But the moral prohibition on siding with any administration that endorses genocide will force a different flavor of the exact same logic that centrist liberalism has depended on for so long: hold your nose and align with the least worst thing. Only the least worst thing will no longer be the mild, ethics-agnostic emptiness of modern Western liberalism, nor will it be the multitude of barbaric authoritarians and their secret prisons. It will be communal solidarity, or else nothing, a walking away from all of this. Countless otherwise pragmatic people who would in any other circumstance choose liberalism by default will instead decide none of this is worth the damage to one’s soul. They will instead support no one, vote for no one, wash their hands of any ordering of the world that results in choices no better than this. And the obvious centrist refrain—But do you want the deranged right wing to win?—should, after even a moment of self-reflection, yield to a far more important question: How empty does your message have to be for a deranged right wing to even have a chance of winning? Of all the epitaphs that may one day be written on the gravestone of Western liberalism, the most damning is this: Faced off against a nihilistic, endlessly cruel manifestation of conservatism, and somehow managed to make it close.
— Omar El-Akkad, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, correction mine
That argument doesn’t work when one option is a cataclysmic disaster
But most importantly - when you look at what policies that Trump voters said they voted for, you could divide that into a fraction of voters voting for evil (plain stupid racists), and a large fraction voting for something positive which they had been told Trump would deliver - yet which he was objectively worse at. Most people voted Trump for the economy while told he was a great businessman, or for healthcare while told he’d make health insurance more affordable (but now he made it less), etc…
Almost every positive impact in the last decades that his voters attributed to him was delivered by his opposition.
This wasn’t an election lost to attrition. Your quote explains nothing about what happened.
There was more votes than ever. It was lost to propaganda and people being idiots, not seeing through the fraud. Trump’s policies lost every poll when names were taken off. Everything he wanted to do kept being rejected. But the propaganda machine made people distrust the people who delivered all the things they said they were grateful for, and to trust the liar instead.
Maybe they went to an Arkansas school, or any other american one that teaches people to only support the terrible system.
But hey! You voted right so you can be smug and its only fair you get to point your impotent rage at those who did not vote the way you did. And next time when the two parties are both somehow worse you can once again vote for the lesser evil!
— Omar El-Akkad, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, correction mine
That argument works when the difference is small.
That argument doesn’t work when one option is a cataclysmic disaster
But most importantly - when you look at what policies that Trump voters said they voted for, you could divide that into a fraction of voters voting for evil (plain stupid racists), and a large fraction voting for something positive which they had been told Trump would deliver - yet which he was objectively worse at. Most people voted Trump for the economy while told he was a great businessman, or for healthcare while told he’d make health insurance more affordable (but now he made it less), etc…
Almost every positive impact in the last decades that his voters attributed to him was delivered by his opposition.
This wasn’t an election lost to attrition. Your quote explains nothing about what happened.
There was more votes than ever. It was lost to propaganda and people being idiots, not seeing through the fraud. Trump’s policies lost every poll when names were taken off. Everything he wanted to do kept being rejected. But the propaganda machine made people distrust the people who delivered all the things they said they were grateful for, and to trust the liar instead.
Implying that a Harris/second Biden administration wouldn’t be a cataclysmic disaster
Implying that any outcome where AmeriKKKa continues to exist and destroy our world wouldn’t be a cataclysmic disaster
If you can not understand a difference in scale then your school years was a cataclysmic disaster
Maybe they went to an Arkansas school, or any other american one that teaches people to only support the terrible system.
But hey! You voted right so you can be smug and its only fair you get to point your impotent rage at those who did not vote the way you did. And next time when the two parties are both somehow worse you can once again vote for the lesser evil!
You can move to a dictatorship if you want to be relieved of the option to vote wrong
Yeah! That is my point!