I’ve never understood why “Not Republicans” isn’t enough, frankly.
Well there are two reasons:
1-It’ll never beat fascism. The “critical thinking” skills you’re talking about simply don’t exist or aren’t well-developed in most of the American (or really, world) population. The average person does not care about politics, so you have to make them care and no matter how good your stick is if there’s no carror it won’t stick. Voters can wait hours in polling stations to vote for the smaller shit sandwich against the bigger shit sandwich, or they can just… not do that and go about their day. The consequences will only come later, meanwhile the disappointment and indignation come now. Humans simply aren’t made to take the lesser evil here.
2-Voting for a politician is an inherently transactional affair. You vote for them and if they gain power they use it to pass the bills you want them to pass, or at least prevent bills you don’t want to pass from passing. The Democrats stopped honoring that transaction, and in their misguided rightward shift crossed too many red lines. They angered Muslims and progressives by their stance on Gaza, they angered left-leaning Latinos by their stance on immigration, and angered the average voter by pretending that the economy was fine and that they were doing a terrific job when it was not and they were not, etc etc. I remember seeing a comment here a little ways back saying something to the effect of “I’m a Latino and I used to vote blue because of immigration, but now they adopted the republican position so they lost my vote”. Repeat this enough times and you have a significant fraction of their support base saying “you don’t care about me or my struggles? Then fuck you too” and not voting on election day.
Well there are two reasons:
1-It’ll never beat fascism. The “critical thinking” skills you’re talking about simply don’t exist or aren’t well-developed in most of the American (or really, world) population. The average person does not care about politics, so you have to make them care and no matter how good your stick is if there’s no carror it won’t stick. Voters can wait hours in polling stations to vote for the smaller shit sandwich against the bigger shit sandwich, or they can just… not do that and go about their day. The consequences will only come later, meanwhile the disappointment and indignation come now. Humans simply aren’t made to take the lesser evil here.
2-Voting for a politician is an inherently transactional affair. You vote for them and if they gain power they use it to pass the bills you want them to pass, or at least prevent bills you don’t want to pass from passing. The Democrats stopped honoring that transaction, and in their misguided rightward shift crossed too many red lines. They angered Muslims and progressives by their stance on Gaza, they angered left-leaning Latinos by their stance on immigration, and angered the average voter by pretending that the economy was fine and that they were doing a terrific job when it was not and they were not, etc etc. I remember seeing a comment here a little ways back saying something to the effect of “I’m a Latino and I used to vote blue because of immigration, but now they adopted the republican position so they lost my vote”. Repeat this enough times and you have a significant fraction of their support base saying “you don’t care about me or my struggles? Then fuck you too” and not voting on election day.
Warn democrats that this is happening and they call you a russian trumper and blame you when they lose.