As the title states I am confused on this matter. The way I see it, the USA has a two party system and in the next few weeks they’re either going to have Trump or Harris as president, come inauguration day. With this in mind doesn’t it make sense to vote for the person least likely to escalate the situation even more.
Giving your vote to an independent or worse not voting at all, just gives more of a chance for Trump to win the election and then who knows what crazy stuff he will allow, or encourage, Israel to get away with.
I really don’t get the logic. As sure nobody wants to vote for a party allowing these heinous crimes to be committed, but given you’re getting one of them shouldn’t you be voting for the one that will be the least horrible of the two.
Please don’t come at me with pro-Israeli rhetoric as this isn’t the post for that, I’m asking about why people would make such choices and I’m not up for debate on the Middle East, on this post, you can DM me for that.
Edit: Bedtime here now so will respond to incoming comments in the morning, love starting the day with an inbox full 😊.
Edit 2: This blew up, it’s a little overwhelming right now but I do intent on replying to everybody that took the time to comment. Just need to get in the right headspace.
Majority of the people who are saying this are Arab-Americans. They know how bad Trump will be, they voted overwhelmingly in favor of Biden back in 2020. Unfortunately, after a year of witnessing their entire ethnicity being written off as an acceptable casualty in the name of international diplomacy and foreign lobbying, they’ve become numb and just stopped caring. There have been repeated instsnces of Democrats actually silencing them from speaking up as well. They’ve adopted a scorched earth mentality and are deciding to send a giant “fuck you” to Harris and the entire Democratic party.
And the Democrats are also allowing Israel to do whatever they want. There’s not much of a difference between the two on this topic.
There is a difference between them on this topic.
If Trump were in office now, every liberal here would be screaming for the genocide to end and trying to understand how anyone could let this happen.
With Biden in office and his VP as candidate, they are trying to sell you on their candidate rather than working against the genocide.
That’s the thing. I see a more likely scenario where the genocide is hindered under Trump. Not because Trump opposes it, but because it would suddenly become fashionable for liberals to oppose it.
If anyone hasn’t already lost their Israel-colored glasses, they’re not coming off.
I think they would continue staying hone, this time out of spite, until Trump ramps something up and they are given permission to care by their political class, who would attempt to coopt the the pro-Palestine movement while still being explicitly Zionist.
If the election were between Trump and somehow someone even worse who was calling to nuke the entire area and turn it into glass, then I would absolutely be pushing for Trump. Shockingly, if we are trapped in a horrifying, dystopian version of the trolley problem (which we are), I’m going to make the choice that causes the least damage.
Using another analogy, if you have a badly broken arm, you can either set it and try to keep it immobilized, or you can let it stay how it is and all but guarantee that it gets fucked up even worse as it heals wrong. Voting third party is like saying “I don’t like either of those options since they both involve my broken arm, so I choose to pray to the Moon Goddess”. There is no option that immediately stops your arm from being broken. You can delude yourself and say the Moon Goddess will magically fix it, but in reality, you are choosing the option that does nothing and makes it worse. Choosing to set your broken arm doesn’t make you “pro-broken arm”, it’s just the only practical choice given a terrible situation.
It does not get worse than genocide. The habit of inventing a hypothetical bigger and harder gun to hold to marginalized peoples’ heads doesn’t work on this one.
We are not trapped in a trolley problem. You are a human with agency. You can join organizations, you can educate, you can take action. Reducing your political agency to a lever pull for genocide is a helplessness taught to you by the political class because they just want you to vote for them even when they commit genocide right in front of your eyes. They want you to think of Palestinian lives as strategically expendable and that you are actually smart, not racist, for toeing that line. And your compliance with their demands is exactly what ensures they can shove any monster down your throat as a candidate. Harris is complicit in genocide and didn’t win a single primary but Dems say, “well, time to fall in line”. Dems strategists know that “progressive” Dems do this so they do nothing for them in policy, they just deploy PR goons to vote against every 4 years. Compliant voters enable their own irrelevance.
Though of course, voting is very limited and there is much more to be done.
I refuse to entertain analogies justifying genocide.
The craziest part of this to me is that this isn’t the first time this has happened since it’s started like… since the country has been founded. So the fact they’re really still willing to engage politically at all is a pretty good testament to their character, I would say.
This was all laid out in 2020 and we said the fight wasn’t over. We said even if biden won the dems will never be, ‘good enough’ because we all remember Obama. Objectively the best president of my lifetime and catches shit on a number of issues. The dems won’t ever be good enough. The fight can’t end until people learn that politics doesn’t stop when a presidential election is over.
Joe Biden should have been primaried. I said it for 4 fucking years. I will say the same about Kamala. She needs to actually win the fucking primary.
That doesn’t change the course, though. No amount of moral posturing is going to ignite a fire in out despondent electorate. You want a government that works for you. Participate.
See, doing it as a bloc with public visibility I can see. That actually has some chance of swaying at least the rhetoric. But I still think if they actually go through with not voting, they’re voting against their own interests. The right is rabidly xenophobic and loves Israel, the only thing Trump will do to end the genocide is send even more military support.