At risk of beating the dead horse…
These god damn liberals keep harping over how Joe Biden is the “lesser evil” compared to Donald Trump, necessitating that we go out and vote for him come November lest our flawless democratic system give way to fascism. “Something something incrementalism purity test push him left do you want Trump to win???”
In 2020, it could be feasibly argued, if poorly, that Joe Biden was, in fact, the “lesser evil.” Donald Trump was the president, and Joe Biden was not. Given the dual assumption that Donald Trump was a “substandard” president and that Biden would likely be at least “standard” quality, this made some sense. But the cards are on the table now. All of our most fearful suspicions about a Biden presidency have been utterly validated, and that’s not even counting all the atrocities people scarcely imagined him committing or lacked the capacity to predict altogether. He is more evil than we could have possibly known.
All these same libs are now in a bind. Apparently, Biden HAS to be the Democratic ticket, so he HAS to be elected president, because otherwise Trump would win, and that would be bad, wouldn’t it? The only problem is that Biden, the Anointed One, quite literally has no redeeming qualities. So what do you do to convince people to vote for Biden in spite of literally every crime he has committed and every promise he neglected to fulfill?
The most popular strategy is seemingly to just insist, with zero supporting evidence or even reasoning, that Trump’s America is just an objectively worse version of Biden’s America. Everything will be worse under Trump. Everything. Yes, Biden has failed in almost every respect and has actively worked against what he promised to his constituents, and yes, nothing has improved under Biden and in fact almost everything has generally become worse, but Trump will do all those bad things even harder! So you have to vote for Biden. Or you’re making the world worse. You fascist.
At risk of being the Russian troll living inside everyone’s walls, can we take a moment to appreciate the degree to which the discourse has removedd? “Vote for the lesser evil” used to mean that we were expected to make “compromises” with politicians we didn’t completely agree with or even took some issues with to avoid aggressive fragmentation within the Democratic Party, a sacrosanct institution representing all that is good in the world. This is perhaps the first election I’ve ever seen where we are not even being promised marginal progress. We are not even being offered different poisons to pick. The same toxic politics of the fascist right have been watered down by the “adults in the room,” and we are expected to not only drink but be thankful it’s not even more concentrated than it is.
Vote Biden 2024: It could be worse!
Even there, I'd argue that the Democrats, "centrists," and faux-left have done more than Trump ever did in actually transitioning the US in such a direction, all in the name of avoiding the scary orange man and various hyped-up "threats to democracy" like... the peaceful development of China and the global south, actual leftists and anti-war/anti-genocide sentiment, TikTok, and the increasingly mainstream demands for of any sort of accountability, transparency, or economic reform.
Other than that, I agree, the "substantial" difference between Trump and the liberals, is that Trump says nastier things about those he targets- and he actually stirs up hate against the LGBT community, Muslims, immigrants, etc. in this sense. Trump is the demagogue, and the liberals are the backstabbing politicians whose sole selling point is that they won't engage in the same level of demagoguery. But they're both clearly, willfully totalitarian, equally with a promise of violence and the tyranny of capital- the liberals are (outside of the LGBT community and bodily autonomy for women- major issues, granted) every bit as bad, and certainly willing to stir up anti-Chinese, anti-Palestinian, etc. hate. And ultimately- apart from the LGBT community and womens' rights as mentioned above- both are warmongers; both will crack down on the border and exploit migrants all the same; both are guaranteed to further rollback Americans' rights (or perhaps more accurately, "privileges," considering how easily and frequently they are taken away) and in the Democrats' case, when they get to it, they tend to receive little mainstream pushback even when their actions are far worse than that of the American "right"- because they've positioned themselves as the (false) "left" side of things, and they're "as good as it gets" and the "compromise" party, and people are told they just have to just deal with it and all the other bullshit "lesser evil" reasonings and excuses they promote.