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this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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Not voting to protest is as effective as setting yourself on fire in a first world country.
It's not particularly effective, but is still a form of protest. It's important to recognize it as such, because:
It means that there are people who are attempting to have their voice heard
They can be steered towards better forms of getting what they want if they are shown better forms of praxis.
At the end of the day, protestors are people with goals, and if you can convince them that this goal may be met more effectively otherwise, they can be allies.
Unfortunately, lots of folks here on lemmy seem antithetical to the idea that slow or minor progress still counts as progress. Maybe it's a communication issue inherent to this format, but the crux of the argument I see most often is "Biden did genocide, genocide is bad. Therefore, any support for Biden is support for genocide outright."
It seems like an inability or unwillingness to recognize degrees of tragedy...it's the worst case of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm getting pretty damn nervous about the number of folks saying outright that they won't ever vote for Biden because they don't accept the premise that, as long as we still have FPTP elections and the electoral college, voting anyone other than the mainstream Dem candidate makes a Republican victory more likely, regardless of the candidates either party puts forward. I know that at least some of these folks are just trolls, but we're on a razor-thin margin, and in a scenario where 100k votes across a handful of states will likely decide the contest, I worry about even a single person being talked out of participating meaningfully in the election.
It's exasperated by the fact that, for a lot of young voters, every election they've been old enough to participate in has been a boring old white person vs a wannabe dictator and so they've started feeling like "it's the most important election ever" is just a scare tactic to make them vote blue.
I think a key issue here is that you're combining unlike things and trying to make coherent sense of that, rather than analyzing what is driving people to feel this way.
The first part you mentioned, is a key disagreement you have with people opposing reformism. A significant part of leftist history is the conflict between reform and revolution, whether reform is even possible at a large scale or if revolution will ever be more likely to succeed, and so forth. The people opposing reform are not saying that incremental change isn't good, but that:
Incremental change is simply too little, too late, in a modern late-stage Capitalist dystopia
Because the course of politics in modern first world Capitalist counties like the US follows whatever the interests of large Capitalists are, any meaningful reform will be hindered or even reversed unless the system is overthrown in its entirety.
The second claim, that Biden doing genocide is bad and voting for Biden is voting for continued genocide, is built off of the prior point. Because voting for a right winger like Biden or a fascist like Trump will both result in more genocide, their conclusion is that voting for either is to continue genocide, though it remains implicit that if Biden stopped the genocide, they would vote for him.
I of course believe it would get worse under Trump, so as I already mentioned, I will vote for Biden. However, I also understand that protesting against Biden is the best way to change his course now, rather than later.
The final disagreement you have with these people is the idea that Biden is a "slow good" rather than a "slow evil." You're not talking to liberals, you're talking to leftists, who wish to see some form of Socialism take place in America. Biden is continuing the Imperialist project of American Liberalism at the expense of Workers both inside and outside of the US, you can't convince leftists that Biden is good, actually.
The truly best way to get leftists to vote for Biden is to get them to see what is directly more beneficial to the international Proletariat, protest voting for a third party or picking Biden and trying to use that time to organize on the ground, which is easier than under Trump. That's the real key, not to try to convince them Biden is good but slow.
This is actually very useful framing...I'm gonna chew on this for a bit and try to untangle some of my own implicit premises.
Never said it wasn't a form of protest. I said it's not effective and I'd like to add that it's also very dumb. Like setting yourself on fire in a first world country.
That's why I elaborated, though if you're only going to read the first sentence then why even bother replying?