Locking this thread to clean up the mess. Come on, ya’ll, we can do better than this.
Edit: I’ve unlocked the comments in here. We’ve removed some comments in this thread for being inflammatory or for not adhering to Beehaw’s one (and only) sitewide rule: Be(e) Nice.
To elaborate a bit on what that means in !politics:
Be(e) Nice doesn’t mean you have to always be positive or happy. It doesn’t mean you always have to agree. It does, however, that at all times we have to remember the human on the other side of the screen. We can disagree and still be kind to each other and try to assume that others are operating in good faith. I get it - politics are messy and complicated and the issues are big and for many existential. But we can talk to each other and disagree with one another without resorting to personal attacks or escalating the discussion into an all out flame war.
And to reiterate - that doesn’t mean that we will tolerate hate speech, JAQing off, sealioning, or other ways of engaging in bad faith. If you see these things, please report them to the mods.
Not a big fan of this, but I can’t really blame her when the only other options are “unserious protest candidate who’s a bit of a crank” and “unserious protest candidate who’s completely nuts and possibly a crypto-Republican”.
Wow, a lot of vitriol on this topic! Okay, so, for my first post on Lemmy I am going to make a positive leftist case for Biden.
Biden is not the problem! He wants to do big things; he wants be a great president. If congress sent him voting rights, reproductive rights, major climate action, and many other leftist priorities, he would sign them. He could definitely be better, but he is mostly not standing in our way. How many decades would you have to go back to find another president you could say that about?
Biden is not the problem. Congress is the problem. State and local governments are the problem. Nimbys are the problem. We have a lot of problems to solve but the presidency is not one of them. What we need to do with the presidency is simply reelect Biden and then get on with the work of solving the actual problems.
Biden is still a centrist, also known as a fascist enabler.
The man is not for labor, see ending the railroad strike, one of the most infuriating moves a so-called great president could perform.
If he truly wanted to do great things, and not be hindered by the backing of capital, he’d be moving fast and breaking things more than the previous administration. He’s not.
I don’t think Biden wants to do big things.
Yep. He is absolutely invested in the status quo. Which is why the DNC sabotaged the 2020 primary to make sure he’d win.
Biden won the most states, nothing was sabotaged.
Going into super Tuesday, it was clear that Bernie had the lead. Most of the other candidates absolutely tanked, and afterward dropped out and all of them endorsed Biden. Then fucking Bloomberg joins the race out of nowhere, spends a bunch of money, muddies the waters, then drops out after hardly any time and endorses Biden. And when the DNC super delegates decided they’d go for Biden no matter what, it was clear what was going to happen.
Tell me with a straight face that people at the DNC didn’t contact the other candidates and make it clear that they wouldn’t have a future in the Democratic party unless they dropped and endorsed Biden.
The DNC did not want anyone but Biden to win the nomination, and they made sure it happened. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/31/dnc-superdelegates-110083
He was endorsed by the dropouts because any political operative could see that Biden was the best candidate to beat trump. Sanders core support is from white liberals and there aren’t enough of them to win a presidential election. Minorites and moderates have no interest in him and that was shown in the primary results.
Sanders would have been stomped by trump on 2016 or 2020
Would have been nice to see if that is true. Sanders had much stronger support across the aisle in 2016. We’ll never know though.
I think it’s a bunch of kids with little life experience. On one hand their passion recalls fading memories of my own young, idealistic self in my 20s. On the other hand, politics doesn’t work with raging hardliners. On the third hand, the world is pretty fucked, the US is going to hell in a handbasket and I don’t think geriatrics are who we should be voting for. You say Congress is the problem, but really, it’s voters. Voters just fucking suck. But unless someone wants to do away with any type of democracy, shitty voters is where we are at.
raging hardliners
you’re not wrong, politics is about compromise and in the most successful nations no one gets what they want and no one leaves the bargaining table happy. the question is, how does one work the politics of coalition and compromise when the people you’re supposed to coalition-build and compromise with are raging hardliners. How does one find a middle ground with open christian nationalist fascists?
How does one find a middle ground with open christian nationalist fascists?
You don’t. You must never. Because there is no middle ground.
The fact that Dems keep trying to “reach across the aisle” is one of the worst parts of what’s going on right now. They have no spine to stand up for what’s right.
we pick from the menu for dinner tonight, and for future meals we fight to have more of a say in what’s on the menu. there’s too many people calling for my head right now for me to protest vote or sit out because the guy who doesn’t want to kill me is problematic about some niche policy position. remember that a lot of trump’s money in 2016 went toward campaigning for democrats to stay home, with reasons alternating between “clinton is an awful candidate” (she was) and “she’s got this in the bag so your vote doesn’t matter”.
Absolutely.
Anyone, ANYONE that is pushing for protesting the vote is UNdemocratic and essentially actively advocating for fascism.
VOTE like your life depends on it because it will
It would be nice to have a strong challenger, but the DNC protects its elders. I can’t imagine any Dem not endorsing Biden as it’s the only choice, and not endorsing him is a strange waste of political capital.
It amazes me how much and how quick people are to blame Biden or AOC when the political landscape isn’t this richly progressive utopia in a rank choice voting system. We have real problems in this country and the ONLY way we get closer to solving them is by not electing fascists
The ONLY way we get closer to solving them was by educating our populace about the dangers of authoritarianism in the wake of the world wars. And coming to terms as a nation how much the Nazi regime learned from America and our concentration camps that we don’t teach nearly enough about.
But that ship kind of sailed and we now live in a country where some obscenely high percent of Americans don’t even believe the holocaust happened at all.
In my opinion we are way past the solution being democrats, they hardly even stop the bleeding anymore. They are just there to show the masses that there are two parties and they didn’t really want to pass all of this pro business, anti people legislation, but we had to because of the debt ceiling that we didn’t even stop for long and the Republicans can beat us with it again in a few years.
The system is designed to be fucked.
we can whine about how we didn’t do the right thing before now all we want, but we live in the world of today, and the solution, or at least part of it, must be to keep the actual fascists from doing actual fascism. we have to do more, electoral politics isn’t gonna save us, but genuinely it makes me really mad when people get all doomer about this shit. most people used to be serfs. a hundred years ago children were working in coal mines. progress can be made. progress against capitalists can be made. and if voting didn’t matter businesses wouldn’t be pouring money into politics, republicans wouldn’t be trying their best to stop people from turning up.
While I agree that “being all doomer” isn’t exactly helpful, I want to point out that voting democrats in hasn’t been exactly helpful either. Child labor has been happening in America this ENTIRE time, it has just only been legal in the agricultural space. But I had a job before it was legal using a family members social security number, and we were almost middle class.
There are a LOT of problems with our current system. I just feel like continuing to elect the only two parties that got us here is a bad plan.
I want to point out that voting democrats in hasn’t been exactly helpful either. […] There are a LOT of problems with our current system. I just feel like continuing to elect the only two parties that got us here is a bad plan.
as always, if you want this to be different in a way that isn’t going to throw everything to the hardest right politicians (who incidentally are making a full-court press to make child labor legal again) you’ll need to start with voting reform. i would encourage you to formally get involved with an organization like Fairvote to this end.
It would be nice to have a strong challenger
Under Biden, we’ve seen no meaningful action as the right to abortion was lost, housing scarcity has become a crisis for most Americans, another 100 billion unbudgeted was sent to another country’s war, and there was zero meaningful progression on education, health care, militarizing police, or stopping the resurgence of fascism.
Voting for Biden is voting for team color and little else. The man is a shitty president more concerned with stringing together a coherent sentence and running cover for his son than doing anything for the people who got him elected. And the extent to which he is a shitty president is going to usher in an overt fascist when he tries to sell himself on his record in a year.
stop with the prophecy, and stop with the doomer shit. sure, lets say voting biden is “voting for team color”. tell me, would the other team be better? fuck no, we’d be getting even more fucked than we already are. there would be a federal abortion ban. the federal government would be pursuing an actively genocidal agenda towards queer people across the country. millions of real human lives would be negatively affected. there would be less than no action on climate change, instead of the “meager” biggest investment in renewables in US history.
it just makes me so mad. if the red team wins, MORE PEOPLE WILL DIE. is that not meaningful? it is to me. it should be to you. vote blue. it isn’t enough, but not everybody has the privilege of ideological purity. we have to survive in order to thrive.
sometimes I wonder if the “both sides” leftists are privileged accelerationists
i don’t think its necessarily intentional. apocalyptic narratives play well online, the cold war made a generation paranoid about nuclear annihilation, and the US is steeped in evangelical culture. if you listen to right wing media, there’s so much stuff talking about the end times its crazy. the reason the right likes Israel? they think it fulfills end times prophecy. everybody they don’t like is the anti-christ. so many people in this country have been primed to accept the apocalypse as an inevitability, it isn’t that surprising that the sentiment has spread to other parts of our culture, and into our political discourse. at least, that’s my pet theory on why it pops up so often. could just be a human thing, honestly.
I agree.
This thread is the first time I’ve been embarrassed to be a part of the fediverse. This thread shows a lot of nihilistic people who don’t actually follow politics well enough to have views based in reality. People reference the railroad situation without understanding the resolution and reference student debt and other areas as if Biden had full control of the house/senate.
It really is the left’s version of Trump supporters in that they revel in their ignorance, wear it as a badge and then encourage others to follow the same path. At least Trump supporters have the decency to encourage their contemporaries to vote in elections smh.
I mean I really don’t like Biden but fwiw he reversed policies from Trump in areas such as inmigration and transgender people (such as excluding HRT from Medicare), and did some work with food stamps, not to mention the damage control his administration had to do for COVID-19. If Trump have been re-elected, things would’ve been very very different, and if the Senate midterms hadn’t turned out the way they did we might have had fascist federal laws by now.
Currently one party is the Fascist party and the other is the “literally anyone left from that” party. As sad as it is, Biden is probably what the DNC thinks is the best shot at having the entire party voting for him, from the social democrats to the conservatives, since he’s not LGBTphobic nor racist, and supports the current status quo. And yes, the bar is pretty fucking low but if the Republican wins it will be even worse.
Passed under Biden:
- PACT Act
- American Rescue Plan
- Impressive job growth and low unemployment
- Bi-partisan Infrastructure
- Helping defeat Russia
Not a complete failure, but I mean if the alternative is another geriatric, but one who is twice impeached, twice indicted and scummy, it’s a shitty choice, but it’s the only choice.
It’s the only choice because he was shoved down Dem throats though. Great, he accomplished some things. Quite frankly any empty suit could have done that with the clout of the rest of the party. A non-geriatric progressive could have potentially done much more, but the establishment won’t run anyone like that. Eventually the fragmentation will grow too great and start working against itself (we may already be there).
When Biden supported the rail corporations and waffled on student loans (pre-SC scumbaggery), it was apparent that he’s just a shill. The latter went against a campaign promise, but memories are short.
Edit: also “helping defeat Russia” is arguably not a thing. They are not the threat to the US that they used to be. Sure, it’s great to support Ukraine. But China is the only real military threat to the US, and Biden has been status quo there. I get that the US is world police, but let’s not treat the Military Industrial Complex as a plus.
Biden didn’t even need a bill to forgive student debt.
He did it unilaterally in the case of people who were defrauded. The whole song and dance with his ‘plan’ was to give him plausible deniability so his corporate backers wouldn’t lose their golden goose.
100% agree. And it’s something that should be apparent to voters. If it isn’t (and I think it isn’t)… damn, we are in a bad spot.
just a heads up, you should look into that rail thing again. the unions ended up getting alot of what they wanted because Biden’s admin did actually follow through with negotiations. definitely not cool, but also not the unambiguous support of corporations you seem to have interpreted it as. IBEW statement. there are people who are still unhappy, because capitalism sucks and they should be unhappy, but lots of railworkers got significantly improved working conditions out of it.
It is good that the outcome came out better than it initially looked. But I have a really hard time understanding why a Democratic president couldn’t overtly and publicly support a union in the first place. Full stop.
Welp, there you have it.
AOC has absolutely, 100% betrayed the principles that got her elected in the first place. It’s not surprising. Most people who stay in Washington long-term end up falling in line, but still, kind of disappointing to see.
My thought exactly. The Democratic Party is more fragmented than they want to admit. She was on the progressive side (I thought). Or maybe there actually is no progressive side.
Had high hopes that she wouldn’t fall in line.
People like AOC are why I’m generally convinced my vote really doesn’t matter. We elected a Democratic president with a congressional majority last time, and in return most of the country is working multiple jobs to survive AND you no longer have the right to abortion.
When we get conservative outcomes regardless, what does my Democratic vote really matter for?
Your Democratic vote is the only thing preventing this country becoming a theocracy. We had one term of Trump and look at the damage he caused. Imagine what a second term would look like.
fuck man. you gotta be in a pretty good spot not being able to tell the difference. there are people who live and die on the outcomes of these politics. if you really think it isn’t enough, get involved in a political project, join a mutual aid program, whatever you think is important, but genuinely even if it barely matters at all (and to be clear, it actually does matter a whole fucking lot, or republicans wouldn’t be pouring billions of oil dollars into mobilizing their base) its literally just a single day at most of effort. if you can’t do that, you genuinely don’t have any right to complain about conservative outcomes.
What? It could absolutely be worse. Look at the policies in Florida/Texas/Idaho against education, trans people, voting rights, labor rights, etc. I’m glad we at least got who we got. We could have done way worse.
I’d say you’re both right. But we have to be careful not to let the fear of something worse take over the potential progress (which often happens). Ultimately, the lack of progress is still a problem, even in the face of not being as bad as it could be.
When the “something worse” is literal fascism, there are no other choices. Stopping fascism is more important than any progressive agenda item because those agenda items will never happen with fascists in power.
They’ll also never happen without progressives in power. Keeping the status quo based solely on the fear of the other guy taking over sounds like the last 50 years (at least) of US politics.
Ugh. I’m not real happy about having to vote to uphold the gerontocracy, but as both likely frontrunners are a part thereof, all I can do is vote to minimize the harm.
That’s only true if you live in a swing state. If your state’s certain to go one way or the other, vote your conscience, even if it’s a write-in.
I would argue the opposite. An increasing minority vote/poll in a “safe” state would pull resources away from swing states to keep the state “safe”. Not many people would have imagined Georgia going blue in federal elections but here we are.
If things are bad enough that NY goes red, how I voted is the least of our problems.
I mean actually red or blue states. Georgia’s dynamics have been moving centerward for years, and people who pay attention to that stuff knew that.
And how do you think Georgia started going blue? It doesn’t happen overnight.
I didn’t say it did. But it can’t happen everywhere either. A unique blend of demographic changes and a long-term, serious, political organizing campaign are a powerful blend, but exactly how long do you think we have to turn this country around, even if every state had an influx of educated professionals like Georgia did? I know the stability of institutions has a powerful pull, but ours are failing, and we have impending crises on multiple fronts that they are incapable of handling. We need to make other plans. Vote, too, if you like. Just don’t count on it to save us.