Political Memes

You claimed that the Gaza issue ‘alone’ proved your point. So originally you were suggesting that not only those 6 mil were left fanatics, but the other 12 mil as well? *

My point is not that they're 'fanatics', my point is that they chose to abstain from voting for the sake of some abstract notion of left purity despite this leading directly to the murder of MORE of the people they claimed to be standing up for, and in service to the genocidaires they claimed to be standing against. I mean, fuck's sake, the Israeli far-right was openly celebrating Trump's win, and openly pulling for him before that.

Enough of that 6 million were left-leaning and voted on purity politics concerns, as demonstrated by the top issue named being Gaza, not a traditionally right-wing or centrist issue, and one that polling backed up even at the time as overwhelmingly the concern of left-leaning voters, not centrist or right-leaning voters, that Harris, a centrist ghoul but the anti-fascist coalition candidate, lost by a paltry ~2 million votes, leading the literal Nazi candidate to win.

My claim is that there are two groups: crazy abstaining leftoids and normal people who lean left. The Dems lost because they failed to effectively appeal to this second group.

There was considerable cross-pollination of ideas between the fringe left in 2024 on the Gaza issue and the mainstream; I find it would be a very difficult argument, then, to make that the 'normal people who lean left' were not similarly 'enjoying' a cross-pollination of narratives of that variety, especially since the ultimate decision made was to abstain from voting despite one candidate being distinctively and significantly worse on the issue than the other. That fringe left groups openly pushed the idea that "both sides" were the same on the issue of Gaza in 2024, it would seem difficult to suggest that 'normal people who lean left' were immune to narrative suggestions by ideological allies, while mainstream sources and folk were uniquely suggestible.

What's more, where and why is the distinction made? If the reason for abstaining is predicated on the same insane ideas, that one worships Stalin and the other 'only' thinks that left-purity on an issue is worth genociding Gazans and Americans alike is a minor detail. My claim is not that the majority of those who abstained on the Gaza issue are Stalinists, but that they, based on insane ideas of purity and overwhelmingly on leftist grounds, not right-wing or centrist grounds (as neither right-wing nor centrists are particularly anti-Gazan genocide in appreciable numbers, nor are they ordinarily reliable Dem voters), cratered our last hope of averting all of... this. Regardless of what happens going forward, we very much did not avert goddamn anything, and we very easily could have.

The 'R/Stalinisgreat' reference is sardonic, not literal.

I think that group can be mobilized with a good campaign that appeals to those people.

I think we're arguing about different things.

My point is not that these people cannot be reached under any circumstances. My point is that here, on Lemmy, people constantly talk about how abstaining is a perfectly acceptable and moral choices under grounds of left-purity. For that matter, the attitude is far from restricted to the Gaza situation; the Gaza genocide is just the purity politics issue which is most starkly leftist and the one most often praised on here, whereas the broader argument is that this whole purity politics bullshit is bad and contrary to the point of political participation for anyone with a hint of actual morality instead of masturbatory self-indulgence dressed up as civic interest.

As the meme points on, no amount of street cred or internal fuzzies justifies murdering people for no gain for anyone except the people you (generic you) claim to be enemies with. This was a bad decision; in fact, it was an outright immoral decision, and it should be recognized as such. That many people on here insist on lionizing this decision as some heroic blow against 'the Man' is not only morally repugnant, but actively encourages a repeat of this purity-politics behavior the next time the issue of "Please for the love of God unite against the literal goddamn Nazis" comes up, whether in an electoral context or an... uglier one. And in support of that, you can look at any number of historical revolutions which fell to infighting, even at the cost of their own literal lives; the successful revolutions succeed because unity politics, not purity politics, are the narrative successfully pushed in service to defeating the greater fucking evil.

By normalizing this purity-politics outlook wherein people are encouraged to sabotage anti-fascist coalition efforts based on nebulous ideas of strategic civic-duty decisions as a spiritualist, personal matter, we set up the scene for this exact kind of situation to happen again. To be quite honest with you, having my life potentially condemned by people who claim to be the allies of folk like me, on what is theoretically on behalf of folk they, likewise, have condemned in greater numbers, is a shit deal to go through even once. I would rather not go through it twice, assuming I get to live that long.

I'm not looking forward to RFK's camps for concentration. I'm not looking forward to having Medicaid stripped from me and ending up unmedicated and vomiting blood on the floor of my bathroom, again, this time probably until I exsanguinate. I'm not looking forward to hearing about Israel finishing up their long-desired genocide in both Gaza and the West Bank. I'm not looking forward to hearing the horror stories from Alligator Auschwitz. I'm not looking forward to hearing about whatever murderous fuckwit plans the administration has for trans folk. I'm not looking forward to the 6 million projected deaths from the pointlessly cruel abolition of US aid internationally. I'm not looking forward to hearing how many additional Ukrainians are going to die because the US is now simping for Russian genocide and imperialism. And I'm really fucking tired of hearing people talk about how letting all of this happen was Great, Actually, because it fulfilled some need to keep a pure soul for the Leftist Afterlife(tm).