politics

Who is out there saying that the Dems are great and we need to vote for them because they're actively good?

Almost all mainstream media that isn't intended for right wing audiences. Every person who has knocked on my door, sent me an email, or called my phone to talk to me about Democratic candidates for the last 25 years. 80% of the people I have had political conversations with in the real world who aren't Republicans. Calling it millions of people would be a conservative estimate as best as I can tell. The only people I hear saying what you're saying, which by the way isn't too dissimilar to what I have been saying for the last decade, are people in niche online communities like Lemmy and the occasional outlier politician like Bernie Sanders.

The vast majority of people I see advocating Dems are very candid about it being a harm reduction strategy.

I'm all about harm reduction. I think it's a great strategy that most people can get behind. However, when I say harm reduction I don't just mean slowing the rate at which shitty things happen. I mean reducing the amount of harm in the world. So the question is, do Democrats reduce the amount of harm in the world or do they simply slow the progress of shitty people?

Now, I understand that a lot of people think slowing the progress of shitty people is it's own reward, and in a vacuum I think that's true. That being said, are we actually slowing it down indefinitely or are we simply delaying it while at the same time making it inevitable? There is a difference. Biden slowed MAGA down for sure. While he was President they could not actively pursue their goals to the same degree that they could with Trump in the White House. However, I think Bidens policies in general but especially his refusal to go after Trump in a serious manner have made our current situation more likely, not less. The only way to prevent what we have now was to clamp down hard on Trump's lawlessness and executive overreach when we had the chance or to improve the lives of the average American significantly enough that they would not fall for Trump's lies about the economy or immigrants or whatever else. Biden could have done at least the first pretty easily. Instead, he decided to mostly maintain the status quo and hope Americans made the right decision in the end. Well, given that Trump's 2016 win was, in my opinion, largely a rebellion against the status quo, that seems like a bad move. Further, giving Trump four years to strategize and consolidate power within the Republican party led to worse outcomes in 2025 than would have been possible in 2021.

There's a lot more to say here and I feel like I've been going on too long already so let me sum it all up like this; I believe that putting Biden in the White House in 2020 on the basis of harm reduction was worse than a Trump win would have been. Biden didn't do anything significant to either disqualify Trump himself or materially change the conditions that led to his election, which made Trump's eventual reelection both more likely and more dangerous because Trump and his cronies had four years to plot out their strategies. In the end, aiming for harm reduction actually increased harm.