: i am just not sympathetic to the idea that voting for Biden constitutes blood on your hands in a meaningful way. i think if you accept this line of argumentation, you would ultimately have to bite the bullet that this could also be said of paying taxes[1]–and i certainly don’t begrudge people for paying their taxes even as this lines the pocket of the war machine, so then why should judge them for voting?

This is such an important perspective that often seems ignored in these discussions. There is such a wide nuance to being an American and our participation, be it taxes or voting. It’s always seemed clear to me that at bare minimum voting for the lesser evil is the first step down the path of doing the right thing as a citizen. However I also would say that I do somewhat feel this to Trump voters, but I would say that’s more about the intent. I would hazard the assumption that if you’re voting for Trump again it’s likely because you have been pushed to have hate in your heart, not because his foreign policy is just so stellar. Whereas if you’re voting for Biden the intent is likely to not have the other guy.

OP’s post is a very good conversation of exactly this. “I won’t support a genocide, so I won’t vote!” That’s awesome, but by not participating you are inherently accepting to the default winner - your bare minimum participation of voting could have had an affect which you abstained from. In a hypothetical landslide of 1 vote for Trump, suddenly voting has a lot of power. By the way, some of our votes in the last 8 years have been down to barely triple digit breaks - legitimately 1 small town voting could have swayed the results in that towns favor. Voting matters quite a bit.

Given our current circumstances, in regards to deciding a vote for the lesser evil, I personally see a former president who placed as many restrictions as possible on specific citizens while relieving as many restrictions as possible on (mostly specific) corporations, and who had been all too happy to engage with the wrong sorts of International Relations, belligerently ignoring allies and goading more dangerous countries. I also see a current President who is historically known for not making the best decisions for the people, while also having a lot of policy that specifically is (or at least tries to… or at bare minimum says he’ll try to even if he won’t which should go without saying for sooo many Presidents).

Which by the way, yes, I would rather have a President who says he is for ____ rights but maybe doesn’t always have policies that fully align with that. As opposed to a president who says he is actively against those same rights, and actively promotes harm to certain demographics… Damn right. Send yourself back in time 10-15 years, try to remember the general public perception from 2008 to 2014. We were calmer citizens because we had a rational leader who wasn’t spewing hate speech at every turn. Of course other factors had an effect, media exacerbation and whatever else, but that wouldn’t have been the case had we had literally any other President.

And that’s the whole thing of it - if you don’t vote, the voter has no power (giving it to the rest of the voters). If you do vote, the voter has very little power. At. Bare. Minimum. If you are a voter who canvases in your area, you have made a much larger difference - you have gone above and beyond the bare minimum. And who knows, maybe you just happened to live in the town that changed your swing states results. The thing is, the bare minimum should be much more than just voting. Just voting is how we got here in the first place. Just voting isn’t ever going to change anything, because just voting alone doesn’t rally people together under a united ideal.

All this to say - I personally do not think that it is wrong to take what power you have to vote for “fascism in 50 years” as some have recently started to say about Democrats. It’s not wrong to vote this way when the alternative is fascism in 4 years. Futhermore, I think it’s also admitting that doing the absolute bare minimum just isn’t entirely effective.

As U.S. citizens, voting is what we have to do at the bare minimum. We should all be out actively campaigning in our local elections specifically to encourage, inform, and expand our collective understanding of politics. This works two-fold, because as we become more engaged @Kwakigra@beehaw.org we become much more observant. As you say, if Dems are on a path to evil, isn’t the solution for all of us to get as possibly involved as we can? At a certain point, we would be the Dems playing the game.

I say this as someone who has written to my California representatives about many things and having gotten response letters basically calling me an idiot for me expressing my wishes for him to reconsider his position, and why the evil things he’s supporting are actually a good thing. It’s obviously not easy, we’re fighting against 2 generations of propaganda and a media mogul. Some say that we are too far gone, though I don’t believe in that sort of defeatism.

We have many steps that we need to take in order to be set on the right path again. It should start with revitalizing the nations public education system, with a stronger focus on a healthy life-work balance. The fact that basic things about the U.S. system aren’t taught anymore has been a huge setback. I’m young, I didn’t have any sort of homeroom or home ec, it took until my senior year in High School to even learn about how we do our taxes (and it did nothing). These classes were supplemented with “extra critical thinking”, which has clearly failed, something that can be seen by reading just about any comment about a piece of media online. Home Economics, Time Management, and Critical Thinking all meld to make life at home manageable and enjoyable. From working with schools it’s been clear to see what I went through growing up has gotten even worse, especially with Covid putting all of the students on screens and a significant portion of them hardly even learning during that time at all.

Catch up our nations students and we’ll be well on our way back to civility. Fighting against the anti-education crowd and having homeschooling be far, far, far more rigorous than it currently is - state dependent I’m certain but the 3 I’ve lived in, CA, OR, and WI, holy shit they are awful. Homeschoolings seems to have almost become co-opted by the anti- crowds, I’ve regrettably only had 1 good encounter over the last 10 years and it was because the school remained open during Covid, to which the parents said screw that we’re homeschooling. As opposed to homeschooling because they’d have to get a vaccine otherwise, or because the schools “agenda”…

Anyway, I’ve said far too much and gotten pretty off topic. It’s been a while since I’ve gotten to say anything about this and it’s clearly been pent up, otherwise I’d have wrapped this up many paragraphs ago.

I am also primarily a utilitarian thinker. What has me considering the deontological position on this specifically is that, for utilitarian purposes, I have voted to allow our entire federal government to continue to drift right. When choosing the lesser of the two evils every time I did, I think I failed to consider that my permissiveness would embolden the lesser of the two evils to become increasingly evil as they were aware I wasn’t voting for them but against their opponent. I gave them license though my voting behavior to move to the right as much as they wanted and be financially rewarded for doing so because they knew they would always have my vote as long as they weren’t as bad as their opponents. This genocide is a red flag to me that since I have been voting to avoid immediate consequences, the ultimate consequence is that some of those consequences I was afraid of are now guaranteed from both options to varying degrees. The more I have rewarded the Democrats with my vote which they need to be elected, the only thing they need from me, they have no incentive whatsoever to do anything but what benefits themselves just as long as what they do isn’t as bad as what the Republicans would do. Average people aren’t funding their campaigns, we are only handing our votes over to them because their opponents are worse, despite both of them becoming worse all the time.

When I talk about whether to grant or withhold my vote to my only actual option, it’s a matter of currency and power rather than morality. I have found that if I always grant my vote regardless of the behavior of who receives my vote, they know they have license to do the things they were doing when I voted for them and no reason whatsoever to change course according to what I would like to see and not see, such as a genocide.

You are absolutely right that there isn’t an option for president outside blue and red. Our system isn’t built for it. Blue knows I’m not suicidal and can’t vote for Red, so the question becomes whether or not I will tolerate them becoming worse every cycle as long as during each cycle their candidate isn’t as bad as their opponent who is also getting worse every cycle. The option is whether to support Blue regardless of what we do and watch the system deteriorate, or demonstrate to blue that there are limits to how far right they can move regardless of who they’re up against with the hope that at least one side will stop getting worse because there are still consequences.

The reason I want to stop this cycle is survival. I think we are guaranteed to drift into explicit oligarchy as long as both sides are allowed to continue moving rightward. Every election since 2010 has been worse than the one before it, and I don’t think there’s a reason that would change after this cycle. The Republicans are going to try to capture the appeal of Trump even though they haven’t yet, and the right wing runs on delusion so they aren’t accountable to anything. All they have to worry about is telling lies that people strongly want to believe. The Democrats have to contend with reality and in my view are party far more likely to react to something that happened here in real life so they have better chances at being elected in the future.

I will easily concede that this is awful timing. Trump is a massive threat as you described. If I thought he would be highly successful in everything you mentioned, I would not consider doing what I’ve been advocating for. Even though I know him to be incompetent and without much support outside his base for anything he wants to do, any amount of success he has will be a problem. The primary reason I see fit to act as I described is because I predict the 2028 election will be between someone who is to the right of Biden vs someone who is to the right of Trump, and every future election it will be more and more difficult to change course from where we’re headed. All future elections could be about how appealing Republican lies are vs how many people don’t want them elected and are willing to vote for anything else.

in general: by virtue of existing within a state, you will always be complicit to some degree in the crimes of that state, regardless of what you do to extricate yourself from supporting them.

I half agree with you. Yes, even if I do not vote for Biden I am certainly complicit in part for his actions, at least so long as I am not in open rebellion against the government. I am, by simple merit of enjoying the privileges afforded me as an American, complicit in it. It’s a passive complicity.

But when you move into taking actions that actively support the evil, you are no longer passively complicit, you are actively so, and I think there is a real material difference, rhetorically, morally, and practically (though even passive complicity is wrong).

If we know, as we do, that Biden will continue to support Israel’s genocide, and still vote for him, how can we un-hypocritically fault anyone else who supports a genocidal leader so long as they can claim some other worse person waiting in the wings?

If we place our own innocent lives above the lives of equally-innocent people in other countries (since none here would be advocating voting for Biden if it was some sub-group of Americans he supported the genocide of, as Trump does), how can we think ourselves better than Republicans? “The only moral genocide is my genocide”, as it were. The genocide of Americans is non-negotiable, rightfully, but apparently the genocide of Palestinians must be ‘contextualized’ properly (and in this case, lose out to our own internal political interests).

On a practical level, we are absolutely hemorrhaging any remaining shreds of international credibility, for a leader who was supposed to be the “return of US world leadership”. We are finding ourselves more and more isolated by the day, which is exactly what Trump and the rest of the isolationist GOPers want as well. Whatever quiet political leverage we on the Left gained from Trump being a worldwide laughing stock (and if you know any Trumpers, you know that no matter how much they pretend otherwise, they do feel anger about that ridicule), has now been matched by Biden being a worldwide figure of shame and frustration. Our closest allies are rebuking us over our inability to even just step aside and allow the rest of the world to pressure Israel into a ceasefire. Biden may have actually succeeded in undermining US hegemony in a way that Trump could only have dreamed of.

I am not claiming to have an answer that fixes this. I don’t think there is any way to extricate ourselves cleanly from the very circumstances of our country’s origins and its continuing imperialism and settler-colonialism. We’re stuck with this collective guilt, until the day this government ceases to exist. If you choose to treat that guilt as the simple “cost of doing business” of living as an American, and vote for Biden, that’s fine. But for me, I cannot accept active complicity in Biden’s reelection without eschewing my own personal moral redlines. Everyone has to draw their own lines. Maybe some would torture one man to save the lives of many, and that’s certainly Utilitarian, but don’t condemn the persons who wouldn’t, lest we lose sight of the heinousness of the act itself.

To my mind, this rhetoric pushing Biden over abstention as the only moral action risks is taking us down a pathway of moral relativism in which even genocide can be excused under the right circumstances, and that’s not a path I will walk.