e: disclaimer, I am not going to vote for Biden and I feel that I need to say that explicitly to manage the discussion happening below
the way I see it is that a Biden 2024 win will be loosely equivalent to a Trump 2024 win in Ukrainian/Russian deaths, Gazan deaths, jingoism in Taiwan, border/migrant deaths, and impoverished deaths, but Biden will be notably better than Trump about trans people deaths, so Biden is really only like a 95% Trump. I'm also suspicious of how thoroughly Trump can be handled into implementing Project 2025, I think he's very stupid and not good at following orders, but even a half way implemented Project 2025 is much scarier than another 4 years of neoliberal purgatory.
The flipside of that though is that the dems will truly never run anyone but a neoliberal unless they get completely decimated and see that their existing strategy buys them nothing but ruin. If they get their faces kicked in hard enough running Biden, who knows, they might actually run a berniecrat in 2028. Not likely, given that what I'm describing is the loose equivalent of Hillary getting annihilated in 2016 and then them actually letting Bernie run in 2020, but it's a thought.
Honestly, I think Biden winning is (slightly) worse for all the overseas wars and the genocide in Palestine. Trump's sycophants are terrible at running the war machine, they're fragmented and incompetent. They're more concerned with their individual career trajectories than the projects of the state. Biden's admin also has a fair bit of that, but people like Blinken and Nuland are closer to ideological true believers, who have stopped at nothing and continue to scale up these conflicts, everything else be damned. He's also completely ambivalent to the red states putting trans people and the parents of trans children on lists, forbidding trans healthcare, etc. I don't buy the argument that he's better than Trump on trans issues. Trump is no more likely to get blue states to destroy trans rights than Biden is to get red states to leave trans people alone. But that's just my cis opinion.
The flip side is that, as much as there's incompetent careerist ghouls in Trump's team, like Bolton or Giuliani, there also are some insane neocon/fascist true believers too, and those are the scariest people in politics.
Trump in 2020 would have been the harm reduction candidate through his incompetence and a democratic majority in the house/senate. We'd have the exact same COVID denialism, lack of economic relief, wars, inaction toward LGBT and reproductive rights, funding of the police and military, and border policy. The only difference would be that liberals would have to put their names next to opposing those things. Even if it's only rhetorical, the left would slip in like it did in 2018. Instead Blue MAGA gets to hoot and holler at the worst of their politicians and we are tied to them by the voters.
Democrats would be entering 2024 in a much stronger position with a much stronger candidate. 2022 and 2024 would both have more radicals, there'd be more opposition to Israel and less support for Ukraine, Ukraine would have probably ended much sooner with the same result and hundreds of thousands of lives saved. Liberals would still believe COVID exists and BLM could have probably maintained momentum as the economy continued to get worse. Locally the democrats were instead allowed to take comfort in voting blue no matter who working as a result of being the opposition party. They voted blue and checked out entirely leaving us with functionally right-wing politicians who rode the 2018 progressive wave.
Trump tries to be 100% Hitler but is so incompetent he only does like 70% of his Hitlering.
Biden gets to be 99% Hitler with no opposition while saying “Please vote for me not Trump I promise I’ll be 100% Hitler he’s only like 70% Hitler I can be 100% Hitler just vote for meeeee”
We wouldn’t have the same wars. The Russia-Ukraine war is a project of Biden and Nuland. Starting in 2014 when he was VP and picking back up in 2021 when he became president.
If Trump had been re-elected, it’s likely Russia wouldn’t have invaded and the conflict would stay frozen. Or even if they did, Trump wouldn’t support Ukraine so it would have been over pretty quick.
direct quote from the official text of project 2025 (emphasis mine):
Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.
You can call it vapid virtue signaling if you want, but the fact of the matter is that they are gunning for unitary executive power, and every single person who holds that unitary executive power will believe this and rule accordingly.
It is pretty concerning that that's the attitude they're showing, but I just don't see them actually going through with it. Desantis showed that running on transphobia and trying to attract everyone purely by culture war issues isn't a viable electoral strategy. Will they still rule accordingly when their base just seriously doesn't care? I don't mean to dismiss their transphobia, and obviously there are rabid chuds that absolutely will eat up the bathroom bills, the bans on trans education and healthcare, etc. But how much more of that are we going to see under Trump than what Biden is already turning a blind eye to?
I still don't blame you if you think voting for Biden is what's right because of your concerns about trans rights. I just think the difference is so marginal when Republicans are already allowed to go nuts.
Oh I'm not voting for Biden lmao, I have a bottle of champagne ready for when he bites it, I'm voting uncommitted in the primary and 3rd party in the general. I do wanna say though that I deeply appreciate you for your attitude here, I am getting burnt out by people detecting what they think is a hint of pro-Biden lesser-evilism and instantly launching into patronizing rhetoric that makes me feel like everyone sees me as a Hillary supporter. Justice cannot be attained for the people of the world without the downfall of America and the west and also there's room to have nuanced discussion on the pros and cons of another Trump term versus another Biden term with that foundational understanding in mind.
I mean, I know they won't, me saying that they probably won't is the start of the very next sentence that you left off your quote. We saw this with Bernie in 2016/2020, I'm just hoping something might change if they lose yet again but even harder this time. Again, probably not, but we're certainly not seeing a Berniecrat win in 2028 if Biden takes it in 2024
I'm just hoping something might change if they lose yet again but even harder this time.
We shouldn't forget how many things had to break right for Dems to be able to ratfuck Bernie:
Covid hit during the primary, undercutting the ability for people to vote for Bernie/against the ratfuck and relegating all other news to the backburner.
Obama was able and willing to pull the strings for the coordinated dropout/endorsement of Biden. Will he still have the juice to do that in 2028? He'd do it for his former VP, but is he going to do it for or someone? That someone would have been a better choice for the party in 2020 but they didn't get picked then.
Biden could lean on his VP time and because he hadn't been doing a real job for 12 years could avoid most criticism with "that's ancient history." Who's going to do that this time?
Dem politicians and voters in part went along with the ratfuck because (a) Bernie was farther left than any major presidential candidate since maybe 1988, and (b) Trump said scarier things out loud than any recent Republican candidate. But people have been talking about Bernie's positions on topics like healthcare since he forced that conversation back into the mainstream, Trump won't be on the ballot in 2028, and your Republican nominee might be some more polished freak like Nikki Hayley.
Warren stayed in, which made the coordination behind Biden less obvious and cost Bernie some supporters.
It was a very specific combination of circumstances. They could still pull it off, but they had to try, and they had to get a little lucky. They might not be able to pull it off in 2028, or they might have to do it so blatantly that it backfires.
Finally, it got shoveled under the rug because Biden won. If they do it in 2028 and lose, the internal party divisions that sprung up after Hillary lost (and helped Bernie become a real contender in the first place in 2020) will re-emerge even stronger.
Bernie is a lib, the best lib but still a lib. And if they didn't even want him to win, then Dems are fucked as far as turning "left." Until they get superdelegates it's impossible to trust their primary process.
Republican primaries don't have superdelegates to help keep control, so until the Dems get rid of that i don't expect much. The GOP primary doesnt have NEARLY that level of control. Which is pretty fuckin funny.
I think a 2028 Berniecrat W would not be a result of the Dems finally wising up and running a Berniecrat, but instead be the result of a party leadership crisis in 2024 leading to the progressives winning smaller elections actually seizing enough party leadership to gum up any potential 2028 ratfucking.
Project 2025 would be interesting because they are literally declaring class war on the democratic liberal base. Cheney was the only true accelerationist. Except his vision is "we need a Caesar".
The DNC won't learn. They'll just keep doubling down because their money is on the line.
e: disclaimer, I am not going to vote for Biden and I feel that I need to say that explicitly to manage the discussion happening below
the way I see it is that a Biden 2024 win will be loosely equivalent to a Trump 2024 win in Ukrainian/Russian deaths, Gazan deaths, jingoism in Taiwan, border/migrant deaths, and impoverished deaths, but Biden will be notably better than Trump about trans people deaths, so Biden is really only like a 95% Trump. I'm also suspicious of how thoroughly Trump can be handled into implementing Project 2025, I think he's very stupid and not good at following orders, but even a half way implemented Project 2025 is much scarier than another 4 years of neoliberal purgatory.
The flipside of that though is that the dems will truly never run anyone but a neoliberal unless they get completely decimated and see that their existing strategy buys them nothing but ruin. If they get their faces kicked in hard enough running Biden, who knows, they might actually run a berniecrat in 2028. Not likely, given that what I'm describing is the loose equivalent of Hillary getting annihilated in 2016 and then them actually letting Bernie run in 2020, but it's a thought.
Honestly, I think Biden winning is (slightly) worse for all the overseas wars and the genocide in Palestine. Trump's sycophants are terrible at running the war machine, they're fragmented and incompetent. They're more concerned with their individual career trajectories than the projects of the state. Biden's admin also has a fair bit of that, but people like Blinken and Nuland are closer to ideological true believers, who have stopped at nothing and continue to scale up these conflicts, everything else be damned. He's also completely ambivalent to the red states putting trans people and the parents of trans children on lists, forbidding trans healthcare, etc. I don't buy the argument that he's better than Trump on trans issues. Trump is no more likely to get blue states to destroy trans rights than Biden is to get red states to leave trans people alone. But that's just my cis opinion.
The flip side is that, as much as there's incompetent careerist ghouls in Trump's team, like Bolton or Giuliani, there also are some insane neocon/fascist true believers too, and those are the scariest people in politics.
Trump in 2020 would have been the harm reduction candidate through his incompetence and a democratic majority in the house/senate. We'd have the exact same COVID denialism, lack of economic relief, wars, inaction toward LGBT and reproductive rights, funding of the police and military, and border policy. The only difference would be that liberals would have to put their names next to opposing those things. Even if it's only rhetorical, the left would slip in like it did in 2018. Instead Blue MAGA gets to hoot and holler at the worst of their politicians and we are tied to them by the voters.
Democrats would be entering 2024 in a much stronger position with a much stronger candidate. 2022 and 2024 would both have more radicals, there'd be more opposition to Israel and less support for Ukraine, Ukraine would have probably ended much sooner with the same result and hundreds of thousands of lives saved. Liberals would still believe COVID exists and BLM could have probably maintained momentum as the economy continued to get worse. Locally the democrats were instead allowed to take comfort in voting blue no matter who working as a result of being the opposition party. They voted blue and checked out entirely leaving us with functionally right-wing politicians who rode the 2018 progressive wave.
100% agree with everything you said
Trump tries to be 100% Hitler but is so incompetent he only does like 70% of his Hitlering.
Biden gets to be 99% Hitler with no opposition while saying “Please vote for me not Trump I promise I’ll be 100% Hitler he’s only like 70% Hitler I can be 100% Hitler just vote for meeeee”
We wouldn’t have the same wars. The Russia-Ukraine war is a project of Biden and Nuland. Starting in 2014 when he was VP and picking back up in 2021 when he became president.
If Trump had been re-elected, it’s likely Russia wouldn’t have invaded and the conflict would stay frozen. Or even if they did, Trump wouldn’t support Ukraine so it would have been over pretty quick.
direct quote from the official text of project 2025 (emphasis mine):
You can call it vapid virtue signaling if you want, but the fact of the matter is that they are gunning for unitary executive power, and every single person who holds that unitary executive power will believe this and rule accordingly.
It is pretty concerning that that's the attitude they're showing, but I just don't see them actually going through with it. Desantis showed that running on transphobia and trying to attract everyone purely by culture war issues isn't a viable electoral strategy. Will they still rule accordingly when their base just seriously doesn't care? I don't mean to dismiss their transphobia, and obviously there are rabid chuds that absolutely will eat up the bathroom bills, the bans on trans education and healthcare, etc. But how much more of that are we going to see under Trump than what Biden is already turning a blind eye to?
I still don't blame you if you think voting for Biden is what's right because of your concerns about trans rights. I just think the difference is so marginal when Republicans are already allowed to go nuts.
Oh I'm not voting for Biden lmao, I have a bottle of champagne ready for when he bites it, I'm voting uncommitted in the primary and 3rd party in the general. I do wanna say though that I deeply appreciate you for your attitude here, I am getting burnt out by people detecting what they think is a hint of pro-Biden lesser-evilism and instantly launching into patronizing rhetoric that makes me feel like everyone sees me as a Hillary supporter. Justice cannot be attained for the people of the world without the downfall of America and the west and also there's room to have nuanced discussion on the pros and cons of another Trump term versus another Biden term with that foundational understanding in mind.
no they won't
I mean, I know they won't, me saying that they probably won't is the start of the very next sentence that you left off your quote. We saw this with Bernie in 2016/2020, I'm just hoping something might change if they lose yet again but even harder this time. Again, probably not, but we're certainly not seeing a Berniecrat win in 2028 if Biden takes it in 2024
We shouldn't forget how many things had to break right for Dems to be able to ratfuck Bernie:
It was a very specific combination of circumstances. They could still pull it off, but they had to try, and they had to get a little lucky. They might not be able to pull it off in 2028, or they might have to do it so blatantly that it backfires.
Finally, it got shoveled under the rug because Biden won. If they do it in 2028 and lose, the internal party divisions that sprung up after Hillary lost (and helped Bernie become a real contender in the first place in 2020) will re-emerge even stronger.
Bernie is a lib, the best lib but still a lib. And if they didn't even want him to win, then Dems are fucked as far as turning "left." Until they get superdelegates it's impossible to trust their primary process.
But maybe enough Dems will be disgusted by the neoliberals that do nothing AND eat shit that they turn left.... /hopium
Republican primaries don't have superdelegates to help keep control, so until the Dems get rid of that i don't expect much. The GOP primary doesnt have NEARLY that level of control. Which is pretty fuckin funny.
not to dems: they get to fundraise indefinitely with no expectation that they ever wield power again
who? there's no bench and the dems like it that way
I think a 2028 Berniecrat W would not be a result of the Dems finally wising up and running a Berniecrat, but instead be the result of a party leadership crisis in 2024 leading to the progressives winning smaller elections actually seizing enough party leadership to gum up any potential 2028 ratfucking.
Project 2025 would be interesting because they are literally declaring class war on the democratic liberal base. Cheney was the only true accelerationist. Except his vision is "we need a Caesar".
The DNC won't learn. They'll just keep doubling down because their money is on the line.