- cross-posted to:
- stuffandsuch
- cross-posted to:
- stuffandsuch
This article does a great job of explaining people’s frustration with having to vote for Biden again. It’s long, so here are some quotes. They’re totally cherry-picked, I’d recommend reading the whole thing (especially if you think the problem started with Biden, and that Clinton and Obama were ever good choices).
during the 1980s and early 1990s, fears of a relentless Republican juggernaut pressured those left of center to take a defensive stance, focusing on the immediate goal of electing Democrats to stem or slow the rightward tide.
Today, the labor movement has been largely subdued, and social activists have made their peace with neoliberalism and adjusted their horizons accordingly. Within the women’s movement, goals have shifted from practical objectives such as comparable worth and universal child care in the 1980s to celebrating appointments of individual women to public office and challenging the corporate glass ceiling.
Each election now becomes a moment of life-or-death urgency that precludes dissent or even reflection. For liberals, there is only one option in an election year, and that is to elect, at whatever cost, whichever Democrat is running. This modus operandi has tethered what remains of the left to a Democratic Party that has long since renounced its commitment to any sort of redistributive vision and imposes a willed amnesia on political debate.
I mean, you probably should vote Biden this time, because he’s not all that bad, he’s done some good things. And trump is so terrible, it probably will be the end of democracy and the victory of fascism if he wins. Right? But what about in two years time, or four years, or eight years?
Eh. The two parties used to be a lot more similar, never with Clinton or Obama was the dem-or-else mentality particularly strong. Swing voters have gotten rarer, but they used to be quite common. That’s a person that will vote for either party, depending on the individual. This was sensible because they weren’t as far apart from each other.
I mean, particularly with Obama vs Romney. Obama’s signature achievement? Obamacare. Romney’s signature achievement from his time as governor? Romneycare. And they were extremely similar, policy-wise. These folks tended to get called “moderates”, and it didn’t really much matter which party they were a “moderate” of.
Now the choice is between one of those old moderates, same as we’ve had, and a wannabe dictator. So, Trump makes things special.
And the major reason it was based on Romneycare was because it was feasible they would get some support from the conservatives that way and be able to sell it better to the country as a whole for being bipartisan, and for a while they actually played along. But the GOP decided that they couldn’t be seen to help a black man and in an unprecedented manner went full obstructionism in a direct line that leads us to today.