“vote blue no matter who” rhetoric is there literal exact reason why there’s no true leftist party in the US and why we’ve been steadily moving farther and farther right for fucking decades
Republicans are openly fascist trash.
Democrats are quietly fascist trash who happily continue the efforts of Republicans and are very comfortable moving farther right with every election because they know they’ll always get support because they’re the “lesser evil”.
Democrats can say or do whatever the fuck they want because they KNOW they’ll still get votes. The entire party is literally based around “vote for us because we’re marginally less cartoonishly evil than the other guys” and we fucking fall for it every goddamn election.
Politicians exist to SERVE THE PEOPLE. They aren’t fucking entitled to our votes just because they have a specific label slapped on them, and the idea that we should vote for someone just because they’re a Democrat and might not be as bad as The Other Guys™ is just proof that our system is fucking ruined beyond saving.
Hey real quick, if you genuinely fucking believe that there’s absolutely zero difference between Trump winning and Biden winning in November, you either have your head in the sand or you’re being dishonest
Yes, both parties are hot garbage, but the democratic party is garbage in a way that they don’t have a backbone and are a functionally right wing party and the Republican party is garbage in the way that they’re a death cult
If Trump wins, democracy in America dies
If Biden wins, we stand a chance to push further left or to slow down this county’s collapse. We have a chance under a Biden presidency.
Literally, under Obama, Bernie Sanders went from an unknown mayor to one of the most well known leftist political figures in the country. Under the nothing burger of the Obama presidency, we achieved the conditions necessary to radicalize people to the point where we nearly got Bernie Sanders to become the fucking president! The conversations have shifted so much further left than they would’ve under a red president as well. In the 4 years of Trump, we haven’t seen as much progress, and Bernie did worse than he did in 2016.
Trump literally wants to lable Antifa as a terrorist organization, even though Antifa is neither a terrorist group nor an organization. If he wins, he can put whoever he needs to in power to label people who dare criticizes him and fascism an enemy of the state and fucking arrest them as terrorists! Trump is actually threatening our free speech, his healthcare policies would kill and jeopardize the lives of afabs and trans people, reproductive rights are in jeopardy, our right to assembly is in jeopardy
Biden won’t fucking do that. Harm reduction is a thing! Please god, I know that both parties are trash, no one is particularly excited about our choices, but please fucking vote blue as long as they’re the lesser of two evils
Sitting on your hands because you want to feel like you can’t compromise your values or whatever is letting the fascists win.
Our options are wading through shit or eating the shit until we die, and I’d much rather plug my nose and get through it than force it down my throat until I’m a corpse in the septic tank.
Whatever happens, people will die.
Trump has dropped the ball Completely with this pandemic, he has radicalized his supporters to a point of mania, and whether he wins or loses, blood will flow
The facts are that regardless who wins, people will get hurt. It’s just a matter if we want 200,000 people to hurt or 100,000.
Vote blue. Please god, vote blue.
Some highlights for those who don’t want to read the whole article, which is fair though I highly recommend trying to:
When proclamations are made that “voting is harm reduction,” it’s never clear how less harm is actually calculated. Do we compare how many millions of undocumented Indigenous Peoples have been deported? Do we add up what political party conducted more drone strikes? Or who had the highest military budget? Do we factor in pipelines, mines, dams, sacred sites desecration? Do we balance incarceration rates? Do we compare sexual violence statistics? Is it in the massive budgets of politicians who spend hundreds of millions of dollars competing for votes?
Though there are some political distinctions between the two prominent parties in the so-called U.S., they all pledge their allegiance to the same flag. Red or blue, they’re both still stripes on a rag waving over stolen lands that comprise a country built by stolen lives.
We don’t dismiss the reality that, on the scale of U.S. settler colonial violence, even the slightest degree of harm can mean life or death for those most vulnerable. What we assert here is that the entire notion of “voting as harm reduction” obscures and perpetuates settler-colonial violence, there is nothing “less harmful” about it, and there are more effective ways to intervene in its violences.
[…]
The anarchist collective Crimethinc observes, “Voting consolidates the power of a whole society in the hands of a few politicians.” When this process is conducted under colonial authority, there is no option but political death for Indigenous Peoples. In other words, voting can never be a survival strategy under colonial rule. It’s a strategy of defeat and victimhood that protracts the suffering and historical harm induced by ongoing settler colonialism. And while the harm reduction sentiment may be sincere, even hard won marginal reforms gained through popular support can be just as easily reversed by the stroke of a politician’s pen. If voting is the democratic participation in our own oppression, voting as harm reduction is a politics that keeps us at the mercy of our oppressors.
[…]
There is nothing intersectional about participating in and maintaining a genocidal political system. There’s no meaningful solidarity to be found in a politics that urges us to meet our oppressors where they’re at. Voting as harm reduction imposes a false solidarity upon those identified to be most vulnerable to harmful political policies and actions.
[…]
Under colonial occupation all power operates through violence. There is absolutely nothing “less harmful” about participating in and perpetuating the political power of occupying forces. Voting won’t undue settler colonialism, white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, or capitalism. Voting is not a strategy for decolonization. The entire process that arrived at the “Native vote” was an imposition of U.S. political identity on Indigenous Peoples fueled by white supremacy and facilitated by capitalism.
[…]
The genealogy of the Native vote is tied to boarding schools, Christian indoctrination, allotment programs, and global wars that established U.S. imperialism. U.S. assimilation policies were not designed as a benevolent form of harm reduction, they were an extension of a military strategy that couldn’t fulfill its genocidal programs. Citizenship was forced onto Indigenous Peoples as part of colonial strategy to, “Kill the Indian and save the man.”
There was a time when Indigenous Peoples wanted nothing to do with U.S. citizenship and voting.
[…]
Perhaps one of the clearest illustrations of assimilationist strategies regarding citizenship and voting comes from Henry S. Pancoast, one of the founders of the Christian white supremacist group, the Indian Rights Association (IRA). Pancoast stated, “Nothing [besides United States Citizenship] will so tend to assimilate the Indian and break up his narrow tribal allegiance, as making him feel that he has a distinct right and voice in the white man’s nation.”
[…]
The cost of citizenship has always been our sovereignty, the conditions of citizenship have always been in service to white supremacy.
[…]
Lucy Parsons, an Afro-Indigenous anarchist was among many who critiqued suffrage at the time. Parsons wrote in 1905, “Can you blame an Anarchist who declares that man-made laws are not sacred?…The fact is money and not votes is what rules the people. And the capitalists no longer care to buy the voters, they simply buy the ‘servants’ after they have been elected to ‘serve.’ The idea that the poor man’s vote amounts to anything is the veriest delusion. The ballot is only the paper veil that hides the tricks.”
[…]
So long as the political and economic system remains intact, voter enfranchisement, though perhaps resisted by overt white supremacists, is still welcomed so long as nothing about the overall political arrangement fundamentally changes. The facade of political equality can occur under violent occupation, but liberation cannot be found in the occupier’s ballot box. In the context of settler colonialism voting is the “civic duty” of maintaining our own oppression. It is intrinsically bound to a strategy of extinguishing our cultural identities and autonomy.
[…]
Since the idea of U.S. “democracy” is majority rule, barring an extreme population surge, Indigenous voters will always be at the mercy “of good intentioned” political allies. Consolidating the Native vote into a voting bloc that aligns with whatever settler party, politician, or law that appears to do less harm isn’t a strategy to exercise political power, it’s Stockholm syndrome.
The Native vote also seeks to produce Native politicians. And what better way to assimilate rule then with a familiar face? The strategy of voting Indigenous Peoples into a colonial power structure is not an act of decolonization, it’s a fulfillment of it.
[…]
A less harmful form of colonial occupation is fantasy. The process of colonial undoing will not occur by voting. You cannot decolonize the ballot.
[…]
Voting will never be “harm reduction” while colonial occupation & U.S. imperialism reigns. In order to heal we have to stop the harm from occurring, not lessen it. This doesn’t mean simply abstinence or ignoring the problem until it just goes away, it means developing and implementing strategies and maneuvers that empower Indigenous People’s autonomy.
Since we cannot expect those selected to rule in this system to make decisions that benefit our lands and peoples, we have to do it ourselves. Direct action, or the unmediated expression of individual or collective desire, has always been the most effective means by which we change the conditions of our communities.
[…]
We aren’t advocating for a state-based solution, redwashed European politic, or some other colonial fantasy of “utopia.” In our rejection of the abstraction of settler colonialism. we don’t aim to seize colonial state power but to abolish it.
Hey, this is stupid. I have zero patience left for this bullshit.
Not voting doesn’t strike a blow against the system or anything. Not voting is EXACTLY what the fascists want you to do. Voting for some third party or write in candidate that literally cannot win is what they want you to do.
You want change? Good. Build a fucking guillotine and get to work on the revolution, or get involved in local politics, or whatever your thing is. But that’s all shit you do *in addition to* voting for the least awful option.
A banquet is being served in five minutes and we know that all that’s in the fridge is cheap bologna and rat poison. Do you just throw your hands up and say “might as well eat the rat poison?” Because that would be insane. Going to the store and learning to cook and planting a garden and whatever else are all great options and you can totally do those things, but right this fucking second something is going on the plates and there’s no good option but the rat poison is way way fucking worse.
We fucked up. We didn’t stop this yet. We need to do better and stop it going forward. But SINCE we fucked up, these are our options. Suck it up, vote Biden, and then please by all means revolt and reform and do whatever you can to buy yourself time to do that by not letting Trump be in charge for a second longer.
Biden is bad, yeah. But if you think that means you shouldn’t vote you’re either absurdly uninformed or a child throwing a temper tantrum.
I simply do not get it. I may be Canadian but I’m with the baron on this one. It affects us too. Every day Trump is in power, right-wingers get bolder over here. I am tired of living beside a burgeoning dictatorship. When your house is literally on fire you shouldn’t stop to bitch about where the fire extinguisher came from.
If you and your roommates are picking someone to sign the lease and your only choices are a) Disgusting Donny who at this very moment is trying to squeeze out a turd onto your pillow, or b) Jowly Joey who doesn’t flush and swipes food from the fridge sometimes, you should always pick b — AKA the guy who is not currently shitting on your pillow. If you don’t, you’re either too dumb to understand how elections work or privileged enough to afford new pillows every day. Because if you just sit on your hands and go “well nyeh, I hate both of these people so I’m just not going to pick ANYBODY,” then congrats, Donny’s friends all pick him anyway and it’s pillow turds for all eternity — and not just for you, but for everyone else in the house who isn’t his friend.
By all means, we should continue to advocate for the issues, we should continue to push progressive candidates, but in the meantime, please pull your head out of your ass and vote Biden. For the love of fuck. A leaky valve is better than a completely broken one spewing sewage everywhere.
