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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   24134 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

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I'm seeing a consistent stream of content from people these days decrying Biden and saying that they're not going to vote for the Democratic party in the election. This is one example:

Voting for Biden is letting the Democratic Party know you are okay with them not raising the min wage to a living wage. It's letting them know you are okay with record military budgets while homelessness spiked 12% in one year and that you are OK with sending billions of dollars in US bombs and bullets to Israel to blow the heads and limbs off little children and babies while leveling 70% of Gaza. Sometimes in a democracy, the strongest word you can say is NO.

Here's another:

You don't have to choose between genocide and a felon.

And here's a tweet indicating that voting for the Green Party is not the same as voting Republican:

If I cast my vote for the Green Party ... my vote does not go to the Republican. We'll go over this again tomorrow

This sort of thing seemed to start around the time the Israel-Palistine culture war heated up and I haven't really seen it stop. I've even seen one that says that our choices for November are basically Voldemort and Palpatine.

This may just be coming from social-media acquaintances of mine and just the sources they follow (I have a lot of really leftist acquaintances), and may not be representative of the general populace. I really don't know.

I find this interesting for a few reasons.

  1. I somehow find this sort of thing even more annoying than pure Trump bashing, because it's showing me that absolutely nothing will be enough for these people. They seem to think they're entitled to a purely leftist president who agrees with them on everything, and anything right of that makes him evil.
  2. This is the exact opposite of the rhetoric I remember from 4 years ago. Everyone was rallying around the ideas that "we need to stop fascism (read: Trump)" and "it's okay to choose the lesser of two evils, as long as we depose Trump" and "a vote for a third party is akin to voting for Trump". Make no mistake, the people saying they're not voting for Biden in 2024 were the exact same people I saw making these "lesser of two evils" statements last time around.
  3. I think the group fervor and group commitment to all voting for Biden no matter what because they believed it was the only right thing to do, was a lot of the reason why Trump lost in 2020. I wonder if this severe disillusionment with Biden to the point of public denouncement really will hurt his chances in November. Maybe the people I see making these statements are just virtue signaling "look I'm so progressive, even the Democratic president isn't progressive enough for me". Or maybe not. But even if they are virtue signaling and they don't really mean it, they could easily influence others, and the break in the group fervor could have huge consequences.

I think that they have a point. Voters are not obliged to hold their nose and vote for a candidate that they find reprehensible. I myself rarely vote. And I also think that refusing to vote can send it's own message. If the Greens got 10% of the popular vote they wouldn't win,but it would definitely shift the political window and demonstrate that there are lots of dissatisfied voters out there for the taking. Similarly if turnout was to decline precipitously, it would also be read as a political signal.

I say this but I also think that to tie your vote to the affairs of Israel and Palestine is very wacky.

Voters are not obliged to hold their nose and vote for a candidate that they find reprehensible. I myself rarely vote. And I also think that refusing to vote can send it's own message.

I don't personally disagree with you. But I'm not one of these people who thought Trump was literally Hitler 4 years ago. These people I'm posting about definitely are those people. Unless they actually think that Biden is literally Hitler this time around, then it doesn't make sense for them to vote Green.

And I really don't buy that they actually think Biden is as bad as they thought Trump was from 2016 to 2020. If they do, that points to another crazy phenomenon, the fact that they are so disconnected with their past, and with the people who they supposedly felt were most harmed by Trump from 2016 through 2020, as to be willing to throw them under the bus this time.

I don't think this is that crazy. My impression, which might be wrong, is that a lot of the Trump/Hitler crowd is actually from the mainstream left, and The hard left voices that are withholding their votes from Biden took the position that sure, Trump was horrible, but he was just saying openly what Republicans always believed.

The hard left voices that are withholding their votes from Biden took the position that sure, Trump was horrible, but he was just saying openly what Republicans always believed.

That sentiment does not match up with anyone I know personally. Even if they felt Trump was saying things many Republicans believed, they still all thought Trump was a megomaniac who would seize power for himself, ruin our institutions, and start an apartheid state, and that's something I never heard anyone worry about from Mitt Romney.

You might have heard it, but it was certainly being said. No less than Joe Biden stumped that a Romney Administration would see African-Americans in chains in what was a pretty obvious slavery allusion to a mostly black audience.

Mainstream Democratic-aligned narratives in the period was that a Romney victory would be dystopian disaster. The nature of the dystopia varied by the message and audience- it could be a corporatist, religious extremist, but bigotry was an expected component, to the point that 'binders full of women' became a proof of sexism he would bring into government.

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