this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
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There aren't 2 major sides in the US, there are 3.
The 3rd side never does any formal campaigning (though there is some grassroots self-organised spreading of its message), often wins as it did this time and yet never controls any power because of how the electoral system works.
One might call the 3rd side the Not Voting Party.
The entire Democrats campaign was negative campaigning against the Republican Party, something which did nothing to take "votes" from the Not Voting Party and then specifically on Palestine, their actions, whilst if one judges them relative to the Republican Party were neutral, very strongly helped the Not Voting Party whose appeal on this was that a "vote" for Not Voting is a vote that doesn't support mass murder of children.
So if you look at it as a 3-sided contest, suddently the Democrat result is easilly explainable: they didn't as much lost to the Republicans as they lost to the Not Voting Party, and in that loss Palestine probably weighed heavilly, both because the Democrats broke some pretty strong principles for a lot of people (there aren't much strongers principles than being against the mass murder of children) thus convincing them to go "Not Voting" and because they, while raging about how Trump was a Fascist, were activelly supporting ethno-Fascists in Israel (the worst kind of Fascism there is) in the middle of a Genocide, they looked like evil hypocrites and weakened their only message trying to capture votes from Not Voting - the whole "Not voting at all is like voting for a Fascist" thing: calling the other guy evil and dangerous hardly helps convince the unconvinced when the people saying it are active supporters of an extremelly violent ethno-Fascism that has already killed thousands of babies and tens of thousands of children.
Not voting to absolve yourself from moral responsibility for the outcome is a fallacy though. Many people do believe that inaction somehow makes them less responsible but that just isn't the case. Inaction isn't the magical option, you still have to live with the outcome and you still have all the same opportunity costs as with any choice on the ballot.
If you think you aren't responsible for the events in Israel and Palestine because you didn't vote for either candidate you are just deluding yourself.
Well, that's the thing: that's just your character and your opinion.
Clearly other people feel and think differently and a "Trump is Evil vote Harris to stop him" message didn't work with them, otherwise the Democrat Party wouldn't have lost 14 million voters with their strategy of being as bad as Trump in some areas and not much less so in others whilst selling themselves as the "Not Trump" option.
I've had these talks well before the election and indeed back them people might have been right (and me wrong) in their expectation that most people would put "Keep Trump out" above pretty much everything else, including their principles, and vote for a no-hope-offered candidate just to stop Trump.
Turns out that 14 million people clearly didn't got convinced to go vote for a party that offered no actual positive policies, only "We're Not Trump" a characteristic which, as I pointed out above, would only convince to vote Democrat solely to stop him those who think Trump is trully the most horrible thing in existence.
I suppose that outside the bubble in places like Lemmy a lot of people either did not fear Trump anywhere as much as a certain well-off middle class that hangs around here does or thought the Democrats were about as evil as he is (which is were the Palestine situation comes in: in my opinion it convinced a lot of people that the Democrats too are Evil, since it's a pretty natural thing to conclude of those who activelly support the mass murder of children).
The impact of the Democrat choices in Gaza wasn't just about concern with Palestinians, it was also about what it told of the character and morals of the Democrats leadership, which in turn impacts the trust in them and in what they say, which is especially bad for a party with a tradition of lying with half-truths and other such forms of deceit using dialetics trickeries (I suspect with would impact less those using the "just saying anything that comes to his mind independently of it being true or not" technique such as Trump).
A platform of "we're the most moral choice" doesn't work all that well when you're activelly supporting and giving weapons to a genocidal regime mass murdering civilians for their race, including tends of thousands of children and thousands of babies.
Certainly the results don't seem to indicate that "More people like Trump", rather they indicate that even in the face of Trump, fewer people could bring themselves to vote Democrat, which is IMHO a horrible indictment of the Democrat Party.
My point is that Gaza should have no impact on your voting decision at all because not voting, voting Democrats and voting Republicans will get you the same outcome there, which would also be the outcome you got from literally any other US administration or potential administration (as in candidate that lost) in the entire history of Israel's existence.
Which leaves all the other potential considerations. Trust in the Democratic party can certainly be one of those but don't pretend not voting makes you morally better on the Gaza issue itself. That whole "inaction makes me better" mindset when action and inaction have literally the same outcome needs to die because it is literally not true.
"I shall never support evil-doers" is a pretty strong drive in my world.
I guess that's not the case in your own world, leading you to expect that it won't happen in large numbers that people will refuse to vote for either racist bully (which is how Arab-Americans probably saw the Democrat Leadership and Trump both) or calous sociopathic supporters of mass murder for the sake of political and economic convenince (which is how the University students risking their degrees to demonstrate against the Genocide all the while being called anti-semitic by Biden probably saw both).
I would say that the 14 million votes' worth of evidence towards it tend indicate that I'm at least partially right.
I like how you put the comfortable middle class as those pushing for Harris vs not voting. Not a single person, I know, pushing that initiative is doing it because they are well-off middle class. They are all people in minority demographics, and people who are deeply struggling, that are seeing Trump threaten things they rely on to live. They just don't happen to be reactionaries.
So lets turn this around, just because you are privileged enough to be able accept Trump, rather than vote for someone who sucks, but isn't vowing to actively make everything you need to live, get scrapped, while already being in thread bare living situation, doesn't mean the people who do, are just well-off middle class people.
You are making crazy assumptions about me.
Are they assumptions when you're putting your ignorant opinions out here as facts?
Grow up you Palestinian genocider.
child child child, you can't throw the palestinian genocider label on someone who literally just said 'never'. it doesn't work like that. just like trying to tell people they're trump supporters because they don't support harris.
it. literally. does. not. work. that. way. we are not responsible for the actions others take. we are only responsible for our actions. our vote is a form of action. harris refused to commit to upholding american laws to protect palestinians and indeed promised to continue the current administrations policies. she lost those votes. she refused to commit to protecting khan, she lost our votes. trump also lost our votes.
trump's future actions are his and his voters to own not ours. the only difference between you and trump is you're a maybe genocide. whereas harris and trump are definitely genocides.
you made this accusation of the people voting against trump who are on lemmy, I just turned the same accusation back on you, and now you think it is crazy. Funny how that works. I even said I was turning your words back on you in the comment. Hillarious.
True, I might be projecting what I've seen in my own country as a member of a small left-wing party whilst observing the younger generation in the party who are almost all middle class children of the middle class and who, unlike me, did not experience how it is to grow up in the poor working class (and hearing stories of crushing poverty from my parents who both came from very poor countryside families).
Whilst, thanks to my country being far more fair and equal than the US, I had the opportunity to get a degree from a good University and theoretically am now middle class, all I need to do to remind me of how the working class thinks is talk to the vast cohort of uncles and aunts I have (the younger generation are mainly like me and got degrees) and all I need to do to understand how it is to grow up without my own room in a house in bad state were people counted every cent is to remember my earlier childhood.
But yeah, maybe the truly poor (rather than the recently squeezed types who grew up in middle class families in a proper house and not having to sleep in the living room) in the US are amazingly different from those in my home country and hence my experience and observations are not applicable.
There are people in poverty who support trump, for example, I have a neighbor who does, and even when I point out to him, the GOP, are trying to prevent him from getting their insulin, he just said "that isn't true". So I showed him it in writing, from a GOP source, and he said "well, they will come up with some other way, for people like me, to get their insulin". I bet this happens, because democrats block everything until there is some way for this to happen, and then he thanks Trump. Because things like this happened under Trump, repeatedly.
However, most of the people I know with disabilities, chronic medical issues, are minority groups, have a lot of people who were pushing for Harris, because the GOP was literally running on a platform aim directly at ruining their lives. These people range in beliefs, they aren't all left wing, but they aren't stupid enough to vote their lives away. While most of the people I know, who support trump, are middle classed, trades/white collar people with decent salaries, and wealthier people. In my poor city, in my neighborhood which has a large project housing development, is deep blue. When you get out into the suburbs, with their McMansions, is where you start seeing the Trump signs. Most of the poorer people I see who, support Trump, are in rural areas, and being in the rural areas has a lot to do with why they stay poor. Recently though, a lot of the blue collar guys, in this region, got hit with a loss in compensation due to their manufacturing companies preparing for the onset of the Trump tariffs. They are mad, but I don't know if they are mad at Trump/GOP, or they are going to blame democrats/immigrants/etc., like they did when a car manufacturing plant here closed, after Trump promised a subsidy to keep it open, then didn't do that.
I live in the SW PA, SE OH, N WV, Appalachian region, many people are poor here. Like some of the poorest people in the US. Parts of WV are literally seeing third world conditions.
Well, it's that kind of awareness that I would like to see more here.
A lot of people here that just a week ago were making Vance + Couch memes and mindlessly repeating the "Not voting is the same as voting Trump" slogan whilst their candidate wouldn't move a muscle to make herself appealing to the working class are now raging about how the 14 million who didn't vote are to blame rather than the person they uncritically supported and of whom they demanded nothing at all, who was making no effort at all to appeal to anybody but the hard right.
It's those I feel are disconnected from the wider reality of being somebody who is living salary to salary and sees no way out of that for themselves or their children.
The people being squeezed extra hard are ready to grab anything that looks anywhere like a lifebuoy and plenty of those are ignorant and gullible so easily swayed by snake oil peddlers like Trump whilst the ones who are not gullible are probably as distrusting of the Democrats as they are of Trump (and probably thing something along the lines of "they're all liars").
My point is that these are not the people whom a candidate from a party who mainly does what's good for the rich will convince to vote for her solely on the slogan "Not voting for me is voting for Trump" and saying that "Transsexuals will be in danger if Trump is elected" all the while cozying with the hard right in her party like Dick Cheney and claiming to be anti-racist whilst supporting and extremely racist Genocide in Palestine (even if people don't personally care that much about Palestinians, they're still reading the character of the candidate and saying one thing whilst doing the opposite in quite an extreme way is hardly going to make the candidate be trusted when she makes any promises).
(From my own personal political experience, the biggest blindspot of the typical party member - who are generally very tribalist - is the expectation that, as they themselves trust their party leaders completely and hence immediately believe anything those leaders say without even a minimum amount of analysis and checking for logic and consistency, so does everybody else, thus in the absence of a deep down understanding that other people are not starting from a position of unquestionable trust of that party's leader, they're totally lost as to why the party doesn't perform as expected and people aren't as supportive of it as they should given all those great things the leader says).
Lots of people here expect that all those people out there value the same things as they do, feel as they do about various subjects and trust one candidate and distrust the other as as much as they do themselves, hence "logically" (on top of such ridiculous and wholly disconnected axioms) the loss is all the fault of those people for not voting, not of their party's candidate for not trying to appeal to them or of themselves for uncritically supporting a candidate that is not doing do what is needed to win (at times quite the opposite) even though it was right there in front of her and wasn't even that much of a risk.
Unsurprisingly and judging by the results, this was less a Trump win than it was a Democrat loss.
Hey, if you're cool being complicit in the final steps of a genocide don't let us evil libs stop you 🤷
Says the one putting a cross next to the name of a confirmed and active Genocide supporter that even refuses to face Palestinian families all the whilst claiming like an hypocrite that she's anti-racist.
How does complicity in the murder of 17 pages worth of babies less than 1 year old feel?
Did you masturbate yourself when those 2000lb bombs (that the US Military refuses to use themselves because of their massive collateral damage) that Biden sent to Israel whilst you supported him got used to blow up Lebanese neighborhoods killing hundreds of civilian, or was the pleasure of supporting the leader of your tribe no matter what he did enough to give you maximum pleasure?
You know what would have done the most to stop the Holocaust in Palestine? If people like you had turned hard against Biden and the DNC a year ago (with time enough to force him to change his actions well before the election or be replaced by somebody who was different) instead of being subservient little bootlikers to Biden and the DNC guarateing the inevitable Democrat defeat on top of hundreds of thousands of dead with your support.
Keep up preaching your moral superiority from the top of that pile of children's bones - built with the bombs the party leadership you supported like a "good boy" sent to Israel - you think is a moral high-ground.
You would disgust me if I didn't pitty you so much.
awww, this brought a tear to my eye. 😂 . thank you for composing this. can I get your number (rhetorically)?