This is not me saying at all that Trump is better than Biden; it’s more of an equalization argument that I truthfully can’t see a fiscal difference.
It’s been well known by people like us that the two bourgeois parties are basically the same, but I never really understood how close they were until the last like, 6 months.
Maybe it’s JUST Biden that’s super similar. But regardless, I just don’t see the difference. He spews nice words about trans rights, workers, all of these good things. But the exact same shit that happened under Trump basically happened under Biden. Funding for genocidal states, proxy war funding, funding police, loss of abortion federal protection, separation of kids and parents at the border, etc.
People keep saying Biden is marginally better, where?
I don’t know. I can’t bring myself to vote for any of these guys this time around.
You are not giving Biden enough credit.
Take a look at this:
From 2016-2019, white family wealth had stagnated under Trump. From 2019-2022, white family wealth exploded upwards while black and Hispanic family wealth had remained in stagnation, and that’s just the first 2 years of Biden administration.
In fact, black families found themselves getting poorer under Biden, while the opposite is true for white families:
Source: Federal Reserve
Under Trump, everyone suffered. But under Biden, rich white people are experiencing some of the fastest growth in their wealth in a long time, while screwing the other minorities along the way. That’s the difference between Trump and Biden.
Trump somehow coming out as the better president just because of how much of an incompetent clown he is.
The only thing I can say is that the republican party might have a slightly harder time at pushing Project 2025 if Biden gets reelected. But the agendas and policies will be the same, and republicans will still control most local governments. And the fact that democrats are roughly equal to republicans in their evilness.
My “progressive” governor with Dem supermajorities in the state legislature sounds indistinguishable from a Republican when talking about the migrant “crisis” that’s apparently straining every resource in our deep blue state (though in fairness, they’ve managed to keep the mask hanging on by a thread and haven’t compared anyone to animals publicly).
Listening to them pout about the horrid immigration bill not passing doesn’t inspire much confidence that we’d be following another track if there were a different ghoul in the White House. Maybe more performative brow-furrowing to Trump’s uncivil tone and gestures, but in the end they’ll gladly accept more money for more boots on more necks.
I didn’t even consider that most localities are controlled by Republicans. That’s wild
Yeah, it’s infuriating.
Most localities are rural and sparsely populated. Most people are under democratic party local government
Hypothetically, Trump’s second term could be worse than his first term, so if Biden’s first term is basically as bad as Trump’s first term then maybe Biden’s second term would be better than Trump’s? Maybe? Honestly at this point its arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
I feel either candidate (or rather- either side) is going to escalate things up several notches, with their next hypothetical term. Frankly the chances that either goes full fash (while claiming to be defending democracy, of course) seems incredibly high- though all that said, I blame the “establishment” primarily for this as I see their behavior as akin to lighting multiple Reichstag fires, and furthermore I see them as the infinitely more dangerous, unhinged, and yet also, competent of the two sides.
If Trump is the incompetent proto-fascist (he is IMO), Biden and co. (and by “co” I mean- the entire US political “establishment” and blob) are the competent ones who are living out what he could only dream- and using him as a patsy, a boogieman of an excuse to do it. And the process of using Trump and Trumpism as an excuse, has opened a political Pandora’s box- whichever side (though they’re both irredeemable and well on the road to fascism) has the means to do so, increasingly has to utterly destroy the other through lawfare (or hypothetically- worse) to ensure its own safety- that’s my take on it.
Lawfare seems to be more of a liberal thing because ultimately they are ideologically committed to their institutions and laws and norms. Trump and Trumpism are more vulgar, the only commitment is to power and so they just make up new laws and norms whenever it suits them with little interest in preserving institutions. I think that’s really the only strong difference between the two camps.
I’d generally agree with what you’re saying- with the caveat that I don’t think either side is overly interested in preserving institutions, at least not beyond what means those institutions serve of legitimizing their diktat and extracting further wealth and colonial plunder. That’s what it all boils down to, end of the day.
Liberals care about the appearance of their institutions and laws, but I don’t think I’d even say they’re particularly committed to what those laws, norms, and the purported mandates of their institutions stand for. Certainly, I’d say they’re the ones lighting a torch to the (rotten, granted) institutions across the west at the moment- if only to replace what was, with something decidedly worse.
I’ll use the liberal attempts to remove Trump from the ballot as an example. Liberals cook up a way to use existing structures to legally sabotage Trump’s electoral chances, and when the Court blocks them they will just give up because they’ll respect the Court’s decision. They’re ideologically committed to it.
If the Court somehow finds in Colorado’s favor and lets them remove Trump (they won’t but let’s pretend), Republicans would retaliate by removing Biden from their ballots for no legal reason. They’d just do it, they don’t care about legality or the Court’s legitimacy, only results.
I see your points but I’m not sure that Republicans would have the power to do that.
They might not! But they’d definitely try because they don’t care about the law and see it as the pointless obstacle it really is.
Lol yeah pretty much except there’s no pretty violins it’s just gun violence and war planes
Biden has better aesthetics. No anti-intellectualism, focus on respectability, posturing as progressive etc… in a world where I would buy into US propaganda I’d be inspired by the image that the Dems want to give and I’d be scared and revolted by the image that the Reps have.
But that’s all just aesthetics. Libs who urge you to vote Biden are just not seeing beyond PR
Someone I follow(ed) on Mastodon was just trying to shame people who don’t vote, because of the idea that “Trump is going to immediately round up all us trans people and throw us in camps if you don’t vote Biden!!”
As far as I can tell, the claim seems entirely made up, and it feels almost malicious to be basing that entire decision around the idea that “Trump MIGHT come after ME hypothetically!!” rather than all of the people Biden has already thrown in camps and all of the people in Gaza that Biden has given his unconditional support to genociding
It feels downright selfish to still be pushing that “vote blue no matter who” bullshit for that reason, and they clearly haven’t learned shit from 2016 and 2020
They’re also still under the impression that people choose not to vote just so that they can “push the Democrats more progressive”, when it’s basically the opposite, people realize they can’t push the Democrats left so they’re choosing not to participate in the sham they call a “democracy”, but I guess this is one of those people who can only see politics within the confines of the US electoral system
Edit: Not to mention all the other shit people have mentioned as having been actively worse under Biden, it makes it feels especially garbage and selfish that one is still pushing the idea of Biden being a human rights savior
It’s not true. Trump was President for 4 years, that didn’t happen. It’s histrionics.
Exactly, people still have this cartoonish idea of what a Trump presidency would be like as if we didn’t have 4 years of seeing exactly what it would be like
People are like “but maybe he’ll be worse this time!”, and like that could be true, but that’s an entirely different thing than making very specific assumptions about specific actions he’s supposedly going to take based on no actual evidence, it’s just fearmongering to try to coerce people into reelecting a president who has already been actively materially worse (it’s as if everyone’s forgotten how much trans rights in the US have already been backsliding under Biden’s watch)
Him proposing to end asylum for migrants is objectively worse than anything Trump did on the border.
He keeps saying there are no conditions on support for Isreal. No lib has been able to explain to me what is way worse than “unlimited unconditional funding”
We are currently drilling more oil than any nation in history anywhere ever.
It’s literally just lip service and then when a reporter literally asks “are you planning on doing anything other than having conversations” the press secretary gets pissed
No lib has been able to explain to me what is way worse than “unlimited unconditional funding”
Direct involvement perhaps?
I would love for a lib to suggest to me that’s going to happen lol that might be even more disqualifying.
They’re both dumbasses and sides of the same coin. The difference is who they consider the biggest threat, Democrats think its Russia while Republicans think its China.
I mean, in that case Republicans are right lol. Long term at least, not in the “they’re gonna invadeeee” way. China will just win.
“MUH LESSER EVIL”
Whenever the party switches everything gets worse. Trump to Biden or Biden to Trump. Either will continue to support genocide and so on. Whoever wins nothing good will happen,
PSL is running Claudia De la Cruz and Karina Garcia. I doubt they’ll win but their campaign might raise class consciousness.
https://x.com/votesocialist24/status/1756333114354221056
They are really bad on COVID. In particular, they reduce masks to a personal choice that is ineffective at stopping the COVID pandemic and seem to believe that universal vaccination will stop the pandemic. The vaccine is great, it reduces deaths dramatically but it does not stop transmission. I understand masking is incredibly unpopular but they could have simply just not mentioned it.
I’ve read that PSL has CIA contacts and are allegedly controlled opposition, but I can’t testify to the veracity of that.
https://fleawar.substack.com/p/pslcia-the-counterinsurgency-infecting
I’ve posted about it before, but here is a link. I think the article might be reaching in some places, but it has good points.
Counter-point, if it was a genuine vanguard party, they’d absolutely sew these lies about it. In fact I doubt there’s a party out there that doesn’t have someone claiming they’re feds/CIA on substack.
I’m not going to read all of that. If you make these really inflammatory, wrecker claims, you can provide some context.
Question. Are any of the top members of PSL alleged in this (with any kind of proof) to be current/former CIA/FBI or directly compromised or is it all just “these anti-war/anti-imperialist people are associating with and working with former CIA” which is a meaningless charge as the job of anti-imperialist means having strange bedfellows. Which is what I saw trying to briefly skim it in 90 seconds.
I don’t give a fuck that ANSWER works with war criminals or CIA or anti-communists or uses them as expert witnesses as the job of a broad coalition like that is to sway liberal normie people. Fact: former intelligence agents and other ghouls are often incredibly narcissistic and take slights like government going with the other guy’s plan extremely personally to the point of embarking on campaigns of shitting on them and not caring who they’re with. This is not a sign of compromise, it is a sign of dedication to the mission and not being an ultra loser whose purity testing wrecks any chance of material positive outcomes.
You have fair points.
Fleawar is definitely a fed.
I’m not psychic, but now that user dark calling elaborated, I think fleawar is reaching.
Yeah, really can’t throw disqualifying-type accusations around without a shred of evidence.
I’ve posted about it before, but here is a link:
https://fleawar.substack.com/p/pslcia-the-counterinsurgency-infecting
I think the article might be reaching, but it has some points.
Racist geriatric maniac who bombs the middle east vs racist geriatric maniac who bombs the middle east. Neither is better or worse than the other at this point
At least one of the two sought to leave Syria (though they still also bombed it, because of course they did). Though when it comes to the MENA region I think I agree, both are as vile and deranged as it gets.
“Leaving” doesn’t mean much when there are CIA backed militant groups, Special Forces, and private military contractors that can all do the same thing as the soldiers that were redeployed somewhere else.
On one hand; agreed. On the other- those US troops illegally stationed in Syria are there for multiple reasons, not all of which their “non-state actor” counterparts can fulfill- and one of those reasons, is to be a tripwire force, whose presence and any casualties can then be used as an excuse to manufacture consent for greater military escalations up to and including open war.
Once the US troops are out, Syria can begin the (still difficult) process of weeding out the US proxies.
At the moment, there aren’t enough reserve troops or political will to fully engage if the tripwire force was … tripped?
Best we can manage at the moment is just some long range missile strikes or small scale carpet bombing.
But yeah, fair point. (Though I suppose you could replace the soldiers with NGO’s doing “humanitarian aid”
and wait for them to start getting attacked as the same function)
Trump might Mr Magoo his way into better policy by a combination of ignorance, incompetence, and contrarian willfulness. Biden will die in office after nuking Gaza because he has a dementia episode and thinks Hamas killed his son.
The Trump admin was so incompetent that I think they had a net positive on foreign policy by bungling so many things. Lots of Latin American countries seemed to make progress that would normally have been suppressed by American influence in one form or another. I feel like Hillary wouldn’t have let the whole Juan Guaido thing get so embarrassing.
Trump started low burn trade conflict with EU over several things. Biden turned it around to complete vassalisation of EU.
That’s not a very high bar
Trump gave out checks that made life easier for a month or two while Biden said maybe masks and vaccines don’t kill you, the virus does.
I legit can’t think of a distinction other than that either.
Biden wants to destroy Russia before going to war with China
Trump only wants to improve relations with Russia in order to go to war with China now
Both seem to be interested in going to war with Iran in the next 5 years.
