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this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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Politics
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If the people in charge have the ability to end democracy, how can democracy be claimed to exist in the first place? Democracy is supposed to be our capability as individual citizens to regulate the people in power, but if they can turn that switch on or off, we don't actually have that capability except as they choose to allow us to.
The power of democracy is vested with the citizenry. It is up to us whether it lives or dies. Only we, through inaction, can determine if any given leader is allowed to take or remain in office. Currently we have a duopoly that plays at being enemies, casting back and forth between the dictator and the 'stalwart defender of democracy' (whose selection by the DNC must always be respected one more time, lest the dictator take hold again).
Useless and false platitude.
Republicans literally have been splitting in half ever since Trump lost in 2020. They ousted their own Speaker, and are now trying to oust McConnell via public opinion. They had 2 primary candidates (DeSantis and Haley) who actually got national attention, and a decent-ish number of votes. What part of that is "in line"?
If the bar for "in-line" is the party forcefully backing one candidate, the DNC is far more aligned behind Biden.
If you look in conservative political spaces, they literally say the same thing about Democrats being the ones who "fall in line". In both cases, it's just a means to quash democratic discussion of candidates.
My opposition to Biden is not about "falling in love" with someone else, it's about my belief that Biden is going to lose us the election and put Trump back in office. Perhaps you shouldn't be dismissive and condescending towards other people's choices when you know nothing about them? Perhaps they're actually trying to save the US from Trump as well?
Or you can just write them off as being silly people who "lose" for "falling in love".
Are you asking me to respect Republicans for voting for a treasonous, backstabbing criminal that tried to usurp the 2020 election by inciting a insurrection? No, sorry, I'm not going to respect them and I will never respect their decision. They can go fuck themselves.
I don't want to "win over" those people, just as much as I don't want to "win over" Nazis during WWII. They are evil, brainwashed, and beyond saving. The best we can hope for is to outvote them and wait for them to see reason themselves. If they have the foresight to actually remove their blinders and understand the GOP for what it actually is, which is a cult, then I can respect their decision making again.
It's never a binary on/off switch. Democracy dies through slow corrosion. If we let Trump off with all of those crimes he committed, and allow him to get re-elected, all of those crimes are now unenforceable.
Well, unenforceable for the rich and powerful. The poor has a different system of justice.
DeSantis, Haley, and all of the Speaker nonsense has been infighting with old-guard rich assholes who want to break government more subtlety than how Trump and the rest of the Tea Party idiots do things. The GOP has been trying to steer out of this Trump trainwreck ever since it's started, and they don't have the control over their own populace than they used to. But, that's not a good thing because everything that the GOP represents has been going even further extremist.
But, do you know what happens when these candidates drop out? They immediately fall in line. They kiss Trump's ass so hard that no callous insult he made at him is unforgivable. Hell, Trump accused Ted Cruz's father of helping in the JFK assassination, and Ted was like, "Yeah, we should totally vote for this guy!"
There are a lot of ways to define what qualifies as Democracy: is it the mere presence of voting? Is it the impact of that voting? Is it equal/ universal voting rights? Is it the ability to enforce voting outcomes? Or the ability for voters to choose what is voted on?
Some of those are clear binaries, and some of those are gradations or thresholds.
Personally, I think it has to be a combination of universal voting rights, voter-led ballot control(i.e. choosing what to vote about), and enforceability.
To me, we've been failing as a democracy for a long time.
The unenforceability of those laws is not determined by his reelection, they're determined by the actual court cases charging him with crimes. We do not have the ability to force SCOTUS to allow him to be held accountable, and comforting ourselves that we actually can, merely by not re-electing him, means you already realize the laws are not going to be enforced against him in the "Justice" System.
Which is exactly what every Democrat challenger does as well.
No, if someone is claiming that democracy is being killed, it's very important to define what that actually means. If Democracy is the simple act of some any given sub-group being allowed to vote, it's never going to 'die' in the US. If on the other hand it's the actual ability for individuals to overrule those in power via voting, then it's arguably already dead. Definitions are important.
I agree with Stewart on that point:
Trump is not going to end voting if he gets reelected, and voter suppression and disenfranchisement by Republicans existed long before Trump and will continue long after Trump. There is nothing that Trump is going to fundamentally change about our government.
It will be very bad if he gets elected, but the country is not over, and using hyperbolic language that implies otherwise, like "This is a question of whether democracy dies in America." (which is what the commenter I initially responded to said), is just being used to deflect from very important and valid criticism of the alternatives. More importantly, it runs the danger of creating voter fatigue; not every election can be an exceptional, emergency situation, and all of Trump's runner-ups like DeSantis and Ramaswamy, are all running the same playbook.
If the only way for America and/or Democracy not to die is for Republicans to never again become president, it's already lost, because we're in a duopoly with them (which the DNC is actively working to maintain), and it is an eventuality.
You inserted yourself into a conversation I was having, in which the other person (P03 Locke) was disputing Stewart's assertion that the country would not be over, and asserting that
That is the context in which I felt it was necessary to define Democracy.
You then jumped in and said
despite the fact you had not actually said that previously, and that it is a different stance from what P03 Locke said.
P03 Locke never asserted Trump was eroding Democracy, they said he would be killing it, and they said that as a direct counter to Stewart's assertion that the country would not be over, which indicates that in P03 Locke's mind, the death of Democracy is equivalent to the end of America.
In that case, it's incredibly important to define Democracy, in order to understand exactly what changes P03 Locke believes Trump will make, so we can actually assess the likely impact of those changes, and see what precisely they think qualifies as the end of Democracy.
I didn't say you can't participate, but you jumped into a thread in which 2 people were discussing whether the country and democracy were going to come to an end, and then immediately said, "well I never said anything about the end of democracy/ the country". That's cool, but it's completely irrelevant to the discussion that P03 Locke and I were having, which was explicitly about that.
I also note that you have no response to any of the actual points I made, so I'll assume you have nothing to add or dispute.
Lastly, I'd love to see which parts of my comment you consider "an entitled tantrum". Was it when I pointed out that you introduced an unrelated argument, and then acted as though I'd been arguing against it?
Actually, I think I'll just keep pointing out the flaws in your comments.
The simple answer to your question is by the people taking a person who very overtly says that he has no desire to preserve democracy and in fact has already sought to overturn it once before and then proceeding to return that person to office in order to do just that.
We do have the ability to regulate the people in power by not voting for them in the first place. If we take the ability and use it to give power to someone who wants to do away with democracy, that's pretty much on us.
Ultimately, any frustration with Biden - and I acknowledge that valid ones absolutely do exist - must be squared against the fact that we have to put a candidate up against Trump. Whether Biden is the person with the best odds against him is an objective and empirical one, though also one that's hard to accurately study and answer. Disapproval polls are certainly one source of info, but they do not necessarily mean that any other potential alternative would do better. It is very possible for large amounts of people to disapprove of Biden but ultimately disapprove of Trump even more. We can't actually personify "broadly generic and popular Democrat" into a real human, and even if we could, that's basically Biden, so unless there exists an actual specific person who is both broadly popular and with more political clout than Biden who's also interested in running, the practical choice is Biden against Trump, no matter how much ink people want to spill on the matter.
Edit: On a more pragmatic matter, I absolutely agree that telling progressives to shut up, stop complaining, and vote for Biden is not a particularly effective style of messaging.
So if there are only 2 people on the ballot, and you don't want either, what are your options? If the DNC is actively working to prevent others from getting on the ballot, leaving us with only 2 bad choices, and you go along with it, you haven't actually 'regulated' anything. Dangling a false choice in front of people to create the illusion of agency is nothing new, and it's very much what US politics at the national level is.
Want to 'regulate' the ability of the US president to enable a genocide in Gaza? Too bad, because all of the candidates that the parties will let you vote for, will all enable the genocide. Believing you actually have real control over the US government is a lie you tell yourself.
No one here is talking about voting for Trump, and the rhetoric of 'not voting for Biden puts Trump in office' runs directly counter to your argument that we have the ability to regulate who gets into office, because you're explicitly arguing that it's a binary choice and it's a moral imperative to put one of those people in power.
I can't both have to vote for Biden as a moral imperative to stave off the death of democracy, and also not have to vote for him, in order to regulate his ability to wield US strategic power to further a genocide. It's a false choice that's been forced by the political parties' shutting-out of other parties and candidates, but pushing a button every 4 years makes you feel like you had an impact.
Of course, which is why my real anger is directed at the DNC. They didn't learn their lesson in 2016. They put Trump in power by shoving through their preferred candidate, despite her being mind-bogglingly unpopular. Biden eked out a win in 2020 because people hated Trump enough and he was still fresh in their minds, but the reality on the ground now is that Trump has been gone for a while, and most peoples' lives have not gotten markedly better under Biden. Biden's promise that "Nothing will fundamentally change" has proven true, and I think there are too many voters who will not turn out in force to vote against Trump this election, just as they didn't in 2016. And Biden is wildly unpopular, to boot.
Just to be clear; if Biden is the candidate in the General election, I will probably vote for him(because what the hell else can I do? Any actual good candidates were bullied out of running). But at this point, I don't think he's going to win. I think the apathy towards his insubstantive actions, combined with the very valid and justified anger over his aid in the genocide in Gaza, is going to lose him the election. It doesn't matter what politically-engaged people like you and I think, if the average person isn't on board with him, and they're not.
spoiler
asdfasdfsadfasfasdfFrom my other comment:
Our political system is set up to discourage political engagement. Organizing takes time, money, community, and civic-mindedness, and our society is set up to sap all of those away from the average person. You're basically just blaming the people who are overcoming those barriers, to organize and be politically-engaged, for the fact it's impossible for them to singlehandledly overcome the political apathy that the system is built to propagate.
That will never happen, because as I said, our political system does not want that to happen, and works to make sure it doesn't. So what you're really saying is, "don't ever push for change within the party itself, just toe the party line".
No thanks.
You have no clue whether someone online who is complaining is in fact only engaging in politics "one year out of every four", so this is just showcasing your own assumptions.