Trump: Fascism.
Biden: Fascism, but happening where we can ignore it.
Look, the fact they use slaves to build the phone I purchased doesn't mean I have slaves. It's just Apple needs to fix it's supply chain.
Guys, we have to support Gobbels, if Himmler takes over the nazi party we will fall futher into ultra-fascism, Gobbels is not great but he is the best we got to save the democracy in the reich
Listen to this guy, if Himmler takes over things will get really bad
#SettleForGoebbels
Vaush: YOU FUCKING TANKIES! IF YOU READ MARX YOU WOULD SEE THAT HE SAID TO VOTE FOR GOEBBELS. You authoritarians probably want to side with the red fash USSR anyway
Pulls out cherrypicked quote which uses the phrase "The Communist Party entering parliament" to justify vooting for a fascist party of the 'lesser of two evils'
I'm gonna be blunt, but we aren't going to win this discourse this time around. I just scream this into the void even among my normie friends. They hate Trump so much they are willing to accept nothing changing as an alternative and that won't change this election. However if Biden does get in and not change anything, we will definitely be able to agitate this line more among normies. To what extent, I don't know, but we have to look beyond the election and prepare for any situation.
My fear is that they will just go "okay but it was worse under Trump"
Like if Trump doesn't fuck off forever after this, they could just point to him endlessly as an example of how much worse it could possibly be. Getting people to realize that life legitimately can be better than this is hard. Neoliberalism and eternal austerity and shit only getting worse has programmed people into thinking this is just how it has to be.
They can only sleep for so long. The underlying problems and contradictions are still there, still accelerating
All critique of Biden will be met with “He’s better than Trump! Can you imagine how much worse things would be if Trump was re-elected?”
I’ve talked with my lib coworkers about this. I say “ if you’re constantly choosing between the lesser of two evils, you’re still doing evil” and they go “well that’s just the way it is”.
IDK I'm convinced Biden is the actual accelerationist choice now because there's no "normal" to go back to any attempt to do so is going to be hilarious
Obviously not voting for trump but I do think there is a "next time" argument to be made. The successor to a two term trump has way more potential to be good, whereas burdens inevitable successor has way more potential to swing back even further right than Trump.
The biggest political obstacle today to independent working-class political action—not just in the United States—is lesser-evil thinking. Every working-class vote for the lesser-evil bourgeois politician is another step away from building a real working-class alternative. And every vote for a bourgeois politician helps reproduce bourgeois politics. Many a sincere revolutionary in the United States and elsewhere thought that support for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney was in the interest of the international working class. Aside from what the cold facts about the new Obama administration have already revealed—“what thou doest, do quickly”—what such support in fact did, as always with such strategies, was to drain precious time and energy away from what needs to be done. It’s impossible to calculate, but much of the energy of the Occupy move- ments in the United States, with all their strengths and limitations, was siphoned off into the reelection of Barack Obama—a pattern seen with earlier mass movements in the run-ups to presidential elections, such as the Vietnam antiwar movement. The justification is always that failing to support the lesser evil allows the “greater evil,” the reactionaries, to win. reaction actually is and how it advances. One thing is certain: the logic of capital dictates that unless there is a real working-class alternative, boureois politics will keep moving to the right—especially in the context of the still-unfolding crisis. Every delay in the pursuit of independent working-class political action only emboldens reaction.
Whats funny is that I remember seeing a lot that Trump was the lesser of two evils simply because Hillary was such a war hawk that she would start a number of wars
idk, trump has actually ramped up drones quite a bit. but then his coup in venezuela failed so thats good
His brinksmanship with Iran should have put an end to the idea that Hillary would have been worse on imperialism. We traded acts of war with a country bigger and more developed than anyone we've fought since WWII and were hours from an attack that would escalate things beyond the point of no return.
Libs suck, we get it, but it's embarrassing to keep bending over backwards to pretend Trump is kinda sorta OK on this point.
eh, im sympathetic to the idea that sometimes his incompetence and arrogance stops him from doing a bad thing, but yeah. i dont even see what the point of comparing how bad hillary would have been vs trump. we'll never know, other than that both are complete shit.
The thing is, he only has to fuck up once. It's like giving someone who's blackout drunk a gun and telling them to shoot someone across the room. They might fuck up a lot and do no major damage, but you can't count on their incompetence forever. And when they're at that level of incompetence you can't count on them balking at something insane, like invading a country with 80 million people, many in major metro areas.
Some generic Democratic president will still do coups and drone terrorism, but they generally don't have the type of ideological commitment to major wars conservatives have and they won't bungle their way into one like Trump.
well, i don't disagree, but i am sympathetic to people who think trump's incompetence has led to luck. but with the murder of solemani, i dunno, shit is really really bad so i wouldn't say i agree with it, but i am sympathetic.
The Syrian civil war would still be a high-intensity conflict right now if Clinton had won and American bombers would have joined Saudi bombers in Yemen, and god knows what fuckery she would get up to in Libya in the quest to defend her "legacy"
Somewhere around 400,000-600,000 people have been killed in Syria. If an invasion of Iran killed about 10% of the pre-war population (as was the case with Iraq) we're looking at 8+ million deaths. It's an order of magnitude difference.
Did Hillary escalate the Syrian Civil War?
You can't use a hypothetical action to argue Hillary would have been worse and then completely discount a hypothetical where Trump isn't talked out of war with Iran at the last possible minute.
lol yes she did, she was literally Secretary of State, who do you think was funding the "moderate" rebels?
She was Secretary of State from 2009-2013; our involvement started to escalate in 2014.
I get it, she's not good, but too many leftists are so eager to rip on her that they circle back to ridiculous stuff like "Trump's actually better here."
Escalation began in 2012 when western arms began showing up in rebel hands and Obama extended political and media recognition to them that same year, putting the start of American involvement in 2014 is blatant misinformation
I don't really know what Vietnam has to do with it, but the USA literally started Timber Sycamore in 2012, if you want to insist on a "start" there it is, the fact someone would assert 2014 to be the year the US "started" fucking with Syria is frankly incredible
oh ok, yeah that's makes sense, I should have caught your meaning but my cat is in my arms purring, so I was a little distracted
Obama extended
You bring up another good point: Hillary wasn't even in charge. She should take some responsibility, but laying everything at her feet ignores how the government works.
And you're talking about when involvement began, which is not the same as significant escalation, which is not the same as the full-on invasion Trump risked.
Edit: Clinton resigned as Secretary of State on Feb. 1, 2013; your article is from Dec. 11, 2012. It's absurd to compare whatever she's responsible for in 50 days on her way out the door to damn near starting the largest conflict we've seen since WWII.
No seriously are you from a universe where Trump started a war with Iran, you do remember you're offering a hypothetical about something Trump HASN'T DONE
While I'm pointing out something Clinton has already done and what exactly is your point with Clinton's resignations, the program did in fact start under her tenure, she supported it, those are facts, sorry if they're inconvenient for your weird pro-clinton takes
you’re offering a hypothetical about something Trump HASN’T DONE
You're talking about a hypothetical Clinton presidency and a war she would hypothetically escalate. And for some laughable reason you're insisting on laying the entirety of Syria at her feet because she was at most second in command on the situation for two months early on.
You struck out hard on this one; sit down, champ.
You couldn't even get the date of the US escalation in Syria right lol shut the fuck up, YES THE SECOND MOST POWERFUL person in the state happens to have a lot of agency in regards to the Syrian disaster, imagine arguing otherwise
Clinton lost cause she was trash, get the fuck over it
Yeah. While Trump has authorized indiscriminate bombing in the places we already were, he hasn’t started any new conflicts and has scaled down several.
If Hillary was President we would be at war with Iran and toppled Venezuela already
The thing is Trump can easily be manipulated by both sides of an issue, by mainstream conservative/imperialist politics standards of course.
Yes he was pushed to war with Iran, but he was also very easily manipulated by the media and general public opinion against it. He doesn't really care about geopolitics at all.
I think the prevailing theory that is most likely to be correct is that Trump is definitely better(for leftist organization ambitions) than any competent fascist/neoliberal. Hillary can't be manipulated as easily and she is far more competent with actual experience working for the empire.
That doesn't mean Trump is outright better, as I said we only managed to dodge a bullet with Iran because his ego wasn't convinced it would benefit him personally, but we also only got close to war with Iran because he is so easily influenced by these same neoliberals/warhawks. It goes both ways.
Hillary would definitely be trying to keep things going BAU and she would have been competent about it. We are the frog inside the slowly boiling water. Hillary would be far more effective at stopping organized leftist movements. She would be fueling literally all "leftist" discontent straight into a void because everyone would just argue "well would you rather have Trump as president?".
Biden is a problem, for many obvious reasons, one of them being we will have 4 years of "at least he isn't Trump".
