I apologize in advance, I had a lot on my mind.
Your goddamn right.
But my question is now what? How do you hold a government responsible or enact good change when you don't have a side you can believe in or support? This is a question Ive been pondering for my own personal self and still don't really have answer for.
Honestly, I can make suggestions, but I think (and I'll expand on this further down) the damage has mostly been done at the federal level and is irreversibly broken by the design of both main parties. That may explain why there is a sense of hopelessness in both yourself and others.
Getting deeply involved in state/municipal policy and electoral races can stem the tide more than federal political action will, as those races are so sparsely paid attention to that a large cohort can swing results in any particular direction and gives potentially more options for finding better candidates to run, but federal politics has frequently sucked up all the oxygen among the electorate and that presents both a problem and an opportunity for those who still want to believe in electoralism.
Just as an example: The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would have shut Trump out of the White House the first time by forcing the winner of the national popular vote to get all electoral college electors in states that ratified it (effectively nullifying the electoral college), but it's a state-led effort, and if state legislatures weren't going Democrat, that generally meant it wasn't happening (and even that wasn’t a guarantee). Before the 2016 election, states who signed onto it had 60% of the necessary electors to make it the de facto law of the land that the winner of the national popular vote won the presidency. Since Trump's election, that has jumped to 77.4%. And it's because this compact has majority support in the US and people were electing governors that partly campaigned on a promise to make it happen.
But beyond that, it's time to build more robust community assistance and mutual aid programs that exist outside government regulation and funding rather than relying on it, as the government (both federal and state) are not reliable partners in community welfare anymore.
Obviously I don’t agree. Not much else to say. Taking not voting to its natural conclusion, worse and worse bad actors will enter politics stripping the government and its people of its rights and resources. Which we’ve seen. You not voting doesn’t stop the government from existing or those levers of power from being meaningful. It certainly doesn’t teach anybody a lesson other than you are not a reliable voter. You can be tired of democrats - I never liked them - but I can be tired of cynicism masked as enlightenment which encourages disengagement and self disenfranchisement.
Apparently you root for the government to crumble and then say, “well it was all their fault they didn’t woo me.” There seems to be this notion that if people are upset at those arguing that voting is meaningless they therefore don’t also put any blame on democrats if they lose. No idea why. There’s no contradiction holding both thoughts.
Right. And then there’s the outright denial of any accomplishments like the ones you listed as well as his dramatically improved climate policies or student debt forgiveness (which people dismiss because he wasn’t actually able to wave a magic wand), or as you pointed out being able to appoint a Justice, never mind the hundreds of historically diverse lower court judges he’s appointed.
When not aiding and abetting a genocide and reflecting the majority desire of the nation is described as "wooing the electorate" instead of "doing the bare minimum humane thing to do that people would expect of a decent human being", it may be worth re-evaluating that position, because it’s Not a Good Look™. But regardless of that...
I don't even disagree with your assessment of what not voting would lead to, nor do I want to see the result of that, what with all the suffering that entails, but let's be clear on a few things.
When people are coming in and saying "not voting is a vote for Trump", as several individuals did in this thread, it comes with an implicit suggestion that they
must endorse Biden. Some folks who didn't like Hilary Clinton as the candidate voted 3rd-party, and they were raked across the coals if not outright vilified for it with the same exact argument, so it's not an argument made to encourage voting as is being claimed, it's an argument to vote
and to vote the only "correct" way. So pleading for people to vote because it's the only means we have to communicate entirely misses the point, because a vote that isn't for Democrats or Republicans is treated exactly the same by these people as not voting at all and the very legitimate threat of public shaming for expressing dissatisfaction with the political dichotomy actually either scares potential voters into making a choice they hate to reject a choice they hate more, which will eventually disenfranchise said voter through a different kind of guilt and shame, or disenfranchises them right from the outset. The intentional undermining of 3rd-party options throughout the history of US politics has largely been to preserve two-party hegemony and keep current dynamics in place, but even when people want to vote but express their exasperation at the dichotomy provided by the 2 main parties and vote 3rd-party, it's not seen as more credible than an abstention by the 2 main parties or no small number of their supporters, which is willful ignorance on their part. The notion of being labelled an “unreliable voter” that you mention gives the game away, because “reliability” is measured exactly the way I describe, as only any vote for their candidate/party regardless of their policy position, with no reflection on why someone would opt not to, just bucketing them as “unreliable” at best or silently enabling their opponent at worst. And yet, in spite of all of that, House and Senate elections show a statistically higher voter participation than there is for the presidency on a fairly consistent basis, particularly (but not always) among candidates who have something to say outside the party line... almost like standing for something instead of merely standing against something else might
matter to people. But when Biden himself tells people not to vote for him if they don’t like his position on something, who’s really to blame if they don’t?
Because lest we forget the fundamental principle of a vote in an election: it is a personal endorsement of a candidate, full stop. Voting for Biden is an endorsement of everything he stands for, regardless if it's only done to stop Trump. And that endorsement includes actively aiding a genocide, a botched end to one of the US' forever-wars that left broken promises and up to 150,000 Afghani lives at risk of ending (on top of all those killed in said forever-war), a watered-down version of a milquetoast bill on climate action, minimal action on racial equity despite the rhetoric and the collapse of reproductive and trans healthcare (which, to be fair, some of which is not entirely on Biden but his entire party for not acting responsibly on these files when they had the complete opportunity to, along with centrist/conservative state legislatures and many "better things aren't possible" party obstructionists at the federal level… Manchin's ears must be burning right about now, but Biden's are, too, if you've seen his past voting record on some of those issues). So yeah, people are going to feel immensely conflicted and it’s easy to see why. And instead of resolving that conflicted feeling, people are more likely to negate it entirely. And there was a simple solution to that problem that no one once considered, despite what some people have been screaming at the top of their lungs for years. Democrats being ignorant of the political costs of their inactions and/or negative actions is not a new circumstance by any stretch. That these chickens are again coming home to roost at the most inopportune time and that those in power are begging those with the least amount of power to fix their long-standing mistake while having them make a huge moral compromise to do so is peak America.
The US does not need any help with voter disenfranchisement, elections in the US have seen utterly poor turnout by OECD standards and that has been a phenomenon dating all the way back to the 15th Amendment. And not all of that 35-50% of people not turning out to vote in the modern era can be levied against suppression tactics (especially when the most effective suppression tactic, incarceration, removes those individuals from the statistic utterly). This is to say that voter apathy/dissatisfaction is not some new phenomenon, it is a long-standing problem, the causes of which have not once been adequately addressed (though one could argue that engendering voter apathy is, in effect, a Democrat voter suppression tactic, especially when targeted against those further to the left of the party’s policy position, but that’s a whole other conversation). You'd think after more than 5 decades of this shit, someone would have flipped the script by now, but everything is the same as it ever was, ghoulish GOP candidate, only-good-by-comparison vote-entitled neoliberal candidate. This does not engender interest in politics, let alone voting.
You talk about my "cynicism masked as enlightenment" causing disenfranchisement, but there's nothing cynical or particularly enlightening about pointing out the unvarnished plainly-stated fact of how no one could ever do a better job of promoting self-disenfranchisement in the US than the US political system does (or many others for that matter, as the EU election results make plain).
That being the case, the 2020 election had a 66% turnout and that was the highest it has been since 1900 (a rather damning record, to be frank), an election that drew out people who typically abstained from voting on any given year on the threats of a 2nd Trump term. Those individuals wanted that vote to mean something. What they got was more of the same, but slower in some regards, the same speed with others (with all of Biden's expansion of Trump's policies, quite literally so) and the worst possible Democrat to be president during a flare-up in Israel/Palestine. People who don't usually vote to begin with stuck their necks out last election to get rid of Trump and many of them don't have any material benefit to show for it and are now feeling complicit in a genocide because of what the candidate they endorsed is doing, to boot.
Where I will agree is that not voting sends no signal on its own, you’re absolutely right there. That’s why a lot of people not voting aren’t just resigned to that being their only action. They’re at protests, voicing their opinions at town halls, etc, saying in no uncertain terms what they want to see from a Democratic president that they’re not getting now.
They’re doing it with Palestine. The response has been to get the protestors jailed, to discredit them, to say they’re an astroturf movement, to say the thing they’re protesting doesn’t exist, to undermine the United Nations' efforts to hold Israel to account using every lever at their disposal.
They’re doing it regarding Biden’s poor record on police funding and racial equity. The response was to say black people struggling with the decision to support him based on his record
aren't black back during the last election, to discredit BLM protests, to say what black people are asking for can never happen while expanding funding of the heavily-militarized and incarceration-incentivized police force in direct opposition to their preferred outcome.
Women have been doing it for decades. The response was to sleep on the issue until SCOTUS overturned Roe, basically when the damage has been done.
Trans people have been asking to be protected for decades, and while there is finally some movement there at the 11th hour, trans activists aren’t thrilled that their rights are being used as a cudgel to silence dissent for other objectionable acts by the administration, acts that they themselves find reprehensible.
When you’re being as clear as possible about why you might not vote for Biden (or any other centrist in any other nation, for that matter) and this is the response they get, the onus is on the Democrats for sticking their fingers in their ears and being willfully ignorant, to chase “reliable” voters who would “vote blue no matter who” and more than willing to compromise on their principles while the party drifts further right with each passing year. Outside of outright violence, folks choosing not to vote couldn’t be any more clear about why.
But, just for the sake of argument, let’s say folks do what is being asked and elect Biden. Will they not be asked to do it again in 4 more years yet again, sacrificing more and more of their principles on the altar of keeping the GOP from power? This discussion is evergreen for a reason, and it’s not because of the electorate. People want to put their foot down, but the enemy at the gates isn’t going away and are being told to stand down and hold their noses.
The core problem here is that the Republicans aren’t going to disappear in the face of defeat. Republicans give the most hateful and bigoted in America what they want. Democrats love talking about needing “a strong Republican Party”, they mention it every chance they get, but then ask the electorate to defeat it when they get their wish on a monkey’s paw? Please.
Republican voters will always get what they want, their party has the resolve to not moderate their position, emboldened to go further with each win, and have now gone as far as to not moderate the tone with which they communicate their position. Until the same can be said of Democrats instead of endlessly kowtowing to people in the centre (or those to the right who are never going to), this existential threat will never go away and Americans are fighting a battle they will eventually lose without something changing, and it's a change that no one capable of making happen has demonstrated any interest in. Whether it happens now or 4 years from now when the lesson still isn't learned seems mostly a matter of delaying that outcome, not preventing it. So people are choosing to act now, to make demands of their candidate now, and to use their singular method of leverage, to do the one thing that might motivate a course correction by withholding a vote. not resign themselves to whatever Biden wants to do in the next 4 years.
Until these existential problems are addressed, this election will resolve nothing, only kick the can down the road. And people are losing faith that anything will change unless there's some applied pressure, since protest and making their voices heard has been clearly insufficient. There's only one tool left in that toolkit, and people are less and less afraid to use it. Yes, even if the chips don't fall where they want them to.
People proclaiming that "harm reduction doesn't matter!" when only one side in this election wants to enact Project 2025 are asinine.
Some of us want to continue living in a non-theocratic, democracy controlled state, where lgbtq+ people have rights and protestors aren't fucking deported or sentenced to prison. Thanks.
Elect Biden and Project 2025 suddenly becomes Project 2029. This isn't like the Mayan calendar, no one averted apocalypse if 2025 passes and Republicans aren't in power to enact their will. And I don't have faith that Democrats will somehow see the light and make a better candidate choice that better aligns with what people want to see from a president in the modern day. So we will be right back where we started 4 years later. People can only hold their nose for so long before they pass out. You'll never keep the GOP out of power forever unless something changes and there's no appetite for that in the Democratic Party, so... there's no reduction of harm to be had, at best you're getting harm deferral.
At the start of the Trump administration, abortion was a protected right. Now it isn't. That wasn't an inevitability, that was a direct result of the election, and now the Supreme Court is fucked for a generation.
Point of order: it was a direct result of not codifying it into law when there was a chance to, the election was just the outcome of that choice. And one could argue that the structure of the Supreme Court with lifetime appointment, no oversight and no means to pull a judge from the bench has meant it was fucked from its very inception, but that's outside the scope of what you were trying to impart with that comment, I understand.
A conservative-heavy Supreme Court was always a possibility, and I'm surprised actions were not taken with that in consideration.
