You can pick a higher number. The argument still stands.
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I would love for someone to PM or link me a real argument for how another round of Trump enables this. I mean it; Iām open to being convinced. But Iāve asked in genuineness every time this topic comes up and the only response Iāve ever seen is deflection or sarcasm. I would genuinely love to feel like thereās another option to reduce suffering in the world, but thus-far it just seems like thatās the inoperable second lever.
Apologies Louis, I neglected to use the sarcasm font 
The free-thinking man chuckles to himself as he once again subverts expectations. The only thing compelling him is the compulsion to prove he is uncompelled. But that is his compulsion. He is free. And no one can tell him otherwise.
A simple argument is that we canāt have another 50-100 years of combined GOP and establishment Dem control. The solutions the Democratic Party puts forward to things like climate change, healthcare, economic inequality, foreign policy, etc are not an acceptable outcome even if we were to win every election in every elected office for an entire generation. Continuing to support that party will not encourage them to change those solutions. Having consecutive losses to Donald Trump while running candidates that explicitly campaigned as centrists who are in opposition to the progressive wing of the party might cause the party to change their tactics, making it possible for someone who DOES have acceptable policies to get elected in the future.
I donāt think I really believe that last sentence - I donāt think the party is currently supporting Joe Biden because they think he had the best shot of winning, I think they genuinely want the insufficient solutions he proposes. A second, more compelling argument might be that since neither party seems to have any intentions of enacting the bare minimum things needed to save the planet, provide healthcare to our citizens, and reduce inequality, the only shot we have as a country is to burn it all down and hope that progressives/socialists/whatever get a foothold in the aftermath. Trump seems like heās the ideal person for that.
I donāt know that I agree with option 2 either, but this is where I kind of lose the thread and Iām not sure what option 3 is. But I agree with the premises that the Democratic Party is a bad party. Not as bad as the Republican Party, but bad. The issue is that none of the options for getting a more progressive party in office are very palatable.
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The problem with your argument is the premise that the Democratic Party is bad. Nancy and Chuck are the heroes we deserve.
Doesnāt it cause you pause the shift to a more socialist democracy in places like the Scandinavian countries, Canada or Australia didnāt follow your path? Has any democracy?
There is simply not enough public support for good policy.
If Trump wins and it all burns, weāre not going to get Scandinavian-style social democracy on the other side. Weāre far more likely to have a full on dictatorship.
The main problem with America right now is that itās citizens generally hold awful political positions. Itās where the right-wing long game of funding propaganda and buying everyone off pays enormous dividends.
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This nails it.
I remember thinking this might happen after W Bush got elected. Quite the opposite.
If Dems lose to Trump again, theyāre going to slide even farther to the right. Assuming we even have āelectionsā anymore.
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Am I the same free-thinking man at the lever?
Because Iām in Chicago, and Iāll even pull the Biden lever and throw another one on the useless pile if you really want me to, butā¦ Now what? Iām all out of free-thoughts.
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Thanks for approaching this genuinely. I understand most of this in principal, but am more skeptical about the possibility of rising from the ashes.
I just like to write dramatic-sounding posts and then imagine Morgan Freeman reading them back to me. Itās not personal; you do you.
I mean I could easily argue that America has a million confounding factors that those nations didnāt have that would prevent such a change happening organically. Thatās a cheap argument though, because it means we can never compare one country to another.
But really I just cannot envision that change occurring organically here. Campaign finance laws, deeply rooted racism, decades of propaganda from all channels of media. Idk. Honestly why Iām so angry most of the time is because I genuinely canāt picture a future for this country that is a positive one. I donāt see a path to get there. But 300 million of my neighbors seem sure that one of these parties is going to get us there and disagreeing with that means youāre either just a weird conspiracy theorist or a naive idiot who is incapable of understanding realpolitik.
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Ok, maybe Iām being unclear.
The best example I suppose would be Mosdefās joke, and Iām still not sure if it was intentional. I made a joke where part of the punchline was that I wasnāt criticizing Biden, and Mosdef followed with a joke that trump is still worse.
Again, not sure what level that was on but a serious form of it plays out constantly.
If the answer is still that people are so nervous about trump winning that they kneejerk a response about Biden being better and itās imperative one votes for him, I can dig that.
I agree with this whole post, but I think itās important to note that Americans didnāt come up with these awful political positions on their own. If the Democratic Party had campaigned on and talked up single payer healthcare for the last 40 years, we would probably have it by now. Instead āsure we want everyone to have healthcare, but itās too expensive and socialism is badā has been the LEFTMOST edge of the public healthcare debate up until 2016.
Itās intentional, and I think the blame should be placed on the people in politics and the media who kept it that way instead of a bunch of people who have better shit to do than think about healthcare policy in their free time.
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Man healthcare policy should be an excruciatingly boring technical field that absolutely none of us should really know the details of huh? Except for the docs of course.
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I mean, the non-tongue-in-cheek 5% shows an awful lot of disdain for your avatar of the non-lever-puller and their motivations.
p.s. And weāve established nobody here is an accelerationist or even a swing-state-abstainer so it seems like it comes down to, again, people bitching while pulling the lever.
I agree to a degree but I take a different conclusion than you do. We agree the US is where it is as a result of tens of thousands of small political decisions going back to confederation. It is incrementalism that has led us here.
However, the same incrementalism has also led to all the progress we have seen. Law by law, court case by court case parts of the racist infrastructure has been dismantled, LGBTQ rights have improved, women make up more of the power structure and more and more people gain access to healthcare.
That same incrementalism will lead to more and more progressive policies. It wonāt be at the speed we all want but it will happen.
The problem with the burn it down model is it has no evidence of working anywhere, it contains massive negative variance, and there is no guarantee or even idea what probability there is it would end up with a more progressive society. It mostly feels like an existential scream into the void and not real policy.