Well, that was the longest week of my life. I'm still recovering, and after I've recovered I probably won't want to write about this. I hope everyone is celebrating the electoral defeat of the most destructive, abusive, fascistic, anti-American president the United States has seen in modern times, possibly ever. And I hope everyone has been radicalized by this experience to vote in every election, and vote effectively to deny power to the party that foisted him upon us, and enabled and exploited his abuses.
By effectively I mean voting for opponents who can win, which usually means Democratic Party candidates. I understand the attraction of voting for third party candidates who may be closer to your views, but if it is 100% impossible that they will be elected, what are you accomplishing? Unfortunately voting in the USA often means voting to mitigate harm. As more states adopt ranked-choice voting, it will be more realistic to promote very progressive candidates without sacrificing the one piece of political power you truly have.
Electoral wins have been happening on some very tight margins in recent years. The 2016 election was decided by less than 100,000 voters in three states— a population of 29 million people. If a few more people had turned out and/or voted effectively, we would have been spared this four year nightmare, and there would not be a hard core right wing lock on the Supreme Court— who are shameless and aggressive enough to not only block all future progressive legislation, but also dismantle what we have. And we would not have ~300,000 dead people, and hundreds of thousands more who are guaranteed to die because COVID-19 was allowed to get out of control. Go through the list of egregious acts by the current administration. Child abuse as official United States policy, separating refugee families.
We just dodged a very dire situation— people like Donald Trump destroy nations— but all the people who enabled him and supported him are still around, still trying to do all the same things. I hope everyone is radicalized to never forget, and show up and vote in all future elections.
5 comments:
I think one great thing is the over 70% voter turnout, which I don't think has been matched since the beginning of the last century. I hope Canada follows the state's example in this regard.
It still baffles me how more than 1% considered it a good idea to vote for a lying narcissist who has proven his complete incompetence on a daily basis for four years straight. I'm just glad that the world dodged this bullet. Europe is happy and sends its congratulations! The first beer will be on me if you should return for another C&G tour. :)
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/international/articles-reports/2020/10/08/europe-wants-joe-biden-beat-donald-trump
The first couple of sentences made me think you had COVID, but it looks like you were just suffering through the same hell as everyone else, thankfully (I guess).
Your basic thesis, I think, is correct: at this point, no one has the luxury of voting against the Democratic party for ideological reasons. If you're a progressive and you're to the left of the party, or you're a non-brain damaged moderate who is to the right of them, you have to support them just based on minimum standards of competence, honesty, and good government. They're a major political party, so they're going to infuriate you sometimes, but don't fall into the false equivalence of "well, they both have problems so there's no real difference." There is one, and it's enormous. GOP Delenda Est.
Thanks guys-- we were happy to see all the international support and celebration. It'll be nice to ease back into being a normal country. Although we still have 70 million Trump supporting maniacs running around...
m-- I'll be happy to take you up on that! What country are you in?
Xaque-- Nope, no COVID here... that I am aware of. Most people instinctively understand that you have to vote for the best of what's available, to prevent total monsters from gaining power. Unfortunately there are also a lot of people marketing toxic ideas to lefties, to get them to basically forfeit their political power-- with ideas like "voting your conscience" (or: voting for someone you agree with who can't possibly win), or with absurd claims that Dems are as bad as Trump. It was really transparent this election that they were just lobbying to get progressives not to vote. It got to the point where people were calling NOAM CHOMSKY some kind of centrist neo-liberal for telling people to vote for Biden.
Anyway-- thanks again-- slowly letting go of five years of daily stress over this....
Spot on.
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