#he cites revolutions that needed violence to succeed in bringing about positive change too like 🤯 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

articlesofnote · 4 years

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Thoughts on the 2020 election, saved for later

Originally as a facebook comment, and saved here for posterity.

So many threads to keep in hand, so many opinions to attempt to grok! L___ - you started this thread by giving substance to the thought that I've been mulling over in my own mind - to wit, that in terms of actual outcomes a Biden presidency will probably be functionally equivalent to a second Trump term. From what I've seen - and I think at this point it should probably be explicitly stated by anyone having any kind of political discussion that "what I've seen" is mostly equivalent to "a highly curated list of headlines and hot Twitter takes that are engineered to a) fit my preconceived biases by agencies mostly out of my control; b) skewed heavily towards the inflammatory; and c) bracketing the discussion in ways that I don't always notice" - anyway, from what I've seen, this is absolutely a reasonable conclusion to draw. Responding to J___: it is certainly fair to say that Biden and Trump are miles apart in many respects, but to say that Biden "will be nothing like Trump" is, in my opinion, to focus too much on the style and less on the substance of their governance. This is particularly true if, as you say (and I wholeheartedly, whole-souled-ly agree), the most important goal of our next president is "preventing the apocalypse" - which I take to be the already-present and ever-worsening climate crisis, with all of its attendant n-th order miseries. We know that Trump could not care less, but what in Biden's record - not PR horseshit or campaign sloganeering or any no-accountability pabulum he might put out there - makes you think that he gives any more of a shit about "preventing the apocalypse" than Trump does? And even if you're referring to some other apocalypse, I think this point still stands; Biden stands (proudly!) for the status quo power structure that created these problems to begin with. If Trump is the rat in the kitchen, Biden is a termite in the foundation - the rat might seem more important, but it's not going to bring the house down. When it comes to the hypothetical Bernie presidency, you've got some pretty solid points; it's definitely fair to assume he wouldn't have had the political support that he needed to get his headline policies enacted, and in fact I suspect that even if he had won the nomination, he would have had a much rockier road to the election than us Bernie supporters assume. In particular I think his choice of running mate would have been a huge hurdle to overcome - but why bother with moot points? G___ - I think you hit the nail on the head when you say that Biden doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell to beat Trump. It's only a little bit of schadenfreude on my part to say that it's not even likely to be close; he's going to get absolutely wrecked in the general for various reasons that are only tangentially related to how he won the nomination. Gotta disagree with you about violence being the only way to carry progressive ideas forward, as it seems like writing and organizing are also pretty important - but most important of all seems to be picking the right moment and the right allies. And before you too deeply indulge any fantasies of carrying a rifle to the steps of the White House, remember that historically speaking it's the ones that are agitating for change who suffer, rather than inflict, the lion's share of the bloodshed, and that entrenched power structures are usually pretty capable of defending themselves against military force. Your daughter is surely better off with you as a living role model for positive masculinity than as a dead abstraction. If you're interested in learning more about why I think this, I stole most of these ideas from a book by Gene Sharp called "From Dictatorship to Democracy" - worth a read if anything I've said in this paragraph has been interesting. You're actually one of the few people I know who is going about revolution in the way I would consider "right," which is to say, "likely to actually succeed" - building localized resource production where most of the wealth gain is (ideally) kept in your hands rather than enriching those who would use that power against us. I've very much enjoyed your posts about building community agricultural sustainability - that effort is more damaging to the toxicity of the status quo than any armed militancy could be. Then again, the folks with guns will probably have the upper hand if they ever wanted to steal that wealth, directly or indirectly. But this is getting rather far afield from the upcoming election - apologies for rambling. H___ makes a good point about federal judge appointments being worth electing Biden for; frankly, the Supreme Court is already conservative, RBG or no RBG, and Biden isn't going to be the one to add extra justices to make a larger-and-also-progressive SCOTUS. However, such circuit court appointments as come up are damn important as well, and are an important part of building a truly progressive power base as K___ alluded to. The Republicans did not reach their current summit of power - and they are absolutely more powerful, in the sense of being able to enact their policy and control the terms of the political discussion, than the Democrats are - without something like forty or fifty years of patient work, base-building, local victories, organizing, etc. To ignore the structural aspects of political power as the Democrats so often seem to is a trap that I would hope progressives don't fall into. But, then again, the fate of the Bernie campaign does demonstrate that the Democrats understand political power and can marshal it effectively within their organization, more so even than the Republicans could in 2016 against Trump, which implies that their failure to do so in the policy arena is in fact intentional. Certainly they do seem to make a lot of political hay from the fact that they are consistently "the lesser of two evils" - gotta vote for harm reduction! gotta vote for our person, because their guy is literally the fucking worst! - which nevertheless still allows them to be pretty fuckin' bad. J__ and R___ - why in God's name are people so worried about Putin specifically, as though he were in some way uniquely worse than the Americans that Trump has around him? Putin's bad, but he's in Russia; why not be worried that Mike Pence has Trump in his power, which is both a) much more worrisome and b) actually true? And, R___, I know I speak for myself (and perhaps a few others in this thread) when I say that it's Biden's long political career that makes it so hard to countenance voting for him. You might say that it's not the years in the work, but the work in the years, that matter. But, I am young - you must know more about his career than I do, if you're citing it as a reason to vote for him. What has he done that I should respect him for? About the best that I can say of him at this point is what K___ said - he's more (which is not to say very) susceptible to liberal thinking and he perhaps pays more attention to the progressive zeitgeist - that there is a chance he might, if he works at it, mitigate some of the harm done during the Trump presidency. I'm already behind the posts that have come in since I started writing this, so I'll stop here. Apologies for any redundancy or lack of clarity, as well as the length - I had not the time to make it shorter, as the fellow once said.

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