Opinion | Why leftists should work their hearts out for Biden in 2024
Opinion | Why leftists should work their hearts out for Biden in 2024
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About a decade ago, me and my family were part of the very movement that changed the Republican party into the beast it is today. We made it very clear to party members that moderates would not be tolerated. We demonized the RINOs as much as we demonized the Democrats, the Liberals and the Obamas. By primary season of 2016, the last influences of the old Republican party were stamped out. Trump was the achievement of the Tea Party, and how it flipped the neo liberal conservative party into a fascist one.
Blame the Democrats all you want for being milquetoast, weak, or ineffective in the face of the Republican party. As someone who has played for both teams, I have never seen the same fire from Democratic voters to change their party as I have from the Republicans. There is no party wide effort to weed out Democrats who work in the interests of companies only, or are essentially Republicans with the Democrat label. There has been no unified direction for the future Democrats want to see for the US other than the current status quo.
What we did in the Tea Party, is we got involved at every stage of government. We found out who our state and federal legislators were, and if they did not stand with our views, we primaried them out. We took trips to Washington as a church, or as a young Republican's association, and we rallied in front of every monument that they would allow us in front of. In our eyes, our goal was righteous, and we were in a battle for the soul of the country.
I abhor everything I was back then, and feel guilty for the present we have created today. But if there is one take away from my time in the Tea Party that I think could apply to Democrats is you don't have to settle for less. By all means vote for Biden again, but you should make it clear to every Democrat defending their seat next year that you won't be settling for spineless enablers. Now's the time to start campaigning progressive candidates to run against them. Any progressive you get elected should be seen as a victory, and every neo liberal who loses should take it as a message that they are no longer electable. You should practice that democracy as much as you can while you still have it.
Just a reminder to everyone in the comments to be kind. Folks feel very strongly about this subject, and for very good reasons, but we can have empathy and compassion for one another even while disagreeing. Please remember that you are interacting with other humans here.
Democrats need to offer a hell of a lot more than "we're not actively trying to kill you like the Republicans" if they want that.
That continues to be the majority of the way they claim distinction from their Republican peers. They're riding this gravy train, and they don't want it to stop. People like Nancy Pelosi are way more concerned with feckless public displays like kneeling while wearing kente cloths instead of actual legislation to reign in out-of-control abusive and violent policing. They're way more concerned with the money they've made from this charade than actually serving the American people.
They have to offer a hell of a lot more than "We're not Republicans" if they want us doing more than just voting for Biden to make sure Trump doesn't become President once more. That's not a choice, that's a hostage situation.
Biden has objectively had one of the most progressive and active policy agendas in a generation. Even with his failed policies like student loan forgiveness, as soon as it was overturned by SCOTUS, he wasted no time and immediately proposed another way to do it. Given that Dems don’t control congress, this has been an amazingly productive term.
In fact, Bernie Sanders said of Biden, “I think he is a much more progressive president than he was a United States senator.” Sanders credits the progressive task forces that they did together while campaigning.
I agree that Dems need to offer more. But I also think the left eats itself. There are two kinds of low information voters. One kind adores their leaders unthinkingly. But the other kind refuses to give credit when it’s due.
The duopoly is just a game of Good Cop, Bad Cop
Which is why I always vote bad cop. He tells it how it is!Edit: Oop, didn’t notice that this is beehaw. Tough to tell the instance from the mobile kbin site.
I vote (D) because the other option under our FPtP system is fascism.
So, basically, "you're not doing enough for your party!" Gee, thanks for the encouragement.
Why, when I am an anarcho-communist, should I work hard to support the neoliberal candidate? I am not lifting a goddamned finger for Joseph R. Biden Jr other than unwillingly casting my vote for him if need be.
I think part of it though is if you at least talk about being willing to vote for him due to the dangers of the current GOP you may sway other communists/socialists who would vote third party to vote for Biden by seeing the good in at least protecting from the current social Neo-conservatism within the GOP.
It's not even about seeing the good, it's about understanding the real, serious harm the GOP wants to inflict on much of the voting populace. They want to violently beat and disappear people who disagree with them.
And therein lies the problem, because the Democrats are leaning hard on how absolutely vile the GOP is, and continue to act as though they don't have to offer anything because all they have to offer is "we're not literally destroying lives and setting people up to be killed by violence or systemic abuse" (which is also arguable because they are also not doing a lot to stop these things). So they don't see themselves needing to try harder for the American people, because all they have to do is be like "We're not as bad as the other guys!" Because the Democrats are fascism-lite, they don't actually want to solve problems with policing or having a two-tiered justice system or tax the people who fund them.
Leftists are keenly aware of the danger, and they're pretty sick of being expected to vote for people they loathe to "save" the country from itself. Why is it our job instead of Democrats job to fucking do better and fight harder? We'll do it because it's better than straight fascism, but asking us to pat some dim motherfuckers on the back because they couldn't be fucked to fight fascism themselves and wanted us to do it at the ballot box is some straight bullshit.
I dislike Biden intensely. I meant what I said when I wouldn't lift a finger to help him other than vote for him. I sure as hell am not going to work to sway others in my circle to vote for him. That's entirely up to them and the conclusions they draw. It is going against my principles as it is to vote for someone that does not represent my best interests. It's worse that he doesn't even represent my best interests, he does everything counter to them.
There are no viable 3rd party candidates thus far. If one does happen to pop up, I will at least entertain what they have to say and listen to them.
other than unwillingly casting my vote for him if need be.
For whatever it's worth, as a gay guy with trans friends that have had to flee our home state because of GOP policies, that vote is more than enough for me. I'm more on the normie shit-lib side of online political discourse, but we do still have a lot more in common than with the GOP, and we can come together to work on common goals and prevent a lot of very real harm from happening. I know political progress is a lot slower than you (or I, for that matter) would want, but still, it is genuinely appreciated.
If you consider yourself to be "shit-lib" then we have nothing in common because I want to put a terminal end to both parties and breakdown and rebuild our society from the ground up. Both parties are terrible for different reasons. One impedes progress through tokenism and incrementalism and celebrating that as a victory. The other party are Christofascists. You and I are nothing alike. Note that I am purposely leaving your identity out of this because one thing I feel strongly about is LGBTQ+ rights. People identifying as LGBTQ+ would flourish in a system where one party (i.e. the Democrats) does not use you as pawns and the other party (i.e. the Republicans) does not want to relegate you to an underclass.
To paraphrase Charlamagne tha God: Biden wants to be ratchet pussy.
Our system is a ratchet model, in which the Dems try to maintain the current spot on the continuum, while the GOP moves everything to the right when it’s in power.
Because under a FPtP system, the other option, the one you will get from not understanding math & game theory is currently fascism.
On one hand I will be down the D line in the next election because I do understand that the alternative is things getting worse with the republican party and we can only hope two definitive losses can snap the party out of their current strategy and ease up.
On the OTHER hand I'll be honest I dont see the changes in the republican party happening anytime soon especially since it's been this way since reagan. Sure neolibs will clutch their pearls and talk about better days but while the rhetoric may be a little more transparent in some cases, the republicans havent changed all that much. Election fraud fear mongering was a bush era dog whistle, and theyve been chomping away at abortion, appointing conservative leaning judges, and trying to limit public education and programs for decades.
Meanwhile what has the status quo democratic party done about it? They pushed further right in the 90s in order to try to win away Reagan voters and then spent the next few decades as wimpy pro capitalist centrists. Gaining an inch while the right takes a foot and then wagging their finger over how they would never play so dirty. Just look at the last Obama era judge appointee.
They could have fought to make sure their neutral judge would make the bench. But oh no the norms we couldnt do that. Deep down they were so SURE that Clinton could never lose so they wanted to look like they were the grownups who upheld political norms and then get it done anyway. What wound up happening? The republicans repealed that block privilege once in power and pushed their appointments in without issue.
I cant blame people for becoming exhausted and feeling like "not being the republicans" is not enough to keep rewarding the Democrats for being weak. They abandoned the working class and unions in the 90s, they continued to push right and attack their progressive wing while trying to continue to court center right voters. Now that they let the republicans go wild the last 40 years theyre telling us "you better vote for us or DEMOCRACY IS AT STAKE! and our policy is the continue doing more of the same"
It's like if an owner of a dog spent years training it poorly and smacking it around is holding the leash tight as the dog starts barking and jumping towards you. You suggest maybe changing the owner of the dog, but they reply "well if Im not their owner anymore then Im going to let go of the leash and who knows what the dog will do while you wait for the dog catcher to come and get it"
Id settle for "stop pretending neoliberals are the same as fascists" but something tells me the "less progress than all the progress is worse than negative progress, I'm so smart" people aren't very likely to do that.
Edit: yeah so looking at some of the stuff under here....smh
Seriously, it's such a naive stance to think that just because progress didn't arrive hand delivered to your doorstep gift-wrapped with a bow on top exactly the way you imagined, then it's not worth having. What a ridiculous idea. Progress is progress. Every little step brings us closer to the next step. Demanding perfection all at once is going to get us exactly nowhere.
Stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Progress is progress
Is it though? You look at something like the ACA for example, it was touted as some great step towards healthcare reform but all it really did is stop the momentum of healthcare reform dead in its tracks and did nothing besides force people to pay for private insurance that covers nothing. A generation has now lost out on the possibility of an actual functional healthcare system because people voted for "the good".
I'm still uninsured, nothing has changed for me since the ACA. Here's the thing -- I'm not interested in "incremental generational change", because I need healthcare myself in my lifetime. And I'm especially not interested in hearing that rhetoric from politicians who get a supermajority and do nothing with it.
Similarly, Biden's climate change bill was nowhere close to the radical action needed to confront climate change. The house is burning down and you have someone throwing a single pale of water on it then two pales of gasoline then sitting back in a lawn chair and telling you to shut up about your house because they just threw a "historic amount of buckets of water" on the housefire.
Half-measures can indeed be worse than nothing, because nothing at least creates some kind of urgency, where as half-measures are paraded around as some great victory for decades that we don't have.
Vote for the Most Progressive
Upvote. We should always vote for less bad.
This is quickly devolving into fighting, locking this up.
Republican obstructionism is worse than Democrat foot-dragging. Sorry, I know people get frustrated with the lack of progress, but one of those things is clearly a bigger problem than the other.
If a third party revolutionary candidate were actually viable and likely to provide even incremental improvement in the lives of real people, then I'd be on board. But it's not viable. Incremental progress is preferable to no progress or negative progress.
Democrat foot dragging enables Republican obstructionism.
The ACA, the infrastructure bill, the climate bill, getting sick days for rail workers without crashing the entire country
It's not perfect, but it is progress
It's the almost invisible boring little bureaucratic improvements that I actually find most exciting because they signal the real intent of the administration: https://prospect.org/labor/2023-08-07-biden-admin-labor-rule-davis-bacon/
But a third party will likely never be viable in within the lifetimes of people alive today, unless the Democrats suddenly decide to overturn FPTP voting.
So understand what you are asking of people. People are more than "frustrated with the lack of progress", they are enraged because they recognise that the current system will NEVER deliver them real justice and dignity. That they will be faced with this exact same situation every single election. And you are asking them to be content living with their rights and well-being on a knife-edge, likely for the rest of their lives. Because while the Democrats won't give them justice, the alternative is fascism.
So you are correct, the Republicans are objectively worse, and people should vote for the most progressive viable candidates possible. But the neoliberal tendency to demand that leftists stop complaining while they give up everything in the name of "compromise", and then tendency to blame leftists for neoliberal losses anyway, is galling.
Marianne 2024✊
Vote 3rd party, the 2 party system in the US is a scam, and your vote is just a drop in the bucket anyway.
This is the worst plan possible because of the phenomenon of vote splitting. If your #1 issue you want solved is FPTP voting, vote for the party that's shown the biggest tendency to reform that, the Democrats.
If you feel your vote is still worthless, stop complaining online and get involved locally and on a state level to enact the voting reform of your choice.
The US uses a First-Past-The-Post voting system. Third parties are non-viable in such a system. Mathematically.
That is why you have this inane conversation every four years. Because any progressive third-party candidate becomes a "spoiler" for the Democrats, rather than forcing coalitions and compromises, as it should in an actual functional democracy. So every four years we get to hear how leftists should "compromise" by completely giving up their entire position to support a neoliberal candidate because to do otherwise allows the Republicans to continue to hurt women and minorities.
Nothing will fundamentally change until the voting system changes. So of course neither political party is especially motivated to change it.
Again you are correct. There are right wing donors funding RFK Jr and right wing commentators supporting RFK Jr. They feel he can take enough votes away from Democrats for Republicans to gain power again.
Vote for either party provides legimacy to the regime as a whole, which is a nice feature for them as they take turns playing good cop/bad cop.
No. Don't leave power on the table.
Voting is not enough for real change, but that doesn't mean you don't vote. You vote, in every damn election you can, for the most progressive candidate that you can. Because at the end of the day those election will still put people into positions of power. You are not undermining the system by not voting.
Math & Game Theory will never allow a viable 3rd party in the USA as long as we still have FPtP voting.
Your individual vote is worth little but convincing many people of their impotence is incredibly effective at swinging elections. See: US Bernie/Green Party votes 2016.
Bernie conceded to hilldawg...disgusting
I voted for Bernie in the primaries, twice. But the young people didn't go out and vote for him and he lost. I think Bernie is too old to run now too.