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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   24125 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.

Our military budgets are the lowest they’ve been in almost 40 years. About half of what we budget for federal spending on social security programs. While it’s obvious that the left hates Biden, mostly because he’s an old, doddering fool and not one of the cool, handsome presidents they’re accustomed to voting for, this seems like a strange angle of attack. Especially when Biden’s signature foreign affairs achievement is withdrawing from Afghanistan.

mostly because he’s an old, doddering fool and not one of the cool, handsome presidents they’re accustomed to voting for,

Actually, as someone who can understand leftist thinking and beliefs, this isn't the case. What they're objecting to is support for ethnic cleansing in Palestine. They say this extremely loudly and vehemently, and I don't see any reason not to take them at their word. You can blame Tiktok for letting Chinese mind-control algorithms turn them against Israel or whatever, but this is actually the principal objection - not that Biden isn't as sexy as Bill Clinton.

It's hardly clear that Trump would be materially better on this front.

At beast, the claim is that they need to torch Biden to prove, in general, that no D candidate can win without their support and hence no D candidate can have the policies to which they object.

It's hardly clear that Trump would be materially better on this front.

He probably wouldn't, but that's actually an argument supporting the second claim - which I agree with. Voting for Biden because he would be indistinguishable from Trump in every way that they care about would just be a way to guarantee that the issues they care about are never addressed.

This is supposing that there are no other issues that they care about at all.

If two candidates are indistinguishable on some set of issues, the only way to decide for whom to vote would be to look at other issues.

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