Again, you folks are ignoring a key part of what was written. They didn’t say they would vote for any D so long as the Ds can be considered a preferable choice by reasonable and informed people, they LITERALLY said “no matter what.” I sincerely hope you can see a difference.

They didn’t say they would vote for any D so long as they are better than Trump, they specifically said any D no matter what. There’s a big fucking difference.

So, you’d vote for literally ANY Democrat, no matter WHAT, but you think it’s the independents who are mentally defective? You think anyone who ISN’T 100% committed to political party tribalism is defective? Well, I adamantly disagree. I think it’s the unquestioningly partisan voters who are the defective ones.

I’ve never read the Handmaid’s Tale, I really don’t know much about it. I don’t know how analogous that story is to our current situation, if it is at all. But I do know that there is a real danger posed by Trump and the Republican party. Is the Democratic party completely harmless? Absolutely not, but I don’t think they are as great a threat to democracy as the Republicans. We should vote for Biden as a harm reduction measure. Yes, just like in 2020. I know people get tired of hearing that, I know people are fed up with the constant hounding to vote for the lesser of two evils, but that is the situation we are in.

That being said, voting for Biden in this general election lIs iterally the bare minimum that we must do to defend democracy, and if that is all we do, no, it absolutely will not be enough. I think a lot of us, myself very much included, dropped the ball over the last four years and didn’t do nearly enough to try and push for more meaningful changes. That has to change, and, again, I’m including myself in that. I need to do more, most of us do. We need to do everything we possibly can to ensure that by February 2029 we will have a better president in the White House, a better Congress, and a better supreme court, as well as better governors and better state legislatures in as many states as possible.

Everything you said should be enough to get people to vote, but the sad reality is reducing it to that may not be enough.

I understand why it isn’t enough for a lot of people. I think the biggest reason people don’t vote is they don’t feel their vote matters all that much, and/or they see a certain futility in the whole thing. I understand why, in the face of that apparent futility, many people feel powerless and thus choose to disengage. But, yes, as you’ve said, disengagement does nothing and the only way to take back power is greater engagement. The powerful want us to feel powerless, they want us to be disengaged and they want us to be misinformed, thus we gain power by being informed and engaged, which will lead to us feeling empowered, which promotes even greater engagement.

If you live in Nevada, Arizona, Texas, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, or Florida (really any of the fifty states, but these are the most critical), AND you don’t want to see Donald Trump elected for a second term, you must vote for Joe Biden in November. Yes Biden is a doddering old man who is experiencing rapid cognitive decline, and yes it is totally unacceptable that these are our choices, but disengaging does not solve the problem, it only makes it worse.

Believe me, I completely understand the inclination to just say to hell with it and check out, but we can’t do that. I have been as guilty of it as anyone but I now fully recognize it was a mistake. But it’s not too late to make it right. Voting is not only a right, it is a responsibility. If we, the people, want to rule, we must be vigilant and responsible.

Right now, our priority is damage control and harm reduction. I know, it has been that way for far too long, and that is extremely frustrating, but it is nonetheless the reality of the situation. We must vote for Biden this year, and then we MUST stay engaged so that we can work toward nominating the best possible candidate in 2028. We must stay informed and vote, diligently, in every state, local, and primary election.

I don’t want voters to feel ashamed, I want them to feel empowered, and I want them to accept the responsibility that comes along with that power. If we are more thoughtful in our choices, and if we do our due diligence as voters, we give party organizations, like the DNC, less power over us.

None of this prevented democratic primary voters from voting for a younger candidate. The voters still had the opportunity and the agency to make a different choice.

Rigged how? Did the DNC falsify vote counts? Stuff ballot boxes?

I wasn’t given any input into it.

Sure you were, as was everyone else who was eligible to vote in the 2020 primary. That’s the “we” in this scenario. Anyone who could do simple math knew how old Biden would be in 2024, yet a majority of those who voted picked him anyway.

We made our bed, now we gotta sleep in it.

I think it’s a very good thing that the European member nations are taking greater accountability for NATO, since greater than 90% of the member nations are European.

It’s so nice to be leaving another historic, traumatic crisis and entering another depressing normal, where we get to live out our tedious, soul crushing lives while we await the next crisis.

“the bourgeois parties… [and] the Nazis who they collaborated with,” implying a distinction.

A distinction without a difference. Whether explicitly bourgeois parties or not, the Nazis and SPD were both vehemently opposed to the ideology of the KPD, and those two parties received a majority of the votes in the 1932 election.

Working class people can and did support bourgeois parties…

And do, still. By the millions, in every election. Or, at least, if not explicitly bourgeois parties, parties that are based on some form is liberal ideology, not necessarily in opposition to bourgeois interests, and that often are aggressively opposed to Marxism-Leninism.

And yes, the bourgeois parties hated the Marxist-Leninists much more than the Nazis who they collaborated with.

You say “the bourgeois parties,” but that’s all the parties besides the KPD. That’s more than 80% of German voters in 1932. After the depression, the war, the austerity, more people still voted for the SPD, and all the other parties, than the KPD. Those voters couldn’t all be members of the capitalist class. In fact, I’m pretty darn certain they were mostly working class people.

There were a number of objectively conservative parties that backed Hindenburg: Catholic Centre Party, BVP, DVP, and DStP.

That’s true, which means there was no possibility of a coalition being formed that involved the KPD, regardless of SPD’s feelings about the KPD. Believe me, I’m not denying that the SPD hated the KPD. I’m certain of it, and it looks like so did every other party. My point is that the KPD hated the SPD, and all those other parties, at least as much. That’s the thing about Marxist-Leninists, they excel at making people hate them, and they’re perfectly content to be completely on their own, politically and ideologically isolated from everyone else. A plurality of German voters literally chose Nazis over the MLs. Even today, I think there are more people who hate MLs than hate Nazis, and that’s saying something because A LOT of people really hate Nazis, rightfully so.

Did take companies long to stop pretending like they care.

I think they care, I just think they care more about maximum profits. A lot of people believe that maximizing profits and meeting our climate goals are not incompatible goals. Personally, I’m skeptical, to say the least. Regardless of my skepticism, however, the world’s leaders, many of the world’s experts, and most people have decided we should proceed as though the two goals are not mutually exclusive. I guess only time will tell if they’re right or not.

Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party never managed to win a majority in a national election; instead, it was helped into office by conservatives who were more terrified of real socialism than they were of Hitler’s “national socialism.”

Are the social democrats the “conservatives” in this scenario? If so, was it really the social democrats who refused to work with the communists, or was it the communists who refused to work with the social democrats? The communists had no love for the SPD after they helped put down the Spartacist uprising in 1919, and many communists, even today, blame the SPD for the murders of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. So, I don’t think there’s much validity to the implication that the social democrats and the communists could have formed a coalition if only the social democrats hadn’t been so terrified of “real socialism.” Also, not everyone sees Marxism-Leninism as “real socialism.” I’m not sure there is consensus on what constitutes “real socialism,” with every socialist faction believing only their socialism is the real socialism.

There are various strategies you could use for any of the three, with various levels of timeframe involved and chance of success and all, but “let Trump come to power” is not a real good solution to any of them, to me.

Probably not. I don’t know what the right strategies are, assuming they exist at all, but, yeah, that’s probably not it.