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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.

I mean, I think one of the relevant differences between Hiden Biden in 2020 and genocide Joe today is that in 2020 he was, not quite a black box, but a candidate who didn’t run on his record. Like, literally, he ran on, ‘Trump bad, look at the state of the world today for evidence’. Today he has no choice.

I also want to point to, well, the state of the world today. Inflation is higher than the government admits, there’s wars and rumors of wars, crime is at generational highs, housing costs through the roof, etc, etc. It’s hard to be an incumbent in the early-mid 2020s; the tories and Canadian liberals and French government coalition and PiS in Poland can all attest to that.

But let’s circle back to Trump/Biden. From a far left perspective, Biden has mostly failed at being better than a Republican, and quite a bit of the Trump hate is getting transferred to other major Republican figures, like Greg Abbott or justice Alito. Nevermind that a second Trump administration entails Greg Abbott getting much more of what he wants, or at least his policies being extended over a larger chunk of the border. Nevermind that Gaza is not a genocide. Nevermind that it was Trump appointees who overturned Roe. Biden failing to stop them undermines the ‘last chance to stop fascism’ narrative something fierce. Instead what the far left twitterati seems to be settling on is doomerism.

From a far left perspective, Biden has mostly failed at being better than a Republican

Do they really think that? They must have short memories, because when Trump was in charge, they really thought the end was nigh. I cannot overstate how much these people really thought Trump was, well, just the worst in about every possible way. Like they really thought that any day he was gonna overturn democracy, start sending jews to concentration camps, all of that stuff. And Trump is who Biden is up against this time.

They still think the end is nigh.

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