electoralism

So I was thinking - what exactly is it that liberals find so exceptionally scary about Trump? Well, the obvious answer is that he's rather far to the right. And I do think it's reasonable to say (correct me if I'm wrong) that Trump is the furthest right GOP candidate for at least several decades. But a lot of liberals seem to see his influence as sort of unprecedented, which you can see from their apparent nostalgia for the "good old days" of sorts when the big bad evil guy was Mitt Romney or George Bush. I think liberals have a tendency to think of Trump as a fluke, a flaw in the system of sorts, who by all accounts should never have been a mainstream politician. I also don't think this way of looking at it is correct. Trump seems like the culmination of where the GOP was already headed before him, with the final nail in the coffin being how much he appealed to the older, whiter, more racially resentful coalition who were fired up from the Obama years. In short, the system is what brought us Trump; he is a symptom of a flawed system, not a flaw in an acceptable system.

So this brings us to the upcoming election. As everyone knows, liberals have been begging people to vote for Biden, using the "lesser of two evils" and "most important election" rhetoric a lot. I'm starting to wonder if the implicit assumption here is that if Biden wins, Trump and his base will be essentially defeated. And yeah, they won't get the presidency, and Trump will probably die before the next election, but it's not like the supporters and the ideas will just go away. When Biden became president-elect liberals were saying things like "the nightmare is over", only for Biden to basically continue a lot of Trump's policies with better optics and for Trump and his goons to continue trying to reclaim power with Biden doing little to stop it. Likewise, if Biden wins again, it's just going to be four more years of the status quo with the MAGA types struggling for power. And if things keep going in this direction, Trumpists are going to get that power back eventually. (Democrats haven't won three consecutive presidential elections since the 1940s.) Suddenly its not project 2025 but project 2029 or 2033. You can vote for Hindenburg and Hitler might lose but he's not going to give up there.

And the worst part about this is that liberals will cling onto the "lesser evil" argument to the point of excusing Biden's support of Israel despite their atrocious actions (which many libs even openly recognize as such!) as well as his fulfillment of the core promise, "nothing will fundamentally change". For the former they usually claim Biden is actually sympathetic to Palestine (see this comic) and for the latter they usually fool themselves into believing the "most progressive president since FDR" line by pointing to things like the IRA, completely ignoring the lack of any meaningful change. All of this because "he's better than Trump" despite everything in the second paragraph and the absence of substantial policy differences.

So to summarize, liberals see Trump as an exceptionally extreme figure despite the rise of such a figure being unsurprising in retrospect, and use that to justify supporting a man with policies that are hardly any better, despite neither that man nor liberals themselves doing anything meaningful to fight back against Trump and the far right.

What do you think? Have I generally reached a good conclusion here or am I mistaken on some points? Perhaps both? Please inform me, I am relatively new to leftism and only recently escaped the liberal mindset I have attempted to describe.