As the title states I am confused on this matter. The way I see it, the USA has a two party system and in the next few weeks they’re either going to have Trump or Harris as president, come inauguration day. With this in mind doesn’t it make sense to vote for the person least likely to escalate the situation even more.
Giving your vote to an independent or worse not voting at all, just gives more of a chance for Trump to win the election and then who knows what crazy stuff he will allow, or encourage, Israel to get away with.
I really don’t get the logic. As sure nobody wants to vote for a party allowing these heinous crimes to be committed, but given you’re getting one of them shouldn’t you be voting for the one that will be the least horrible of the two.
Please don’t come at me with pro-Israeli rhetoric as this isn’t the post for that, I’m asking about why people would make such choices and I’m not up for debate on the Middle East, on this post, you can DM me for that.
Edit: Bedtime here now so will respond to incoming comments in the morning, love starting the day with an inbox full 😊.
Your vote is your consent.
Imagine for a minute that your perfect political candidate was running. The only catch is that if they win they are promising to personally execute your family in front of you. The other guy is gonna kill your family too so everyone tells you to stop being such a single issue voter and vote for the lesser evil.
Do you still vote for them? Or do you refuse to participate in the execution of your family?
Your vote is not your consent; that’s some nonsense made up to get people to not vote.
In your metaphor, you vote for one your family dies, you vote for another your family and another family dies. You refuse to participate in the system and both families die.
You didn’t consent to that, but you allowed it to happen via your vote of INDIFFERENCE which is what not voting means. It means you don’t care which way things go, because that’s all it can mean to not make a choice.
Of course we are talking about politics, not their metaphor. Metaphors break down pretty quickly in politics, as the actual material logic requires more than a five minute toy example.
In our current scenario, the Dems have a genocide candidate. If you vote for that and tell other people to vote for that, you are telling yourself and those around you that genocide is tolerable. Not just tolerable, even - recommendable in certain circumstances, pleading that it is reluctant. You are, in fact, helping to normalize genocide, and with it, dehumanize Palestinians. And if that genocidal candidate wins with your support, what will be the accepted consciousness? What will you and others internalize? It sure as shut will not be, “wow we should not have supported a fucking genocide what the fuck is wrong with us?” It will be, “hey cool we will support you no matter what, 98% Hitler”. The party will see this and nod their heads, “let’s start doing criminal charges for supporting Palestine” (they are already starting in this direction, e.g. Samidoun) and, “we never have to do anything our voters want”.
Basically, y’all have no concept of leverage but you do have a concept of personal morality and are absolutely trashing it. You will, of course, never be forgjven by those who consider Palestinians to be human. One must hope that you overcome this implicit racism.
You forgot the other scenario. You talk of not having leverage because of a vote, and yet the other choice absolutely has no leverage at all, and possibly makes things even harder to change.
Let me ask this - would you recommend not voting for either President, but voting on the rest of the ballot? Because telling people to not vote usually implies don’t show up at all, and that is part of why nothing changes. Local and state representation can matter more than the President.
Re: your question, I recommend that people consider Palestinians full humans and work backwards from there. I cannot prescribe much more than that outside of recommending they also challenge the omnipresent racist narratives used to manufacture consent for this genocide. That enough to begin a political education.
I don’t really care how an individual decides to check their electoral box, I care about your normalization of genocide and application if lesser evil logic in service of a fucking genocide. If some person wants to vote for some loser for Congress, have at it. But let this moment of genocid apoligeticss awaken you politically and to begin challenging these narratives that led you down this path. Read and learn and understand why genocide is in the table, and no it is not because AIPAC is a big donor. Biden was being real when he said if Israel didn’t exiat they would need to invent one.
I haven’t said anything like, “not having leverage because of a vote”. The relevance of leverage is that the entire premise of y’all’s framings is that your role is to cheerlead your corronated genocidal candidate and accept anything they do, at least up to genocide. You throw away any concept of your own ability to make demands or organize and subordinate yourself to a genocidal political class. It makes you actively work against those who build leverage as well, you try to sheepdog them back into your self-defeating mindset.
So, having thrown away any real political analysis for building and using power, your vote is really reduced to a reflection of your personal morality. And that morality? To look at Palestinians as subhuman.
Re: harder to change, your electoral logic is already self-defeatjng. What do you think you are changing when your electoral logic is, “fall in line vite blue no matter who” including fucking genocide. Who would ever take you seriously? You think they’re going to do anything to “win your vote”? Genocide apologist, they know they already have it. You announced you were giving it to them free of charge, that you will tolerate anything they do and still vote for them, and are actually pressuring others to do the same on their behalf.
You have thrown away any semblance of power or influence, and that is already within the limited confinea of electoralism. We all know that folks who think this way aren’t out there working against the party in alternative organizations.
The correct time to express such thoughts is during a primary. We didn’t have one because we had an incumbent; it happens.
The better place to have this fight is through congress anyways. They’re the ones that actually approve the aid.
Better yet, go talk to the Israel people and get them to vote for someone that stops using our weapons in such an offensive manor. Israel knows that their position is critical to the US interest and their current leaders are happy to exploit that.
Literally, abstaining makes you part of the “party of not voting” and nobody does anything for them, because they don’t vote.
There is no wrong time to be against genocide. It is, in fact, your basic duty as a human being claiming to have any empathu whatsoever.
Despite your pretense of knowing familiarity with how the system works, Buden has been bypassing Congress to send weapons to Israel for their genocide. Good ol’ JDAMs produced right here in the US of A, even.
Israel is a settler-colonial state whose material interests are deeply tied to the dehumanization and oppression of Palestinians. There is no chance for a grassroots mobilization within Israel against the genocide. They want more blood than Bibi gives them. The most helpful thing for someone in the refion to do is to work directly to against Israel and their own governments’ complicity. The US has similar challenges in its material base and society but I am succeeding in my organizing goals here. Every person in the US has a responsibility to work against its war machine.
And Israel is not a separate actor, here. It is fully dependent on the US.
Right, they are actually close collaborators. You should work against them.
You should not vote for genociders or tell others to do so. Whether that means abstaining is up to the individual. I don’t really care. But you need to shed this idea that you are fighting the good fight by supporting genocide, you are actively harmful to working for the good of humanity. Instead of sheepdogging for Dems, join the people with empathy and organize against imperialism.
We are literally in a battle for our ability to vote.
Abstaining from said battle is effectively saying “I don’t care” and letting Trump do what he will. If he chooses to send nukes to Palestine to end the conflict immediately, that’s on everyone that abstained. If he ends aid to Ukraine and those people die, that’s on everyone that abstained.
If he ends voting, you “won some moral battle” but you’ve all but permanently lost the war against genocide as the most powerful military and weapons on the planet are now in the hands of an authoritarian, raciest, fascist, regime that previously imposed a “Muslim ban” and I’m sure would happily do so again.
There is no hypocrisy here, and it’s disingenuous to imply there is.
If you want to protest genocide, then GO DO IT, don’t throw away a vote because that’s not a protest, it’s a pathetic excuse.
If you (allegedly) feel compelled to vote for genocide there is little value in your vote in the first place.
You are not in a battle. You are a human looking at a phone or computer screen trying to normalize voting for genociders and after doing so you will stay home. If you believed your own words you’d be posting signup sheets for shifts in Voter Protection Brigades, ready to take the fight to those attempting to disenfranchise you.
Instead, you are sitting around trying to rationalize support for genocide.
The policy is already genocide, you don’t have a bigger gun to try pointing at people’s heads. If you cared about Palestinian life you would already understand this. Unfortunately you care more about your naive political sensibilities.
The Dems are certainly worse for Ukraine, they are using them as cannon fodder to hurt Russia.
Both parties’ presidents are inherently authoritarian.
Both parties are exceptionally racist, one is just polite and euphemistic about it, normalizing their version of racism so that you accept it without a second thought.
In other news, have you seen Kamala’s stellar polic for getting black guys to buy crypto?
To the extent Trumpnis fascist, we have already been there for decades and decades buddy.
Did you notice the recent EO for domestic military deployments? Betcha didn’t. Y’all igmore fashy policies when your side does them. Incidentally, if your party is the bullwark against fascism, why is it giving the president so much power to invoke martial law? Hmmmmmmmmm.
That is the correct term for all American governments, yes.
Both parties have racist immigration policies, Dems just do it without much pushback. You see their “immigration reform” paxkage they tried to push through Congress?
I don’t think it is hypocrisy per se. I think most Americans are just racist and too embarrassed to admit it.
I don’t want to protest against genocide, I want to build power against it. And so far it is going relatively okay, though certainly not with any help from people like yourself. You are our explicit opponents that work against us.
Easy to say when it’s not your family getting slaughtered.
But we all know you’re a paragon of rationality who would enthusiastically vote for an administration who has promised to kill your family because your love of lesser evilism outweighs anything else.
You know, you can find something evil in just about any politician’s policy depending on your personal perspective.
So let’s just not vote, because we shouldn’t choose. We should just morally abstain from having choices because making no choice is the only way to make a choice.
Do you realize how absurd that sounds?
If you want to protest genocide, then GO DO IT, don’t throw away a vote because that’s not a protest, it’s a pathetic excuse.
Does refusing to vote stop your family from being executed?
When you cease being part of the execution squad itself it becomes much easier to fight them.
Probably not. But it doesn’t include your consent at the very least.
Maybe you’re a perfectly objective person who can still vote for your families execution. But I think most people would struggle with it, if they’re being truly honest with themselves.
It boils down to if you think any admin will ever change how the US deals with Israel. And if that’s true, then how does change happen? Maybe if the rest of the world pushes against the US? Other countries are having their own struggle with any change suggested being labeled as a convenient antisemitism. This is a huge US problem, but not JUST a US problem. And I know OP didn’t want to get into the politics of it, but it’s hard to avoid when that’s exactly what it is, politics while people die and other people try to object and question it but get stomped down for doing so.
I knew I’d get downvoted by some for asking how to arrive at some solution with the given dilemma we’re in. Maybe some people don’t want to fix it.
Does it? Or does it boil down to whether or not you are willing to rubber stamp the death of your loved ones.
When it’s theoretical gamesmanship people like you are more than willing to act like dispassionate chess masters but I have a hard time believing that if it was your family getting killed you would be so cavalier.
Yeah! If you don’t vote, nobody becomes president!
The system marches on with or without your input.
Sounds like a good reason to work on opposing the system and thinking of your vote as a minor expression of your personal morality. And I would hope that personal morality draws the line at supporting genocide.
Does it?
Does your action help Gaza?
No.
So any moralizing based on that is wrong.
My actions? They certainly do, yes.
But you have deflected. Are you afraid of what I said?