Let’s keep running candidates who keep trying so hard to be Republicans and then wondering why 100,000,000 eligible voters stay home because both parties are too similar, and then blame them for thinking that even though the politicians themselves are saying “we have to move toward the right!!”
Dear god let us find someone other than Newsom. The point of my post is that NO CANDIDATE WILL BE PERFECT, so we needn’t apply a rigid purity test. But that seems to be the justification for why 3rd party voters didn’t cast a ballot for Harris. “She’s a cop.” “Or She didn’t say enough about Gaza”
But there was no other viable candidate out there who was pure enough; & if you say Jill Stein I’ll say Jill who!?! Because where the fuck is she right now? So yeah. Put up a better candidate. We’re all waiting. But if that *doesn’t* happen & you throw away a chance at stopping a fascist regime…
…because the non-fascist candidate said one thing that didn’t align with your hyper pure stances, then your 3rd party vote fucking REEKS of privilege. That said, I’m curious to hear who you’d like to see vie for the Dem nomination (& let’s face it - they’re gonna have to be nominated as a Dem)
This is a bit disingenuous: if you’re a trans person and the candidate is siding with fascists, that’s not “saying one thing that doesn’t align with hyper pure stances,” it’s literally putting trans lives at risk, and for no benefit at all in terms of garnering votes. It’s not just a bad opinion.
Like, sure, if a candidate is like “I don’t support raising taxes” or whatever we can call that a matter of debate, but some policies have to be red lines because it means people will die. And since we’re all unwilling to do violence, voting/not voting is the vector we have for teaching politicians.
“I’ll continue our policy of materially supporting a genocide” isn’t just a deviation from hyper purity or whatever—it’s an unforgivable stance that invalidates a politician’s entire platform. If they can’t muster the basic moral wherewithal to oppose genocide, they can’t be trusted in general.
Treating every disagreement as equivalent and every dissonance as merely a matter of an unrealistic expectation of perfection is really disingenuous rhetoric. As if there’s no distinction between, say, not funding high-speed rail and supporting a genocide or oppressing trans people.
Ok. But let’s have a thought exercise. Gavin Newsom is in the Oval Office. He has a Dem majority in both houses. Alito & Thomas die and he appoints two justices in the mold of KBJ. Newsom announces an arms package to Israel and a anti-trans bathroom bill. The people who elected him hit the phones..
They protest at the WH, clog the switchboard, hold massive demonstrations in the streets. Do you really think that administration snubs its nose at that or do you think they’d be willing to listen to the people who elected them!?!
Now run that same scenario but in favor of MAGA.
You & I - hell me & most every other person on this thread probably agree WAY MORE on this topic than was assumed given the responses. But whatever. Go nuts & dunk on my post. It was my mistake to assume folks understood something was sarcasm when there’s a blatant ‘/s’ at the end of the post.