Electoral Politics and Political Strategies

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Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Kith posted:

My take on the 2024 Election is as follows:

Biden has done a lot of really good poo poo. Economy policies, student loan debt forgiveness, environmental stuff, supporting the auto workers' union, actually following through with his promise to help out the locomotive workers after he broke their strike because the country would fall apart if he didn't, and a lot of other things that I can't think of off of the top of my head. Biden is also, at this very moment, enabling the genocide of Palestinians by sending arms shipments to Israel. In a sane world, this would disqualify him from my vote, because I don't give a gently caress about how many nice things he's given me, my closest friends' families have been slaughtered and he's actively supporting that.

But this is not a sane world.

I pulled the lever for the Green Party in 2020 because I couldn't bring myself to vote for a man that I believe to be a sexual predator. But January 6th was a wake-up call: the Alt-Right weren't shitposters on /pol/ or bellowing manchildren in yellow shirts anymore, they were a bloodthirsty crowd in our nation's capitol and they very nearly succeeded in getting the blood that they craved. A Trump presidency would instill in them a new boldness that we are not likely to survive, to say nothing of the policies he promises that would bring ruin to us and beyond.

In the end, it's a modern spin on the classic Trolley Problem:

On one hand, pulling the Biden lever allows the trolley operator to continue barreling through a bunch of innocent brown people who are inconveniencing Israel by existing, and the trolley operator might even pull the brake if the passengers complain loudly enough about the cries of the dying.

On the other hand, doing anything else runs the risk of bringing back the old trolley operator that promised to equip the trolley with fully automatic weapons that fire wildly in every direction, more efficiently slaughtering innocent brown people and also putting the passengers (myself and everyone I care about included) in immediate and serious danger. Additionally, the old trolley operator does not believe in brakes, and has promised to stomp on the accelerator at every available opportunity until the trolley explodes, killing everyone.

I do not like Biden. I hate him, in fact. However, I will vote for Biden because it's the only chance we have.

I wish I had any other choice.

I agree with this. I did vote for Biden in 2020, but primarily because the thought of Trump getting a second term is repellent to me in the extreme. I wish there were more options, and I wish I had a good way to stop the ongoing genocide, but at the same time, there is no way that my vote can do so, and my mental health is strained enough that I cannot do much else besides vote.

# ¿ Feb 25, 2024 01:12

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 10:08

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

One other thing to note - if people decide to not participate in a vote, then that doesn't cause the downfall of the system. It just makes candidates appeal harder to the demographics that do vote reliably (or increase efforts to suppress them, as the case may be). Checked wikipedia, and voter turnout has hovered between ~50% to ~65% or so in the from 1980 until 2020 for presidential elections (and midterm elections tend to knock a good ~10% off of that number). That's a hell of a lot of folks who are eligible to vote and are not voting, and yet the system persists. Refusing to vote sends no signal to the political establishment and will not result in any change.

And, for me at least, voting does not require a huge amount of effort. I am fortunate that I get a mail-in ballot, and filling it out and dropping it off by hand costs me ~2-3 hours of time every 2 years (I've generally kept up on state propositions and just need to check out relevant local candidates). In my mind, that's time spent that's well worth it, especially on the state and local levels, even if I live in a state where the federal outcomes are a foregone conclusion (and my primary votes are, likewise, also useless for the same reason).

# ¿ May 10, 2024 19:35

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Josef bugman posted:

1) Your voting for someone whose making peoples life worse because you think it's still better than the alternative. Your still doing harm, you just don't care because you've categorised it as "less harm" to get around thinking about the harm still being done. You invoke powerlessness with one hand and the ability to change things with the other and refuse to examine yourself because to do so would be to make you culpable for everything done in your name.

Here's the thing - at the level of a country, any legislation passed will affect people negatively. Even not passing legislation will affect people negatively. Voting will always cause "harm" in the way you define it here, especially for the president of the most powerful country in the world. Abstaining from a vote does nothing, and does not absolve you of anything. It does not effect any political change, nor does it send any message to the political establishment, save that your demographic has slightly lower turnout.

So yes, it's perfectly valid to vote for the "less harm" option. The only other choice is to do nothing and to make it easier for the "more harm" option to succeed. There's no magical third option where everything is sunshine and rainbows. And, as folks have pointed out, voting doesn't take that long to do, it's very important to vote for local/state options as well (where your vote has a much larger impact), and it can be done alongside other actions, such as protests, demonstrations, and strikes.

# ¿ May 11, 2024 05:35

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Josef bugman posted:

And when it is active harm to a minority group? I don't expect every bit of legislation that is passed to have no negative consequences, but trying to do the best for the greatest number whilst bearing in mind the harm can be done is the goal, not to just go "well it'll always cause harm, let 'er rip" seems a bit odd. None participation in unjust structures not changing anything does not seem to be borne out by things like boycotts, strikes, denial of service etc.

I fundamentally just disagree that "always vote for the lesser evil" is a statement that you can just live with. It's a level of compromise that, once again, if you are okay to make that is fine, but to claim is the only possible choice sounds like making an excuse.

Because non-participation in voting achieves nothing. In the States we have two choices for president, and that's it. And outside of some outliers, Congress is made up of folks from our two major parties as well. There is a binary choice, and one side of that binary choice will be more appealing than the other.

And "trying to do the best for the greatest number whilst bearing in mind the harm that can be done" is literally the point of voting for the lesser evil. And with the polarization of US politics in the last couple of decades, we have a party that has gone way off the loving deep end in terms of trying to cause harm to minority groups. Voting against them is very important to me and to many other people, even if it means voting for someone who I'm not thrilled about.

Also:

Dirk the Average, in the post you loving quoted posted:

it can be done alongside other actions, such as protests, demonstrations, and strikes.

We agree that other political actions are absolutely effective. Refusing to vote, however, does not do anything to effect change.

# ¿ May 11, 2024 07:29

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