Leftists who don’t like Biden don’t want to see him in office again, so they don’t want to vote for him, or they want to withhold their vote until he changes course. Seems simple enough.

But that’s not how politics works.

So announcing that you'll vote for him no matter what he does will make him change course? Is that how politics works?

Never, in the history of this country, has there been a president who hasn’t engaged in what the left would regard as unforgivable crimes. This is the nature of presidents, and politicians in general. If you, like me, are on the far left, you should never fully trust or have faith in any elected official.

But when I look at the Biden administration, I see a group of people who can be bullied in a leftist direction on some policy priorities.

lenin-laugh

Can anyone today truly argue that the world wasn’t drastically changed by Gore’s loss in 2000? Even if you don’t accept the argument that Nader’s candidacy is what lost Gore the election, how can you argue that the world wouldn’t have been at least a little better if all of those Nader votes had gone to Gore and put the Dems over the top?

Democrats have held the presidency 50% of the time since 2000.

  • CommunistCuddlefish [she/her]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 months ago

    Leftists who don’t like Biden don’t want to see him in office again, so they don’t want to vote for him, or they want to withhold their vote until he changes course. Seems simple enough.

    But that’s not how politics works.

    The point of electoral politics, as it is lived, is not to vote for a friend; it’s to vote for your preferred enemy. You will never find a morally pure candidate, or one whose positions perfectly align with your own preferences.

    By that reasoning I should vote for Trump because Trump is my preferred enemy. A Democratic fascist gets the complacent libs on board with fascism. A Republican fascist shakes the libs to a lower level of complacency and they'll at least do something, albeit ineffective, and then a few defect to the Left when they see that their pussycat pussyhat protests got nothing done.

    So you must find one whom you can effectively bully.

    Well that isn't Biden or any of the corporate Dems. The more we pressure them to stop being ghouls the more they double down. When pushed, they side with fascism instead of joining us in opposing fascism.

    When I was 14 years old, I was a huge fan of Ralph Nader. As a teenage anti-sweatshop activist, I believed that he was the only candidate in the 2000 presidential election who was speaking the truth and advocating for my policy goals. I went to a Nader rally in my hometown of Chicago, where the great journalist Studs Terkel spoke. I’ll never forget what he said in his nasal bark: “Gore or Bush, what’s your choice? Influenza or pneumonia, what’s your choice?”

    It all sounds like nonsense to me now. Can anyone today truly argue that the world wasn’t drastically changed by Gore’s loss in 2000? Even if you don’t accept the argument that Nader’s candidacy is what lost Gore the election, how can you argue that the world wouldn’t have been at least a little better if all of those Nader votes had gone to Gore and put the Dems over the top?

    You know I had this conversation with my parents (who grew up outside the US and so got to watch it on the world stage from a third world perspective) around 2008. They swore Gore would have been as bad as Bush when it came to war because the US doesn't really change its foreign policy no matter which party is in charge, and that Obama was going to be more of the same. I couldn't wrap my head around it then but watching Obama continue the War on Terror despite campaigning on "Change" showed me they were right.

    The author of this article was more mature as a 14-year old than she is now.

    In Weimar Germany, where the German Communist Party was far more robust and ready to fight in the streets, the revolution-oriented strategy—allowing a fascist victory to raise urgency and bring about a more lasting leftist one—didn’t work. Infamously, in the fateful early years of the 1930s, the German Communists viciously opposed the governing center-left Social Democratic Party. Calling the centrists “Social Fascists,” they declared that there was no substantive difference between liberalism and Nazism. They refused to ally themselves with the center.

    They didn't allow a fascist victory, the liberals did and in so doing proved the communists right

    Leon Trotsky himself

    God damn I try not to be sectarian but I don't think I have ever seen a good take from someone who respects Trotsky.

    Workers of the world, unite with your liberal foes; if you do not, you have everything to lose

    Oh how twee, how clever to co-opt a revolutionary communist slogan of liberation and funnel it into supporting the genocidal forces of capitalism. Anyway to address the substance of what she's saying, see the Weimar Republic when the liberals betrayed the Communists. See the 2016 election where even though so many Bernard (gender neutral) Brethren did end up voting for the Democrats' war criminal candidate that she won the popular vote, the liberals turned against the progressives and leftists and blamed them for their loss, when the liberals are the ones who chose to run one of the most uncharismatic and hated war criminals as their candidate. Liberals consistently snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, then blame it on the Left, then side with their fascist friends against the Left. If every leftist voted for Genocide Joe and he lost anyway, they'd do it to us again. If every leftist voted for Genocide Joe and he won because of it, they would still keep attacking us. You can't reason with these people; they don't want to be reasoned to, they don't want to look at truth or what's moral, they just want to keep going to brunch and repeatedly spread covid to the waitstaff.

    • PKMKII [none/use name]
      ·
      4 months ago

      You know I had this conversation with my parents (who grew up outside the US and so got to watch it on the world stage from a third world perspective) around 2008. They swore Gore would have been as bad as Bush when it came to war because the US doesn't really change its foreign policy no matter which party is in charge, and that Obama was going to be more of the same. I couldn't wrap my head around it then but watching Obama continue the War on Terror despite campaigning on "Change" showed me they were right.

      This is something I’ve noticed with libs, they assume Democrats who lost their elections would’ve been ideal progressives if they had actually won. In reality, it’s extremely likely Gore would’ve done something stupid and destructive in order to look “tough on terror.”