Nothing Left, by Adolph Reed Jr.
harpers.org
The long, slow surrender of American liberals

This article does a great job of explaining people’s frustration with having to vote for Biden again. It’s long, so here are some quotes. They’re totally cherry-picked, I’d recommend reading the whole thing (especially if you think the problem started with Biden, and that Clinton and Obama were ever good choices).

during the 1980s and early 1990s, fears of a relentless Republican juggernaut pressured those left of center to take a defensive stance, focusing on the immediate goal of electing Democrats to stem or slow the rightward tide.

Today, the labor movement has been largely subdued, and social activists have made their peace with neoliberalism and adjusted their horizons accordingly. Within the women’s movement, goals have shifted from practical objectives such as comparable worth and universal child care in the 1980s to celebrating appointments of individual women to public office and challenging the corporate glass ceiling.

Each election now becomes a moment of life-or-death urgency that precludes dissent or even reflection. For liberals, there is only one option in an election year, and that is to elect, at whatever cost, whichever Democrat is running. This modus operandi has tethered what remains of the left to a Democratic Party that has long since renounced its commitment to any sort of redistributive vision and imposes a willed amnesia on political debate.

I mean, you probably should vote Biden this time, because he’s not all that bad, he’s done some good things. And trump is so terrible, it probably will be the end of democracy and the victory of fascism if he wins. Right? But what about in two years time, or four years, or eight years?

  • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
    52·
    7 months ago

    I don’t think there’s some majority of leftist voters in any single county that could make a difference in a federal election.

    The federal election in 2000 was decided by 537 Florida voters. That, to me, is within the realm of theoretically being possible for one single person (one volunteer doing consistent aggressive get-out-the-vote drives for example) to achieve.

    Most of the time, it doesn’t happen that way (and there was a ton of standard-American-system corruption that put it in the realm of being that close when Gore was by any honest standard the clear winner). But in the aggregate, those single actions can make a difference, and at least in that one example yes it was very literally that up-for-grabs. And I think in hindsight, the 2000 election was a major decision point in what the future of America was going to be in terms of response to climate change, the growth of the fascist state apparatus, economic justice for the working class, killing brown people in the middle east, things like that. I think a large amount of the suffering we’re going through now – taking all the energy away from any positive progress and forcing us to focus on just stopping the bleeding and getting back to where we were – is continued follow-on impacts from getting Bush instead of Gore.

    And, I think the 2024 election will have a much bigger impact than 2000, regardless of how hard the OP article tries to sarcastically poo poo that idea.