this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
1008 points (99.3% liked)
solarpunk memes
3733 readers
22 users here now
For when you need a laugh!
The definition of a "meme" here is intentionally pretty loose. Images, screenshots, and the like are welcome!
But, keep it lighthearted and/or within our server's ideals.
Posts and comments that are hateful, trolling, inciting, and/or overly negative will be removed at the moderators' discretion.
Please follow all slrpnk.net rules and community guidelines
Have fun!
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"There’s no such thing as a vote that doesn’t matter. It all matters.”— Barack Obama
“To vote is like the payment of a debt, a duty never to be neglected, if its performance is possible.” –Rutherford B. Hayes
“The future of this republic is in the hands of the American voter.” –Dwight D. Eisenhower
“Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.” – Abraham Lincoln
“The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.” –Lyndon B. Johnson
“Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves, and the only way they could do this is by not voting.” –Franklin D. Roosevelt
Jesus Christ. Imagine knowing enough history to dig this quote out of the dumpster fire that is the Hayes legacy and neglecting HOW HE BECAME PRESIDENT.
That's not really the point under discussion, is it?
You said there were no politicians who would advocate for voting in general. I just googled up a bunch of quotes to the contrary. I'm sure I could find governers, senators, mayors too but I was focusing on presidents.
In fact, in regards to Hayes, Bush Trump - isn't losing the popular, but taking the presidency due to process actually an excellent case for more voter rights and less restrictions on the voting process?
And what the hell does the Compromise of 1877 have to do with giving voters water?
Once again, because I feel like you're derailing here by attempting to drag this discussion into 200 year old minutiae, should we not be able to make voting an easy, relaxing, simple, comfortable process and isn't that better for society?
And you've provided no exceptions. All of these guys preceded over expansive and thorough voter suppression. 2010 was a high water mark for gerrymandering and voter caging under Obama. When he wasn't placidly abiding by Red State governors demolishing voting rights, he was actively complicit in defunding and denigrating outreach groups (specifically ACORN, although there were quite a few others) that sought to enfranchise more people.
Hayes ended Reconstruction and turned the southern states over entirely to a century of white nationalism. Our modern system of majority black neighborhoods enduring six hour voting lines where reactionaries can accuse people of fraud for handing out bottles of water could be traced precisely to this moment in history. But that just leads us into the next name on the list.
Eisenhower and his hatchet man Nixon perpetuated enormous deliberate disenfranchisement as part of the Southern Strategy.
Lincoln is probably the strongest name on your list, on account of the 13th amendment, if you ignore the machine politics that got him over the line to begin with. Cooping was a common practice in both parties and was instrumental to swinging both his national campaign and the midterms that gave him a Radical Republican majority. Also, don't ask how many votes the Native Americans got while he was purging them from western territories.
Lyndon Johnson was almost certainly involved in voter fraud in his 1948 Senate primary and only escaped indictment on technicality.
I'm not even sure why FDR is on the list, given that he was a Democratic President elected in the thick of Jim Crow.
None of these political leaders was fussy about winning a rigged game. All of them benefited - either through active malice or complicity - in pursuit of their political ends. And you can definitely argue the necessity of these underhanded tactics given the alternatives. But you can't - with any amount of seriousness or credibility - claim that any of these candidates seriously supported enfranchising their opposition.
If you consider some of the most pivotal elections in US history and the means by which they were won "minutiae"...
I mean they still advocated for everyone voting in general.
You can do that if you're confident you can win. Which is why the gerrymandering apes could do it. But they still did it, because they knew they didn't have to worry about the election, so they could say the right thing, even if it isn't what they did. Because advocating for everyone voting you makes you seem confident, and the perception of the people would be "must be an honest man" instead of "oh shit they're that confident, how have they fixed this system I know to be crooked".
Or that's how I perceived this conversation of you guys.
Tldr you're both right essentially