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snailchimera · 5 months

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So You're A USian Who Can't Bring Yourself To Vote Biden, Even Though Trump-Led Republicans Really Want To Kill You And Everyone You Love

You know what, fair.

I do understand where you're coming from, and I'm not going to argue with you about it. Sometimes there are lines we cannot cross even when there are no better choices, and "not supporting genocide" is a respectable hill to die on.

I personally am still taking the harm mitigation stance on the presidential election; Biden is starting to respond to pressure from protestors, slowly but surely, and I think we can work with that a lot more easily than we can work with Trump and the apocalyptic death cult supporting him.

That said, it was a genuinely difficult decision to make, and I'm still not sure it's the right one. I'm not going to judge you for going the other way.

What I am going to ask of you- what I am going to beg of you- is that you vote the rest of the ballot. Why?

1. It sends a stronger message.

If you don't vote at all, the easy assumption for pundits and politicians to make is that you didn't give a fuck, just like the many, many people who don't bother every year. The unfortunate reality of a two party system is lack of support for one side translates to support of the other side. A big Republican turnout and a small Democrat turnout sends the message that people as a whole like Republicans and want them to keep doing what they're doing. It pushes Dems right and emboldens the worst human beings on Earth to keep killing us.

But if a lot of people show up to vote, but don't vote for a president? In a presidential election? That's damn near unheard of. That sends a different, much more specific message: "Fuck these two bastards in particular". It tells the Democratic Party that there are people who are engaged in electoral politics (they don't give a fuck about people who aren't engaged in electoral politics), who will vote for Dems, but only if those Dems meet a minimum standard of human decency.

2. It keeps us alive long enough to fix things.

A president is not a king, and they only get away with acting like kings if the rest of the government lets them. Has way too much power been concentrated in the executive branch over time? Yeah. Does your average Democrat have a spine made of soggy cardboard? Yeah. But limits on executive power are still limits. The fact of the matter is that either Biden or Trump is going to be president, and if enough people refuse to vote for Biden, it's going to be Trump. We all remember how bad Trump was, and we know he and his followers want to make him dictator for life and murder all his detractors (read: us). We know Trump himself doesn't care about the conservative culture war, but he loves power and he's desperate for popularity, so he will give the evil Christofascist fuckers whatever they want in exchange for those two things. We know Trump enjoys hurting people for the sake of hurting them, because it makes him feel powerful and secure. Last time, a lot of damage was mitigated by the Supreme Court, but this time the Republicans have the court.

If we want to live through the next four years (and still hopefully have the right to vote at the end of them), we need to have Not-Republicans in control of the legislative branch. More importantly, because states generally have more power over their own governance than the federal government does, we need to keep Republicans out of the state and local governments as much as possible.

(There's also the issue that if progressives and radical leftists don't vote, but more centrists/people who actually like the Democratic Party and Biden as opposed to voting for damage control reasons do, the people who get voted in will be more conservative and less likely to actually hamper Republicans in any meaningful way. This is more of a primary issue, and the primaries are over, but it's still worth mentioning.)

And if Biden wins anyway? You still want Democrats in the legislative branch and in your state governments, because if Republicans are locked out of those places, it gives us the breathing room we need to demand better of our elected officials and removes the excuse that nothing will get done unless we're sufficiently "bipartisan". Democrats are easier to apply pressure to. Democrats of the wet cardboard spine variety are much easier to apply pressure to when they can't blame the scary Republicans for their own cowardice, apathy, or greed.

3. There are Democrats who will actually help us, but they need your votes to do so.

If you live in Michigan, you're especially lucky, because you get to vote for Representative Rashida Tlaib. Rep. Tlaib is a Palestinian-American woman who has been extremely vocal about her opposition to blind military support for Israel. She's also been vocal about issues such as immigrant rights, environmental justice, community supports for elderly and other vulnerable people, and healthcare, to name just a few. And she's not alone.

Again, pay special attention to state and local elections in your area. It's a lot easier to get genuine allies into smaller positions, and conversely it's a lot easier for The Worst People On Earth to get their own allies into these positions. This is partly because there's a smaller audience to appeal to, and partly because fewer people pay attention to the small elections. Do you want to protect trans kids? Vote for school board members. Do you want your city to be a sanctuary city? You need to pay attention to your mayor and your district representative. Find out who is, or is likely to be, on specific committees, such as agriculture or LGBTQ rights. These elections generally affect you and your community more than the presidential election does anyway.

4. The Glorious Revolution is not happening within the next seven months.

Electoral politics fix nothing by themselves. Voting is always going to be a method of shoring up defenses and disempowering the worst elements of our society. Ultimately, the US is not a good and noble country with some currently bad leaders; it's a colonialist, capitalist world power designed from the start and refined over time to give a few people a lot of power and wealth at the expense of everyone else, not just here, but everywhere in the world. It's important to recognize this. It's important to act in other ways to dismantle that power before it kills us all.

It is also important to recognize that you will not accomplish this before the next presidential election. You will not accomplish this very shortly after the next presidential election either.

Ideals are never as important as real human beings. Ideals are in fact useless if they do not serve real human beings. Your first priority, always, needs to be people. Do what you can to keep people alive. Do what you can to support them. When Republicans are in power, more people die. More people here die. More people in the rest of the world, including Palestine, Sudan, etc. die. That doesn't mean Democrats' hands are clean. It doesn't mean we shrug, flip the trolley switch, and move on with our lives as though nothing else could be done. It means we use every tool at our disposal to keep people alive, and we recognize that voting is one of those tools.

Smarter and better read people than me have said what I'm about to say much more eloquently, but sometimes it feels like The Revolution is like a leftist version of the Rapture; a single grand moment, long foretold, that will come all at once without warning and wash away all oppression and terror, leaving only peace and brotherhood when the smoke clears. People talk about it like it's something you only need to wait for and have faith in, and never forsake by engaging in ideologically impure action. I don't think that's how this works. I don't think that's how anything works, or ever has worked. Things change; change comes in one form or another, for better or for worse, as inevitably as the passage of time, and human history will not stop after some great, satisfying climax. Big dramatic changes always prove in the end to have been underpinned by many small ones, over long, long stretches of time. Tearing down a wall one brick at a time is still tearing down a wall.

Actions like the student protests are more important and more effective at building the kind of world we want to live in than voting, if you look at each by itself, but you don't have to. You don't have to choose between chip damage and a more meaningful confrontation. You can make the path just a little bit easier. That's what voting is.

In Conclusion

Back in the 2020 primaries, I joked that I would vote for a moldy ham sandwich if it ran against Trump. Then Biden got the nomination, and I said I didn't actually mean we should nominate a moldy ham sandwich.

Biden has done some very useful, important, and meaningful things, which I'm sure other people will be happy to tell you about in detail. He has also failed in some significant ways, and done some incredibly morally reprehensible things (as, to be clear, every single US president in history has); again, other people will be happy to tell you about that in detail. I know the breaking point for many of us has been seeing the horrors Israel is inflicting on Palestine, knowing our tax dollars are paying for that mass murder, and hearing Biden say that he does not care. I'm not going to defend that, because it's indefensible. I'm not going to make excuses for that, because there are none.

I'm just asking you to remember that the presidency is not the only thing at stake this year.

Please, help keep us a little bit safer. Keep Republicans out of your local and state government positions. Get people into the House and Senate who will, at worst, not make things significantly worse; if you can, get people who will stand up to Trumps and Bidens alike.

Don't throw our lives away.

#Snail babble #US stuff #politics #voting #Biden #free Palestine #god I hate that this is an argument I have to make #why can't Trump and Biden both get eaten by tigers or something #I'm gonna regret making this post I can feel it

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