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If more people voted, this would not happen right now :) but both sides the same and voting doesnt matter.
Acting as if fascists did not nearly successfully couped the last time they lost the election is so much denial.
The people that voted last time got a goverment that could not stop a convicted felon, certified rapist, enemy goverment asset and obvious fascist from running again. They would not have been able to stop a fast nor a slow coup.
Literally the outcome of this election was guaranteed back in August. The second the Harris/Walz started polling at 50/50 was when a contested election became the best possible outcome, and a contested election was always going to be awarded to Trump through the captured Supreme Court.
I get that libs are disappointed that the country just gave him the keys without a fight, but Trump was prepared for that fight. It's why they kept shouting that our election was a sham and already decided; they knew they would steal the election if necessary. Dems were never going to do anything to stop it, same as they did nothing for Gore vs Bush.
Their loss wasn't nearly so catastrophic as to make it clear they're in the minority. The issue with democratic legitimacy is that it's mostly about impression of consensus rather than pure numbers because humans suck at processing numbers. Sure, neither government might have the actual endorsement of the constituency, but it doesn't matter if the voting portion of it is split closely enough that it seems like they do.
If, say, the Reps hat lost 30:70, they possibly wouldn't have been quite so bold, and on the other hand, the Dem leadership might have felt more confident in opposing them. Moreover, reducing Rep significance to a footnote could create space for progressive movements to be more than a spoiler, which could give them more weight in the internal party politics.
Note, however, the abundance of "could" and "possibly" and "might". The difficulty with counter-factuals is that you can't really compare them to facts. It's just as possible that nothing would have been different at all. Much of predicting politics and public opinion is guesswork based on incomplete information, and putting it to a representative test would probably be impossible and possibly dangerous.
As it stands, you're unfortunately right.
You're right.
Why slow down the coup when you can just give up and let them announce a concentration camp for undesirable immigrants without any pushback?
Step 1: should have voted to stop the coup Step 2: should have voted for a slow coup Step 3: should have voted for a less fascist coup
We recreate the structures we seek to dismantle...
Don't @ me I voted but the Democratic playbook has been to cede ground and take only clout back my whole life.
Like corporations and consumers the fault isn't with the voter when the system is stacked against them and the options are two evils with one the lesser.
No what I mean is that everyone who want to stop facism should stop relying on groups and organisations that have a record of being ineffective when it comes to opposing and stopping the fascists.
Check out [email protected], [email protected] and other Lemmy communities to find out about ways to oppose fascism without relying on the DNC.
The US has been pretty good at opposing fascists in the past.
We need the media to stop pussyfooting around and call a spade a spade. They're working so hard to appear impartial that they've decided that reporting objective reality shows a liberal bias.
We were only reluctantly against facism during WW2. That's why we didn't join until halfway through and did business both sides before we were drawn in.
And by "opposing" I assume you mean "installing".
It's very funny to see people claiming to be anarchists ranting about "convicted felons" and "enemy governments".
If thats a rant to you I am not quite sure how to actually answer that. And if using language and arguments that that the user person might actually be able to connect to makes one less anarchist, I wonder what kind anarchists you expect on Lemmy
But the people who stayed home because the democrats didn't offer them a pony are noble and should be regarded with the utmost respect!
Oh, the extreme submissiveness of those who chose to blame for an electoral loss the millions who did not vote for the Leaders who refused to move an inch towards the interests of those voters rather than blaming the handful of Leaders for not moving an inch towards the interests of millions of otherwise natural voters (in fact, they even moved away).
It takes quite a "the boss is always right" butt-kissing boot-liking mindset to blame millions for not following an asshole rather than blaming "the boss" for being an asshole.
One of the most eye-openning discoveries here on Lemmy during this whole Electoral Process in the US is just how many of the "centrists" in America have interiorized a quite extreme level of unchallenging subservience to those they believe are their leaders.
You're an idiot. Again, the democrats didn't offer a pony, so dumbasses chose fascism. They chose not to participate in this election, and now there will be no more elections.
They really stuck it to the Democrat leaders though, right? Millions of people will have to suffer and die because people decided to throw a tantrum instead of stopping fascism.
That submissiviness is so deeply engrained that still now you can't criticize the handful of people at the top of only Party with a chance to defeat Trump who by a gigantic margin had the most power out of everybody in the whole damn country to sway the election and "Stop Trump" (as they demanded from others and their useful idiots parroted) and who refused to move an inch on it, and instead you persist on blaming the plebes with their 1-in-240,000,000 voting "power" who did not suitably grovel and supported your Party's Royalty whilst they treated them worse than trash.
I've seen more realistic and hard nosed takes on the relation between the people and their leaders involving actual Royalty, than that "it's all the faults of the plebes" propaganda you and your fellow arse-kissers keep repeating.
But, hey, you keep on licking that boot. Yummy yummy.
Did I ever say the democrats weren't to blame for the situation? Both democrats and idiots who stayed home are to blame.
Stop trying to justify letting fascism happen.
You relentlessly and repeatedly persist in voicing criticism for the choices of the near-powerless whilst staying silent on the choices of the powerful.
This is to the point that when confronted with it you claim that you never dismissed the blame of the powerful, immediatelly followed by once again NOT blaming the powerfull and instead throw even more insults towards the near-powerless that didn't suitably support those very same powerful people (whom you have so far, already 3 posts down, not criticized) who didn't even try to appeal to them.
The nicest possible interpretation of your mindless repeating of that mantra even whilst claiming you're not doing it, is that all that shoe polish you must have ingested has affected your brain.
The voters weren't near powerless (they are now, though). In fact, they had all of the power. They were literally the last defense we had against fascism, and 1/3 of them chose to not stop it because the democrats ran a bad campaign.
The Democrat leadership was irrelevant at election time. The choice was between the status quo and fascism. There's no nuance. Because guess what? The Democrat leadership is now completely irrelevant because you can't vote out fascism.
If you didn't vote against fascism, you are complicit in it happening.
And I am blaming the powerful. The reason I didn't focus on that is because you already blame the powerful, but you're trying to excuse the voters who absolutely share culpability, which is why I focused on them.
1 in 244,000,000 votes in an electoral system so bad only 2 choices, ever, are viable, is damn near powerless, barely above being a common citizen in an autocratic dictatorship.
The Democratic Party leadership are veritable Gods in terms of the power they have in comparison with the poor sods you, like some kind of windup flag waving muppet, are raging against as enablers of Fascism and idiots.
If as you try to claim your Rage was truly against those who made choices that led to a Trump victory and Fascism in America, and thus fairly approportioning blame by taking in account each person's ability to stop Trump and their refusal to do so (especially those who dishonestly shouted that their greatest priority was to "Stop Trump!" and then went and put other priorities above that), this raging you've shown here against the riff-raff for not at all voting (not even for voting Trump, but for just not voting) would have an equivalent rage against DNC member so huge that you would have your bloody own nuclear program just so that you could nuke their offices and homes, so great was their power to make sure Trump was Stopped and so little were they willing to concede to make it happen, often acting in ways that actually boosted Trump's chances.
After Trump himself and the Republicans, the by far bigger contributors to a Trump victory and Fascism in America were the top Democrat politicians who, to get all that sweet AIPAC and corporate dosh, actively chose to deny the wishes of so many voters that their candidate lost against a known giant bullshitter and convicted criminal like Trump even after Trump's disgraceful first term.
The people you here - following EXACTLY the propaganda line straight out of the DNC on justifying their incredible, disgraceful loss - are raging against like a madman, those who simply did not vote, are dead last in the blame list, and whilst not blameless they're a long, long distance from people who had far more power than them.
Even better, YOU and people like you who have loudly and mindlessly like good little muppets supported the Democrat Party Leadership no matter what they did, by helping convince those powerful people that they had enough useful idiots to win the election no matter how little they listened to voters, have more blame than non-voters for Fascism in America: for at least a year I've seen you muppets here in Lemmy supporting the DNC's strategy of "Don't do shit to address voter concerns and try instead to scare voters into voting for us whilst doing the opposite of what they want", an extraordinarily bad and risky strategy whose choice as the Democrat Party Presidential Campaign Strategy can only be explained by the DNC members wanting to keep getting money from the AIPAC and fat-cat business interests, and a strategy which failed miserably, an outcome which was from the very start highly likely, so bad is that strategy.
Though supporting an incredibly bad electoral strategy against Trump whose only upside was personal upside maximization for those people leading the Democrat Party, you mindless tribalist muppets have much more blame for Fascism in America that any non-voters and, even better, in the very same way as Trump-supporting muppets, you lack the intelligence and self-awareness to see it and in a good old Hard Right tradition chose to blame the least powerful of all people.
I think I've figured out what's wrong with people like you. You have no concept of prioritization.
If someone throws a Molotov cocktail through your window, fixing the window first is stupid.
The broken window is absolutely a problem that needs to be dealt with, but the house is currently on fire, so the window needs to wait until that's addressed. You can never fix the window if the house burns down.
Every battle has a time and place, and this was not the time or place to try to force Democrat leadership to change.
I hated the fact that Biden ran in 2020. I hate the fact that he ran again in 2024. I hated that we didn't get to have a primary and got stuck with Kamala. I hated that the DNC supported Israel. I hated how they shifted right to try to court semi sane republicans.
But I hated fascism more and sucked it up and defied it.
Whatever you need to tell yourself to sleep at night, but you made the wrong decision and people will suffer because of it.
The fact that NOW, when attacking the DNC leadership for their explicit choices of benefiting themselves that unnecessarily led to Trump getting elected has no electoral consequences, you are here raging against non-voters instead, disproves your excuses for not criticizing them.
If indeed too close to the election would've been a bad time (but that excuse didn't apply earlier, such as a year ago) NOW is exactly a consequence-free time to be tearing a new one on those Democrat leaders for all they failed to do and all their choices that benefited nobody but themselves and ultimately helped bring Fascism to America, but instead you repeatedly choose to attack the near-powerless non-voters for not getting in line with the wishes of the very leaders who were betraying those values they claimed to uphold and who, for their own personal upside maximization, did not do all that it would take to achieve that which they loudly claimed was the most important thing to achieve - "Stop Trump!"
In the subservient mind there are always excuses to "get in line" with the wishes of the leadership and your "I'm powerless" style of (finally, after much prodding!) criticizing the DNC whilst excusing yourself for doing nothing about it, further betrays that deep down your mindset is of "yielding to your betters" and turning against the peasants who didn't do the same.
PS: Your ability to read me is so bad you have failed to notice from my use of British expressions that I'm not an American. All this time you've been "seeing" in me that which made you feel better about your own choices. It is telling that in your mind you had to frame me as an American non-voter defending myself from your righteous anger, when I am in fact an outside observer watching a willful puppet to one side of the political propaganda in America attacking on command a minor guilty party to avoid point the guilt of the far, far more guilty people holding their strings.
There are two kinds of muppets in America, one dangling on the strings of Trump and the Republican Party leadership and another dangling on the strings of the Democrat Party leadership and it's thanks to both that America was always condemned to Fascism, sooner or later, with the Republicans turning ever more Facist whilst their muppets cheered it and the Democrats hugging them tightly a tiny, tiny (oh so tiny) bit to the left whilst their own muppets shout "we have no other choice" and "vote us to stop the other guys".
Mark my words, with the Republicans trying to distance themselves from the Democrats by going even deeper to the Right, turning ever more Fascist, and the Democrats in close pursuit of them deeper into the Right, Trump isn't the worst president America is going to get and you, mate, busy fighting those who wouldn't go along with that political play, are part of the problem, not of the solution.
But you haven't thought of how clean their hands are.
"Didn't offer them a pony" doesn't equate to "stop funding a genocide in Israel". This level of callousness is exactly why people stayed home
If they thought genocide in Israel was bad, why did they make it worse and global?
If they cared about human rights, they'd be defending human rights. People who make matters worse out of spite are not the good guys. I wish they at least owned their awfulness instead of crying all over social media how people blame them for the things they actually did, when they themselves happily boasted about it just a month ago.
I'm getting so tired of liberals who spend all their time complaining about people not supporting their preferred genocidaire instead of demanding candidates that aren't aspiring genocidaires.
It is the candidate's job to win the election, not the electorate's. If the anti-genocide voting bloc was enough to swing the election (it wasn't) then maybe your candidate shouldn't have supported a fucking genocide in spite of that.
The US style "Liberals" seem to be incredibly subservient, prefering to blame millions of people for not chosing their "boss" rather than the "boss" for not even trying to appeal to those people.
All the talk of the supposedly Go Getter and Independent spirit in America and yet around here we are faced with an overwhelming amount of American arse-kissers who are seemingly unable to even conceive that maybe, just maybe, "the boss" was the one who did things the wrong way, causing millions to refuse to chose them and hence has most of the blame for the outcome.
On the upside, watching this is a wonderful opportunity to learn a lot about the evils of people being mindless unchallenging followers of "Leaders" in Politics.
People didn't abstain from spite, they abstained from a correct belief that the system doesn't work for them, or they couldn't vote against their conscience. Your own framing of lesser evilism and weighting voting more than other kinds of political activity inevitably creates the situation where people can't just cast a vote strategically. You dismiss 3/4 of the picture in order to make a point based on only 1/4 of the information, in other words, you are distorting the truth to fit your narrative.
Politics often comes down to a struggle between two views, but your attempt to shunt anyone who didn't vote the way you did into some enemy category is, predictably, no strategy at all. Unless your strategy is to divide the electorate, which sort of defeats your entire premise.
Actually try to understand other people as having minds and wills of their own, rather than narcissistically making your own view the objective one (like a religion might) and then condemning others (like a religion might) for their sins.
Their not voting created this situation in the first place. They wanted this situation. People who are hurt by this situation are rather justified in hating the people who put them into it. You say it's because these people choose to do this on their own, because of their own free will. I agree with you on this. But THEIR justification in creating this situation does not fucking matter to others. It does not matter if somebody stabs you in the back because they hate you or because they are trying to make a point or out of boredom or out of some philosophical whatnot, what matters to you is that you have a knife sticking out of your back and bleeding to death. And when you turn around, what you see is your attacker crying a river about their right to stab you and why are you blaming them? It's not like THEY hate you like THOSE other guys!
Fact is that if they voted for the other side, they would have a perfectly stable democracy (lol, not really) where they could then campaign for stuff they want without the world being on fire around them. Which btw, they aren't doing with the word being on fire around them either, but if they did it now, they'd be wiped off it by the powers they put into place.
Your "leaders" created this situation in the first place by refusing to even acknowledge the concerns of those voters, much less address them.
It would be far more reasonable for a handful of Democrat Party leaders to move their position in a handful of subjects to address grave moral concerns of millions of their natural voters than for them to expect than they could get the votes of all the millions for whom those things were important without conceding an inch on those subjects.
Want to see who gave the election to Trump on a platter: look inside the Democrat Party.
You are entitled to hate whoever you like, but hate doesn't make you right. In fact it might be altering your judgement just a little.
I think its a little dishonest to collapse everything down to this one moment, that decides the moral standing of a person, whether they are for or against the movement to defeat trump and the criminal right wing. Its important to take into considerations what came before, at least, not to mention that the country is a big diverse place largely controlled by private interests. If you aren't out here trying to educate people and wanna sit on the sidelines and judge others I won't stop you, but IMO you really have very little right to judge when the time comes.
It's not dishonest. This election was a vote between the status quo and outright fascism. If you didn't vote against fascism, you supported it.
There's no nuance here. Your reasons don't matter. If you didn't vote against the guy who straight up said he would be a dictator, you're culpable for the situation we're in now.
You people treat this like it's some zero sum game. The democrats did screw the pooch, but so did the people who didn't vote to stop fascism. Both can be true.
Why so quick to blame the people rather than the democrats incompetence. You say its all or nothing until you need nuance to support your perspective. Even if you're right, and the emphasis of blame, what blame is going to accomplish though remains a mystery, is on the people who didn't vote, it doesn't justify this seething, well you called it, hate.
What is it with you, good and evil, love and hate, is this really a political platform or strategy that others should adopt? I'm actually serious, if some politician got up in front of america with your rhetoric it would be called demagoguery. Which doesn't make you wrong necessarily, like I've said I agree with your central argument, but the way you represent it is incredibly toxic, and a big reason why many people stayed home in fact.
In fighting the right you have become exactly what the right says about the left, so much so it is beyond parody. Some might call it ironic, but I would say it is dialectical. Hopefully you get over this issue you seem to be stuck on, so I dont have to waste any more time on you or others who myopically follow your same flawed rationale, which does nothing but give cover to the democrats and consultants who so badly lost this election. This is why hate is a dead end, it blunts your ability to reason through these very important problems brought on by the rise of Trump, but also capitalism more generally.
Because the democrats aren't the only ones who deserve the blame. Like I said, the democrats are to blame and the people who didn't vote are to blame. The two aren't mutually exclusive. Many systems failed getting us to this point, but voting was the very last line of defense.
I'm not trying to absolve the democrats for running a garbage campaign, but you're trying to absolve the people who knew the consequences of their actions and chose to sit back and let it happen.
Again, because the democrats didn't give them a pony, they chose to let fascism happen, and now they're trying to justify it.
"Didn't give them a pony" and "didn't stop genociding Palestinian children" are actually mutually exclusive concepts.
I'm giving them a pass at what? They hold no institutional power, why kick down like some conservative? No I believe in holding power responsible.
The nyt published this yesterday https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/us/politics/democrats-trump.html where top democrats admit they have nothing to offer voters, other than "not Trump." It's not giving them a pass to like try and imagine their perspective, based on actual research done by polling agencies, publications, as well as IRL conversations. I feel like you just want to feel better than others, to believe that the action you took made a difference, and maybe you need that justification to deal with the world.
Especially since it was a good amount of bullying to vote against Trump by the democrats and their mouthpieces that caused people to be disaffected and stay home. So I agree there is plenty of blame to go around, but let's not leave out one of the main culprits: people like you who make discourse toxic and muddy the waters with false framings of very important issues, because their leaders are incompetent nincompoops who can't do anything but go to brunch and blame the left for every problem they created.
You dismiss 3/4 of the picture in order to make a point based on only 1/4 of the information
That's exactly what you're doing. Ignoring how much worse the situation is if you abstain from voting because you're focused on the lesser evil. Even on Gaza Trump said he wants to "clean it all out". Even on this issue the greater evil is worse. Stop pretending there was anything noble about letting that monster have power again. The system doesn't work so they let an even worse one take over and people who abstained or protest voted bear some of that responsibility for the consequences
I don't frame questions in terms of lesser/greater evil. I actually don't need religious concepts at all to understand this situation, all I have to do is listen to people and remember what came before.
You're so divorced from reality that there are no actual people who you are condemning, you're just mad at some strawman constructed by the party that humiliated itself, for it was the democrats failures that lost. You're buying into a ridiculous narrative that deflects all crit away from the democrats and puts it in some strawmen. It's like conservatives with their woke washing of all politics, or bad faith liberals and "tankie".
And to be clear, I don't agree with people who abstained to vote, I did not abstain to vote. and I didn't encourage anyone to abstain. I am very politically active and fundamentally agree with your logic. However...
What I despise is the scapegoating and strawmanning that is just endlessly regurgitated on this site.
I actually don’t need religious concepts at all to understand this situation
You think good and evil are religious concepts? That's a new one. And I'm the one divorced from reality lol. People who abstained choose to do nothing about the rise of fascism. I do not blame them as much as someone actively supporting it but they absolutely share the blame for doing nothing to stop it and it's absurd to give them a pass as we suffer the consequences of their decision
So far, Gaza is infinitely better than it was previously. Colleagues are seeing less people at a clinic in the south, with a lot of displaced people returning north. They even returned to checkout an office up north and assess the damage. Sure, it's not fine / okay, they are returning to rubble, no schools and no hospitals, but the ceasefire is holding for now.
https://www.reuters.com/world/trump-netanyahu-set-pivotal-talks-middle-east-agenda-2025-02-04/ ooooooffffff your comment did not age well
Netenyahu kept it going to help Trump. This ceasefire was coming regardless when there was no reason to keep it going
BlueAnon
Furhermore, Trump and the Oligarchs have yet to seize the good parts of Gaza for their own. That's coming.
Hitler was appointed as the lesser evil according to the liberal government that appointed him.
Lesser evilism is the most evil option in all scenarios.
And Trump is the lesser evil according to maga. Your point is we should just do the opposite of what liberals think? That's the entire philosophy of Republicans so that adds up
Greater evilism is as dumb as it sounds
Trump is the ideal leader according to maga, not a lesser evil.
If you're going to troll, at least get the basics right, lib
The choice also has never been binary.
You think maga thinks Trump is more evil than Biden? Who's trolling? Pointing out all the bs in your points is not trolling.
Give me a third choice, that's what we both want. We did not have that, how do you not get that? Not voting helped Trump
No, troll.
The lesser evil is not good, it's the less evil option.
Trump, to maga, is a good option. If there were a hundred candidates, they would pick Trump.
Biden, to no one, is a good option. If there were a hundred equal candidates, no sane person would pick Biden. He is evil. He is a ridiculously racist, ridiculously right wing, ridiculously evil person. He spent his career harming the working class and reducing your rights.
Only in a captured system where you only have two options would anyone ever consider voting for Biden, and only if his opponent is worse. He would be the lesser evil.
Drinking a bottle of gasoline is less bad than drinking a gallon, but it's not good. And it's never your only option no matter how thirsty you are.
I hope writing at a second grade level has cleared up your ignorance and misunderstanding.
To your last point, there's always more than two choices. Always. In every system of governance. You didn't find any other option tasteful, because out of all of them you still wanted evil — you just wanted less.