They are both awful, yes, but one side is distinctly worse than the other
Are they both objectively terrible?
I mean, trump seems obvious. Unstable wannabe tyrant/dictator from a party of evangelical theocrats, criminal, fraudster, blatant liar, thief, rapist, sycophant of dictators, insurrectionist, wife beater...and we haven't even dug in to the party that supports this behavior along with their LGBTQ hate, restricting womens' rights, voter fraud, election fraud, gun rights > your life, handing everything to the billionaires, environmental destruction of most every kind, and of course their NAZI underpinnings.
Joe is a career politician with all the baggage that goes with that, but he's not actively and willfully sabotaging the country.
One has worked with Bernie Sanders and helped get some his goals achieved in policy and legislature.
The other hired his own children despite their inability to get security clearances, cheated on his wife while she was at home with their newborn, paid illegal hush money over that matter, stole classified documents and likely gave them to adversaries, likely compromised national security multiple times, sowed doubt in our elections with zero evidence to back it up, blew up the debt, fucked up the Supreme Court and has said he’d ignore the constitution, term limits all of that.
But both sides amirite?
The list is so long I’d forgotten about that stuff too.
Yea but don’t forget, since I’m not getting 100% of what I want, the way I want, achieved precisely when I want it… then they are both the same.
To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. "Can I interest you in the chicken?" she asks. "Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it? To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
David Sedaris
And then not voting is like the attendant coming back after everyone else has made their choice but she only has one of the options left for you
Not voting is a conservative ploy. It's their best chance.
The process of evolving your leadership remains the same:
pick the least-worse option, based on who can realize goals they're pitching that actually help people.
repeat step 1 every election.
Since the conservatives in my country have no platform other than "My opponent is terrible!" they should be disqualified .. but aren't.
The way to fight the 2 party system, starts at the grass roots and grows upwards, you can Not fight it from the top down.
The only other fast way to fight it is with violence, but without clear national unity and already decent leadership it usually results in some form of autocracy, making the situation worse.
Edit: violent revolution* usually doesn't work, but violence itself can be rather effective
Oh man, the fucking sass in the comments of this post. You're all so passionate about these things.
.... And almost all of the arguments are whataboutisms. It's a fucking race to the bottom with everyone.
All I'm going to say is that not voting is not a valid way to protest. That's excluding yourself from the process, and letting others decide for you. Just go vote. I'm not going to tell you who to vote for, just go do it. Have your voice heard.
I realize this years vote for Americans will very likely turn into a competition of who is less bad of an option, but you need to still go out and cast a ballot. Please just do it. Please!
He was equally alert to the problem of voter fetishism: voters mistakenly thinking the vote is an exercise of power, when in fact power in a capitalist society is collective, social and located largely outside the parliamentary realm. Elections had a place, but they were no substitute for mass working-class action in the workplaces, streets and squares. Ultimately power must be wrested from the capitalist class in revolution.
This is asinine. Trump has literally threatened to use dictatorial methods on his first day in office.
It's like approaching Hitler and Joe Rogan in the same room but you've only got one bullet. And instead of using it, you just walk away talking about how they both suck. Like, kill fucking Hitler, what are you doing?
It would be so much better if we just had rank choice voting
Then you might want to vote for the party that hasn't made RCV illegal in 4 states.
We had a brief chance to elect Sanders and we failed. Hillary gave us Trump.
A lot of my American friends are buying into this both sides thing, they say prices are up and the democrats aren't doing enough to deal with the climate so neither really care about anything...
I've been an eco obsessive since the 90s so to me it's painfully clear the night and day difference between the two parties, trying to explain it is so hard because they've got their talking points like more drilling under Biden than Trump but when you try to talk about the lag effects related to leased land it's all just hand waved away - they've seen people talking about it as true and not mentioning that lease sales are at all time lows which will result in significantly less permits in future years so it's 'Biden bad, end of story.' Saying 'they say there'll be less but they say anything, they said there would be less now' totally ignoring the logic of the argument.
Right wing psychological experts plan these talking points and seed them, the left falls for them every time it's so frustrating.
I think part of the problem is people want the world to be simple, the immigration issue is another thing a lot of my left voting friends are struggling with at the moment, blaming the housing crisis on immigration for example then I point out immigrants working construction is super common and they say why don't they work instead of being put up in hotels so I say there's a complex process involved in getting a right to work designed to protect American jobs and many are rejected and returned to their country of origin without obtaining this right... but again 'it's super complex and messy but they're trying to improve things' is easily shrugged off just like with the climate argument by saying 'they only say they're trying, trying means nothing only actions matter'
The problem is the two parties play totally different games with totally different objectives. One is trying to tangle a ball of yarn into.a mess and the other is attempting to untangle it and knit a cardigan.
Class solidarity, I bet those terms are well received by democrats
As bad as establishment candidates tend to be, trump is far far worse. The problem with the trump supporters is they boil everything down to "X bad, so not X good!" Trump was an outsider which is why they supported him, but just being an outsider doesn't automatically make you good, and in his case he's far worse.
