Quincy Abeyie wrote:
mdgoonah41 wrote:
His supporters have threatened to "vote for no one if you don't make bernie the nominee"....that is toxic behavior.
Klaus wrote:
What's more important: voters uniting around a candidate or the party doing it? Genuine question, because a lot of people seem to mistakenly think the latter matters more, and it strikes me as sort of antithetical to the whole point of representative democracy. "Fuck off with your concerns, if they're not in alignment with the party's goals we don't want you."
I've thought about this since mdgoonah wrote that. Is that toxic behavior? If someone with a policy you don't agree with at all is nominated, I don't see why you should vote for them. America's form of democracy is already a very diluted version, but at least not voting is one way of saying that it isn't good enough. You shouldn't vote for someone you don't agree with just because it may be a slightly better alternative than Trump. As you're saying, it's the party's responsibility to have a candidate people want to vote for, not the voters' responsibility to vote for the party candidate.
Yes, pretty much. To me it's the kind of bad faith argument that only helps to keep things static, and keeping things static only benefits those already in power. Take the DNC allowing Michael Bloomberg to buy his way into the primary for instance. Before we even get down to the logistics of gross billionaires, sexual harrassment lawsuits and how disqualifying it should be for anyone to have their name scribbled down in Jeffrey Epstein's little black book, how many black and muslim lives has he helped to ruin?
Imagine telling those people, or their children, partners and friends, that they're actively supporting Trump if they don't vote for Bloomberg.
This happened in 2016 too, not with muslims and afro-americans specifically, but with an entire middle and working class that saw their wealth eradicated by the same Wall Street that Clinton received over $100 million from. Obama bailed out all the banks who had created a global recession that doubled the US national debt and plunged over 15 million people across the world into poverty, homelessness and starvation. Some of the biggest villains got new jobs in his administration, and then Clinton buttered them up and took their money with promises of further deregulation behind locked doors.
Before the election cycle in 2016 you had Occupy Wall Street circa 2011-2013, a movement that took hold in literally every major city in America. The post-mortem in American media was so useless that it drove you mad. "What do they want? Where do they come from? Haven't they got anything better to do? Don't these people work?" What did they want indeed. They wanted the crooks weeded out of the fucking economy, not being given new top jobs. It was the first massive sign of a grassroots movement against income inequality and corporate lobbyism taking shape, and no one listened, no one cared, because virtually every single significant person in media and politics across both parties were making their money from that same lobbyism.
Everyone except Bernie Sanders basically, an independent outlier in American politics who had been against those very things his entire life and gotten ostracized for it. And a lot of the Occupy people ended up organising for him. Which only pissed the Democrats off further.
Instead of listening they went and picked one of the most unpopular candidates of all time, the literal embodiment of a career politician with zero integrity, and at the end of the day she still won the election by three million votes over the fascist horror clown, but ended up losing the presidency anyway because the electoral system they have is something rich southern slave owners came up with so they could count their human property as three fifths of a white person for extra political gain.
At every twist and turn there's a reminder of how antidemocratic the system itself is, how it's always been rigged for the wealthy, and how no one is inclined to change the state of things because both parties draw their power from powerful minorities (i.e. the One Percent) rather than the people itself. And then they accuse you of doing the devil's bidding because you refuse to give them your vote. Like Gazza says, things are awfully quiet right now from the "vote blue no matter who" crowd, and no surprises there.
