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this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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Political Memes
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Voting for a candidate is not an indication of support for all of their policies - it's an indication that you prefer their policies, taken as a whole, to those policies of the realistic opposition candidates, taken as a whole. Seeking consensus is not the same as seeking a complete lack of dissent - consensus inherently includes compromise. Typically, those citizens actually involved in the political process begin by running, assisting, and promoting candidates in the primaries, who they agree with most closely. Then, as the agreement of proportions of the electorate winnow down the field to a smaller number of candidates whose policies are acceptable to a larger subsection of the voters, voters pick which one they disagree with least; as the concept of finding a candidate that agrees with you 100% on every issue is about as insane as finding a fellow voter that agrees with you 100% on every issue. I understand this concept can be confusing to those more familiar with 'democratic centralism', in which everyone toes the party line, but this is how actual democracies work.
Do I have to simplify this any further, or have I now succeeded where your high school civics course failed?
This has become so non-stop that I had to do some research on logical fallacies because I was quite sure that there was a formal name for what we're seeing from anti-electoralists and accelerationists (the Venn diagram is pretty much a circle). And I was right.
In this thread there's actually two (at least).
False Dilemma (aka false dichotomy): "You can either support genocide by voting for Biden (or Trump) or oppose it by voting third-party (or not voting)." This is just ridiculous levels of oversimplification with an implicit nested False Equivalency fallacy ("both sides are the same").
Denying the Correlative (what I had to look up): "Vote third-party." In the first-past-the-post, two-party system, there are only two choices that can have an impact. According to the data, voting third-party is nothing but a spoiler for the candidate of the major parties that one prefers. The choice is
Biden ⊕ Trump. This fallacy is basically the inverse of the False Dilemma, which makes it all the more impressive to see the two used alongside one another.OK, so in the event that there is no candidate that is absent a policy position that, hypothetically and personally, is so completely morally bankrupt that you cannot possibly support them, what are the available options? Because if protest is an option, but the government is under no obligation to listen to it, and voting third party and not voting is also not an option (because for whatever reason the second most likely option is end-of-times^tm^), it really sounds like that voter (or that group of voters) effectively have no choice. Not 'literally' (because literally they have choices that have no effect), effectively. It seems like to that voter and the group of voters that are in that situation are living under an autocracy lead by whatever party that provided those options as the only ones. They are effectively disenfranchised.
I would go on to say more about the popularity of dissent to that policy, but the way we measure popularity is so skewed by the above political situation that it's essentially begging the question.
Welcome to being part of a small minority in a democracy; sorry that democracy isn't utopian and that changing minds requires time and effort. "I want a leader who agrees with all of my positions but I don't want my positions to have to be popular or supported by a broad swathe of the population to achieve that" is more vanguard politics stuff; democracy isn't really your speed.
Welcome to the *third panel of the meme:
"A democracy that can ignore civil protests is effectively an autocracy"
*3rd panel