this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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I agree, but I don’t have that choice right now. The issue of genocide isn’t on the two-party ballot. The issue of public education is. Fewer educated people means fewer people who can even identify genocide when it happens.
“But what good is identifying genocide if you’re not gonna stop it”
HOW THE FUCK CAN I STOP IT?!?!?!?
It's on there at least twice and you have every choice to not put a checkmark there or tell others to do so.
Lesser evil genociders is not a good argument, though this premise is also false. Dems cut education budgets as well. Blue states with blue districts in blue cities still underfunded and are at the forefront of charter school "experiments".
You cannot absolve support for genocide. You get no excuses. You should feel bad for even trying to make them.
The first step is to stop supporting it. The next step is to become educated in how the system works. The next step, which you can do simultaneously, is to join and participate in organizations with these same lines: no support for the genocidal capitalist parties, solidarity with Palestine.
You talked about education. You need some yourself but the primary work is in organizing, which includes teaching others. Instead of trying to justify supporting genociders you should be working against them. Stop pretending you have no agency and there is nothing to do.
I do not feel good about voting for genociders. I feel fucking awful about it. But I know with absolute certainty that a democrat or a republican is going to be elected president, and yes democrats also defund schools but I’d way rather not have to start from square zero four years from now.
You will start from square zero either way. They don't care about you or listen to you. One of the reasons they don't need to is that there is no organized, disciplined opposition. Dems expect vaguely left people to fall in line, they don't even pander most of the time. Look at the DNC where they brought in an Israeli to speak, denied a Palestinian, and brought in the daughter of a Contra to lie about Sandinistas. They didn't even try pandering. They could have picked a comprador Palestinian to say some both sides BS but instead gave you the middle finger and lied about a ceasefire.
Square zero is organizing. You will have to organize just as much in 4 years. Dems will not slow or stop the degradation of conditions, their neoliberal policies are driving that process. And if there is no left, this only fuels an ascendant right. Every election is going to be "the most important one of your life" for the foreseeable future and Dems will be complicit in this. Our only hope is to organize a left opposition as quickly as possible. Part of that requires shedding the false idea that telling people to vote for genociders is helping. It isn't. It just normalizes genocide.
Genuinely, with no wish to sound snarky or get an "own": That awful feeling is your conscience and gut telling you that this is both terribly unnatural and entering dangerous territory, respectively. Regardless of how this election goes, the US and it's vassals are going to get more fascist, and we are all going to be asked, politely at first, to go along with more and more atrocities. The sooner we stop swallowing our humanity and start listening to the blaring alarms in our minds that this is all wrong, the safer everyone will be.
The thing that I think really makes it obvious that your thinking here is completely defective is that you don't even bring up the question "are you in a swing state?" I'm in a deep-blue state, why the fuck, even by your broken logic, should I vote for Kamala? She'll win my whole state anyway, so all I'm doing is helping to legitimize her if I vote for her, not do a single thing to keep Orange Man out.
Not voting for Harris sends a message to the democrats that they are not championing human rights strong enough, and that supposedly ought to send their platform in the direction we want, correct? The more people who don’t vote for democrats, the stronger the message is so we should tell more people not to vote for democrats if I understand you correctly.
It should go without saying that if you tell enough people not to vote democrat, even in a deep-blue state, republican votes will win out. I’m not saying that’s a likely scenario, but why when I know people like you will opt not to vote, should I encourage other people anywhere to not vote and even get close to risking that? And before you say “like you said it’s not a likely scenario so there’s no risk” there is absolutely risk. We risk losing public funding for education and we risk further loss of human rights in our own backyard. I’m not sure why that thinking is “defective” but if there is a specific flaw in the logic please point it out.
First of all, no one except for straw-anarchists are saying not to vote. Everyone who objects to Harris says to vote third party. Of course, some people will respond to what's going on by not voting, but we (leftists) encourage them to vote instead.
There is no viable risk, a plurality of people already either don't vote or vote third party, the people like me are already accounted for since I wasn't about to support neoliberals anyway and have already voted third party.
So the only ones left are people who are just starting to vote third party. Let me say simply there is no way for us to just speak into existence a new voting bloc of around 15% of the population of the entire state to spoil your favored cop's chances of winning. If things were that easy, we could have a communist President within, like, 3 election cycles. No, things move much more slowly than that because you can't just manifest "Well what if everyone laid down their arms voted for Elizabeth Warren?" on a population like you made a magic wish.
The voteblue philosophy is one of fear, of an overriding fear even at things that are impossible in material reality, and using that fear as an excuse to never fight for someone who is better than center-right while always promising that on some future day we will finally have something better. It's a psychological hamster wheel, you'll keep running on it forever and never make progress, so the only solution is to get off.
If you actually want to stop fascism in the long term you'll need to join a socialist org. Liberals have historically acquiesced to fascism because of systemic forces inherent to capitalism.
If you'd like to know more, I'd recommend reading "The economy and class structure of german fascism"