Trans journalist Erin Reed has published a list of Democratic midterm candidates with anti-trans records, and the question she is forcing is one the party would rather not answer: if trans voters keep rewarding Democrats who harm them, what signal does that send? The calculation is real, the stakes are high, and there is no clean answer.
No, you’re looking at it through the lens of propaganda. It is not cold logic to believe that a politician in the Democrat party is inherently obviously better than a politician in the Republican party. The two parties are PR campaigns of the rich elite. The psychographics of the voting population are broadly segmentable into groupings that can be assigned to one party or the other and remain consistent enough to fit their campaign. Using cold logic, the Ds and the Rs are sharing the responsibility of maintaining an ultraviolent genocidal oligarchic international EuroCentric Christian white supremacist patriarchal empire.
Obama is literally out here this week saying the Ds need to stop campaigning on material conditions and focus on moral narratives about we can all live together in this country. He and Biden were the ones that created the policy framework, headcount, budgets, and private contractor relationships that Donald Trump is using to terrorize cities with ICE. Obama/Biden appointed the exact same man that Trump appointed to be deportation czar. And Obama came after Bush 2 but continued Bush 2’s war campaign to destroy 7 countries - Libya was the 6th that Bush couldn’t get to, so Obama and Clinton took care of destroying that sovereign nation. Iran was the 7th, and Obama couldn’t get to it so he negotiated the JCPOA and then Trump demonstrated that the military strategists were already planning to destroy Iran they just needed more time.
What else does cold logic tell us? Did Biden know Trump was a fascist threat? Sure seemed like he was talking about it mostly openly. What did Biden do? Well, he had the full unredacted Epstein Files. He could have launched a federal criminal investigation into Trump. But he didn’t. He just sat on it. And then he fucked the primaries. He did nothing at all to stop Trump, to reduce his available toolset, to play politics. Nothing. Biden saw Trump with a knife and a bunch of people saying “he’s got a knife” and said “watch out for that guy, he’s got a knife” and then left.
What else does cold logic tell us? Corporate profits are higher under Democrats. Democrats regularly say one thing on TV and then vote with their Republican colleagues. Democrats support mass domestic surveillance, Israel genociding Gaza, increased military spending, increased police spending, using police against the homeless, mass recialized incarceration, and yes, they even support anti-trans sentiment.
That’s logic. Blue no matter who is not logic, it’s emotional.
Those are all fair points; I can’t argue any of them, at least not with my level of understanding. I would even agree that Republicans and establishment/neoliberalism Democrats are ultimately rolling up to the same folks to get their marching orders, even if their outward facade paints them as opposing factions. I would argue, though, that while the Democrats you describe represent the same brand of fascism as the Republicans they (ostensibly) rail against, they do push it in a noticeably slower, less heavy-handed way than Republicans do. That doesn’t sound like much of a benefit, but I would think it offers progressives a chance to shift the Overton window back to the left during the eras when Democrats are in power; more of a chance than they’d have during a Republican administration like this one anyway, where people are constantly overwhelmed with the avalanche of blatant corruption and intentional cruelty directed toward them. A slower-moving disaster is an objectively better situation than a fast-moving one, because you at least have more time to try to stop it or get out of the way. That’s the cold logic I was referring to in my original comment.
But like I said, I’m not really here to argue. I just wanted to ask a question, the one you skipped right over: What do you expect to gain by either not voting or voting third party in this particular election? You’ve given a salient explanation of why Democrats aren’t much better than Republicans as leaders, but you haven’t explained why picking an unlikely third option (or not picking one at all) is the best choice.
So let’s answer your question. I expect to gain nothing. Which is exactly what I expect to gain if I do vote for them.
There’s a sense in which the process of “power” shifting from one brand to the other brand is much like people buying store brand vs name brand of the same product made by the same manufacturer. People buy the one or the other en masse because of larger economic trends driving their buying behavior. Individuals making deliberate choices to “not pay the brand tax” is such a small component of aggregate buying behavior it’s not even worth modeling.
In this way, the old adage “it’s the economy, stupid” is saying that people don’t really win elections because conscientious voters who are thoughtful and strategic do things - people win elections because of larger economic and social trends. Yes, in individual small swing districts conscientious voting can sometimes become large enough to have a measurable impact, but not in most races, not in most districts, and even among swing districts, not that often.
Instead what’s happening is the 2 brands work to temper the psychological needs of various groups of the American population, serving to create us/them dynamics within the population that serves to divide them against each other and enlist them in maintaining the very powers who oppress them.
Like what happens in these discussions. We are all being oppressed by the entire political system, and yet some of us believe that others of us are paid Russian or Chinese trolls or that we’re actually Republicans because we are trying to keep the focus on the total political system. What we need is to band together as a single group, not as separate groups who fight on the terrain of ballots, but a single unified group of the people against the oligarchs and that means fighting against their mechanisms of control. Party politics is one of those mechanisms.