Here we go again

Every election is the most important in your lifetime as long as fascists are on the ballot.

If it's that important maybe the democrats should start appealing their target group instead of trying to get Republicans to vote for them (which didn't really work anyways)
- It's possible that there is a way to win them over, but it's not by getting up on stage with Liz Cheney. The idea of "the elites are working against us" does resonate with certain Republican voters, even if their anger is being misdirected in support of Donald Trump. It's not something the Hillary Clinton wing of the party could possibly harness. People like Bernie or AOC could, though.
  Here's Bernie demonstrating it: https://youtu.be/RP8Oxe6OxJc
- Agreed. I vote for them out of practicality, not because I actually like them.
Remember when the Democrats propped up Trump thinking Clinton would curbstomp him because who the hell would vote for him? Good times. (Europe is doing the same, pushing the far right to pretend the vanilla right is the only viable opposition and actually pretty center, and then act surprised when everything implodes)
- I do! Real It Can't Happen Here moment. Kinda worse in Europe because It's Already Happened There.
If your system has allowed itself to devolve into "vote for my slightly less oppressive status quo or else you get abject oppression" then you kinda have to begin admitting the entire system is folly and needs to be dismantled.
- You're not wrong. Easier said than done, though. Looks like we'll be doing it the hard way, societal collapse.
- Getting rid of Citizens United and implementing ranked choice voting will get rid of this. We have to continue voting for the most progressive candidates running in the primaries and still eating the shit sandwich when it's an establishment dem if we ever want to fix it.
- Slightly?
It’s a trick to keep preserving an awful status quo in perpetuity for your whole life.
Surely the fascists will pack up and go home if the Democrats can just win this one time…
- I would have greatly preferred the awful status quo to what we have now.

These past few elections have been fucking important. As someone who lived through the whole "boring" era of Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama, these last 10 years have been aberrant in every way politically and it's dumb to pretend they haven't been.

It's also dumb to pretend the "boring" era wasn't politically aberrant as well. They were setting the stage for what we are seeing now, and it's telling that people are only getting upset now that fascism is getting focused inwards and domestically instead of outwardly towards other countries.
- It's naive to believe that this is anything aberrant to begin with.
  They have been setting up this stage since the fucking New Deal made concessions to the working class to stymie a growing threat of working class revolt. Not even a few years later they enacted Taft-Hartley and began dismantling union power.
  There was a slight resurgence of working class action during the Civil Rights movement but unfortunately that was all co-opted by the establishment in order to keep the working class divided.
  The Gilded Age rober barons were pissed they lost their fiefdoms and then began to systematically claw it back from the people ever since.
- yeah this is a fair point, there has not been a time in US history when our politics was not fucked up in same way or other, and we weren't doing a bunch of terrible shit both across the world and domestically. I just hate when people look at Trump and are like "yep, this is what we've always been, every President is exactly like this." Because they are simultaneously so right and so very very wrong about that.
bush literally stole an election with the supreme court. boring. ho hum
- I mean, you didn't have multiple militia groups and a bunch of rioters break into the Supreme Court trying to stop them from making that ruling, and then all get arrested and sent to jail, and then all get pardoned by the very guy they wanted to illegally stay in office, so yeah, bush v gore was relatively boring.
I fully agree, it's too bad that the point was lost on so many people who just heard "YOU HAVE TO VOTE" and didn't make any effort to absorb reality and multiple angles of actual news stories and not just Facebook memes and shorts played on Twitter.
The last several elections have had the highest turnouts in US history, including the largest youth turnout, but on exit polling the people were completely tuned-out and said they didn't actually think there was meaningful differences between candidates and just based their decisions on prices of groceries and who was in charge when the prices got high... by their own reckoning. A lot of "Well maybe Trump will shake things up" and seemed to have ZERO memory of his first term or that he was even president before.
Bush II was not "boring". His neocon illiberal war on terror, torture, rendition, patriot act and illegal war started the descent into what we are experiencing now.

To be fair, everyone has to keep saying "This is the most important election of X" because everyone fucking has the attention spans and memories of earthworms or bivalves.

Half of Lemmy right here would tune and use any excuse to not be involved, and this is a politically active community, imagine what it's like out there for the vast majority of voters who work 6 days a week and get all their media and news from fucking facebook for two hours on a Sunday night while kids and dogs are fighting around them.

Bold of you to assume Democrats don't know what they are doing.

The nice thing is there are starting to be better comedians on the set.

Obligatory

Unironically typing "repeat the mistakes of the past" with ignoring the history of how we got here displays an astoundingly myopic view of recent events. Both parties serve the same billionaires, which is why the Republicans do what they want and Dems are content with "decorum". In fact, our two-parties have displayed a remarkable overlap on the Venn Diagram:

        • Republicans and Democrats both vote to increase ICE funding every year. 
    • Republicans and Democrats in Congress both practice insider trading. 
    • Republicans and Democrats presidents both bail out corporations that are "too big to fail" (i.e., Bush Jr., Obama).
    • Republicans and Democrats both vote to give corporations subsides (i.e., corporate welfare). 
    • Republicans and Democrats both receive campaign finances from billionaires (i.e., legal bribery). 
    • Republican and Democrat presidents both order drone strike, resulting in mass civilian casualties.
    • Republican and Democrat presidents have both bombed countries without Congressional approval (e.g., Trump, Biden). 
    • Republicans and Democrats both kept Guantanamo Bay open for decades. (A precursor for Trump's treatment of immigrants.) 
    • Republicans and Democrats both crack down on whistle blowers. 
    • Republicans and Democrats both maintain a surveillance state on its citizens. 
    • Republican and Democrat administrations both assassinated democratically elected leaders overseas. 
    • Republicans and Democrats both fund Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people.

Trump was not created ex nihilo. Presidential power has been growing for decades. Congress has been blatantly corrupt for decades. We have broken (and supported breaking) international laws for decades. Trump is a symptom of a larger problem: our government functions to serve profit rather than people. The problem will continue long after he is gone, unless the American people demand more.

This image describes my soul.

omg I am so sorry
- Thank you, but there's no need to be sorry. It's something that's been accepted and fuels my desire for deeper knowledge.

Get out there and run for an office, back somebody you like who is running for office, or stop whining.

I supported Bernie but the DNC are not legally required to be impartial. I voted for Obama, twice, but he turned out to be an establishment Democrat (despite the "Change" slogan).
Setting my own voting aside, imagine someone complaining about voting in Russia and you respond with: 1) Either run for office yourself or 2) Vote for who you like. That response completely misses the point. The electoral system is inherently flawed and aggressively suppresses attempts at reform that would actually represent the people.
- Well, if you vote GOP in these conditions, we will no longer have to imagine what it’s like to pick a candidate to support in a country like Russia.

How about read what I wrote