To be fair, everyone has to keep saying “This is the most important election of X” because everyone fucking has the attention spans and memories of earthworms or bivalves.
Half of Lemmy right here would tune and use any excuse to not be involved, and this is a politically active community, imagine what it’s like out there for the vast majority of voters who work 6 days a week and get all their media and news from fucking facebook for two hours on a Sunday night while kids and dogs are fighting around them.
To be fair, the current election is always the most important one of the time. Does no good to ruminate about the past, and nobody knows what the future holds.
Every election is the most important in your lifetime as long as fascists are on the ballot.
If your system has allowed itself to devolve into “vote for my slightly less oppressive status quo or else you get abject oppression” then you kinda have to begin admitting the entire system is folly and needs to be dismantled.
You’re not wrong. Easier said than done, though. Looks like we’ll be doing it the hard way, societal collapse.
Good, this society deserves to collapse. It is fundamentally oppressive and exploitative.
Also don’t disagree. It’s just tragic how much suffering has to happen.
Slightly?
newsom bulldozes homeless camps and arrests them while having a donor base of tech bro cryptofascists and real estate developers, Biden ships blockbuster bombs to Gaza, Obama drones multitudes and continues Bush’s “nation building” kleptocracies, Bill Clinton sets the future economic agenda for all of the above when he guts welfare spending while sacrificing local industry jobs for financialization via NAFTA
This is fine.
Yes. Capitalist Imperialism is only marginally better than Fascism. It enables the rise of the other, afterall.
If it’s that important maybe the democrats should start appealing their target group instead of trying to get Republicans to vote for them (which didn’t really work anyways)
It’s possible that there is a way to win them over, but it’s not by getting up on stage with Liz Cheney. The idea of “the elites are working against us” does resonate with certain Republican voters, even if their anger is being misdirected in support of Donald Trump. It’s not something the Hillary Clinton wing of the party could possibly harness. People like Bernie or AOC could, though.
Here’s Bernie demonstrating it: https://youtu.be/RP8Oxe6OxJc
I’ve seen that video before. It’s a good one that, to me from far away, shows how the more progressive side of the democratic party should very much resonate with poorer, currently republican voters if they just leaned into that messaging more.
The message at it’s core is so simple: The country is rich, you’re poor, fuck that shit.
Unfortunately, speaking with conservatives is an exercise in polite futility.
I could get an American conservative to agree with Marx, and lay out an entire world map with functioning historical socialist states to their approval, and inside of a day they would be back to ‘Socialism doesn’t work and it’s bad’
US conservatives are not interested in policies or principles. It is pure tribalism to them
Agreed. I vote for them out of practicality, not because I actually like them.
Remember when the Democrats propped up Trump thinking Clinton would curbstomp him because who the hell would vote for him? Good times. (Europe is doing the same, pushing the far right to pretend the vanilla right is the only viable opposition and actually pretty center, and then act surprised when everything implodes)
I do! Real It Can’t Happen Here moment. Kinda worse in Europe because It’s Already Happened There.
It already happened there 90 years ago. AND they get to see our results within this decade. They think afd is different from Trump somehow? Not significantly.
It’s a trick to keep preserving an awful status quo in perpetuity for your whole life.
Surely the fascists will pack up and go home if the Democrats can just win this one time…
I would have greatly preferred the awful status quo to what we have now.
The “status quo” is partly that way because Democrats don’t provide instant gratification. The changes tend to be significant, but slow. In the next ten years, if the plans don’t get demolished, I’m going to be able to take passenger rail to Chicago.
The problem is progress is slow, but destruction is fast. Every few years people get frustrated with how slowly the Dems are building the house of cards and they bring Republicans in to knock it down.
And then people look back over the past decade and wonder why the house of cards is in the same state.
Sometimes you have to push through a bramble patch to get out of the dark woods and into the garden.
And if that happens, it will have been worth it. But it remains to be seen.
Glad they lost in 2024
These past few elections have been fucking important. As someone who lived through the whole “boring” era of Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama, these last 10 years have been aberrant in every way politically and it’s dumb to pretend they haven’t been.
bush literally stole an election with the supreme court. boring. ho hum
I mean, you didn’t have multiple militia groups and a bunch of rioters break into the Supreme Court trying to stop them from making that ruling, and then all get arrested and sent to jail, and then all get pardoned by the very guy they wanted to illegally stay in office, so yeah, bush v gore was relatively boring.
no you just had shit like people with (justified) geopolitical grievances against the US flying planes into towers. very dull.
Well that’s quite a pivot from bush v gore and also isn’t about elections, but sure, I’ll concede that major geopolitical events also happened prior to 2015 if that’s what the frame of the discussion is now.
Bush II was not “boring”. His neocon illiberal war on terror, torture, rendition, patriot act and illegal war started the descent into what we are experiencing now.
I fully agree, it’s too bad that the point was lost on so many people who just heard “YOU HAVE TO VOTE” and didn’t make any effort to absorb reality and multiple angles of actual news stories and not just Facebook memes and shorts played on Twitter.
The last several elections have had the highest turnouts in US history, including the largest youth turnout, but on exit polling the people were completely tuned-out and said they didn’t actually think there was meaningful differences between candidates and just based their decisions on prices of groceries and who was in charge when the prices got high… by their own reckoning. A lot of “Well maybe Trump will shake things up” and seemed to have ZERO memory of his first term or that he was even president before.
It’s also dumb to pretend the “boring” era wasn’t politically aberrant as well. They were setting the stage for what we are seeing now, and it’s telling that people are only getting upset now that fascism is getting focused inwards and domestically instead of outwardly towards other countries.
It’s naive to believe that this is anything aberrant to begin with.
They have been setting up this stage since the fucking New Deal made concessions to the working class to stymie a growing threat of working class revolt. Not even a few years later they enacted Taft-Hartley and began dismantling union power.
There was a slight resurgence of working class action during the Civil Rights movement but unfortunately that was all co-opted by the establishment in order to keep the working class divided.
The Gilded Age rober barons were pissed they lost their fiefdoms and then began to systematically claw it back from the people ever since.
yeah this is a fair point, there has not been a time in US history when our politics was not fucked up in same way or other, and we weren’t doing a bunch of terrible shit both across the world and domestically. I just hate when people look at Trump and are like “yep, this is what we’ve always been, every President is exactly like this.” Because they are simultaneously so right and so very very wrong about that.
What type of smooth-brained clown wouldn’t think that the current election isn’t the most important one?
This meme isn’t as clever and edgy as whoever made it thinks it is and the comments I’m reading show that a lot of people here are totally fine to repeat the mistakes of the past and keep the status quo going.
Unironically typing “repeat the mistakes of the past” with ignoring the history of how we got here displays an astoundingly myopic view of recent events. Both parties serve the same billionaires, which is why the Republicans do what they want and Dems are content with “decorum”. In fact, our two-parties have displayed a remarkable overlap on the Venn Diagram:
• Republicans and Democrats both vote to increase ICE funding every year. • Republicans and Democrats in Congress both practice insider trading. • Republicans and Democrats presidents both bail out corporations that are "too big to fail" (i.e., Bush Jr., Obama). • Republicans and Democrats both vote to give corporations subsides (i.e., corporate welfare). • Republicans and Democrats both receive campaign finances from billionaires (i.e., legal bribery). • Republican and Democrat presidents both order drone strike, resulting in mass civilian casualties. • Republican and Democrat presidents have both bombed countries without Congressional approval (e.g., Trump, Biden). • Republicans and Democrats both kept Guantanamo Bay open for decades. (A precursor for Trump's treatment of immigrants.) • Republicans and Democrats both crack down on whistle blowers. • Republicans and Democrats both maintain a surveillance state on its citizens. • Republican and Democrat administrations both assassinated democratically elected leaders overseas. • Republicans and Democrats both fund Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people.Trump was not created ex nihilo. Presidential power has been growing for decades. Congress has been blatantly corrupt for decades. We have broken (and supported breaking) international laws for decades. Trump is a symptom of a larger problem: our government functions to serve profit rather than people. The problem will continue long after he is gone, unless the American people demand more.
Soooo…. The next election isn’t that important?
Unironically, no. The last election was the most important in American history, and this next one will do little to undo the damage. Even if Democrats win every seat in the midterms, all it could do is make Trump tear off that last veil of normalcy and make good on his promise to kill “traitors.” That likely won’t happen because too many safe Democrats will fold to maintain normalcy(corporate interests).
Only local races can affect policy in the next election, and all races need to build a left wing political movement that opposes corporate interests to make any progress. The only enemy that’s reachable through elections are the corrupt establishment, not the fascists. They don’t need to win elections, only have enough foot soldiers to crack faces.
The presidential election won’t even matter as long as Trump’s still breathing because his death is the only way he leaves office. I’ve been saying this all year: liberal democracy is over. We will see years of political turmoil as opportunists pretend we can rebuild on the old system, but the foundation is now too rotten to remain stable. It will never be the same.
“Power is now the final form of representation: it only represents itself.” Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power.
It’s important in so far as your preference, the party of the carrot or the party of the stick.
Being against the rabid Zionism of the Dem mainstream is based. The second point, not so much.
warn people that losing an election to fascists will lead to fascism
people ignore the warning
election is lost to fascists
fascist administration immediately starts doing fascist things
blame the LIBS for making a big deal out of it
???
I think their point is that they pull the same tactic every year and it’s clear it’s shit
You mean tankies and the FSB right
No, we mean the idiot controlled opposition that is the DNC.
The ones that wouldn’t be rounding up immigrants, kissing putin, and tanking the economy? That idiot controlled opposition?
You do know Obama created the cages kids were being put in and Biden did nothing to stop it from happening even when he became president right?
Nope. Prove it.
The only true statement in your sentence is about Putin.
Ah yes the famous American political powerhouses, the Communists and the *checks notes* Russian CIA.
What?
Ah yes the famous American political powerhouses, the Communists and the checks notes Russian CIA.
tbf, while I think the previous comment was silly, that Trump is in office again suggests the latter may not be quite as much of a nonentity in US politics as I would’ve said in, say, 2015.
[drinking]
Makes perfect sense when you realize their goal is to accelerate the complete collapse of the system so that their perfect ideology can rise from the ashes.
The snark from the sidelines is just gravy on top.
I don’t think everyone who talks like that is an accelerationist. Many are just deeply disillusioned, and fuck, I can hardly blame them for being disillusioned.
I just think that particular volley is misaimed. The Dems have plenty of problems - emphasizing the importance of elections - especially considering the conse-fucking-quences of losing the last one we’re seeing right now - is not one of them.
Probably true, I think the “vote blue no matter who” line needs to really die. The messaging needs to be that the vote is against fascism, not in support of the status quo.
I have always understood it to mean voting against fascism using a candidate that has a chance of winning instead of throwing away the vote to a third party due to first past the post.
Or expanded “The only way to stop fascism is to vote blue no matter who in the general election.” Which isn’t a great slogan since some Dems still enable fascists.
Which is what it’s supposed to mean, but MLs and Anarchist’s only seem to hear the “Vote blue” part.
Pretty much anything turned into a slogan loses a significant amount of meaning.
True, but they’re not going to vote or offer support anyway. So. fuckem. In their worst case scenario Democrats win and advance the goals of H4A, Green New Deal, and (now) rebuilding everything trump destroyed in six months.
Love you saying “fuck em”, but I can guarantee they’ll be who you blame when the Dems lose…again
Even more so when Dem turn out is so fucking low compared to the Reps. But at this point, what can even overcome all the voter apathy? If voting against fascism doesn’t do it, I have no idea what will.
Putting forward a candidate that stands against genocide and for leftist ideals like M4A, living wages, caps on rent, and government housing.
Stop putting up neolib and you’ll see better turnout.
Stop putting up neolib and you’ll see better turnout.
Fuck’s sake, do you not remember how Bernie performed in 2020?
Considering he called it quits early and told everyone to support that shithead Biden I’m not surprised. Anyone that supports either of the major parties can get fucked.
Considering he called it quits early
Let me rephrase, then - do you not remember how Bernie performed in 2020 before he dropped out of the primary?
I was a Bernie supporter. I am a Bernie supporter. I campaigned hard for him, both in 2016 and 2020. And seeing my fellow Americans - and worse, Dems, who are the less right-wing of this fucking population - express overwhelming apathy in 2020 was heartbreaking.
Anyone that supports either of the major parties can get fucked.
Okay, now that you’ve excluded a majority of the US population from your calculations, what’s our next fucking step
Tankies not organizing and voting to then wonder why they have no influence is like not training for a marathon and wondering why you aren’t making it very far.
Not just tankies, unfortunately.
How about read what I wrote
The nice thing is there are starting to be better comedians on the set.
Don’t worry - they get the same heckling from the same crowd
Get out there and run for an office, back somebody you like who is running for office, or stop whining.
Spoken like someone who never tried to run for office.
Unless you are rich, you need a sponsor to pay for your ads so people know who you are.
If you aren’t a capitalist bootlicker then the rich people in society will not help you get into office to tax them or fuck with their power.
I supported Bernie but the DNC are not legally required to be impartial. I voted for Obama, twice, but he turned out to be an establishment Democrat (despite the “Change” slogan).
Setting my own voting aside, imagine someone complaining about voting in Russia and you respond with: 1) Either run for office yourself or 2) Vote for who you like. That response completely misses the point. The electoral system is inherently flawed and aggressively suppresses attempts at reform that would actually represent the people.
