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this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2026
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I used to be critical of sitouts but over time I've grown more sympathetic towards them. Imagine voting out Trump with the expectation that Trump is going to come swinging next election and democrats will prepare to make sure fascism doesn't get a foothold in America. And then for the next 4 years you see nothing being done to prevent fascism and what worse, you see democrats capitulate to fascists and normalize fascism by moving to the right themselves. I too would get jaded about voting when there's no "I don't want fascists" option. What failed America weren't the sitouts. It's the decades of political apathy letting corporations take over politics, which has led to republicans going full fascist and democrats turning into controlled opposition.
Blaming the sitouts isn't going to solve anything because what are they supposed to do? Voting for democrats isn't going to get rid of the fascists, it's only going to delay until the democrats themselves turn openly fascist. Obviously they shouldn't vote for the republican party because that's a lost cause. Voting current third party candidates is kinda pointless because of how the political system works. So what's the solution you expect from the sitouts? I'dsay sitouts have nothing to do until there's a schism in the democratic party and the progressives split from the establishment democrats. Then sitouts should vote for the progressives and I imagine the vast majority of them will because then they'll actually have someone willing to represent them.
While Biden should have done more, Trump was put on trial. The system could and should have worked, and Trump would be in prison, except for the corrupt judges instated by Republicans who sabotaged the trials. Especially SCROTUS.
And now the sitouts, who you are sympathetic to, has just put Republicans in power again. And Republicans are appointing more corrupt judges, stacking the courts. All because of sitouts. And then when Democrats are in power again, sitouts will again complain about Democrats doing nothing when those corrupt judges block Democrats. Fuck sitouts, they are stupid.
Do you know what would've kept Trump away? Absolute low-hanging fruits like fixing the healthcare system and affordability. Democrats could've taken a "what's a social democracy" checklist, put half of them as their campaign promises and had a landslide victory. The democrats didn't need to put Trump in prison to prevent him, all they needed to do was give the people what they need and they couldn't even do that because it would hurt their corporate overlords.
Voters did not give Democrats the votes in Congress for this.
Sometimes I think Americans just don't know how democracy works at all. If you do not give a party legislative power, then you can't blame that party for not passing legislation.
So Trump can run on affordability but democrats can't?
Trump lies. Trump has just caused huge inflation, with the oil crisis caused by the Iran War. Would you be happy if Democrats just lied too?
If they actually tried to work towards getting those things to pass, yes I'd rather have them "lie" and try than be honest and do nothing. Because is it really lying if you're actually trying to do it?
Last time you gave Democrats the slimmest temporary filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, they passed Obamacare. Which while imperfect was a huge leap forward for health care for the poor in America.
And it wasn't even a real majority - they had to court independent Lieberman, who demanded that Democrats drop the public option as a condition for his vote.
Are you aware of the policy plans Harris put forward? I haven't read them myself, but people who read them said they were quite good.
Obligatory fuck Joe Lieberman.
Harris was on the right track in some points but even those those points weren't good enough and in some cases she ended up campaigning against her own points by refusing to distance herself from the Biden administration.
Furthermore people have a serious issue with the economy because things were getting more expensive while purchasing power was going down. Biden claimed everything was fine and Harris refused to oppose that though it was clear to everyone that things were bad. That is what Trump tapped into with his affordability claims. People responded better to a clear lie that acknowledged their hardship instead of ignoring the hardship all together.
Trump can shamelessly lie and the media and his supporters will eat it up while democrats are held to an entirely different standard. Yes.
Hello! We offer you a child rapist, convicted felon who supports bibi the nazi, that plans to install nazism in your country and take you back 500 years in rights and quality of life OR a stablishment candidate that will keep things as they are now.
Apparently, things before trump were so awfully worse than people had a hard time between staying the same and voting for the child rapist, convicted felon who supports bibi the nazi, that plans to install nazism in your country and take you back 500 years in rights and quality of life.
Now that's a more accurate representation of the offers. And yeah, clearly things did get to shit that people no longer cared to vote on whether to get fucked right now or later.
Do you want to go full fash in a couple of years? Or go slowly and maybe work in the meanwhile to change things?
And, are you telling me that by the end of biden's presidency things were as bad as they are now?
America tried that between 2020-2024 and how did that end? You still went full fascist. You want my scorching hot take? Had Trump won in 2020 things wouldn't be as bad as they are right now because he wouldn't have had time to plan out how to properly fuck everything over. He would've gone into his second presidency with poor popularity and an uprising would've happened sooner rather than later. By playing the waiting game you've brought more suffering into the world.
You didn't have to choose pedohitler. He could have lost if all the sitouts voted against him. And for 2028 he would be dead.
But by electing him in 2024, you probably killed democracy in the country. I guess it was better than electing a non-nazi candidate... Well, what to say? Enjoy your choice. The rest of the world is certainly enjoying it and can't wait to pay you back for all the enjoyment your choice is causing us.
You don't get it. This isn't about Trump anymore. Trump could die tomorrow and America would still stay fascist. You'd get Vance for this term but who is so unpopular he'd give the baton over to Tucker Carlson for the next term and Tucker is going to be a far worse autocrat than Trump because unlike Trump he actually has a brain. The democracy in the US is already dead as far as I'm concerned because you have the nazi party and nazi-later party. You want democracy in America, tell democrats to fuck off until they come back representing the people and not corporate overlords. Or guilliotine the entire political elite and start over with a parliamentary system.
"bad things happened, fuck it I'll help more bad things happen" will never be the reasonable take you're trying to say it is.
That's not what I said. I said "shit is bad and I have a choice between shit getting worse fast or slow, so I don't care which I choose because both options lead to shit going bad".
If you had to pick between getting fucking in the ass with a 9 inch dildo or a 6 inch dildo that will eventually grow to 9 inches, do you really care that the 6 inches is smaller right now? Or would you prefer to not get fucked in the ass in the first place? You probably wouldn't be getting fucked in the ass by a 9 inch dildo if the alternative was to not get fucked in the ass at all.
You just illustrated in your own analogy perfectly what our point is. These people never had a real choice if they cared about the outcome, they just wanted to feel blameless for the bad choice they wanted to make.
So you'd rather get fucked by a 6 inch dildo than demand to not get fucked as all. Got it.
Your analogy explicitly lays out the options and just whining about there not existing a third option does not change anything.
And there's no third option because anyone who falls out of line to demand more gets told to fall back in line. Case in point blaming the sitouts. They're sitting out because they don't want to get fucked and you're flaming them for not wanting a 6 inch dildo up their ass.
If sitting out somehow resulted in a redo instead of the worse option winning, you'd have a point.
The point I'm making is that if the outcome of the vote doesn't really change anything for you then the vote itself is also meaningless. Let me use a different analogy. Let's say you don't like cheesecakes and you don't like chocolate brownies. What you do like is a nice Creme Brulee. If there's no option for a Creme brulee and you MUST choose between a cheesecake or a chocolate brownie does it really matter which one you get? You don't want either of them. So the choice is meaningless.
If this was a restaurant you'd say you don't want dessert and think to yourself what a shitty restaurant for not serving creme brulees. But because this is the American political system you think it's logical people shouldn't except a creme brulee and instead should be happy getting the cheesecake because they're allergic to chocolate.
You can cry about it all you want, but in the system we have right now one of two people was going to win and by not voting for Harris, you helped Trump win.
All your analogies are fucking awful, by the way. A better one here would have been your town has two restaurants, a Chinese place and an Italian place. But you want Mexican so you decide to just not eat. Even that is still flawed because you'll come up with some BS answer like "I'll cook at home" to sidestep the problem.
And if you think invading fucking Michigan and starting a war in Iraq after mass pardoning a bunch of insurrectionists (some of whom have since faced charges of child molestation) in addition to all the other horrendous shit Trump is doing is somehow not different from a milquetoast establishment candidate who would have maintained the status quo, then I don't think there's a sensible discussion to be had.
I find your focus on assfucking strange. It's almost as if you're as afraid of it as these sitouts are of admitting responsibility.
This is so fucking ignorant. People are literally dying worldwide because of the actions of these people in 2025
Yeah. And none of it would've happened if the democrats had actually tried to appeal to their voters instead of pulling the same "but our hands are tied so we won't even try" shit they've been doing for decades. Do you want a pad on the back for it happening in 2025 and not 2022-2023? Had Harris been voted it would be happening in 2029. You're missing the big picture. This was always going to happen because there's no pushback against fascism, there's only kicking the can down the road.
Perhaps, if more people voted for Dems more regularly they'd have more balls to do stuff like throw trump in jail etc. But as it is now, they have to deal with having a very tight margins on the political capital they have to spend. Not voting just makes things worse.
As I pointed out in my other comment, they didn't need to throw Trump in jail. Had they campaigned on what people actually need (you know shit that is common sense in other western nations like free healthcare, affordable housing, workers rights, free education) they would've easily beaten Trump. This notion that they needed to lock up Trump to win is exactly what is wrong with the democratic party. It's not focusing on what they can do for the people, it's focusing on what they can do to be in power. Demand more from the democrats.
You are missing my point. They can't do the things that people want because the same people don't vote for them enough and give them big enough majority and enough political capital. Its always 49,9% vs. 50,1% or something stupid like that. In that sort of system they have to walk the middle road as much as possible to pull the morons away from the right. If they start doing stuff like universal healthcare etc, the morons are just going to yell "communism!!111!!1!" and vote them out in the next cycle. So of course they can't do that, because they are afraid of being voted out.
Its 100% the voters fault for being such stupid morons that the adults in the room have to cater to the idiot babies who have the votes.
And people don't vote for them because they never offer the voters what they want. Do you see the problem here?
Yeah I see the problem. The people need to take the first step and support them for more than a couple of election cycles. And I don't mean just voting. Vote, contact them, go to their events, call them, send mail, emails. Make sure your voice is heard.
I find it ridiculous that people sit at home and yell at their tv "they aren't doing what I want!" and think they are politically active. Goddamn morons.
That is not how representational democracy works. The politicians represents what you want and then you vote for them. It doesn't work the other way around where you vote for a politician and then maybe they'll do what you want them to do. Is it their job to know what you want BECAUSE IT IS THEIR JOB TO FUCKING REPRESENT YOU.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that sympathy towards Israel is waning, there are multiple polls from multiples sources showing that. So why hasn't the democratic party taken a more anti-Israel stance? Is it because they're too fucking incompetent at their job to know what the people want (in which case why the fuck would you vote for them in the first place) or is it because they don't care what the people want because they get money from AIPAC?
Have you thought about telling your politicians what their job is? One effective way to let them know is to vote the ones, who have forgotten, out and vote the ones, who know what their job is, in.
And when your options are between voting for the ones who have forgotten and the ones who also have forgotten, what vote do you cast? It's almost like it doesn't matter which way you vote, so why vote at all? Maybe if the politicians cared about votes they'd figure out why they're not getting votes.
You vote for the least worst option.
And you get the current American political landscape where democrats have no incentive to do what you want because what are you going to do? Vote for the fascist?
Either you vote against the fascist or you help the fascist get in power.
And how did voting against fascists work out in 2020? Did you feel like your life improved between 2020 and 2024 or did you feel like you're still getting the same shit every day except ever so slightly worse?
You're not voting against fascists. You're just voting for the people paving the way for fascists. Because your material conditions are going to keep getting worse and worse until you're so desperate that you turn to fascism in hopes of getting a better life (which just to be clear is always going to be a lie) or you're going to drown in apathy and not vote and then the desperate voters vote fascism in.
You're not seeing the big picture here. It doesn't matter which way you vote, both votes end up going for fascism. The only difference is whether the fascism happens now or later. And you could argue that later is still better because at least it's not now, but if there's no escape (which in the current political landscape there isn't as long as the democrats stay the way they are) that later might as well not exist because fascism would be inevitable. You're just kicking the can down the road and prolonging the suffering of everyone.
Worked quite well, since the fascist was kept out. That was objectively and factually better option that letting the fascist in. Just because it wasn't perfect doesn't mean it wasn't better.
You know what happens when people dont vote against a fascist? Israel starts razing Gaza to the ground and attacking Lebanon, girl schools in Iran get bombed and a major global supply chain gets shut down for no particularly good reason or without plans, a guy who fucks kids gets into the white house, global economies suffer, decades long alliances crumble, countries start to run away from America, leading to a economic downturn for the USA. Thats what happens when you stay home and don't vote.
You can live in your magical la-la land where there is a perfect candidate you can vote for without any doubts or conflicting feelings, but here in reality you've got to vote based on what the choices are.
You donkey, you know what I asked so don't fucking duck the question. Did you life improve? compared to 2014?
That started when the supposed non-fascists were in power.
Has been happening for decades at this and even when non-fascists were in power.
A girl school didn't get bombed but Iran still got bombed when non-fascists were in power.
Bill Clinton exists.
I'm going to throw all of those together because those don't actually have anything to do with fascism, that's just having a moron in a position of power. And if I'm being honest, I'd take those over the US having a competent autocrat in power because the rest of the world would be fucked. The amount of power the US has to exert around the world is insane and a competent fascist could easily use it to subjugate even more of the world. The incompetence of Trump is the only saving grace here.
Guess what. That is magical la-la land you're describing is a dream for Americans. I'm not an American and I do get to vote for a candidate that very much represents my political beliefs because our political system isn't fucked beyond repair.