this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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It's not trump that bothers me, it's who will grab the machinery the he's set up that keeps me awake at night.
And because of that, every election from now on will be about voting against a full-blown fascist dictator while any talk of progress becomes taboo for the sake of winning over centrists.
We could have had Bernie in 2016
You would have had Trump in 2016, but then again, it'd be over now. Unless he would've actually destroyed democracy.
Bernie was never going to happen ever. Even the democrats didn't want him.
The Democrats, as in the democratic voters, did want him. The DNC was willing to let trump win to avoid a Democratic Socialist from becoming president.
Absolutely.
That became painfully apparent in 2019 when Bernie won the first three primaries and the party rallied around the fifth least-popular candidate: Joe Biden, only slightly more popular than Mike Bloomberg.
And they handed out favors to the others in order to drop out and endorse this shitty man who did nothing meaningful to stop fascism, thereby making Trump's fascist candidacy inevitable.
I have at least one friend who won't vote anymore because of that. He'd rather the US get Trump and despair than give the DNC the satisfaction of another vote. I've tried to convince him.
I did vote, though, for what it's worth. My state, Missouri, has lots of state initiatives that are very progressive, like voting down the abortion ban and voting in a $15 minimum wage, among other things.
I fully understand the hopelessness. I don't think anyone but billionaires have meaningful power to make change in this country anymore.
TBH, I voted Biden four years ago with zero belief that he'd do anything meaningful to make the lives of the working class and poor any easier, and for the most part, that's how it turned out. The major departure from that, as far as I've seen, is the hundred of thousands who've had their student loans forgiven, and I know someone personally who had $200,000 in debt wiped out. That's huge. Absolutely huge.
The problem is, apart from that, it's hard to see where Biden didn't capitulate or cut himself off at the knees to satisfy the same Republicans who painted him as their enemy. We got a Build Back Better bill that was a shell of what it should have been. We got a "gun control" bill that only allocated money to the states without any requirements to regulate guns. We got an Inflation Reduction Act that doesn't do anything to control inflation. We got US-backed genocide in Israel and a blank check for war in Ukraine.
Therefore, even with the modest achievements (if you can call them that) the vast majority of the votes Democrats need are coming from people whose lives are much harder now than they were four years ago.
I voted Biden solely because I thought a cultural win against fascism would turn the tide.
It didn't. No one we elected had the balls to confront or punish Donald Trump, and now, we have a fascist state in all but name. I'm not uncertain that we won't have a full fascist state in the coming year.
There's a lot of caveats to that.
First, that was absolutely the plan when they started shifting the Overton window in the 1980s. They didn't realize how important good faith is to democracy, and it's gotten more out of hand than they intended. Now you've got Dick Cheney, Rex Tillerson, and other 80s Republicans trying to rein it in.
Second, compromise goes both ways. Our agenda doesn't have to go out of the window. The neolibs will give the kids free school lunches to help defeat fascism. This doesn't mean that we try to jerk the Overton window so far the other way that it breaks and we lose to fascists. We can both compromise in good faith.
Third, those Republicans always think results are instant. Fire employees and if things don't break in a month, then they were clearly right! And when things go to shit in two years, well, there must be another reason. Don't make the same mistake with progressive changes. We need more than a 50/50 senate split with West Virginia included to be able to make big changes. Results aren't instant, and don't give up when they're not.
The thing that really sucks is that to a lot of voters, results are instant. Every time the price of anything goes up, it's the current presidents fault. Seen all those "I Did That!" Stickers idiots put on gas pumps? It makes no sense when you're talking on an economic scale for things to suddenly shift overnight, or even in 2-4 years. But a huge bump in inflation from companies trying to capitalize on economic changes through covid? Ope, bidens fault.
There are so many political schemes that take advantage of the "right now" results, even if those results are from years of changes and slow effect activity. I wish I could get people to see that not every little thing that happens is because someone in govt went to the "magic number machine" and moved the sliders up or down that morning.
And in red states which have abandoned workers, Chuck Schumer always campaigns for the pro-trump Democrat instead of the candidate with the energy behind them. Gotta lose all the fucking dinosaurs that keep causing losses.
Fascism can never be voted out. I've been telling social media how to deal with this and they have been banning my accounts and calling me a violent loon for the past eight years but hey look here we are
Until you end up having to vote between 2 fascists, because the genie is out of the bottle.
-> You are here
Not even close.
Run for local office. Petition your local leaders.
Yeah I am worried more about the precedent and 'momentum' this creates more than Trump himself.