there’s no other realistic interpretation of your words unless we’re presuming that you spoke without any connection to the matter at hand, and were just spewing out random thoughts with no relevance to any context in this post or comment thread.
The statement stands on it’s own. If you must vote for a party then you don’t have a democracy. Even if the ruling class is benevolent and lets you believe you have a choice, it’s still not a democracy.
The statement stands on it’s own. If you must vote for a party then you don’t have a democracy.
I’m sorry, were we rounding up people with our Dem paramilitaries and forcing them into the Voting Fields™?
“The statement stands on its own”; no, it’s dribble that you refuse to assign any meaning to, because that would mean having a position that could be addressed instead of vagueposting.
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If you can’t abstain then you don’t have a democracy. (Yes Australia i’m looking at you) You have a system of coerced consent where the political parties wouldn’t even know how to change, but that’s okay because there’s no incentive to change in such a system either.
It’s literally the fastest way to get Party AB instead of Party A and Party B.
Great you started with the conclusion that not voting is fine and then tried to find a way to justify it. You failed.
I’m not going to write a 20 page paper for you. This is what it is. If people have to vote then the sitting parties have no reason to respond to voters.
What the hell are you talking about? Your solution to making democracy work seems to be telling people to stay home on election day. Fucking brilliant
No. The people can certainly go vote if they want. They can also stay home if they want.
You prefer the latter, or I wouldn’t see you defending that shit in every fucking thread.
Then people could abstain by writing in someone else. Not voting is a serious problem.
Write ins aren’t actually a free for all in most states. You have to qualify with signatures for the state to bother counting them. So no, not really.
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Still mad, huh?
It’s not even inauguration and we’re going to have to deal with 4 more years of Mr. Trump’s wild ride. Why wouldn’t I “still” be upset?
No, OP and I got into an insanely long argument about this exact thing yesterday that I’m honestly kinda embarrassed I engaged with for so long. Then i woke up to this meme, so…I guess he’s still mad.
Posted this long before the conversation had run its course, but it’s cute that you’re still thinking of me. :)
Alright, since you asked so nice, I won’t put it in the newspaper.
Resoonds within 1 minutes “I’m not mad, you’re mad! Look how mad you are!”
Alright, bro, I’m clearly mad. Ya got me. Oh no.
(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻
Uh, sorry for being online at the same time as you? lmao
And yet, here you are still engaging in other places I guess 🤷♂️
Pug its only been a month
Go back to sleep and enjoy the last month of Biden doing fuck all about any of the core problems that Trump is about to expand a thousand times.
This meme even contradicts itself. If its already known there’s a limit to reason, why didn’t the Democrats utilize this like the Republicans did? Obama lied about a ton of crap to get votes and everyone was still happy. All of a sudden the DNC has moral compass that prevents them from properly pandering to voters but full send genocide is worth losing all three branches of the federal government over.
Do people not realize that without legislative backing the President’s powers to make long term and lasting change are extremely limited and nil? Like how he pursued student loan relief and got blocked by the Supreme Court?
Biden has never had a true majority in Congress, the senate was always 50/50 at best and even then two of those were DINOs with one of them fully switching to GOP in the last year. Scream all you want about Biden not doing anything but there really isn’t anything else he can’t legally do without Congress or Supreme Court just stopping his plan before it can even be publicly known. You want to see change with an actual leftist government in the US? Then fucking vote. Not just every 4 years in Presidential elections. but in midterms and special elections too. Find out who your state representatives are and vote in those elections too. If you don’t know who represents you from the local level of city council all the way up to US House and Senate then you’ve really got no room to criticize the DNC for being paralyzed in not wanting to upset the voters they actually can get to turn out to the polls.
I don’t know about anybody else’s state, but my state was gerrymandered to extremes. I agree that there are a lot of voters who need to do their jobs, but there’s a lot of underhandedness going on to make sure voters have less power.
This meme even contradicts itself. If its already known there’s a limit to reason, why didn’t the Democrats utilize this like the Republicans did?
Because the Dems are fucking morons. This isn’t an excuse for the Dems. This is a reminder that voters are at fault too, and that allowing fascism is not magically okay just because the Dems are spineless gutless weasels.
I didn’t vote. That’s the democrats fault. They didn’t run anyone I would vote for in ‘16, 20, or 24
It’s the Democrats’ fault that you prefer fascism to spineless liberals?
If the spineless liberals are empowering the fascists even in years when they hold the majority, then there is no difference between the two.
“Both sides are literally the same”
How predictable. All of us who are going to suffer under the Trump regime thank you for being privileged as fuck.
I’m a LGBT+ person of color, don’t get self righteous on me, white boy.
Oh, so you’re voting for my death AND your own, how wonderful. So you’re not selfish, just malicious.
You’re fucking melodramatic, aren’t you? We didn’t let Trump kill us off last time, and we’re not going to let it happen this time either. But don’t worry, while I know democrats can’t be bothered to get off your lazy fucking asses and protest, the trans and LGBT community has armed leftists to support us. We’ll be just fine, so don’t you worry, no need to cancel brunch.
You’re fucking melodramatic, aren’t you?
lol
The Democrats used to promise real change and progress, but they’ve only proven themselves to be the party of stagnation in recent memory. Nowadays they don’t even try to inspire their base, but rather scare them into submission with the threat of Trumpism.
Sure it’s better than the rapid decline into chaos that the order party is trending towards but this pattern of “a couple careful steps forward then a dozen strides sprinting backwards” isn’t working for Americans. Many of us have lost faith in the system because the system doesn’t work for us. What’s worse is that when we get a candidate who speaks to us, the Democratic establishment shuts them down with more efficacy than they ever seem to direct towards any of the Right’s regressive politics.
While I still fall in line and vote for somebody who I am not excited or inspired by in a seemingly futile effort to hold the line, many others have given up because their struggles aren’t being addressed or even acknowledged. You can yell at them and criticize them until you’re blue in the face but I can guarantee you they’re either so tuned out that they’ll never hear it or so dug into their own political ideals that they won’t receive it.
If you want their vote, you’re going to have to earn it.
If you want their vote, you’re going to have to earn it.
“The Dems need to change” and “Allowing fascism is not okay” are not mutually exclusive positions, and I hold to both.
I think you’re right and that’s ultimately why I voted for Harris but as your original point says either apathy or ignorance amongst many other Americans has grown to the extent that they are willing to risk declining into fascism.
Are we going to change that by telling them to stop being apathetic/ignorant and that fascism is bad? Because that seems to have been the primary strategy the Dems have run over the last decade and the only time it’s worked for them was when the effects of Trump’s incompetence was unavoidably present in the minds of Americans. I’d rather we not depend on another catastrophe to win the next election, assuming we will have one.
Are we going to change that by telling them to stop being apathetic/ignorant and that fascism is bad? Because that seems to have been the primary strategy the Dems have run over the last decade and the only time it’s worked for them was when the effects of Trump’s incompetence was unavoidably present in the minds of Americans. I’d rather we not depend on another catastrophe to win the next election, assuming we will have one.
No, the solution is much deeper and more multifaceted. The Dems have the approximate strategic competence of a walnut.
At the same time, the toxic positivity of ‘agree to disagree’ that has become increasingly present even through the radicalization of the right since the 1990s has allowed many people to entirely detach their increasingly fascist political choices from their social lives, and this must be reversed. The fact that many here on Lemmy seem hell-bent on playing apologist for allowing fascism makes the message particularly important to be said here - we are all responsible for our choices, our choices have moral implications, and we live with those choices forever. There is no washing your hands of your deeds, there is no sitting out and playing innocent. This is not (yet) a despotism; in a republic, citizens have political power, and with that political power, responsibility for what they do or do not do with it.
And yet, Everytime I see someone talking about the Dems needing to change I see you playing goalkeeper. What’s up with that I wonder aloud for no reason?
He’s not saying Democrats shouldn’t change, just acknowledging that this election result is not 100% on them
It’s 100% on them. They lost. That’s how democracy works. They didn’t allow a real primary. Their candidate sucked. Their messaging sucked. They ended up with the biggest loss in decades, losing all three branches of government and the popular vote. This is a failure on every level and they don’t get to blame voters.
And yet, Everytime I see someone talking about the Dems needing to change I see you playing goalkeeper. What’s up with that I wonder aloud for no reason?
I suppose because your sense of pattern recognition is damaged.
Is this an anti-democracy post? Is OP saying people shouldn’t be allowed to vote…?
No, it’s mocking the idea that voters aren’t responsible for their own choices, and that the Dems running a dogshit campaign means that voting for fascism or sitting it out and letting fascism take the reins of the country is somehow okay.
The Dems ran a shite campaign. The Dems are absolutely guilty in this shitshow of fascism we find ourselves in. But the people who deny all moral agency to the voters who sat by and said “Yeah, voting against fascism just isn’t that exciting” is absurd. They’re fucking guilty too.
No he’s saying we must vote for one of the two parties, thereby manufacturing consent for whatever they decide to shovel down our throats.
I do not blame people who voted for third parties or write ins. At worst, they make a compelling point to campaigns - that there are many voters that are active, but want another option.
And you’re here trying to tell people to either not vote or vote third party and any time someone points out that just was the death of America you have to deflect. You’re reliable to do it in every thread. It is gross.
Hahaha no. First of all, politicians have used that bit of PR in every election I’ve ever seen. So that might be a clue as to why you ran around shouting about it and people were like, “yeah, and?” Secondly, I actually shut up about it before the election.
Oh so you’re one of the non voters who helped Trump win?
Oh so you’re the guy who makes assumptions that make you feel more comfortable.
Fault is on everyone
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Non-voters and trump voters
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russian propagandists
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“useful idiots” telling people to not vote harris for perceived evil
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democratic leadership for not having a better platform
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Kamala Harris, who just cant stop getting pulled towards cheneys like a magnet
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Joe “I don’t wanna quit yet, even tho I’m old as fuck” Biden
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republicans, who just want to destroy democracy
Everyone is at fault
Miserable, isn’t it?
People want one easy foe to blame, and to exonerate all other forces. Tribal mentality. Absurd from a supposedly educated modern population, but here we are.
Nearly everyone who had a serious hand in this election is guilty for this fucking debacle. Some by action, some by inaction; some by malice, some by incompetence, some by ignorance, some by sheer fucking stupidity.
What a fucking shitshow this all was. And will be for the foreseeable future.
The denial of some assholes on here go through is incredible. They won’t hold anyone accountable for their vote. Like who the fucks voting? The DNC isn’t voting. No group is voting vicariously for anyone. No one is mandating you vote. People vote. And many people let themselves be misled, and shirked all personal responsibility to understand who is leading the country and why and how. The half that voted for that orange asshole fucking deserve what’s coming to this country. I fucking hate it here.
Democrat bad. That only thing matter
Pretty much. Buncha crogmags
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As a Brit I’m not immersed in American politics day to day. My (unqualified) take from a million miles away went:
“Oh, Joe Biden got elected thank god”
“Oh, he’s promising to only serve one term, good that’s completely sensible”
“Joe’s running again? What? Could they not find anyone better? This isn’t going to go well at all…”
“(during that debate) Oh well, looks like Trump’s going to win…”
“Hey, Kamala looks like she would have won if this had been the plan from the beginning, not a sudden fumble when Biden’s brain melted beyond repair on live TV…”
Seems like - from my point of view- the main culprit was hubris on Biden’s part ever attempting a second term. And the inexplicable failure of the whole party to not force him out of that self destructive choice. Other candidates besides Kamala likely could have won, just seemed like any Dem candidate would be fatally undermined by starting a late campaign.
Well you see the Democrats are a gerontocracy and if they pushed him out then they could do the same to someone like Pelosi. Don’t you know it’s their god given right to die in office after years of going senile on live TV?
You’re not wrong. Biden never formally promised to serve one term, but heavily implied it. Many of us were disappointed when he announced he was running again, but conventional political wisdom that the incumbent has a massive advantage was still a compelling argument. For an incumbent to be forced out is nearly unheard of in presidential politics.
Even after the debate, I was willing to lend Biden the benefit of the doubt insofar as I considered him to be doing what HE believed to be the best chance of winning. When I learned that he had internal polling showing a total massacre long before the debate, my opinion soured from “Idiot, but I get it” to “Narcissistic moron who lost the country to fascism”.
Harris started with strong support she could have, potentially, won with, but in the process of ‘defining’ herself to the electorate, chose what she saw to be the ‘safest’ choices in a attempt to not lose that lead. Unfortunately, that lead was largely built on possibility, and in the process of defining herself, especially defining herself in the ‘safest’ possible way, obliterated the ability of all people to see her as all things, and cratered her chances of success. She would have probably had more success with at least a vague argument of change rather than “I can’t think of anything I’d do differently [than Biden]”, even if it created bad blood between her and the president. Whether that would have been enough to win, God only knows, but I think we can all look back and say, at this point, that the ‘safe’ choices were not, in any way, safe.
Tbh honest I was surprised Biden was even a consideration back in 2020, he was too old even then and it made the criticisms of Trump’s age and mental health not land so well. The moment it was a close call in 2020 the plan should have been ‘popular dem by any means necessary’. Not, double down on aging incumbent when they rarely do better on re-election. I can’t tell it if was hubris or a complete failure of the party apparatus to believe it could come up with someone more appealing than Trump…
That tracks. I was hopeful that Harris would put some more distance between Israel and us than Biden had (not a big or difficult ask, I thought). Her consistant distancing from any Palestinian-adjacent ideas really put the nail in that coffin.
She was either disappointing or unnoteworthy on most other fronts, but I voted for her anyway.
It seems like your take on the Harris campaign, boiled down, is basically that they tried to optimize for center too hard? And should have gone farther left? I hope I’m not putting words in your mouth, that’s how it reads to me.
I agree. Like you said it’s impossible to know how that would’ve turned out, but after seeing this last election, hard not to conclude that Dems need to start spitting some fire and getting spicy. This milquetoast party of reasonable takes really isn’t getting anything done.
Sure they’d lose some (many) moderates, and I bet they’ve polled and “determined” that they’d lose more votes than they’d gain, but polls can’t capture the momentum generated by a movement for change, the potential support is de facto unobservable under current conditions.
Regardless, even when Dems “win”, it seems little changes. Really wish they’d start swinging for the fences and see what sticks.
Edit to add - I agree with your post as well, don’t want to (yet again) hyper focus on Dems-the-party
It seems like your take on the Harris campaign, boiled down, is basically that they tried to optimize for center too hard? And should have gone farther left? I hope I’m not putting words in your mouth, that’s how it reads to me.
I would love if they had went further left, but ultimately it’s that they ran on a platform of ‘everything is okay’ when the mood of the country was not ‘okay’.
She would have probably had more success with at least a vague argument of change rather than “I can’t think of anything I’d do differently [than Biden]”, even if it created bad blood between her and the president.
Exactly! She should have thrown Biden under the bus! He’s done with politics, his polling no longer matters and fuck his feelings. She should have used it as an opporitunity to highlight all the shit people dislike about him and promise to do differently. She should have used trashing him as a springboard to promise to be better. Instead, she just promised to be Biden 2.0 when nobody even liked Biden to begin with.
A decent “party” would dispel “ignorance” rather than thriving on it.
That’s completely within the bounds of reason.
“I am speaking”
This is great. Needs a dash of misogyny though.
