this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
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You're misrepresenting the meaning of a vote in the general election of a first past the past voting system to select electors who will cast votes later after the result is certified.
If we're being really casual, sure, it's "approval." But what it really is is a selection of the best option out of what is available.
When the votes are tallied and the Electoral College outcome is finalized, it will either be President Biden getting ready for another four years or President Elect Trump getting ready to take office.
So our only choice here is between a bad four more years of Biden doing some good things because he wants to and some when he has no other choice, or a disastrous four years of Trump doing as many terrible things as possible as fast as possible, almost certainly ending our way of government.
We don't have the "luxury" of time but we have to live in the reality of time. Time is something we can't work around. It takes time to organize, time to work within whatever system(s) we're in, time to convince others to join us, ...
Whatever damage we do to the climate becomes more and more difficult to reverse, major and more difficult to adapt to, affects more and more people, as time goes on. But we have to plan for working in that scenario because we still don't have the numbers of people on our side.
I'm not arguing that we should "wait," either. We've seen that Biden can change his mind and change course. We need to work with that, get more progressives and liberals and Democrats elected from medical examiner to dog catcher to school board to state government to federal. And push them left every time. More unions. More corporate regulation. A four day work week with no reduction in pay, or five 6.5-hour days. Universal basic income. Lower the Medicare eligibility age by five years every 2 years until we have Medicare for all. End all fossil fuel subsidies, and transfer 75% of the subsidies to renewables and the other 25% to next gen power research. Give every worker a minimum of 3 weeks paid vacation and 6 months of parental leave. Provide for end of life care. Make abortion legal safe and rare and decided upon by the pregnant person and their doctor. On and on and on.
On foreign policy, basically support actual freedom and oppose oppression. (Not 1960s Cold War "support capitalism" CIA bullshit.)
We can take steps toward that with Joe Biden as president. Not as fast as you or I would want. But we'll get none of that, and probably the opposite of some of it, if Trump is elected.
A vote for someone is approval of them. It legitimises them. We're not being casual, that's just what a vote is.
You are voting for your representative. Your vote signals approval of said representative. Or does Biden come to your house after you've voted for him, to ask you "hey Jack, what kind of vote was it you gave me? Do you support me a lot or just kind of?"
Voting legitimises the government. The US has, time and again, used the fact that it's government is elected (never mind the fact that voter participation is low and popular vote doesn't matter) to impose it's will on countries which has "wrong democracies".
I stopped reading after your first two blocks of text, because it's clear you're just doing handwringing and semantics wrapped with some slight condescention. I'm not interested in simple rhetorical debatebroisms, and I'm not interested in your lib-cliches of pretending to acknowledge issues only to then trivialise and ignore them, whilst completely misunderstanding what is actually being said. Misunderstanding being the charitable interpretation.
I'm sure the rest of the text is you speaking about the climate in some dumbass manner and saying some dumb bullshit about how Biden "at least lets us work with him" or whatever. Probably something akin to "sure it's not as fast as you'd want, but at least it's something". The world is going to burn and you will sit in the rubble wondering what happened. I'll bet 5$ that you say some variation of "we can work on pushing Biden left"
It's clear you have no concept of how political power is wielded.
Almost, but not quite.
What a vote actually means is "I prefer the result I expect from this vote over the result I expect from the other vote."
If withholding your vote this time means they offer more next time, that's a result you might want. On the other hand, if you always vote blue as long as you slightly prefer the democrats, you give the democrats permission to move to the right, slightly behind the republicans, indefinitely.
in practice, though, they'll always find some way to gin up votes without offering substance. that's their whole job.
This is not true in the slightest.
Why would it be? The Democrats only need to be slightly less bad than the Republicans, and your vote is guaranteed.
Democrats are not the American Left.
What have the Democrats actually done?
The policies of the Democratic party are bought by corporate interests. The material interests of a corporation run directly counter to those of a worker. Workers want higher wages, companies want lower. Workers want public healthcare, insurance companies want private. Workers want less war, the MIC wants more. Workers want lower housing costs, hedge funds and landlords want higher. Who do the Democrats side with? What direction is America headed in?
Is this a democracy or a good-cop bad-cop routine?