deep sigh

1. There are two choices in the United States 2024 election. No third party stands a ghost of a chance of winning. No, not even if the 30,000 people you can reach on Lemmy all vote for Timothy Greenparty.
2. A Trump victory in 2024 would not only be just as bad if not worse for the citizens of Gaza than Harris would (Harris has at least said she wants Israel to stop. Trump wants them to finish the job), but would also pose an existential threat to a large number of vulnerable Americans (trans people, immigrants, women seeking abortions).
3. Given the margins of victory in 2016 and 2020, Kamala might not win if leftists don’t vote for her.
4. Snoozing fascism for four years is better than inviting it through the door now, and buys us time to build our defenses for when it comes back.
5. Regardless of whether you do anything else to fight fascism or not, if you don’t vote, or you vote third party, you raise the chances that a Hitler admirer will enter the white house.

I’d like to focus my counterargument. Which of these statements do you disagree with?

Yeah, this year the German government passed the law for decriminalization of weed, and it was almost blocked by our Federal Council if it weren’t for thousands of community members harassing them on social media and via Fax (yes, Telefax is still used by our government 🤦)

I set up a harassment campaign

AKA lobbying.

The argument for Trump isn’t that he’ll make the trains run on time. He’s more like the guy who’ll shut down the trains and sell them for scrap.

Trump is the guy you vote for because he hates the same people you hate.

We’re here because people keep supporting a broken system. We keep getting elections with gerrymandering and candidates that don’t represent people because people are unwilling to take action outside of them or even exercise that power in its most basic form. Even if you maintain that things are genuinely good when Democrats win (we’ll circle back on that one), it’s such a brittle system. Any progress that has been made can be wiped out every few years due to elections which have been gerrymandered to create the 50/50 coin-flip when the actual population doesn’t support the right at nearly that rate. Plus, because of the messed up process of supreme court appointments, we sometimes lose rights even when Democrats are in office because of a fundamentally undemocratic institution. You could argue that’s all the more reason to have voted against Republicans in the past and why we should vote against them now, but once again: In a system that is supposedly based on constitutional protections, why are our rights contingent on the random time an old judge kicks the bucket? Or the supposedly illegal actions of a president?

Because there’s nothing to actually stop any of it. Rights are hard to establish and enforce and really easy to be taken away or ignored. Republicans will “break the rules” and then Democrats will decide to be bound by not only the rules their “opponents” won’t follow, but by the new rules that come out of their actions. If you truly believe your opponents are fascists, and you’re genuinely opposed to that, then nothing should be off the table for resisting them. At the tamest end of things the least they could have tried to do would be to break the power of the court or anti-majoritarian rules in the legislature. But again, if rules don’t matter to fascists, you should be willing to go way further than that to stop them. Instead, the “#resistance” under Trump largely consisted of tweets, protest signs, and a call to vote differently in 2-4 years while simultaneously questioning if we’d even have an election to vote in. If Trump wins are liberals going to get out there and do something about it? Are they going to storm the capital to boot out the fascists? Fight cops and feds from taking away minorities? No. That’s way too “uncivil” for them. We’re just gonna have to vote harder next time!

And if only all we had to talk about were the trains being on time!

Circling back to how things are under Democrats: Sure, maybe they’re a bit nicer to minorities publicly, but we still get:

• An ever expanding military, police, and surveillance state. Bush might have started the Iraq/Afghanistan wars and enacted the Patriot act, but Obama continued the wars, including the torture and indefinite detention he said he’d end. We also learned about the NSA’s mass surveillance program under Obama and when confronted with the public outcry about an assault on our fundamental rights or the war crimes being committed by the military, he chose to go after whistleblowers instead of doing anything about it. Since then has ANY president or major presidential candidate even talked about the NSA or given any indication that they’d cut back on surveillance or imperialism? In my lifetime over 3 Democratic and 2 Republican administrations, the military budget has tripped. And of course support for Israel’s genocide has continued with little more than hand wringing and empty promises.

• Anti-immigration policies continued under Obama and Biden. Biden in particular continued the detention centers and even allowed for the wall to keep being built.

• Climate legislation that isn’t good enough to meet the existential threat posed by the problem. Far from being “something is better than nothing,” these compromise positions obstruct efforts to implement the necessary changes. Plus whatever “advancements” are put in place tend to be fairly temporary in nature. A regulation can be easily overturned by a future administration or court. It’s a lot harder to go around destroying public transportation and clean energy infrastructure after it’s already been built. We are facing a global crisis and the system is going to get us all killed eventually, and poorer countries even sooner.

There are a lot of people who are hurt by US capitalism and imperialism even under Democratic administrations. It’s a decision to not value those people. And it’s not even like they’re always different people. The surveillance state hurts everyone, but in particular it makes it easier for the government to target undesirable groups like immigrants, LGBT people, or say, women who want to get an abortion. There are certainly LGBT people, disable people, women, PoCs, etc amongst those the US has bombed, sanctioned, or caused to live in chaos after a coup. Lack of adequate healthcare means that accessing abortions or gender affirming care harder even if they are completely legal.

But don’t worry, just vote for the Democrat then push them to the left! By… uh… holding up signs? Making tweets? You definitely need to unconditionally vote for them again next time, so you can’t pressure them that way.

It’s ok, next election we’ll talk about ~the trains~ the military, surveillance state, healthcare, the environment, etc.

The lack of an /s in your comment worries me, especially since the entire conversation is about the fact that there are those among us who say what you just said with no hint of sarcasm.

…and you’ll be doing so with someone who is slightly more likely to be concerned with their image, and hence slightly more likely to listen.

Why would they be concerned with their image if people are going to vote for them anyway? We have a candidate who supports literal genocide and that’s not bad enough for people to do something. What exactly, precisely, practically, is the mechanism for holding a politician accountable when you will always vote for them and won’t take any actions outside the electoral system?

The trains were just keeping with the metaphor of the OP. (Although we do need much better trains too.)

Acting like the only thing wrong is train schedules is really reductive. People who insist on voting as THE prime form of political participation will often say that not voting for a lesser evil is a privileged position because you’re not going to be impacted by the stuff the other party will do. But I’d argue there is an inherent privilege to being someone who won’t be materially impacted by US imperialism.

We’ve all been conditioned to view the violence the government inflicts on the rest of the world as normal. Maybe you don’t agree with it, but only as much as you don’t agree with, say, tax policy. It’s an abstract thing. We’re removed from the constant horror it represents. We’d like it if it wasn’t happening, but we don’t have to think about it most of the time and will clearly not do anything about it any time soon if everyone left of Hitler’s position is “vote for the Hitler that’s only going to do the bad stuff to other people.”

In general I take issue with people framing this as protecting democracy from fascism. The US is not a democracy.

• For starters, a constitutional democracy shouldn’t be able to end through a simple vote that doesn’t even include most of the country. If voting in fascists is an acceptable outcome of the system, it’s not a good system.

• From the ground up, the US was built to be as anti-democratic as possible while still technically having voting. Obviously it started with only land owning white men being allowed to vote. It’s expanded slowly over the years, but it STILL explicitly disenfranchises people such as prisoners. The electoral college, gerrymandered congressional districts, and the longer, staggered term limits in the senate, and the lifetime term limit for supreme court justices are all mechanisms which were explicitly designed to filter out the will of the masses from influencing government. To bring in a personal example: I live in NY. My vote doesn’t matter. I don’t say that as an excuse for not voting because I know I won’t have an effect of the election. I say that because I don’t even get a vote! Even if there was a candidate I cared about, just because of where I was born I can have zero influence on their election into government.

• Finally, I’d argue that an imperialist country is definitionally not a democracy. The core principle of democracy is that the government rules over only those who have consented to it. An imperialist state such as the US takes actions all around the world in other sovereign countries that have major influences on people who never consented to be subjects of US power. An Iraqi who’s house got bombed didn’t get a chance to vote against Bush. A person in Latin America didn’t get a vote on the US invalidating the vote in their country with a coup. Cubans, Vietnamese, etc. didn’t get to vote on the US making sure they couldn’t trade with the rest of the world.

As a related point to the last point: This is why I think it’s philosophically wrong to vote for candidates who don’t represent you in the US elections. In a democracy you are still considered to have “consented” to being governed even by an opposition party you didn’t vote for because you consented to the process. By voting you are saying that you agree that this is the way we will choose our government and that you will abide by the results even if you don’t get the outcome you want. That’s fine if the process was truly democratic and you can live with any of the outcomes even if you’d prefer something different. But if all outcomes are systematically unacceptable to you and the process itself is flawed, then still casting your vote within that framework is consent to the government and the process that produced it. When you go vote, there’s no box for “I’m only voting for this person because they’re technically better than the other one. I’m not actually ok with them.” You simply vote for Harris and the implicit choice of “I will not try to enact change in any other way.”

If you think Trump represents the rise of fascism and the end of democracy, then you shouldn’t be willing to abide by the results of the election anyway. But could you imagine any of the people telling you to vote against fascism taking up arms to storm the capital to protect that democracy and it’s people? Could you even imagine those people symbolically supporting leftists if they did this? I can’t. Because they didn’t do shit last time. Because they spent years talking about the right wing coup attempt in terms of it being treason rather than it being a problem because they’re fascists. Because civility and rules are more important than anything else to these people. If Trump won, the day after the election the same people who said it’d be the end of democracy will be saying “We’ll get em’ in 2-4 years.”

It only mentions him by name over 300 times.

Didnt trump claim he has nothing to do with project 2025?

Deporting illegal immigrants is literally hitler hey? Look i dont like what he stands for but perhaps it a little extreme to compare deporting illegal immigrants to murdering 6million people.

Hitler also said a lot about how every (german) man deserves a family, land, a house, and a job which is the same thing that practically every politician ever has promised.

Well this isnt a good faith engagement of ideas this is just i have no argument and i must scream.

There were forced historectomies women were made to undergo in ICE custody.

This is malinfornation and false1

His supporters claim crime is linked to race, rather than poverty/alienation/neglect.

What some of ur supporters may claim means nothing here is a hypothetical example. “Im a kamala harris supporter and i think crime is purly because of race and we should execute all non white people” anyone can say that doesnt mean thats kamala harris supports it. Also race is statistically correlated with crime so it is linked just not causationaly so technically they are correct.

Both attacked trans people and education around them. Both supported street thugs like The Proud Boys and other rightwing groups (the ones that Trump told to “stand by” with violence, or the ones he said “were fine people”). Both were supported by a coalition of rightwing racists, like those who turned up to the Unite The Right Rally and the Tiki torch rally. Both pushed conspiracy theories, and specifically ideas around “Cultural Marxism/Bolshevism”.

Anyone can make a venn diagram of Hitlers beliefs and anyone else and end up with a list just as long as this.

Both spread misinformation and targetted the safety of their opponents “the traitorous left”.

When has trump targeted the safety of the traitorous left opponents. Who? U spread misinformation with ur claim about mass historectomies so i guess ur hitler.

Both claimed to have victories they didn’t actually win.

“We beat medicare” - president biden

Did we really?

Both used executive orders to skirt democratic processes. Both won elections then rigged elections.

How does utilising an executive order put in place for the executive within a democratic system constitute skirting a democratic purpose? Do the democrads do primaries cos how did kamala end up the nominated? How has trump rigged this election?

Both had a sense of how to do propaganda. Both were sexual deviants with history of attraction to young girls. Both found support among wealthy business owners who did so for financial motives. Both praised and made alliances with other fascists and Authoritarians.

This described almost every single politician in the history of politicians.

Trump’s ex-wife even said he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches on his bedside table, she said that before he ever ran for office.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” - Sun Tzu, The Art of War

How does have a rally in a specific area make u a nazi? Thats gotta be the stupidest argument ive ever heard. By that logic the current german president is a nazi cos the building their office in in.

There’s also lots of historical comparisons that can be made.