Why I’m Voting for the Enemy
Why I’m Voting for the Enemy
www.thenation.com
Why I’m Voting for the Enemy
The left needs to challenge Biden, especially on US involvement in Gaza. But to do that, we need to keep him in office.
19 comments
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"the fact is that a Republican administration would be even worse. We know this because they’ve told us that it would. This is not idle rhetoric; it’s who they are."
Trump wants to engage in Israeli policies HERE.
Remember the illegal invasion of Lebanon?
Think Mexico:
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Trump literally watched 'Sicario' that night and was like "We can totally do that".
There is no reality in his mind. Remember nuking hurricanes?
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The fuck is up with the simpsons porn spam? I am not gonna acknowledge it beyond that.
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You can't just browbeat people into voting for Biden. Biden has to get people to vote for Biden. To make that happen, he has to do better. For better or worse, it looks like he'll take the nomination when the convention happens. Its on him now, and its basically out of all of our hands, whether journalist or commentator.
Its on Biden to win this election. He has to make the case for why he is better than Trump. He's got to go convince the vast majority of non-voters that he's worth showing up for. Trumps followers will be showing up in force and are as excited as ever to vote.
You can't just argue someone into being excited to vote for a candidate. Nor can you guilt them or shame them into it either. It doesn't matter if you personally see it as secondarily important. What matters is how they perceive it. If they see it as a 'no difference' or as if 'my vote doesn't matter', or 'Biden is just as bad', then you've lost.
Biden's got a tough road to 270. Firstly, he doesn't have a cult. Second, irl, things were actually better for most people economically under Trump. Its a circumstance of history, but it is what it is. It doesn't matter why things have gotten worse, it just matters that they have and under whose watch. Then you compound that with Bidens position on Gaza effectively being a complete departure from his base. He's softened that corner in the most microscopic of ways, but nothing meaningful has changed there. He's unable to whip Congress into passing his bills. He can't get them to fully fund Ukraine. The domestic agenda he did go for does almost nothing directly for individuals; if anything the infrastructure bill could hurt him because these projects will just be starting to interrupt traffic around election time, and they've all got big signs that say something along the lines of 'Bipartisan infrastructure bill', effectively 'your tax dollars at work'. But legitimately, people might be seeing those signs in November thinking 'this project made me late to work'. Its not clear that the bill will be making any kind of a difference that peoples lives. And our lives have become objectively worse under Biden. We are making less relative to the cost of things, and that hurts. It happened under Biden, and that's what people perceive.
I'm not writing Biden out yet, but he's got a real tough slog ahead of him, that he doesn't appear to be even starting to work on.
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Second, irl, things were actually better for most people economically under Trump.
I'll dispute that. 2021-2024 has so far been better economically for most people than 2016-2020. The top ten percent has seen a dramatic increase in income during the Trump administration, but the bottom half has been almost entirely stagnant while the cost of living has increased. Biden hasn't done much to change that trend, and I'll agree with you that economic performance is more circumstance than policy-driven.
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I’ll dispute that. 2021-2024 has so far been better economically for most people than 2016-2020.
Ok...
The top ten percent has seen a dramatic increase in income during the Trump administration, but the bottom half has been almost entirely stagnant while the cost of living has increased.
but the bottom half has been almost entirely stagnant while the cost of living has increased.
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People are downvoting you because they don't want to hear what you're saying even though it's true. Biden is objectively better than Trump but that might not be enough. We can debate the how's and the why's of that statement but I don't think there's any reason to dispute it.
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It's not true. Voting isn't a moral calculation, it's a strategic one. I absolutely agree that the onus is on Biden to bring people into the tent, but anyone that isn't going to vote for him because "he hasn't done enough" or "both sides are the same" (which are objectively untrue) is making a poor strategic decision that is against their own interests and supporting Conservatives. People should understand that. They should understand why their protest vote in a general election isn't a protest vote and how it damages their own cause.
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I agree with everything except:
he doesn’t have a cult
His cult is downvoting you.
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19 comments
I was with this article until the accusation that the Biden admin "stoked tensions" between Russia and Ukraine. It was Putin who invaded Crimea in 2014 and Putin who started backing and staffing separatists in Eastern Ukraine in 2018 and Putin who was talking about getting the USSR back together in 2020 and Putin who massed troops on the Ukrainian border in mid to late 2021, not even a year into the Biden administration.
It's absolute bullshit to blame those tensions on Biden. Complete brain dead, clownish buffoonery.
Yeah, the article is pretty tankie on that point, the author’s far-left credentials are pretty well established though. I thought it was a good argument why people who are way left of the current Democratic Party still benefit from continuing to vote for democrats because it allows them to keep pushing for change.
Yeah. The title is a bit clickbait, though. The "enemy" being Biden in this election is pretty disingenuous when we have a literal fascist opposing him.
Saved me a click™!