Personality certainly matters. But it might be more useful, in terms of the actual stakes of a contest, to think about the presidential election as a race between competing coalitions of Americans. Different groups, and different communities, who want very different — sometimes mutually incompatible — things for the country.
The coalition behind Joe Biden wants what Democratic coalitions have wanted since at least the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt: government assistance for working people, federal support for the inclusion of more marginal Americans.
As for the coalition behind Trump? Beyond the insatiable desire for lower taxes on the nation’s monied interests, there appears to be an even deeper desire for a politics of domination. Trump speaks less about policy, in any sense, than he does about getting revenge on his critics. He’s only concerned with the mechanisms of government to the extent that they are tools for punishing his enemies.
If you’re an American, and you like what the Democratic coalition is after, then get involved, help with money if you can, and pay attention to downballot races too, not just the top.
Think of it as Fascism vs. Democracy
And for those who spout “gEnOcIdE jOe iS jUsT As fAsCiSt !1!1!!11”:
The fairytales called lemmygrad and twitter. They want their orks and trolls back
Democracy is when there is only one good party and that good party still supports genocide 110%.
Yes, you are correct, our democracy is severely flawed and limited, and we should fix that. I haven’t seen anybody say otherwise. Becoming fascist isn’t going to help fix it.
The system is already fascist, we just get some benefits trickled down after the rich suck out almost the entirety of the fruits of our labor. Notice how republicans will magically get around half the votes no matter how much their demographics appear to be dying off.
Party leadership on both sides play all kinds of games to keep the balance of power, to keep voters scared of the other guys, in order to maintain control of their own parties, but that system isn’t infallible. Bernie almost won the primary, twice, and Trump actually did. If he weren’t so abysmally bad at placating centrists liberals, he’d still be in the Whitehouse. I think that’s a terrifying prospect, but also, both hopeful, and instructive. A true left-populist candidate, who respects the rule of law and democratic consent of the governed, once in office, would be almost impossible to remove.
Overall, your assessment of the current system isn’t bad, but you are very wrong to describe that as fascist. It just isn’t, definitionally, what “fascism” means. Not yet. Certainly, significant aspects of fascism have been put into place, or have been there since the beginning, but our current system is not, overall, at the bar of fascism, and saying it is cheapens the critique of, and warnings against, actual fascism. In the big picture, our current system is actually much more democratic, and further from fascism, than it was not that long ago, even though there have been some specific, and worrying, steps backwards.
Being vigilant against fascism is good. Being defeatist about it is not.
Two parties working together to carry out whatever they feel like (e.g. full support of genocide) against the will of the people (and having a media machine trying to convince people that it’s what they want) isn’t much different from having a single figurehead acting as dictator. In fact it allows for plausible deniability.
Would the Holocaust have been better if it was carried out between two political parties where you get to choose who carries it out? Vigilance against fascism should include being able to identify when a system is fascist in a roundabout way.
It’s not “fascism vs. democracy.” The US has never had democracy - but it certainly helped spread lots of fascism around which is now coming home to roost.
A few people in these comments are essentially saying there are no real differences in the parties. Don’t get me wrong, there are 100% things that the parties agree on, like capitalism, supporting Israel, and continuing to fuck with countries that we really shouldn’t be messing with. But here’s the thing, if you think the parties are the exact same then you most likely aren’t having your rights to exist threatened by this election. Republicans want to ban books, want to have lgbt people put in prison for just existing, want to keep people of color from voting, want to have women getting illegal abortions so more of them die, want to force Christianity on the entire country because they think they’re the religion that’s “right”, want to make trans people illegal and force all of us to detransition or be put in prison, want to block all immigrants and deport the ones that currently exist in the country, want democratic lawmakers to be killed in a mob, want to go on a murderous rampage killing all they deem to be scum of the earth, want to literally bring on the rapture, want to establish death and work camps like what was done in nazi germany, want to have putin take over all of europe because he has dirt on them, want to remove all governmental assistance so that poor people die more often, want to eliminate all public education, want to take away voting power from women, want to make the internet as uniform and unsafe a place as possible, want to have disabled people be unable to afford to live so that they die, want to strip all workers rights and go back to before we had unions, want to criminalize homelessness to the point that they are literally dying because that’s easier, want to increase fossil fuel consumption because they don’t think that global warming is real, want to make life on earth as shitty as possible because they think they’re gonna be raptured up and won’t have to deal with the ramifications of their actions. I could go on but this is already a really long comment. There are important differences to the parties, even if you personally won’t be significantly impacted by those differences.
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Do you think it’s the newest or most experienced member of the secret service who is in charge of stocking the white house with depends?
Number 1 probably.
Do you think the same guy is responsible for stocking the Depends in Congress and the Senate as well, or are there a few of them?
This would clearly be a number 2. Separation of powers and all that.
The coalition behind Joe Biden wants what Democratic coalitions have wanted since at least the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt: government assistance for working people, federal support for the inclusion of more marginal Americans.
Uh…
The Democrats of the 1930s and 1940s were racist, but FDR started work to help people who were marginalized economically. The modern coalition wants both that and support for those whose economic marginalization is a result of racism
They had that in 2020. And they did absolutely nothing. So while they SAY they want those things, it’s funny how when they had the opportunity they didn’t actually DO those things.
Neither Manchin nor Sinema was on board, and without them, there was no majority in the Senate to pass anything
Had it not been the 2 of them it would have been someone else. Democrats, FOR DECADES, have been the party of bark and no bite. Their goal has been to appear to stall our slide into fascism while continuing to serve their corporate sponsors. Which is why you see things like their constant appeal to “undecided voters” by shifting positions to the right. Isn’t it funny how Republicans never seem to worry about that?
How exactly do Democrats pass legislation when we elect people to block said legislation? They literally do not have the legislative power to pass the stuff you’re claiming they secretly oppose. The solution here is to get rid of the assholes. The majority of Democrats don’t fall in that category.
That’s exactly my point. If it wasn’t Manchin and Sinema it would have been someone else. You see stuff like this all the time in DC, where a party “supports” a bill but a couple defectors oppose it and it fails. It might have been those 2 this past time, but it will be another couple next time and we’ll say things like “oh, they’re in a purple state we have to just deal with it if we want to stay in power.” But what’s the point of “maintaining power” if dems don’t do anything with it? We KNEW an overturn of Roe was coming in 2020. What did Dems do? Nothing.
I’ve seen this exact play SO MANY TIMES that I know it when I see it. Hell, Biden WAS the Manchin in the Senate for a while, and now he’s supposedly a flaming liberal.
My point is, it’s often that there’s a group of people who will vote for a bill because of “optics”. Most people in the room know if a bill will succeed or fail before it comes up for a vote because it’s been decided behind closed doors before the vote is called.
Yes there are people in the party that don’t support progressive change. All I’m saying is get rid of those assholes. It seems like you’re saying the entire party falls in that bucket or that everyone is taking turns killing progressive legislation. I don’t see any evidence of that. They have not had the votes to do the things we want. Manchin/Sinema isn’t a surprise hurdle, we’ve known they weren’t going to vote to remove the filibuster. Moderates blocking stuff isn’t new, it’s been a hurdle with every single bit of progress we’ve ever achieved.
The solution is to get more seats filled with progressives and make it so we don’t need to rely on their votes (or any moderate Democrat). Your rhetoric seems to imply that project is pointless and drives people away from putting in the necessary groundwork to enact real change. That’s all I’m saying. If you have a better solution I’m all ears.
It’s neat how the people who block everything that centrists want blocked aren’t expected to vote with the coalition.
The Democrats of the 1930s and 1940s were racist, but FDR started work to help people who were marginalized economically. The modern coalition wants both that and support for those whose economic marginalization is a result of racism
The coalition doesn’t have politicians who agree with them regarding those who are economically marginalized.
It does, but not enough to pass legislation.
Yeah. Sure is funny how just enough Democrats always vote with the “other” coalition when it’s anything that might benefit the poor.
We don’t always get that - that’s how we got a child tax credit for a few years. It’s that enough Americans have been stampeded into “hate the other person, they have darker skin, a different religion, etc” that we don’t elect people who do want to benefit the general public instead of billionaires. Change how we vote, and policy can and will change to match.
We don’t always get that - that’s how we got a child tax credit for a few years.
Joe Manchin made sure it died. The only democrat whose vote actually matters doubled child poverty. Thank you for illustrating my point.
He did kill it — something like 48/50 Senate Democrats wanted to keep it, and every Republican wanted to get rid of it. That’s a reason to elect more and better Democrats, not to reject them entirely.
Lmao, they’re getting desperate.
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Hm?
Personality certainly matters
Not really, no. You know what DOES matter, though, more than anything else? Policy and actions!
NYT never want to talk about those things, though.
When the preferred candidate of the DNC in any election is charismatic and personally popular, they want to talk about personality.
When the candidate isn’t popular, they want to talk up tribalism, they want to convince people to uncritically back the chosen leader for the good of the tribe.
They want people to forget that Biden is still enabling genocide. They want people to believe them when they say that Biden is seconds away from brokering a ceasefire. They don’t want people to believe the actual fact that they never stopped sending weapons and money to the fascist Netanyahu apartheid regime even as it became increasingly clear that they’re engaging in almost all named crimes against humanity.
They want minority groups such as Muslim Americans, black Americans, involuntarily pregnant, the LGBTQ+ community and people who lost their right to vote that Biden and his administration promised them justice but didn’t deliver.
Most of all, though, they want people to lower the bar. They don’t just want people to hold their noses and vote for Biden because a Trump administration would be much worse (which everyone definitely should, because it definitely would be).
They want to convince people that the lesser evil is in fact not an evil. They want people to believe that being in opposition to someone much worse makes it ok to be awful. That the very fact that there’s only an atrocious alternative makes Biden a good choice that should not just be tolerated, but celebrated and NEVER criticized, lest we “give Trump ammunition”.
Fuck. That. Bullshit!
lol. The only thing the coalition behind Genocide Joe wants is not-Trump. Same as the last time he ran
And yet, somehow still compelling. :(
I’ve never thought of it as a contest between Biden and Trump - it has always been little more than a good cop, bad cop routine masquerading as “democracy”. And, despite all the liberal histrionics, there is little sign that this charade will be coming to a stop any time soon.
There are very real differences between the parties, on a pretty wide variety of issues. Who is elected has consequences in terms of policy that we have to live with.
That’s a very big deal.
There are very real differences between the parties
Of course - the good cop bad cop routine doesn’t work if there is no difference between them.
a pretty wide variety of issues.
Let’s see about that, shall we?
Both are pathologically dedicated to capitalism.
Both are pathologically dedicated to imperialism.
In everything that matters (ie, are not contrived “hot button” issues) the reps and the dems march in perfect lockstep with each other.
You were saying?
The Democrats don’t work in perfect lockstep; they’re a coalition, and as such, you often see pieces of the coalition who disagree with each other.
The Republican party tends to operate as a patronage machine, where they all go along with what the patrons dictate.
The Democrats don’t work in perfect lockstep
Then show me the aspects of the Dems that are anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist. Shouldn’t be too difficult if you are correct, right?
Examples include Sen. Sanders. It’s not hard.
Sanders isn’t a Democrat, he’s independent.
He was. He changed registration to run for President a few years back, and caucuses with the Democrats.
Examples include the guy that democrats fought hard to make sure he wouldn’t win the primaries, twice. Note that he polled better against trump than clinton did, so we could’ve avoided all this trump trash from the beginning, but the democrats didn’t actually care about that, they just wanted to keep their status quo power structure going.
As Democrats are so happy to point out whenever anyone says the party screwed him over in the primaries, Sanders is not a Democrat.
It’s not hard.
If it’s not hard, why have you failed?
Sanders is not an anti-capitalist nor an anti-imperialist. He’s just an old-style “New Deal” liberal who believes that capitalism needs to be “nicer” to the people it crushes underfoot in order to be maintained.
Do you have anything else, perhaps?
It’s between their administrations.
