lets aggregate our best. both most satisfying and the most effective.
Best response is "No". Second best is "No, Bernie was the furthest right I was willing to go."
If we're specifically talking about libs:
-make sure to preface your argument with the fact you ARE voting (even if you're not, probably just lie if you want to talk about Biden). This matters more to them than anything else. If you tell them you're not voting, they're going to get mad at you and it'll be their whole thing: they'll even say things like they'd rather you vote for Trump than not vote, which, yeah, they have brain worms. Plus if you vote Green there's that extremely unlikely situation where they hit 5%, which I forget why that matters.
-the easy dodge: you probably live in a state that is not in play for the election. Note though: this should really be used if you don't want to have a conversation. Like, you are not addressing the issue with this; you are failing to address it.
-Basic ethical arguments: Because you get to choose who you vote for, it's unconscionable to you that: Joe Biden raped at least one person; is at best extremely tolerant of segregationists but more likely just doesn't view segregation as a problem or a bad thing, which is wild; is a hair-sniffing, child-groping freak; by all appearances suffers from dementia and, on bad days, has trouble forming basic sentences; is an actual architect of the War in Iraq; is an actual architect of the carceral state. You only vote once in the 2020 election, and you'll need to live with the decision to vote for a rapist/segregationist/war criminal/creep/mentally incapacitated person for the rest of your life.
-Utilitarian arguments: People will argue that Biden will reduce the amount of harm in the world compared to Trump. Maybe he will. But the border crisis comes in part from the Obama administrations coup in Honduras. Biden lobbied hard for the Iraq War and seems to like war. The Dem Party forced people to vote in-person in the primary during a pandemic, and now such party bigwigs as Cuomo and Schumer are insisting on sending kids back to school, which will kill people, and it's not like Biden is reining them in. Biden could easily kill just as many people as Trump will through the State Department, three-letter agencies, armed forces, public schools, and honestly, there's not much reason to believe ICE is going to be a lot better.
where they hit 5%, which I forget why that matters
“What would really be a big victory would be if we got 5% of the vote,” Hawkins said.
“That qualifies us for a public campaign financing grant for the general election in 2024 for president. If we got to 5% there’d be about $20m at least waiting for our presidential ticket in 2024, which would be a jump up. So 5% is benchmark.”
source
I've tried this one. they keep waiting for a response, having chosen not to hear the last 11 words.
"Without mentioning the Republicans, name a policy that Joe Biden and I both support"
Or, to use the exact quote from Biden himself:
"The thing the event the you know the one that which we all can clearly see the thing you know which the whatever other people say or pretend to know with really anything else but you've got to understand that the situation is of course whatever we said last week"
“He doesn’t need my vote, his moderate tendencies should pull in enough centrists and never-Trump republicans to guarantee a victory, after all wasn’t electability his big appeal?”
Alternately:
"From Hell's heart I stab at thee. For hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee"
Short: “He repeatedly, literally asked people like me not to vote for him.”
Long: “He repeatedly implied that my vote is not needed to beat Trump. For every leftist who does not vote, there must be 10 moderate republicans that he convinced to swing, since he is so good at reaching across the aisle and the only efficient way for democrats to win is to appeal to the center. Either that, or he is a liar, and I do not vote for liars.”
Say Trump has done 100 horrible things. Now imagine there's a Clone Trump who's done 99 of those horrible things. You can tell me -- truthfully -- that Clone Trump is objectively better, but I can tell you just as truthfully that they're so close it doesn't matter who I vote for.
Now the conversation is about the many ways Biden sucks, and if they try to hit you with "c'mon, man, Trump's still worse" you go back to what you talked about at the beginning: that this might be true, but at some point both options are bad enough that the difference no longer matters.
Alternately:
Look at the convention; voting for Biden is voting for Bush III.
Alternately:
Convince me to vote for Biden without mentioning Trump.
Alternately:
Trump is too incompetent to be truly dangerous, and Biden in 2020 just paves the way for a competent fascist in 2024.
I did say 'fuck around and find out', well you fucked around, now you're at the finding out part.
“Even when there is no prospect whatsoever of their being elected, the workers must put up their own candidates in order to preserve their independence, to count their forces, and to bring before the public their revolutionary attitude and party standpoint. In this connection they must not allow themselves to be seduced by such arguments of the democrats as, for example, that by so doing they are splitting the democratic party and making it possible for the reactionaries to win. The ultimate intention of all such phrases is to dupe the proletariat. The advance which the proletarian party is bound to make by such independent action is indefinitely more important than the disadvantage that might be incurred by the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body” -Marx
(Yes I am going to keep posting this everywhere it is needed.)
The advance which the proletarian party is bound to make by such independent action is indefinitely more important than the disadvantage that might be incurred by the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body
Does this still hold true if there is no "proletarian party" of any significance?
In 1900, the RSDLP had less than 2000 members. Hardly of significance in a nation of 140 million people and a good deal smaller than many US left parties..
On the eve of the 1905 revolution, the RSDLP had 8400 members total, most non-Bolshevik. Another 24,000 from the Jewish Bund were in support.
By 1907 they had 83 seats in the Duma (in coalition with the SR) and 147,000 members.
You never know how fast things will grow, or when you or someone else will gain traction, which is why the current parties contest elections even without widespread worker support.
I enjoy when I tell people I refuse to vote for evil, and they reply that that's a childish attitude.
Like...they're not wrong. Even children know it's fucked up to willingly choose evil.
There is zero trust that the Democratic party, with Biden as president, will do anything good. Immediately after getting the nomination, Biden/Harris removed the 'no fossil fuel subsidies' part of their platform. As someone who cares about climate change, it's clear that voting for Democrats will not even be an effective stalling action. It is necessary for a green party to rise up and the sooner the better, or we'll all die on this shitty flaming pile of rocks in thirty years.
Yeah, Trump is bad, but from the perspective of keeping the planet habitable, Biden is also bad. Neither of them will fix things in time. It doesn't matter if Biden is better, because he still won't do the hard things that enable us to tackle climate change. He won't even do the easy things.
The climate change crisis is existential. If there are two losing options on the ballot, then the first priority is to promote a third option that might actually do something about it.
(Or something along those lines)
