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Punish the Democrats, she says
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this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2026
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Even knowing that Trump was going to actively help Bibi? That's the thing I didn't understand: sure, the Democrats were not doing much to stop the slaughter, but from the previous Trump administration we knew Trump was going to actively help.
The demorcrats would also have gone to war with Iran, if Israel wanted it. Notice how almost none of the majour dems have really condemned the war in Iran, even though it would have been massively electorally advantageous for them?
Maybe they would have done the war more carefully / competently, but they are slaves to the exact same forces of capital, that pushed Trump towards the war.
in the recent election for MJTs seat, the D candidate lost. One of the reasons given for WHY was because he actively opposed the war, the winning R was all Fir the war.
looking at that, when offered a chance voters sided with the pro war ideologue. They don't have to vote D next time but they could have this time.
Fundamentally a politician wants to win. As a voter, I get people being despondent when there's no real choice but here voters had a choice. Democrat politicians would be stupid not to pay attention.
Ok, but you see how massively demoralizing this conversation is, right?
Making logical points weighing up two distinct yet similar stances on genocide is only going to suppress voter turnout.
It shouldn't. It's basic harm reduction.
One side probably won't stop it, but they're on our side so there's a sliver of a cintilla of a chance we could pressure them into it.
The other side absolutely would not, vocally stated he would help accelerate it, and would laugh in our faces and do even more to accelerate it for no other reason than it made us mad.
The choice should have been obvious, even if I and everyone else would have preferred better options.
See people aren't exclusively machines.
I know people who felt that both sides at least tacitly supporting the genocide was so depressing that for their mental health they basically checked out of politics.
No, that response isn't helpful, but it's a very real thing that happens to real people. They needed a candidate that cared that people's lives were ending across the sea, and neither side offered that.
That hurt Kamala's chances in a very real way, and might even be the deciding factor for Trump's second term.
While you and I can look at this and go "Wow, that's not logical, she's way better than Trump", the Democratic campaign should have had political scientists and psychologists that knew about this well-documented phenomenon. I imagine they did, and ignored it, because siding against Israel would've cost money.
So while it's true that the choice was still objectively obvious, it's also completely true that the Democratic campaign absolutely mishandled it, because this isn't some new phenomenon, and group human psychology isn't unpredictable. It's also not the fault of those who didn't vote because of that.
to do that in a democracy is beyond shameful.
You don't have to be invested at the grass roots or debating magats but you can still turn up at a polling station on election day, or do a fucking postal vote
D and R parties both need independent voters to win any election. For example, even if every D voted for a D, they would lose without independents voting for them in significant numbers. This has been a political fact for many years.
So... why did the Harris campaign target REPUBLICAN voters (instead of Ds and independents)? They wasted a lot of vital time on that ("He doesn't need to know who you voted for" etc), and they knew that they would lose if they did so.
She knew it too, Harris isn't stupid. She took a knee.
yep, and the Dem leadership still support israel no matter what they do. They learned nothing and will try to set up the same voter hostage situation in every vote from now on.
At the very least maybe the Dem party should have been smart enough lie publically that they would censor Israel and reevaluate US support of Israel (even if they wouldn't actually follow through). It's almost like losing is preferable to risking any AIPAC $.
But we've got a bunch of supposed leftists in this very thread talking about how they wouldn't vote for these types of democrats. These are people that obsensibly are self aware enough not to let their supposedly so well informed morality be determined by feeling bummed out about their options.
I don't expect miracles from the average, barely informed voter. I do fucking expect supposed informed leftists to not actively campaign against voting. I expect them to fucking understand this "obvious" situation. THAT is my main sticking point.
If every election is a decision between the lesser of two evils and both evils become more evil over time then harm isn't actually reduced in the long run. This is why harm reduction is a failing long term electoral strategy.
People preaching harm reduction whose candidates only ever increase harm over the last offering know this. They're arguing in bad faith.
We don't live in a world of "should", in the real world of course it is demoralizing and affects the vote turnout.
We all know the US government will back Israel no matter what... and the voters can only punish the incumbent party for doing so.
65% of Democrats don't want to finance Israel. Two thirds of their own party, that's massive!
Voter turnout will continue to fall; D and R parties will continue to lose voters (now down to 30% registered voters each) and the Independents will continue to grow (now up to 40% of voters).
Why? Because our major parties ignore what their constituents actually want, and we can only punish one party every term.
It shouldn't be that way, but it is.
The same people in this thread blaming voters for how Kamala Harris ran their campaign were the same ones insisting we had to run Biden as the incumbent, and calling you a bit or a school if you said they needed to be replaced.
We wouldn't have this outcome if the people who've made it their entire identity to blame voters had placed their frustrations with the party and demanded better, sooner, when it could have made a material difference.
The very fact that the Trolley Problem exists as a thought experiment and there is still active discourse over the correct solution should tell you why people didn't all feel that they had a responsibility to vote for harm reduction. You can't expect an election that resembles a famously divisive philosophical thought experiment to turn out with everyone arriving at the same conclusion, and it's pointless to dwell on the fact that everyone didn't fall in line with what you think is obvious rather than adjusting to the reality and acting accordingly. That means getting candidates elected in primaries that aren't going to put us in the same trolley problem come time for the general.
Nonsense.
Absolute nonsense, and the Palestinian Americans who voted 'undetermined' en masse during the Democratic primaries to send a message to Biden/Harris knew it too. The party made their choice between the people and an unpopular genocide. They chose genocide.
Perhaps. But that's not the world we live in. Demanding an electorate to suddenly change in a way it never has and start behaving like Homo economicus is only going to lead to further loses.
What is more the "Democrat are bad because Palestine" was the opposition's framing. The argumeny was pretty unanimous that the policy on Palestine was going to cost the Democrats the election. The Democrats were bad because they knew full well they were going to choose to lose over changing that policy.
And that's just tunnel visioning at only the Israeli policy.
Yeah, the choice was bad or worse, and people chose worse. Life sucks sometimes, they need to grow up.
If genocide is bipartisan, then the less bad choice is whatever collapses the US the fastest. You wouldn't try to choose the leader of Nazi Germany based on who's going to run the holocaust most effectively
But you can’t deny a progressive Führer wouldn’t be better for us.
Sure the Jews, gays, and other undesirables may suffer but the far-right Führer made it bad for us as well and that’s unacceptable.
They were selling weapons to enable the genocide you're downplaying by refusing to call it a genocide.
Answer the fucking core of their point, instead going on random tangents. How the fuck is Trump better for the palestinians you supposedly care about than the Democrats? How did NOT having a spineless democrat in office help them? What did all you moral purists do in those 4-ish hours once every 4 years where you didn't vote? How many walmarts have been fire bombed?
Imagine being so disingenuous that you actually believe (or at least want others to think you do) that we just didn't know whether Trump would be worse than Harris on Palestine, Iran, and every other fucking thing possible for that matter. I never used to hold much creedence with the whole paid russian or chinese actors angle, even back in 2016. It is becoming more and more difficult to rationally explain how anybody actually living in the US could, with a straight face, make equivalency arguments between Trump and Clinton, Biden, or Harris. It does, however, seem like a perfectly rational act for foreign actors who just want to accelerate their replacement of the US as hegemon to take.
Not doing much to stop it is a weird way of saying actively helping it.
The US was doing it anyway before Trump2.0
Yes. Because what so many folks can't seem to get is that different people are different. And they have different ethics.
This is literally the entire point of the trolley problem. Yes, you can stick your fingers in your ears and say, "always pull the lever for the track with fewer people on it." But that's just not how ethics works. Utilitarian ethics is one way to live life, but utilitarians have this incredibly annoying habit of assuming that theirs is the only valid ethical system, and that you're a complete moron if you follow any other school of thought.
You're demonstrating a utilitarian sense of ethics. One who follows a respect-for-persons belief system would say that the ends don't justify the means. That it's not fine to pull the trolley lever, even if that would result in a net saving of lives. That it's fine to vote to hold people accountable, even if that will objectively result in net material harm. It's not always about the greatest good for the greatest number. Otherwise, for example, we would never put any research dollars into studying cures for rare diseases. Those dollars could always objectively do more good elsewhere.
Hell, even our criminal laws don't follow a utilitarian sense of ethics. You can't legally get out of consequences from killing someone by saying, "this on net saved lives." Even if you can objectively prove it, you're not legally allowed to kill people. It doesn't matter if your murder on net saves lives, you're still a murderer. If a gang kidnaps your two children and tells you, "you must go kill this other one person if you want them to live." If you do that, if you go and kill that stranger to save your own kids? You will be charged and convicted of murder. You're not allowed to kill one innocent person to save two innocent people.
Many people voted against or refused to vote for Kamala because they were trying to punish her and the Democratic Party. Voting is the only way we have of holding politicians and parties accountable. Millions of voters saw the horrific haughtiness and barbarity of how the Democrats acted around Gaza, and they wanted to punish them for it. It was about holding them accountable. It was about justice. Many voted against Kamala to punish her for supporting genocide. And if the likely thing came to pass, if Trump supported genocide as well? Well those voters would vote against him for the same reason. They vote to hold people accountable for past actions, not to speculate on future ones. Maybe not how you vote, but again, people are different and can use whatever ethical system they want in choosing their vote.
Again, you can argue greatest good for greatest number, but that isn't the only system of ethics out there, and it's not even the system that defines the foundation of our legal codes.
What would you call Genocide Joe keeping the WMD shipments flowing, on time, without end, even during a manufactured famine?
This is one issue where both parties are literally the same.