This is not me saying at all that Trump is better than Biden; it’s more of an equalization argument that I truthfully can’t see a fiscal difference.
It’s been well known by people like us that the two bourgeois parties are basically the same, but I never really understood how close they were until the last like, 6 months.
Maybe it’s JUST Biden that’s super similar. But regardless, I just don’t see the difference. He spews nice words about trans rights, workers, all of these good things. But the exact same shit that happened under Trump basically happened under Biden. Funding for genocidal states, proxy war funding, funding police, loss of abortion federal protection, separation of kids and parents at the border, etc.
People keep saying Biden is marginally better, where?
I don’t know. I can’t bring myself to vote for any of these guys this time around.
Biden has better aesthetics. No anti-intellectualism, focus on respectability, posturing as progressive etc… in a world where I would buy into US propaganda I’d be inspired by the image that the Dems want to give and I’d be scared and revolted by the image that the Reps have.
But that’s all just aesthetics. Libs who urge you to vote Biden are just not seeing beyond PR
You are not giving Biden enough credit.
Take a look at this:
From 2016-2019, white family wealth had stagnated under Trump. From 2019-2022, white family wealth exploded upwards while black and Hispanic family wealth had remained in stagnation, and that’s just the first 2 years of Biden administration.
In fact, black families found themselves getting poorer under Biden, while the opposite is true for white families:
Source: Federal Reserve
Under Trump, everyone suffered. But under Biden, rich white people are experiencing some of the fastest growth in their wealth in a long time, while screwing the other minorities along the way. That’s the difference between Trump and Biden.
Trump somehow coming out as the better president just because of how much of an incompetent clown he is.
The only thing I can say is that the republican party might have a slightly harder time at pushing Project 2025 if Biden gets reelected. But the agendas and policies will be the same, and republicans will still control most local governments. And the fact that democrats are roughly equal to republicans in their evilness.
I didn’t even consider that most localities are controlled by Republicans. That’s wild
Most localities are rural and sparsely populated. Most people are under democratic party local government
Yeah, it’s infuriating.
My “progressive” governor with Dem supermajorities in the state legislature sounds indistinguishable from a Republican when talking about the migrant “crisis” that’s apparently straining every resource in our deep blue state (though in fairness, they’ve managed to keep the mask hanging on by a thread and haven’t compared anyone to animals publicly).
Listening to them pout about the horrid immigration bill not passing doesn’t inspire much confidence that we’d be following another track if there were a different ghoul in the White House. Maybe more performative brow-furrowing to Trump’s uncivil tone and gestures, but in the end they’ll gladly accept more money for more boots on more necks.
Hypothetically, Trump’s second term could be worse than his first term, so if Biden’s first term is basically as bad as Trump’s first term then maybe Biden’s second term would be better than Trump’s? Maybe? Honestly at this point its arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Lol yeah pretty much except there’s no pretty violins it’s just gun violence and war planes
I feel either candidate (or rather- either side) is going to escalate things up several notches, with their next hypothetical term. Frankly the chances that either goes full fash (while claiming to be defending democracy, of course) seems incredibly high- though all that said, I blame the “establishment” primarily for this as I see their behavior as akin to lighting multiple Reichstag fires, and furthermore I see them as the infinitely more dangerous, unhinged, and yet also, competent of the two sides.
If Trump is the incompetent proto-fascist (he is IMO), Biden and co. (and by “co” I mean- the entire US political “establishment” and blob) are the competent ones who are living out what he could only dream- and using him as a patsy, a boogieman of an excuse to do it. And the process of using Trump and Trumpism as an excuse, has opened a political Pandora’s box- whichever side (though they’re both irredeemable and well on the road to fascism) has the means to do so, increasingly has to utterly destroy the other through lawfare (or hypothetically- worse) to ensure its own safety- that’s my take on it.
Lawfare seems to be more of a liberal thing because ultimately they are ideologically committed to their institutions and laws and norms. Trump and Trumpism are more vulgar, the only commitment is to power and so they just make up new laws and norms whenever it suits them with little interest in preserving institutions. I think that’s really the only strong difference between the two camps.
I’d generally agree with what you’re saying- with the caveat that I don’t think either side is overly interested in preserving institutions, at least not beyond what means those institutions serve of legitimizing their diktat and extracting further wealth and colonial plunder. That’s what it all boils down to, end of the day.
Liberals care about the appearance of their institutions and laws, but I don’t think I’d even say they’re particularly committed to what those laws, norms, and the purported mandates of their institutions stand for. Certainly, I’d say they’re the ones lighting a torch to the (rotten, granted) institutions across the west at the moment- if only to replace what was, with something decidedly worse.
I’ll use the liberal attempts to remove Trump from the ballot as an example. Liberals cook up a way to use existing structures to legally sabotage Trump’s electoral chances, and when the Court blocks them they will just give up because they’ll respect the Court’s decision. They’re ideologically committed to it.
If the Court somehow finds in Colorado’s favor and lets them remove Trump (they won’t but let’s pretend), Republicans would retaliate by removing Biden from their ballots for no legal reason. They’d just do it, they don’t care about legality or the Court’s legitimacy, only results.
I see your points but I’m not sure that Republicans would have the power to do that.
They might not! But they’d definitely try because they don’t care about the law and see it as the pointless obstacle it really is.
Whenever the party switches everything gets worse. Trump to Biden or Biden to Trump. Either will continue to support genocide and so on. Whoever wins nothing good will happen,
PSL is running Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia. I doubt they’ll win but their campaign might raise class consciousness.
I’ve read that PSL has CIA contacts and are allegedly controlled opposition, but I can’t testify to the veracity of that.
https://fleawar.substack.com/p/pslcia-the-counterinsurgency-infecting
I’ve posted about it before, but here is a link. I think the article might be reaching in some places, but it has good points.
Fleawar is definitely a fed.
I’m not psychic, but now that user dark calling elaborated, I think fleawar is reaching.
Counter-point, if it was a genuine vanguard party, they’d absolutely sew these lies about it. In fact I doubt there’s a party out there that doesn’t have someone claiming they’re feds/CIA on substack.
I’m not going to read all of that. If you make these really inflammatory, wrecker claims, you can provide some context.
Question. Are any of the top members of PSL alleged in this (with any kind of proof) to be current/former CIA/FBI or directly compromised or is it all just “these anti-war/anti-imperialist people are associating with and working with former CIA” which is a meaningless charge as the job of anti-imperialist means having strange bedfellows. Which is what I saw trying to briefly skim it in 90 seconds.
I don’t give a fuck that ANSWER works with war criminals or CIA or anti-communists or uses them as expert witnesses as the job of a broad coalition like that is to sway liberal normie people. Fact: former intelligence agents and other ghouls are often incredibly narcissistic and take slights like government going with the other guy’s plan extremely personally to the point of embarking on campaigns of shitting on them and not caring who they’re with. This is not a sign of compromise, it is a sign of dedication to the mission and not being an ultra loser whose purity testing wrecks any chance of material positive outcomes.
You have fair points.
Yeah, really can’t throw disqualifying-type accusations around without a shred of evidence.
I’ve posted about it before, but here is a link:
https://fleawar.substack.com/p/pslcia-the-counterinsurgency-infecting
I think the article might be reaching, but it has some points.
https://x.com/votesocialist24/status/1756333114354221056
They are really bad on COVID. In particular, they reduce masks to a personal choice that is ineffective at stopping the COVID pandemic and seem to believe that universal vaccination will stop the pandemic. The vaccine is great, it reduces deaths dramatically but it does not stop transmission. I understand masking is incredibly unpopular but they could have simply just not mentioned it.
A jury would never convict Trump of keeping classified documents because his fan base is a cult. A jury would never convict Biden of keeping classified documents because he’s a kind old man who forgets things sometimes. It’s pretty clear who the lesser evil is.
I don’t understand the point you are making
A dumb joke about the special counsel report on Biden’s handling of classified documents while out of office
We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory
Is the point of the “lesser evil” part that we can’t tell what you meant?
Trump might Mr Magoo his way into better policy by a combination of ignorance, incompetence, and contrarian willfulness. Biden will die in office after nuking Gaza because he has a dementia episode and thinks Hamas killed his son.
The Trump admin was so incompetent that I think they had a net positive on foreign policy by bungling so many things. Lots of Latin American countries seemed to make progress that would normally have been suppressed by American influence in one form or another. I feel like Hillary wouldn’t have let the whole Juan Guaido thing get so embarrassing.
Trump started low burn trade conflict with EU over several things. Biden turned it around to complete vassalisation of EU.
That’s not a very high bar
Racist geriatric maniac who bombs the middle east vs racist geriatric maniac who bombs the middle east. Neither is better or worse than the other at this point
At least one of the two sought to leave Syria (though they still also bombed it, because of course they did). Though when it comes to the MENA region I think I agree, both are as vile and deranged as it gets.
“Leaving” doesn’t mean much when there are CIA backed militant groups, Special Forces, and private military contractors that can all do the same thing as the soldiers that were redeployed somewhere else.
On one hand; agreed. On the other- those US troops illegally stationed in Syria are there for multiple reasons, not all of which their “non-state actor” counterparts can fulfill- and one of those reasons, is to be a tripwire force, whose presence and any casualties can then be used as an excuse to manufacture consent for greater military escalations up to and including open war.
Once the US troops are out, Syria can begin the (still difficult) process of weeding out the US proxies.
At the moment, there aren’t enough reserve troops or political will to fully engage if the tripwire force was … tripped?
Best we can manage at the moment is just some long range missile strikes or small scale carpet bombing.
But yeah, fair point. (Though I suppose you could replace the soldiers with NGO’s doing “humanitarian aid”
and wait for them to start getting attacked as the same function)
I hope Trump wins if only because I want to see the liberals suffering and seething. It’s hardly adequate karma for the genocide of the Palestinian people but it’ll be something and maybe just maybe to someone somewhere it will send the message that supporting an open genocide even in the genocidal settler west is a bit too far. It also wrenches the system back and forth which is good. Forces all those Europeans who’ve been sobbing about NATO and democracy and liberal values and how evil Putler is to either embrace Trump and look like even worse hypocrites or to distance themselves. It won’t be enough to destroy NATO naturally but any tension that can be added is good. Trump doesn’t wear the mask of respectability Biden does to the world and that’s something too which makes me feel it’s slightly more positive if he’s president in the long game-plan. Liberals won’t be in the streets under 4 more years of Biden, they might be under Trump.
Of course nothing much will change either way. There is no lesser evil, only funny evil pedophile war criminal and not funny evil pedophile war criminal who is hidden by his staff and who make all the decisions for him and give him a veneer of respectability. If you’re a Marxist you shouldn’t vote for either of them. Vote for a communist on your ballot or do a write-in or don’t vote at all for a presidential candidate. Amazingly you can just go and vote on local and state ballot initiatives while not putting anything down on the presidential race.
to either embrace Trump and look like even worse hypocrites or to distance themselves
Or they could do what they did the last time trump was in office - pretend to distance themselves, while running backroom deals and agreements, further colonising Europe to US capital
Well that was happening anyways. The Ukraine situation has assured Europe’s hollowing out and subjugation to the US and they did that all to themselves willingly in the open while proclaiming loudly it had to be done for democracy and liberalism and all that. I frankly don’t see that trend reversing no matter who is president, just that they might have to seem estranged for a while it might encourage a few more politicians on the edges to grow a stronger backbone as Hungry has demonstrated.
Trump gave out checks that made life easier for a month or two while Biden said maybe masks and vaccines don’t kill you, the virus does.
I legit can’t think of a distinction other than that either.
They’re both dumbasses and sides of the same coin. The difference is who they consider the biggest threat, Democrats think its Russia while Republicans think its China.
I mean, in that case Republicans are right lol. Long term at least, not in the “they’re gonna invadeeee” way. China will just win.
There’s no meaningful difference between republicans and democracts because both parties represent the interests of class that holds power in the end. And this isn’t just us Marxists saying this, here’s what a Princeton study analyzing many decades of US policy concluded:
US elections are just a circus with the sole aim of making people feel like they’re participating in the political process. Republicans are a brand curated to appeal to social conservative people and Democrats are a brand for socially liberal ones. The goal is to get people to get invested in issues that don’t threaten capital and to fight over them. As Parenti so aptly puts it in Blackshirts and Reds:
Seizing upon anything but class, leftists today have developed an array of identity groups centering around ethnic, gender, cultural, and life-style issues. These groups treat their respective grievances as something apart from class struggle, and have almost nothing to say about the increasingly harsh politico-economic class injustices perpetrated against us all. Identity groups tend to emphasize their distinctiveness and their separateness from each other, thus fractionalizing the protest movement. To be sure, they have important contributions to make around issues that are particularly salient to them, issues often overlooked by others. But they also should not downplay their common interests, nor overlook the common class enemy they face. The forces that impose class injustice and economic exploitation are the same ones that propagate racism, sexism, militarism, ecological devastation, homophobia, xenophobia, and the like.
I would say its worse than a circus, because with the exception of the time a circus elephant ran through my back yard I can ignore a circus. In the US I cannot ignore an election, no matter how much I tried the news cycle is now built atleast partly around a “big election that will make or break everything” happening soon, either this year or next and if its next we have to start working on it now. It could be just my perseption, but it genuinly seems like the more obvious it is that things are breaking the move the election circus is pushed, as if we have not been playing that way for decades or more
It is an obnoxious spectacle to be sure, and I’m subjected to it living outside the US as well. I do imagine sucking up all the air in the room is an intentional feature. The more news coverage focuses on the election the less attention is given to everything else that’s going on.
Oh undoubtedly, not only does it take away attention from the bigger issues, but it gives the masses a way to channel their frustration through an acceptable (read will do nothing of note) path, and then they can move on with their day. It also gives them a convenent scape goat, the other half of the uniparty, to blame for everything wrong in the world, without focusing on any real systemic issues.
yup
What baffles me is that democRATs cannot produce any viable candidate apart from Biden. Do they have no idea how bad it looks? Even disregarding that Biden is a racist genocidal piece of shit (something that democrats do not care about), he is degenerating neurologically by the day. Looking at him I cannot confidently say that one year from now he will be able to walk and talk at all.
They could literally just fish one of the candidates from last time’s primaries, who are already part of the administration. Mayo Pete? Kamala Harris? Literally anybody who is not at risk of randomly dying of natural causes from now to January next year?
I still maintain my position that the DNC wants to lose, so they can keep the “battle for the soul of our nation” distraction going for another cycle or two. Though I don’t think it’s going to work, I doubt their electoral system is going to last that long.
Viable in what sense?
Getting votes? Getting their “base” motivated to take part in the election?
'Casue I imagine that with Trump being the Republican candidate, the Dems are going to be able to fund raise like crazy.
Getting votes against Trump
Do the high-ups really think Biden is the “compromise candidate” that can “reach across the aisle,” (ie shift right wards) and win support from the mystical “moderate” at this point?
I find this very peculiar. They are in the “vote blue no matter what” mode even if “what” is open genocide, so they should also with no problem vote blue no matter who, and their entire campain for Biden have exactly one point “he is not Trump” anyway.
So why that carcass, they could as well put up random John Doe, Florida Man or a cat and “not Trump” would still work.
This is the problem with listening to their rhetoric rather thsn looking st their acrions. Their rhetoric is a smokescreen; their actions reveal their true values.
“Vote blue no matter who” is a rationalization. You are correct that if they wanted to win no matter what, they’d pick a better candidate than one who is explicitly pro-genocide, has dementia, and has fucked the working class over for his entire career. They’d go with a Bernie style populist and run on his wildly popular platform.
Western white liberals are at their core extremely racist. They fear and hate bipoc people, Middle Easterners, and especially Muslims. So Biden’s genocide in Palestine is actually a positive for them – but many* have enough self awareness to know they can’t openly cheer for it without revealing how depraved they are. They don’t just want to beat Trump, they want to do so while maintaining the fascist, imperialist, capitalist project. Biden is their guy
- Thomas L Friedman who recently got an op-ed published in the New York Times likening Middle Easterners to wasps and calling for the entire region to be set on fire, is a notable exception
I had someone say to me recently “I have nothing against Muslim people, but I don’t like their religion. The religion says you should be put to death if you leave it.”
Not knowing a lot about the Islomic faith I left it alone. I imagine the list of religions void of violent punishment for going against its faith is short.
But logically, there must be different sects or denominations of the islomic faith that worship differently, interpret their texts differently, and are ultimately not “violent” in their expression. Aka Islam can’t simply be a monolith.
So to hold that point of view, that islam is a violent monolith, you must at least agree then that all practicing Muslims have violence at the core of their faith and by extension are more violent…
Which is void of any materialism.
My mom is Muslim and warned me not to be public about my apostasy in case some extremists went after me. But in all the years I’ve been an apostate, I’ve told plenty of Muslims and their attitude has always been very chill and accepting – “that’s between you and Allah”, “hope you find your way back but even if you don’t you’re clearly a good and principled person and inshallah that has to count for something. Allah is merciful after all!”, " it’s not my place to judge". No Muslim has ever given me shit for leaving the faith. In fact when I’ve told them about why (I simply can’t worship someone who refused to protect my family from AmeriKKKa’s systemic racism and hatred of Muslims) they’ve been sympathetic.
Whoever said that to you is full of shit, propagates racist Islamophobic lies, and should go die.
Yeah thats what I imagined the experience being like. It doesn’t sound like it’s much different then others dealing with falling out of their religion. This person wasn’t a random person, so I’ll take your closing sentence as an expression of frustration. We’ve both been doing a lot of learning in recent years and this is just another one of those moments. Confronting your own reactionary tendencies doesn’t happen all at once.
But thank you comrade for your perspective, its valued.
Thanks. Yeah, it’s frustration, I already used up more than a lifetime’s worth of patience on having compassion for racists. It got me nowhere good and I don’t feel I should have to put up with their shit anymore. I can’t anymore even when I try. At this point I’m just automatically hostile to them, but I still appreciate other people who can have the patience to try to rehabilitate them. You’re doing the Lord’s work reeducating them so the rest of us don’t have to deal with their shit.
My best guess is because Dems alienated their power base. They used to be “the progressive choice”, but over the years have shown they’re just the same as pre-Trump Republicans, just a little less homophobic and racist. As long as I can remember, Dems usually struggle to rally behind a single candidate and it has hurt them in elections. There’d be, like, 3 Dem choices while Republicans get it boiled down pretty quick, and the Dems always betray the most popular to select the most status quo.
So, if I had to guess why Genocide Joe is still in and backed by them, it’s because they recognize they simply can’t afford the arguments and division. Nobody likes them except deluded libs. Nobody believes or trusts them. Progressives are disillusioned, many realizing voting doesn’t work, others desperately looking for an alternative. Meanwhile, Republicans don’t have that issue. The Trump cult wants him back, and failing that they’ll overwhelmingly select the closest to him, because to them voting is more about patriotism and owning the lib. They’ll vote so they can say it’s rigged if they lose.
democRATs
We really don’t have to adopt 2000-era right wing crank aesthetics to criticize Democrats.
