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this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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politics
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Trump is an effect of this system, not an anomaly. Thinking that we can vote our way into a healthier system when this one works perfectly and increasingly well for billionaires and corporations who control how and what congress votes on is naive. If the system of law is so flawed that a person who tried to foment an insurrection ACTUALLY has a shot at being president again, it's clear to me that we're just living in some clown world where nothing we actually need to happen will actually happen without direct action.
Positive change is relative dependent on your status in society. Trans people are still afraid of their lives under Biden. Marginalized communities are still seeing their towns become polluted under Biden. Women's rights are still being taken away under Biden. People are still electively dying because they can't afford medical care without ruining their family. We have an issue in this country where a large number people are hurting so bad that they'd rather make someone else hurt than fix anything because they feel defeated. I assume a lot of them see trump as a sort of "well, my life isn't going to get too much better regardless, but it's fun making those people in that gated community squirm for a bit". Do you think this issue goes away if trump can't run for president? Do you think this problem goes away if Biden wins? We need more of a sense of community and we can't get that if everyone is competing for table scraps and playing team sports with politics.
If half of the voters in this country are seen as enemies to the survival of democracy, what's the end goal in solving it? Mass de-programming? If the shoe was on the other foot and they wanted to do a mass-deprogramming of you (or worse considering gun ownership) and everyone who thought like you, what sort of impact would that have on your opinion of them? They're our neighbors who are hurting and unfortunately they're getting all their outside perspective from propagandists on Fox News and OANN instead of actual people. And it's not like liberals are without their propaganda either. No one is faultless. Instead of acting with kindness and understanding when the working class are having difficulties, there's so much of "well, those stupid rednecks should've tried not being so stupid by getting into a coal career if they didn't want their jobs and livelihoods to be ruined. Sucks for them. The world will breathe better without them in it". And we wonder why they're angry enough to vote for trump. Presenting Biden as the knight in shining armor so much that all the responsibility is removed from ourselves and any blowback from our political negligence can be waved away in a sort of plausible deniability is not the right way to incrementally fix things. It's just a way to distance ourselves from the problems we have created.
Again, you've listed a lot of problems without proposing any solutions apart from vaguely hinting at "direct action". And if you think voting is unlikely to have an effect, then whatever direct action you have in mind is absolutely doomed.
We've already seen various "direct" efforts from both sides over the years from the Million Man March to the Ammon Bundy standoff to Occupy Wall Street, and none made the slightest difference. So I'll stick with voting, which at least has a track record of producing incremental improvement.
You seemed to have not read my previous message where I explicitly said revolution. Protests, unless they stop the beating financial heart of a city by blocking highways (which quite a few states have passed bills considering this domestic terrorism), are largely ineffective.
Voting is also pretty ineffective at actually being democratic. Everyone seems to be voting against the worse option than an actual thing they want. Hell, Biden's approval rating is worse than Trump's. He's either not doing a good enough job or isn't good enough about lying about how good of a job he's doing. Biden acted fast when it came to the rail worker's union cutting off profits and he also moved fast when it came to Yemeni Houthis who interrupted a profitable trade route. He also acted fast when Silicon Valley banks were failing. On everything else, it's "ho hum, the republicans won't let me" or "I worked with the republicans on a climate bill which was named as if it took care of inflation, with the help of a ton of provisions that the republicans wanted on there". If making surface level gains to the benefit of republicans is democrat's goal, it seems like what's "incrementing" is actually just democrats becoming more and more like yesterday's republican but under a more pinkwashed flavor.
The US desperately needs a mass labor strike, but I fear that people are too amused with the increasingly-out-of-reach bread and circuses to act before it's too late. Will we enter an era of fascism? Probably. And that'll probably be the case even if Biden is re-elected. Voting isn't enough if you actually care about how things are going. But it seems you've chosen your side in all of this, so I doubt I'll ever be able to convince you that things desperately need to change- more than Biden would ever be able to accomplish.
I did read that, but I don't think it's going to work. Waiting for a revolution to solve your problems is like waiting for your fairy godmother to solve your problems.
Voting hasn't solved all our problems, not even close. But in the past 20 years voting has accelerated our path to carbon neutrality, stopped health insurance companies from dropping patients when they get sick, and legalized gay marriage (the last via SCOTUS appointments).
Maybe Republicans got things they wanted in exchange, but so what? If Republicans were willing to pass M4A in exchange for a big corporate tax cut, I would not hesitate to take that deal. My goals do not include making political opponents cry, I leave that childish pettiness for the GOP.
And those three things may not seem like much, but I'll take them any day over the empty promises of a glorious revolution.
If you’re sitting around waiting for a Revolution, you’re still doing nothing but voting. You obviously think we have more time than we do. I don’t have much more time to spend on people who would happily vote for our extinction, so long as it’s a more comfortable ride.
People have been planning a revolution since boomers were children. It didn't happen then when people actually took to the streets, and it certainly won't happen now that people prefer to grumble on social media. You might as well propose solving our problems by moving to Musk's colony on Mars.
In truth we are stuck on planet Earth and stuck with our current political system. So I prefer more realistic options.