At risk of beating the dead horse…
These god damn liberals keep harping over how Joe Biden is the “lesser evil” compared to Donald Trump, necessitating that we go out and vote for him come November lest our flawless democratic system give way to fascism. “Something something incrementalism purity test push him left do you want Trump to win???”
In 2020, it could be feasibly argued, if poorly, that Joe Biden was, in fact, the “lesser evil.” Donald Trump was the president, and Joe Biden was not. Given the dual assumption that Donald Trump was a “substandard” president and that Biden would likely be at least “standard” quality, this made some sense. But the cards are on the table now. All of our most fearful suspicions about a Biden presidency have been utterly validated, and that’s not even counting all the atrocities people scarcely imagined him committing or lacked the capacity to predict altogether. He is more evil than we could have possibly known.
All these same libs are now in a bind. Apparently, Biden HAS to be the Democratic ticket, so he HAS to be elected president, because otherwise Trump would win, and that would be bad, wouldn’t it? The only problem is that Biden, the Anointed One, quite literally has no redeeming qualities. So what do you do to convince people to vote for Biden in spite of literally every crime he has committed and every promise he neglected to fulfill?
The most popular strategy is seemingly to just insist, with zero supporting evidence or even reasoning, that Trump’s America is just an objectively worse version of Biden’s America. Everything will be worse under Trump. Everything. Yes, Biden has failed in almost every respect and has actively worked against what he promised to his constituents, and yes, nothing has improved under Biden and in fact almost everything has generally become worse, but Trump will do all those bad things even harder! So you have to vote for Biden. Or you’re making the world worse. You fascist.
At risk of being the Russian troll living inside everyone’s walls, can we take a moment to appreciate the degree to which the discourse has degenerated? “Vote for the lesser evil” used to mean that we were expected to make “compromises” with politicians we didn’t completely agree with or even took some issues with to avoid aggressive fragmentation within the Democratic Party, a sacrosanct institution representing all that is good in the world. This is perhaps the first election I’ve ever seen where we are not even being promised marginal progress. We are not even being offered different poisons to pick. The same toxic politics of the fascist right have been watered down by the “adults in the room,” and we are expected to not only drink but be thankful it’s not even more concentrated than it is.
Vote Biden 2024: It could be worse!
It is strange to contend with for sure. People are actually facing up to an ongoing genocide and using language like (and I am not exaggerating here based on what I’ve seen) “Trump would make it a thousand times worse.” It is a claim that has no grounding in a reality that we can contend with. Genocide is about as bad as you can get. There is no “turbo genocide.”
What that kind of language tells me is that the people peddling it either: 1) don’t believe there is a genocide going on or 2) don’t care very much that it’s happening because it doesn’t affect them personally.
I don’t know how else one could arrive at such an absurd position. I expect revulsion, disgust, outrage, at what is being backed by the US state and in spite of the horror, it is heartening how many people seem to get that aspect of it (I will take the positives where I can find them). But when it comes to the liberals who somehow bypass all of that and say “but Trump,” I do not trust their understanding of the world or their capability to empathize. I find it difficult to see them as substantially different from reactionaries who fear scapegoated specters.
Very true, and I do wonder if part of the problem lies in their failure to conceive of political action beyond electoralism, even when it’s as simple as withholding their votes. They have way too much faith in the system and not enough faith in themselves. That’s assuming they do, in fact, care and want things to change like they claim they do.