I literally do blame the Democrats for Trump, and if you don't, you weren't paying attention.
Plenty of us were critiquing Clinton's campaign on those merits and were consistently talked down to in shocker the same way we're being talked down to now. Shocker, she lost. I remember saying a few weeks before the election "We're about to get Brexited." I put my vote down for Clinton, because Trump is fucking insane, and that was clear before he was President. It was clear in the fucking 1980's.
Being able to critique our leaders is supposed to be what is the difference between us and conservative voters. They're the cult who unquestioningly believes all the bullshit that comes out of Trump's mouth and diapers. I find it weird that people think we should be more like them in regards to our leaders like that would be a good thing.
I mean, Trump won prettily handily against the other Rupublican's is my recollection. I can agree that Clinton and her campaign wanted to face him, and helped, but I think it still would have been Clinton vs Trump regardless. I think blaming Democrats for Trump is similar to blaming Trump for Covid: Yeah he made the US response worse, leading to unnecessary deaths, but Covid was still going to affect the nation and people were going to die regardless.
I mean there's an increasingly muddied line between critiquing the potential president, and supporting their opponent. Russia is almost certainly trying to push the latter here in Lemmy and everywhere else. It worked amazingly well in 2016 and they're hoping they can repeat that for this election. With so much of that propaganda they're pushing, people do get defensive about critiquing Biden. Sometimes rightfully so ("Biden is supporting genocide in Gaza, we need to vote 3rd party or Republican so the Democrats can change") other times its not warranted ("Biden needs to fix his response to Israel to not turn off voters to him").
Critique all you like. You're allowed too. But I feel a lot of people draw the line at encouraging voting 3rd party, not voting or voting for Trump for this election. There may be a D candidate that's more favorable than Biden, but statistically, the incumbent has better odds at winning reelection than losing. I'd much rather ensure that Trump doesn't get reelected, rather hoping a new candidate is not only better than Biden, but also able to beat Trump.
And here's the crux of the issue, a lot of us aren't actually doing that but are being accused of it nonetheless. We're often still being accused of being "Russian shills!" even if we profess our plans to vote Democratic and that we want people to vote Democrat, but we don't want them to be thoughtless cult followers like Trump voters. We want thoughtful, engaged, educated voters. Those voters question things, even when it's not comfortable or the best time, sorry.
I mean, you know what your are. Ignore the ignorant conversations and focus on the actually thoughtful conversations. The internet has its share of assholes or mistaken people, all you can do is try to reach out the the sensible people.
A very good perspective to have to be sure. Cheers, mate.