pulsewidth comments on Just a reminder

[–] pulsewidth@lemmy.world 17 points 1 month ago (8 children)

I don't know a single person I organize with in DSA that didn't go vote for Harris. We aren't the ones that didn't show up.

Why are you writing novels to defend yourself against something that wasn't even directed at you?

OP clearly referenced people who protest-voted against Harris and subsequently made everything measurably worse for the Palestinians and Earth at large (which was obviously going to happen if Trump won).

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[–] wheezy@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (6 children)

My very first sentence categorized their comment as a misrepresentation of what caused the Harris loss. I had a paragraph in my "novel" originally that said that even if all protest votes went to Harris she still would have lost. But I guess my editor removed it in the final draft /s.

So, since I categorized the comment as a misrepresentation of what happened (protest votes having impact), provided evidence for why people stayed home, and provided an explanation of the campaigns failures; the quote you took was a defense of this conclusion in my "novel" and the actual actions of the people that spoke out against Harris for not standing against a genocide.

You can joke about the length of my comment. I am myself. But, don't quote a single sentence out of the context of "the novel" and pretend it was irrelevant to what I was explaining. Do you disagree with the protest vote being irrelevant? It doesn't sound like you do.

I've had this conversation for years now. The next step after I point to the protest vote as mathematically irrelevant is for Harris defenders to blame the "stay at home". It's why I addressed the reasons people stayed home and the failure of the campaign to win against "the couch". The problem was people staying home. But people stay home because they are apathetic, uninformed, misinformed, or aren't excited for either candidate.

We can be frustrated about why that is. But, if a presidential campaign doesn't run their campaign on how things actually are; and instead try to motivate this large voter base through morality or fear. They're going to fail like they did to have people "pokemen go to the polls".

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[–] CannonFodder@lemmy.world -2 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Why didn't all those non-voters bother to vote for Harris? You say it was because she didn't run a good campaign, that she had a bad platform. You criticized her 'bad' mistakes and spread the word on how bad she was. Don't you think that might have been a contributing factor as to why too many people thought she wasn't worth getting off their asses to vote?

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[–] wheezy@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

Let's assume for a moment that what you're saying is true. I'll "steelman" you're argument. Let's assume that the criticism of Harris "from the left" played a large enough role for enough people to stay home.

What you are advocating for is that if a political campaign is bad, but "less bad" than the alternative, we should not criticize it. We should not demand the candidate for our party run on policy positions that we want.

You realize you are advocating for an increasingly worse and worse political choice over time. If no concessions are ever offered by politicians to their voters, and those voters still show up religiously, that is not democracy. That is a cult.

Not only that. But what you're advocating for is impossible. You will never live in a world in which people don't criticize a candidate that is "less bad" than the other candidate. You can, however, live in a world where the politicians that lose elections to historically unpopular candidates like Trump, are replaced by candidates that actually offer policies the voters of their party WANT. We are seeing this grow with DSA right now.

So, even if what you are saying was true, the solution would not be to shame voters. That literally will cause MORE of them to sit on the couch on election day. That's just people. You can't sustain a political party by being "less bad" than the alternative. People will stop showing up. People sitting on the couch when their politicians ignore their material needs is literally how democracy should work.

You're saying the same thing I am saying. But you're for some reason placing blame on potential voters doing exactly what they SHOULD do in a healthy democracy. You seem to want a party that has cult like loyalty as long as "the other guy is worse". Well, that's exactly how you get worse and worse political policy, constantly shifting rightward, for decades.

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[–] CannonFodder@lemmy.world 0 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Ok. So things are working perfectly then with the upshot being Trump gots elected, and so we'll probably never get reasonably fair election again? And we've already destroyed our global alliances, started unnecessary wars, sent the economy to hell, put corruption off the charts ... and that's just perfect.

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[–] wheezy@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

You wanted to have a discussion about the influence of criticism in the elections. I yielded concessions to your point of view to make an important point about what you are advocating for. This is your reply?

Why do I even bother? You didn't respond to a single thing I said.

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[–] CannonFodder@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

Sorry. I'm just very frustrated. You are right in concept, but nonetheless we've ended up with Trump. So is it really right? Should we have 'played the game' and pushed all out for the better candidate and ignored the deficiencies to do anything to convince enough people to vote against Trump? I don't know. But we're fucked now.

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[–] wheezy@lemmy.ml 1 point 1 month ago*

I think our biggest difference in opinion is that you seem to think Trump brought fascism to America. Would that be fair to say?

I can understand that belief. But, I don't blame Trump solely for the rise in fascism. He didn't bring it. We are talking about a country that had an apartheid state of white supremacy when many of the representatives in office today were already grown adults.

White supremacy is a fundamental part of the American political system. If you always analyze your politicals based on an single election between two presidential candidates then what you are saying makes sense in a vacuum.

But, that is not how we got Trump. We didn't get Trump just because he won the election in 2016. If Trump died from a heart attack in 2013 we very much would have gotten the same dominant Republican party. The Republican party and it's tea party was ripe for the conditions of a politician like Trump. Roe V. Wade would have still been overturned. ICE would have still been expanded.

The Democratic party has been running on "lesser evil" campaigns since they lost to Reagan and abandoned the working class party of FDR.

Trump is leading fascism in America. He didn't create it though.

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[–] ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 month ago

Probably because people still don't seem to understand the electoral college. Which is very bad for demonstrating being a knowledgeable member of the American electorate.

Votes for president have negligible to no meaning due to the electoral college system. We now know that the protest votes counted in the hundreds whereas millions failed to vote at all. No outcomes in any race were decided by protest votes. More right wing libertarians protested the GOP.

The protest voters demonstrably did not make everything measureably worse. They are quite frankly the reason we have seen the dial shift towards elections of people like Mamdani. They're still throwing McMurrows out at every turn.

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