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this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
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Biden couldn't beat Trump in a debate, how is he supposed to win an election?
Is this... are you... Are you serious?
This is a ridiculous equivalence on its face, and you should feel ridiculous for saying it. A debate does not have a "winner" beyond that which any number of biased observers, such as yourself, attempt to assert. This is not baseball.
The winners in any debate, if there must be any, are the people who use what they see and hear to inform their voting choices. What, exactly, do you perceive DJT to have said and done on that stage that will convince supposed "undecided" voters to vote for him? What do you perceive Biden to have said or done that would make them decide that Mr. Trump is the better choice?
As you said:
Were you yourself undecided? Or perhaps planning to vote for Biden prior to the debate, but now will vote for Trump instead? Given your analysis of undecided voters, I fail to see how the debate would have motivated the non-voters to go out and vote for a President Trump.
What I saw, personally, was two very old men who have wildly different takes on ethics and the seriousness of the position. One of which has a lot of practice being on camera. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if Biden's performance at the debate was at least somewhat intentional, setting up a wonka-esque reversal for debate #2. Considering recency bias, along with the media's desperate need to turn everything into contentious clickbait, I think it would be a pretty brilliant tactic, even.
Of course, what do I know. I'm a moron. Much like your opinion, mine has very little value.
I'm completely serious. Biden had a month to prepare for a debate, on friendly ground, with rules his team helped define, and he still got his ass handed to him... by a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist.
There was no way this was even supposed to be a fair fight and Biden came away looking like a lost little boy.
It doesn't matter that Trump lied through the whole thing. Biden looked weak, lost, unprepared, incapable, incompetent.
That's not how you win.
We must have watched different debates, then. I saw one weak but curated personality, and one flawed human being. Maybe both of us are just incapable of seeing past our biases?
I saw a dumpster fire of a candidate, and the best candidate for a nursing home.
Okay. So, which one do you think we should vote for?
I can't say who anyone else should vote for, I'll be voting for whoever the Democrat is, knowing that if it's Biden, he'll lose, if it's Harris, she'll lose, and if it's anyone else, they'll lose too.
I see. Frankly I can't live my life with that level of pessimism, because if I adopt that sort of outlook then I'm very likely to sink much deeper into depression, something I've struggled with all my life. That sort of thinking genuinely leads me to hopelessness and suicidality.
This thinking is part of what lost Biden the debate. He thought he was attending a debate in the traditional sense, but that's not what political debates are. A political debate is about communicating your platfotm and hammering on the other person's weaknesses (ex. Abortion, him being a convicted felon etc.).
Biden lost because he sat there like a dope and tried to answer the questions, instead of doing what he claimed was his strategy for taking the debate in the first place; exposing Donald Trump as worse.
As usual, neoliberals fail to understand the moment and meet it, which is why they're losers.
From my point of view Biden didn't have to lift a finger to expose Donald Trump as worse. Trump seemed happy to do that himself. But then, as I said, I'm a moron.
Stupid as I am, though, I don't have to lower myself to calling people "losers". I retired that word from my vocabulary when I graduated from elementary school.
I don't mean it as a pejorative, I mean it as a description of one of neoliberal dems defining characteristics; they lose, chronically, when it counts.
They got a supermajority and they still fumbled. And it's deliberate losing, that's their role in the duopoly set-up; to promise progressive change and fail to deliver because of those "wascally wepublicans". What they are failing to understand is that the Republican party is no longer playing the "one hand washes the other" game to maintain the corporate status quo -- the Republican party has been taken over by literal fascists who are out for blood and the neoliberal democrats still think they're playing the status quo game. They don't understand that losing comes with real consequences now, but it's all they know how to do.
I see. In that case, I think you may fundamentally misunderstand the world. You seem to want to frame it up as though there's some master plan or conspiracy, instead of a bunch of individuals working in hotly contested fields, just trying to keep their jobs by doing what they perceive as best at any given moment.
No. If I misunderstood then campaign finance and lobbying money wouldn't be the rock solid predictor of how a politician will vote. But money remains one of the most reliable predictors of politician behavior, and most democrats take huge amounts of corporate money to obstruct any real progress.
That doesn't seem particularly at odds with what I said, but I guess I'm glad you've got it all figured out. I'm hoping your plans to change the system work out. Genuinely. If you have actionable, realistic, achievable ideas for removing the corrupting influence of money from the world at large, I'm all ears.
In the meantime I'll to continue to vote for whichever candidate (that stands a realistic chance at winning) I feel will do the least harm to the people I love and the institutions I begrudgingly tolerate.
I've already mentioned that I'm a moron, this should reinforce that.
Not voting for the corporate obstructionists would be the most basic starting point. Its not about having everything figured out, it's about the urgent need for people to understand that what you percieve as harm reduction isn't working, that thinking is why we're here to begin with. It's not even actually harm reduction, it is soft-selling fascism and acclimating the Democratic base to it which increases the potency of the GOP's fascism by helping normalize it in increments. It can't be allowed to become the new normal.
I guess I'm confused. Are you advocating for accelerationism regardless of the cost to human life?
What are you talking about? We're funding a genocide.
I'm saying critical reform of the Democratic party is not possible if you keep supporting fascist-lite candidates and letting them get away with their pied piper bullshit. Ever. People are already dying and suffering due to the lesser of two evils politics, both in Gaza and here in the US. What you're afraid of is that you will suddenly start to feel the consequences of your politics. People are already getting screwed over, it's just acceptable to you because you're not part of those effected groups. You're allowing them to suffer for our collective political sins.
It has to sink in sooner or later that neoliberalism is politically bankrupt, it can't deliver what we need to stop the slide into fascism and the more energy you put into trying to convince everyone that voting for the Bidens and Clintons of the party will save us, the more acclimated the general public becomes to fascism until one day nothing Trump or the next christo-fascist does will elicit any shock or outrage, there will be nothing you can do to get the majority to care or resist because they're comfortable and all the bad stuff is out of their sight.
That's the attitude that made the gas chambers possible.
You are making a lot of assumptions about me without really knowing anything about me. I would like to continue this discussion but I don't think it's worth it if you want to insist on being intellectually dishonest.
I do not consider myself a neoliberal. I spent 5 years of my life living and working on communes. I am, quite literally, a communist.