After the last post where I kind of went blue no matter who there, I feel like I owe people reading this blog an explanation.
For the most part, in recent years, my opposition to voting democrat was grounded on the basis of opposing centrism and the neoliberal third way ideology dominant among the democrats. It was based on the calculus that left wing policies were actually popular and would sway people to vote democrat, and that centrism is boring and alienates left wing voters. I believed that in a political environment where one party has gone the deep end, and the other party devolves to "you better vote for me or else" while ignoring their constituents, the moral thing to do is to...let that party lose. If they want to piss off and alienate their voters by not doing nice things for them, let them. And if they lose, they lose. I'd rather lose one election than lose an entire party alignment. In other words, I'd rather let the dems lose now, and then run someone else who is much better the next cycle and potentially win, than to enable crusty old centrists to stay in power without ever being challenged. Again. My goal is to shift the overton window of the country left. To make left wing ideas more popular and commonplace, and to have a powerful left wing consensus not seen in this country since the days of FDR. I've even been willing to compromise some parts of my ideology, such as UBI, temporarily to make these alliances happen.
But...the democrats screwed up. Hillary DID lose in 2016, and Trump won. And Trump realigned a lot of otherwise centrist voters to his camp. In 2020, the dems did win, but they barely won, and Trump showed his coalition is here to stay. 2016 wasn't a fluke, like 74 million people actually voted for Trump, and he almost won again.
Now, 2022. 2022 looked bad regardless for the dems. It happens when one party takes over, but lacks the popularity or mandate to keep people on their side. And generally since the 1990s, when one party takes over the government, the other starts gaining support. And the same happened with Biden. We were looking at an apocalyptic red wave for a while, especially as Biden floundered and failed to do anything.
BUT...Biden has tried his best to at least do some things. Congress has been a joke with manchin and sinema sabotaging his entire agenda, but Biden finally did the left wing populist thing of doing things like forgiving some student loan debt and forgiving marijuana offenders. And he promises to codify abortion if he wins the senate. But despite this, these things aren't helping him gain support and are actually losing it.
In the last post, we looked at what is motivating voters right now. And it's not left wing policy. Left wing ideas are actually unpopular right now. The economy is being blamed on Biden, with the narrative being it's all of those stimulus checks and people not wanting to work (a bunch of nonsense but the GOP is memeing this until it works). The democrats are being blamed for a crime wave, because of wokeism, even though once again, the COVID recovery is the likely culprit (same as inflation). And all of Biden's initiatives to protect abortion and pardon drug offenders and forgive student debt are falling on deaf ears. This is BAD. Because if the GOP succeed here, the left isn't coming back.
Biden isn't perfect. Far from it. I consider his presidency mediocre and don't really have strong opinions either way honestly. He's a typical centrist democrat, but he did do some cool things with the power he had. And I believe we should reward the democrats with this power. Even expand his power, by voting more democrats into congress so we can bypass manchin and sinema, who are basically moderate Rs with a D after their name at this point.
Here's the thing. I believe in a carrot and a stick. If you ignore me, I use the stick and promise to never vote for you. But if you do things I like...well...you get a vote. Biden is making a compelling reason to vote D in 2022, with abortion rights on the chopping block, and cool things like marijuana offenders being pardoned and student debt forgiveness. And honestly, while it doesnt go far enough, Build Back Better is a decent climate change package and it's inspired by Bernie's Green New Deal plan.
If you care about these things, vote blue. But that's the thing, if you want the democrats to keep doing nice things, you need to show them that doing nice things will make you vote for them. My strategy has always been one of incentives. I won't reward bad behavior on the part of democrats. but I WILL reward good behavior. I believe democrats need to earn my vote, and I believe they have earned it enough this time around. Again, are they perfect? No. Are they even close? No. But I will say this, if you DONT support them this time, and you let the right control the narrative, you can say goodbye to any chance of a UBI in our lifetimes. You can say goodbye to further student loan reduction. You can say goodbye to the right to choose.
This isn't a debate about rewarding bad democrats vs voting blue for the sake of voting for a party to keep the other party out of power. This is about the war for IDEAS. And if you do not vote blue, it shows the democrats that the key to win is to "play it safe", run to the right, and give more ideological concessions to the other side. Biden won't do cool things for the rest of his time in office, if he does not see gains. And if the public is against his agenda and in favor of the right's agenda, that's just going to lead to more triangulation in the long term.
The last time the democrats were facing the kinds of crises we're facing now, Jimmy Carter was in office. And Biden is looking a lot like Carter 2.0. But wanna know what happened after Carter? Reagan. And it destroyed the left since. It led to Bill CLinton who did sell the soul of the democratic party to the devil just to win. It led to Obama and Hillary Clinton who were stuck in the same mindset. If left wing ideas go in the toilet for approval ratings, it's over. The dems will change their strategy by running right, and they will then turn around and point to 2022 to show why. They will say they did X, they did Y, they did Z, it didn't help them, so those issues arent important to voters, and there's no incentive to do more cool things.
If you care about nice things, vote for the people doing the nice things. But if you don't, don't complain when the democrats dont do nice things in the future.
Again my strategy has always been about a carrot and a stick. It's time to get out the carrot. And my refusal to vote democrat has always been about them refusing to do nice things. I am loyal to my IDEAS, not the party. I want to make that clear. Always have been. When the democrats cross me, they get punished. When do things I like, they get rewarded.
Again, use the carrot guys, put away the stick. This isn't a "stick" year. In previous elections left wing ideas were popular even if the candidates were not. Right now support for left wing ideas is in the toilet. That's bad for us and our argument to push the democrats left falls apart if they lose under these conditions. So vote like the future of the country depends on it. Because it does.
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