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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   24126 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.

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.

There is a good case to be made that this is deliberate tactic to drag the democrats as far to the left as they can. Just make the democrats panic so that they think they need to align their policies with them, hoping they'll throw them some candy like student debt forgiveness, and then closer to the election switch to the "choose the lesser of two evils" narrative regardless of how may of their asks were covered because ultimately that still drags the country closer to their preferences than voting R, third-party or not voting.

I think this is what the game theory bears out for the partisans, but IMO taking it seriously is hurting the party with moderate voters who don't like the the associations with the crazies. I think the administration, and indeed the country, would have been better off, for example, cutting the more extreme college protesters loose and daring them to vote for the other guy.

It feels to me like they're hemorrhaging swing voters because the one I know best (me!) has basically decided that the blue platform is largely unprincipled, and falls well short of its promises of egalitarianism and competent governance. Someone like Bill Clinton could have had my vote in this red state.

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