I have come across a somewhat uncomfortable scenario more than once this past week that I need some advice on from non-white folks here as a white woman in real-world organizing/activist spaces that do not necessarily lean very far left. I do not know how to approach BIPOC folks in these spaces (or even just in the general public I’ve encountered) espousing the virtues of voting Kamala Harris. I feel like @Angel@hexbear.net’s response to this in here is absolutely the correct perspective, but…is that even my place to say? I do not want to tell any non-white person how to express their frustrations and especially not as a white person, but…voting for Kamala was not it. It was never going to be it. I heard the same things back in the Obama days, too, and we have the benefit of hindsight now to tell us how poorly that goes. But I feel like I can’t be the one to say it. Is that the correct way to handle stuff like this? I feel very stuck.

This should be a signal for american liberals that the democratic party is not a viable option anymore. Look at what happened, a total defeat, the republicans control both the house and senate in addition to having elected someone who according to your own law is a convicted felon.

Do you still want to cling to the democratic party as it keeps on recycling the same impotent strategy over and over again magically expecting a different result?

That there are fifteen million people in the US who said “I’m not going to vote for genocide and I’m not going to vote for things to stay the same” is fantastic fucking news. You really can’t say it any other way. That’s fifteen million people who are prime candidates for radicalization.

The road to hell is paved with “lesser evils”.

All I have to say is

1. The DNC learned nothing from 2016. It is the definition of irrationality to do the same thing twice and expect different outcomes.

2. Bernie could garner huge crowds and massive support by campaigning on the basis of policy that has mass appeal, such as universal healthcare. Kamala chose not to do this because she prioritised business as usual over stopping Trump.

3. You say “things will get worse under Trump”. That’s true. But things got worse under Biden/Harris after Trump’s first term as president - environmental policy, the border camps, reproductive rights, trans rights, cop city, the genocide of Palestinians etc. So when you say “we must vote for Kamala or things will get worse” that line of reasoning is at best unconvincing and at worst it betrays the 4-year state of amnesia you have lived in because you are so politically detached from the consequences of your voting.

4. Telling people to protect democracy—the system where you vote for the candidate who best represents your political values—by voting for a person who in no way represents your political values in order to save democracy is tortured logic.

5. No, I’m not an accelerationist. Me advocating for people not to vote for Kamala Harris is not an accelerationist position because we should not be giving a mandate for a genocide, climate change, and civil rights-eroding accelerationist by voting for them.

6. How many delegates did Harris win in the last primaries? How many did she win in the primaries to get her to run for president this time? Is this what you claim as your democracy?

7. When I list a number of legitimate grievances with Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s regime and issues with Kamala’s election platform, none of which have a single thing to do with her race or gender, and you respond by calling me racist or misogynistic it drives home how little you are willing to listen to my political concerns and how intransigent your favoured party is. When you act this way and then tell me that people have to vote for Kamala in order to push her left while you yourself are unwilling to even acknowledge the fact that Kamala’s platform has serious issues, it signals to me that there will be no shifting left on anything. I already knew this fact but you have done an exceptional job of inadvertently teaching other people this lesson.

8. When entering into negotiations with someone, it’s a uniquely terrible tactic to hand over your one state-sanctioned bargaining chip before making even one single demand.

9. You are chasing the DNC to the right and one day you will wake up and wonder to yourself “How did I end up all the way over here?” I’m not following you into that marsh but you’re welcome to go into it yourself, just don’t get upset at me when I point out what you’re heading into and don’t get angry when I refuse to blindly follow you.

10. Kamala Harris is the only thing that can stop fascism. Kamala Harris cannot do anything to protect reproductive rights, trans rights, Palestinian lives, the lives of Marcellus Williams and Robert Robertson etc. because she is powerless to do anything about it 🫠

11. Kamala Harris said she would “follow the law” regarding trans people. She was angling to become the primary lawmaker in the US. Not only does this show a lack of whatever libs care about like “leadership” but it shows how cowardly and detestable she is because she understands the law and she is willing to follow it but not when it comes to things like international law, only when it’s laws that she can use to hide behind while trans people are subjected to further oppression through legislation that strips them of rights.

12. Historically, fascism has never been stopped at the ballot box. You being convinced that this is possible does not sway my opinion on any matter aside from my estimation of your political awareness and your ability to achieve change.

13. You had four years (eight+ if you count Trump’s regime and the lead-up to it in this calculation) to “stop fascism”. What did you do in this period of time? Did you push Biden and Kamala to adopt policies which have mass support? Did you do anything except go to back to brunch?

14. When you accuse me of not organising irl, when you say that I’m not doing anything:

• I’m not about to dox myself

• I’m not going to make a laundry list of the things that I have done w/organising and activism just to impress (?) you, especially not when you’ve already told me that I haven’t done anything

• It’s a huge self-report and it’s obvious that you’re projecting

• You alienate others by telling them “I do not recognise your efforts and everything that you have done is unimportant in my estimation”

15. You aren’t entitled to others’ votes. Stop pretending that you are.

16. We aren’t splitting the so-called left, Kamala Harris did that all by herself.

17. You have no red lines. There is nothing that could make you not support Kamala Harris and we know it. Telling people to drop their standards and ignore their conscience to vote for Kamala is a fatal strategy and you killed her campaign by deploying it.

18. Selective invoking of people of colour to advocate for Kamala was ridiculous and disgustingly tokenistic. Yes, Angela Davis is smarter than I am. Telling me that I’m stupider than her and so I should take my political cues from her with regards to electoralism is a losing argument and it’s low-key ableist became you’re arguing that the person who lacks intelligence also has a commensurate lack of political virtue. Historically speaking, very intelligent people have had absolutely atrocious politics. Also people like Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas are almost certainly a lot smarter than I am. It would be wrong of me not to defer to their superior intellect and their politics, isn’t that right?

19. You say that democracy is going to be strangled in its crib and that fascism has come to town. You are maybe posting about this online in your echo chamber and that’s it. You do not take politics seriously, not even your own, yet you demand that I take your politics more seriously than you yourself do. There are things that I am doing right now to avert this trend in politics. There are things that I would do if fascism proper had seized power, none of which I would post about online. We are not the same. Enjoy your brunch though.

20. Almost all of your arguments for voting for Kamala Harris (aside from the “it will stop Trump” argument which, in retrospect, appears to be a dismal failure) also apply to reasons for voting for Trump. “You can push them left”, “By voting we will get a seat at the table”, “Voting third party or not voting at all is a wasted vote”, “We have to vote this way to protect the country”, “Politics is about comprise - you cannot expect them to be your perfect political candidate”, and whatever hold-your-nose-and-vote arguments you trot out. Did you ever stop to ask yourself why it is that you do not find these arguments for voting Trump to be convincing?

21. Last time Trump got elected you were brutally vindictive. You took glee in the thought of people in red states and marginalised groups suffering due to policy and things like natural disasters, regardless of their politics or how they chose to vote. You were excited to tell these people that they were going to get deported and put into concentration camps. You will do it again this time too because you have learned nothing. November came and these people you targeted with your vicious schadenfreude remembered. They aren’t going to forget how effortlessly you abandoned them and how you wished the worst suffering and ill-fate upon them.

22. You said that a non-vote or a 3rd party vote is a vote for Trump. We have been shouting from the rooftops that Kamala Harris is fundamentally unwilling and incapable of stopping Trump. History vindicates this position; Trump managed to win the popular vote while Harris underperformed by millions of votes, even compared to Joe Biden. Thus your support for Kamala Harris was therefore support for Donald Trump’s presidency. Congratulations on getting the candidate which you campaigned so hard to get elected.

23. I don’t care about the US. America must die and if Trump is to be its undertaker then I am relieved to hear it. What you have done is to accelerate the destruction of the US. If I were cynical about achieving my political objectives, wouldn’t have said any of the above. If I was an accelerationist I would have been pushing for all of the things that you’ve been pushing for instead of pushing back against them. I would have even gone so far as to furnish your side with more poisoned chalice arguments (I do this with the far right, I exactly know how to do it). Instead I’ve been defending your political project against your own excesses and self-defeating narrow mindedness. You are right in the fact that I am your enemy but you are wrong to oppose me because you are a far greater enemy to yourself than I could ever have the stomach to be. You won’t listen to a word of what I’ve said because you refuse to learn and to reflect.

24. A cynical person might argue that my strategy is to oppose you in the knowledge that this will make you react by becoming more deeply entrenched in your position, encouraging a sort of siege mentality in you, so that you see any criticism or difference of opinion as being an existential political threat that must be eradicated as a means to create more disaffected people to radicalise out of bourgeois democracy. This is not my intent. If things improve for the proles and the marginalised because of what I argue for then that’s a win for my political objectives. However I can’t control your actions and if you choose to respond by taking a hatchet to your precious liberal democracy then, likewise, that’s a win for my political objectives. Which way, western man?

Harris did not lose (primarily) due to her gender or race. I feel that people who are operating under this assumption need to examine the dialectic here a lot more closely. Kamala’s major L is not a testament to Trump being any degree of magnificent but rather a demonstration of how God awful she is. Liberals need to garner far more awareness. If your answer to the question, “Why did Kamala lose?” has anything to do with assuming that it’s mainly the fault of reactionary, sexist, and racist white men, you are cutting out a whole bunch of very important factors from this equation. Plenty of marginalized people feel utterly disappointed in the bourgeois, imperialist machine that is the Democratic Party of the United States.

We’ve seen that they will truly do nothing to further our rights or even maintain them as they currently stand. They don’t care about economic equality, and the most we’ve gotten from them is lip service. Democrats and Republicans are two heads on a vicious and malevolent double-headed fire-breathing dragon. One of these heads breathes fire of its usual color, and this head will explicitly warn you that this fire is there to kill your ass. The other head, on the other hand, will breathe a mesmerizing, astonishingly flashy rainbow-colored fire instead. On top of that, this head will tell you that if you get touched by this fire, you’ll heal from all of the wounds that the other head’s fire has given you, but in actuality, it just exacerbates the damage.

This double-headed dragon has wreaked havoc on marginalized communities, and these marginalized communities know, be they oppressed on the basis of race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, religion, or anything else, that the rainbow fire actually has zero healing properties, so stop acting like they do not know because we do. In addition, stop pretending that you care about us because you liberals have constantly demonstrated to me, a poor neurodivergent transfem of color, that you do not care about my view on bourgeois electoralism. It’s clear that I am nothing but a pawn to you, and you seem to want to dispose of me the moment that me being your pawn stops working in your favor. If that were anything but the truth, you’d listen to me on how to be a better ally to the marginalized, but you never do. If your outlook is that you want to hurt marginalized people while pretending that you care about them, it’s no wonder that KKKamala HarriSS seems right up your alley.

“Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”

I have none except that:

1. This country is going to get worse and worse. Neither party offers any way out (because they are beholden to capital) and the unviability of a third party means people will constantly bounce between the two, blaming the current signs of decline om the incumbent party. Incumbent disadvantage will be a thing. In the end, Harris lost because she was a member of Biden’s administration and Biden himself only won because he wasn’t a member of Trump’s administration or a member of Trump’s party.

2. The majority of people already recognize the sham election for what it is and opt out to not waste their time. Imagine wasting an entire workday standing in line with nothing to show for it in the end. And as the country further declines and third parties continue to be unviable, more people will check out. These people are fertile soil for radicalization. They are disillusioned with the status quo but don’t know exactly why and are just begging for somebody to show them the way forward.

3. The people who still believe in the electoral process will be and ought to be treated like Jehovah’s Witnesses: a bunch of evangelizing and obnoxious freaks. Believing in the electoral process should be treated like believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.

I think we can use this to put the nail in the coffin of arguments about stalling or harm reduction. I think even people who find that convincing as a concept would have to concede that they’ve ridden that horse as far as it can carry them. It seems self evident that this is not a working strategy at this point.

So if you’re talking to a progressive/lib ask them what their plan was once they stalled as long as they could. Because they have.

lmao AOCIA is already on live breaking out the crocodile tears she perfected during Trumps first term.

-Can’t blame third parties, the margins are too big and they wouldn’t have mattered in a single state.
-Can’t blame non-voters, voter turnout was relatively high.
-Can’t blame the Electoral College, Trump won the popular vote by almost twice the difference that Hillary has in 2016.
-Can’t blame it on people being ignorant of the ramifications, Trump had already been president for 4 years, he was the presumptive nominee all along, and throughout election season he actually polled higher than his favorability when he left office.
-Can’t blame corruption or voting machines, the last week of polling had Trump ahead, and the exit polling lines up with the results.
The only thing the Democrats have to blame is themselves, for running a bad campaign with an inferior candidate and striking out on a softball.

A close friend of mine was remarking in the last few weeks how the Democrats had pivoted from the “weird” messaging, which seemed to be working, back to the “he’s dangerous and unstable and a threat to democracy” messaging, which they knew from experience did not have much of an effect. In fact, from exit polls, out of people who said “democracy in this country is threatened” or prioritized a candidate’s capacity to do the job, a clear majority supported Trump! This is yet another damning piece of evidence that suggests that Democrats were actively not doing what they could to win the election. Either they prioritized fundraising at the expense of outcome, or they actually threw it.

Also, Allan Lichtman BTFO.

I’m Canadian and Trump hysteria is only gonna hurt the conservatives and helo the ndp, the lib party is dead in the water as far as public opinion goes. This is gonna make things easier for the NDP cause we can literally point to America and say ‘look where it got them, we have a viable third party’

Texts with my lib dad

For anyone talking with trans friends or loved ones, here’s a good resource @marcie@lemmy.ml prepared.

I think this fits: