Locking this thread to clean up the mess. Come on, ya’ll, we can do better than this.
Edit: I’ve unlocked the comments in here. We’ve removed some comments in this thread for being inflammatory or for not adhering to Beehaw’s one (and only) sitewide rule: Be(e) Nice.
To elaborate a bit on what that means in !politics:
Be(e) Nice doesn’t mean you have to always be positive or happy. It doesn’t mean you always have to agree. It does, however, that at all times we have to remember the human on the other side of the screen. We can disagree and still be kind to each other and try to assume that others are operating in good faith. I get it - politics are messy and complicated and the issues are big and for many existential. But we can talk to each other and disagree with one another without resorting to personal attacks or escalating the discussion into an all out flame war.
And to reiterate - that doesn’t mean that we will tolerate hate speech, JAQing off, sealioning, or other ways of engaging in bad faith. If you see these things, please report them to the mods.
Wow, a lot of vitriol on this topic! Okay, so, for my first post on Lemmy I am going to make a positive leftist case for Biden.
Biden is not the problem! He wants to do big things; he wants be a great president. If congress sent him voting rights, reproductive rights, major climate action, and many other leftist priorities, he would sign them. He could definitely be better, but he is mostly not standing in our way. How many decades would you have to go back to find another president you could say that about?
Biden is not the problem. Congress is the problem. State and local governments are the problem. Nimbys are the problem. We have a lot of problems to solve but the presidency is not one of them. What we need to do with the presidency is simply reelect Biden and then get on with the work of solving the actual problems.
Biden is still a centrist, also known as a fascist enabler.
The man is not for labor, see ending the railroad strike, one of the most infuriating moves a so-called great president could perform.
If he truly wanted to do great things, and not be hindered by the backing of capital, he’d be moving fast and breaking things more than the previous administration. He’s not.
I think you’re wanting him to be more like LBJ, using his political power to drag reluctant congress members along, and you’re right, someone like that would have gotten more done. But LBJ wasn’t perfect either, and the LBJ approach isn’t the only way to get things done. Another way is more bottom up, get the support in congress and then just have a president who’s willing to go along. I’m guessing that’s probably AOC’s intention, to bring liberals and leftists together so we can present a unified front and get majorities in congress.
But yeah, I agree about the railroad strike. Also the vaccine patents. He’s not perfect.
I don’t think Biden wants to do big things.
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we pick from the menu for dinner tonight, and for future meals we fight to have more of a say in what’s on the menu. there’s too many people calling for my head right now for me to protest vote or sit out because the guy who doesn’t want to kill me is problematic about some niche policy position. remember that a lot of trump’s money in 2016 went toward campaigning for democrats to stay home, with reasons alternating between “clinton is an awful candidate” (she was) and “she’s got this in the bag so your vote doesn’t matter”.
Absolutely.
Anyone, ANYONE that is pushing for protesting the vote is UNdemocratic and essentially actively advocating for fascism.
VOTE like your life depends on it because it will
Biden is trying to get some progressive stuff done. For the most part pretty happy with his agenda. Still be nice to have someone running that isn’t old as fuck.
Really wish we didn’t need to wait for politicians to die of old age before we could replace them…
I imagine in this case there’s a little more to it, namely that incumbent presidents overwhelmingly win a second term. The last time a sitting President failed to do so prior to Trump was all the way bac in 1993.
I don’t like Biden, hell, I don’t like electoral politics; but it’s probably wise in a party-political sense.
I really wish workers had enough organizing power to yeet these duplicitous assholes. Why can’t we have candidates who actually fucking care about bettering our circumstances?
Welp, there you have it.
AOC has absolutely, 100% betrayed the principles that got her elected in the first place. It’s not surprising. Most people who stay in Washington long-term end up falling in line, but still, kind of disappointing to see.
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this shit gets me angry. both parties suck, biden sucks, yeah yeah yeah. he isn’t in support of actively ripping rights away from millions of people, and he isn’t on board with genociding trans people. i swear, you have either be super out of touch with the people actively under threat by republicans or putting your principles over the lives of actual people to even begin equating the two parties. work on utopian political projects every other day of the year, build movements to affect broader social change, but i swear if you end up not voting blue during one of the most precarious moments of this shithole’s democracy what comes next is worse for all of us.
and to be clear, biden sucks and i hate him. but genuinely i don’t want to get genocided, and the blue guy is a lot less likely to try that shit on me or the people i love.
People like them is why Trump won.
No, Hillary is why Trump won.
Just on my tiny street in America, three families lost their homes to Obama’s foreclosure crisis. Multiply that by every street in this country and you have a lot of people who won’t see the appeal of Hillary being a continuation of Obama’s policies.
and the blue guy is a lot less likely to try that shit on me or the people i love.
So it’s only “a lot less likely” not a definitive won’t ever?
oh for sure. i don’t trust the dude, and his policy (like all capitalists) has tangible impacts on my quality of life. every moment we don’t have universal health care, and specifically universal gender affirming healthcare for one of my specific minority corners, leads to the unnecessary deaths of innocent people. every moment we don’t have housing justice, climate justice, and any number of other progressive policies leaves more people in horrific situations. i just don’t think electoral politics provides a pathway for anything better at the moment, and if it goes to the red team things get much worse for everybody much quicker.
And that statement isn’t really true if you’re a wage earner, need health care, need education, or an abortion, or need a home that you can both afford and live in. Dems just as enthusiastically shit on all of those people as Republicans.
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Lol what? Please explain the fascism that I’m apparently completely out of the loop on.
EZPZ
Democrat = Liberal = Socialist = Communist = Fascist = Nazi. Therefore all Democrats are literally Nazi Fascists
/s
No, but the uni-party that’s in power in the U.S. is quite fascist. That has nothing to do with leftism, and I never implied it does. Apparently you missed in my original comment where I made it clear that Biden isn’t the only fascist being promoted (“either”).
Oh, I was replying @DesertRose and I only saw your comment immediately before it. I’m not a ‘both sides’ kinda person but they are both quite guilty - Republicans do seem to be more mask-off tho.
That being said, I don’t disagree with your response to @DesertRose.
My comment was more tongue-in-cheek and not meant to be taken too seriously, thus the “/s”
Fair enough. It sounded like you were attempting to characterize my comment, and that the “/s” was meant to show that you, yourself, didn’t agree with that characterization. Thanks for clarifying.
Fwiw I generally don’t think Biden is a Fascist per se. I think he is a corporatist and a neolib which can quickly lead to fascism. We need a different voting system besides first past to post so we can get some of these ghouls out of office.
“‘If they didn’t vote for a lizard’, said Ford, ‘the wrong lizard might get in.’” - Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Fwiw I generally don’t think Biden is a Fascist per se. I think he is a corporatist and a neolib
Those are not mutually exclusive. Biden very much subscribes to fascist politics, and has for his entire political career.
Plenty of fascist policy in Biden’s career of politics: mass incarceration—including concentration camps—the “War On Drugs”, union busting and strikebreaking, mass surveillance (e.g. the Patriot Act, which he happily takes credit for), militarization of the police, attacks on journalism and whistleblowers, etc.
Yes, you really should work on getting in the loop.
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The war on drugs has been a policy standard since Nixon to put minorities and the leftist youth in prison and has unfortunately has not been recanted but progress is slowing being made to change that.
The union busting was heartbreaking to hear but it is by no means an indicator of somebody being a fascist. In the US there has been plenty of union busting by capitalists.
The PATRIOT Act is a very unfortunate product of fear that nearly everyone gave liberty for some sense of security. Most people in the US were frightened by the 9/11 attacks, and there were few people at the time that saw that it would be a huge mistake to give the government such vast surveillance powers. Hindsight is very strong now with this.
Militarization of the police has more to do with a state by state, and department by department thing. The federal government has very little to do with local policing. There’s several Supreme Court cases basically saying so. Probably not the greatest idea as I would like a little more federal protection from and oversight of local police forces.
The only one I’m not familiar with is the whistleblowers. The only attacks on the press I know of are him calling out far right outlets that publish false and misleading information. Certainly not the president who claimed fake news about everything.
I am not super supportive of the Democratic Party, it has its issues but it is far from fascism. I think you are confusing that with authoritarianism. The Republican Party is the one that endorses candidates that want people like me to be dead and that is a pretty big motivator to vote for the Dems to prevent that from happening to me or others.
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Receiving support from a political party and the ability to influence policies behind the scenes requires playing the patronage game, which means protecting incumbents, especially in the Senate and presidency. Given this, I’m honestly surprised that no third parties have been able to win seats in safe districts, because doing so would somewhat fix this problem by making those representatives a genuine independent bloc able to negotiate bilaterally with the major parties. Are voters seriously content with the two-party system just because there are primaries?
Not a big fan of this, but I can’t really blame her when the only other options are “unserious protest candidate who’s a bit of a crank” and “unserious protest candidate who’s completely nuts and possibly a crypto-Republican”.
