There's No "Progressive Foreign Policy" Without a Reckoning for Dems Who Supported Genocide

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/64444464

There's No "Progressive Foreign Policy" Without a Reckoning for Dems Who Supported Genocide - Divisions by zero

>Progressives acknowledging the fact of genocide is a good first step, and it’s useful that Ocasio-Cortez and others have done so — “I think [unconditional aid to Israel] enabled a genocide in Gaza,” she said in Munich — but it is not in and of itself sufficient. Before anyone in the party can move on to selling a post-Biden vision of human-rights-first foreign policy, they must address what accountability for the war criminals in the Biden administration — those who aided, armed, and funded genocide — should look like.

Come mid-terms I’m going to proudly vote democrat everywhere I can so hopefully we can get some control of the country again.
even if said dem supports genocide and war crimes? vet carefully. vett? vette? whatever. boba vett your votes carefully. :)

If it’s a choice between republicans and democrats I will vote for democrats every time.

I will vet during primaries but mid-terms aren’t the time for that with what’s happening at home in the states and aboard with the current administration.

Democrats who support genocide can’t win, and candidates aren’t static.

If at any point you are supporting a Democratic candidate who holds unelectable policies, you are doing work to support the opposition. Your only option is to move the candidate when they hold a policy which will prevent them from winning the election.

When you say something like “Any Blue will do” in the face of a genocide, you are doing work to get the Republican in the race elected.

If you read my entire comment you’ll see I’m not advocating for ‘any blue will do.’

Not voting for the only other viable option is actually doing the work to vote in the republican.

Please, address the issue on its merits: If you advocate for a candidate who has a policy which will prevent them winning a race, you are doing work for their opposition.

This is what happened with Biden/ Harris. By supporting them (ABWD) instead of being critical, you set up the permission structure necessary for them to recognize they’ve got your vote without having to change policy positions. The permission structure you and I do me you because you are maybe the most clear and consistent Blue MAGA voter on lemmy, that permission structure allowed Harris to maintain a pro-genocide stance into November. Since holding that stance would prevent her from winning the election, shifting the responsibility from a candidate who is one person, of one mind, running one campaign to change their policy, you shifted that responsibility to the millions of unwashed masses, whom have no great track record for making good decisions when it comes to November, and for which there is no credible mechanism to move the minds of millions of people in the period of a few months or weeks. There is no tool a campaign can operate which changes millions of minds from “I will not support a genocide” to “I will support a genocide”, and I’m glad that this is the case.

Framing elections as if its a matter of individual choice shows an explicit and intentional illiteracy when it comes to how campaigns, electoral-ism, and electorates work. One voter is like a grain of sand. It acts and behaves like a solid, and has other properties we would liken to “its a tiny rock”. But when millions of grans of sand are moving together, their behavior is nothing like an individual grain. When we take individual votes and scale them to millions of voters, their properties and behaviors are different. What and how an individual voters should act is fundamentally irrelevant. We’re not talking nor are we ever talking about what individual voters do. That’s what oil companies in the 90’s did with recycling: they convinced you that your individual choice was what mattered, when they controlled the levers of power to determine what choices were available to you.

The candidates and campaigns have all the power to change their polcies or approaches in this system. Voters as individuals have practically 0 power in this system. There is no practical mechanism to get millions of voters to do whatever it is you would have them do (at least not over the course of months and weeks, like an election). There is an abundance of tools to operate on individual politicians to get them to change.

If you allow a politician who is competing for your vote to maintain an unelectable position, you are doing work to support their opposition.

I’m not gonna lie. I also tend to ignore posts using the term “Blue MAGA”, because it was frequently used to harass black and brown people for being scared about Trump.
You should work on that then. Its a useful term and a clear demographic, and has been for almost 10 years, and I can’t think of any example in history of it being used to harass black and brown people. You’re more than welcome to provide one.
It’s used to equate normie Democratic voters with MAGA. It’s especially cruel and disingenuous coming from someone who helped the MAGAs defeat Democrats and put us where we are now.

Yes, in other words, Democratic voting fascists.

Democrats who simultaneously want their perspectives to be the only perspectives catered to in elections, and yet also argue they’ll vote for anyone or anything the party apparatus serves up to them. They support kids in cages. They want better training and body cams for ICE. They have no real issue with Trumps foreign or domestic policies, and are mostly just annoyed that Trump isn’t going through the appropriate permission structures to enact them.

They are why we lost 2024. And its out there now. Everyone whose perspective worth two wiffs of stinky piss gets it.

All I’m doing here is presenting the reality of voter behavior. You want voters to behave differently than they do. But thats not how voters work. You can want them to be smarter, to vote more however you would like them to, but in reality, the world we actually to make decisions around, voters don’t do that. And we knew, then, in 2023, that just telling voters that they had to vote for a candidate whose policies they didn’t support, we knew then it would lose the election.

Blue MAGA is the contingent that maintained the party in un-electable policy positions. In every election, no matter how much you might like to present it to the otherwise, there are three options: your candidate, the opposition, and the couch. And guess what? They’re already at home on the couch. Strategic voting as a game-theoretical principal falls apart when it meets the reality of voter behavior.

You have a distorted view of the average Democrat. Can I ask where you get your news?

You have a distorted view of the average Democrat.

Who has the distorted view of the average Democrat? The one who is advocating for a strategy that (in both foresight and hindsight) would have won the election, or the the one advocating for the strategy that objectively lost the election?

I would argue that the campaign had a distorted view the average Democratic voter. They lost 7.7% of their own voters from 2020 into 2024.

They support kids in cages. They want better training and body cams for ICE. They have no real issue with Trumps foreign or domestic policies, and are mostly just annoyed that Trump isn’t going through the appropriate permission structures to enact them.

Where did you learn this?

I learned it by not living in an ahistorical vacuum. If you don’t know the context of those points, you are simply illiterate with regards to recent history.
I won’t speculate on your motivations like you do with Democrats. I’ll just say that those statements are clearly not true, and if you were secretly supporting the MAGA movement, you couldn’t be doing it any better than you are now.

You are completely asinine. Its established at this point that the only thing Harris could have done to win the election was to shift her stance on Gaza. You want to provide an excuse to Harris that actually the voters just needed to suck it up and vote for the pro-genocide candidate. the one person who could have made a different choice such that we get a different outcome.

You being media illiterate doesn’t change that. You being electorally illiterate doesn’t change that. If you provided this same excuse for either the Biden or Harris campaign from 2023-2024: you contributed to Trumps victory.