An increasing number of Democratic partisans are assigning blame to avoid it
Some in the Democratic grassroots scapegoat tiny populations to keep from criticizing the party as a whole
There are some who are determined not to learn the lesson of the Uncommitted voter.
As others have opined, those for whom Gaza was the top priority were put in a moral quandary, one that delivered anguish and despair.
Many of those voters, in the Democratic camp, saw the polls showing that a significant majority of Democratic voters consider what Israel is doing in Gaza is a genocide.
They saw that a majority of Americans supported a restriction on arms to Israel.
Yet they saw their standard bearer, Vice President Kamala Harris, go out of her way to assure an apparently narrower band of supporters that her policy for the Middle East would not differ materially from President Biden’s.
This Trump campaign ad ran on loop in the Southeast Michigan area. It’s devastatingly effective because nothing is embellished. It’s simply a clip from The View.
What does the despondent voter do? As the lesson of WarGames has it, the only way to win is to not play the game. And in this contest, it seemed like a game, one where there was no winning move. For those voters, the best move was not to make one at all, so as to avoid affirming the genocide that was being fed by the party in power.
Others, such as those in the Abandon Biden and, later, the Abandon Harris movements, suggested punishing the party in power by voting for Trump. I am not here to defend that thought process, except to say that it, too, must have been borne out of a feeling that nothing fundamentally would change or even could change. There was no real choice of the two main options.
The only anti-war choice was the third-party candidate, which is why you saw such outsize numbers for Jill Stein in Arab-American strongholds in Michigan and elsewhere. Was it a viable choice? No. Stein had no path to the White House. But at least such a vote cast would still count as making a move on the board.
Many in the mainstream Democratic camp wanted to lambaste the Uncommitted voter even before any votes were cast.
“Don’t be a single-issue voter” (even though they were counting on single-issue abortion voters for the upcoming ‘Roevember’).
“Vote now and maybe you’ll have a seat at the table after the election” — conveniently neglecting that once the votes were tallied, such voters could be safely ignored from that point forward, having no longer any leverage to seek a hearing.
“This is the best you’re going to get!” (This is and was always a terrible argument.) Translation: “You’ll take genocide and like it! Where else you gonna go?”
And these Democrats wonder why people stayed at home.
The New York Times, in an article where it analyzed some of these trends, focused specifically on Michigan, breaking down the numbers (especially those out of the city of Dearborn). But not only data was available but also a short anecdote. A canvasser spoke of encountering a Black female resident of Detroit who proceeded to tell him that she was not going to vote. There was no point, she said: nothing was going to change.
How do you motivate a voter like that? Certainly, you don’t say that you wouldn’t change anything that your predecessor has done. Those words are the soul crusher.
Now these stalwart Democrats want to blame the non-voters for Trump winning the election. These folks have it backwards. Those votes were available — Harris didn’t win them. She had every opportunity to convince those people and she didn’t do it.
Harris clearly had determined that she did not need to reach out to Uncommitted voters. She may have crunched some numbers and calculated that she could make a run at winning without them. If that’s the case, then it is entirely Harris’s fault for not trying to obtain those votes. That was a choice. There are no grounds in such a scenario to blame the reticent voter.
More than that, it’s grotesque to blame the disillusioned, dispirited erstwhile voter who stayed home with the same amount of blame placed upon those who affirmatively voted for Trump.
That makes no sense — except to those who had completed enough mental gymnastics to convince themselves that anything other than a vote for Harris was a vote against her. Sorry, that’s not how culpability is meted out. To engage in this thought process is a way to avoid blaming Harris for her own campaign’s shortcomings.
Don’t get me wrong — this was a multifactorial loss. Many individual and disparate factors figured into Harris’s loss, racism and sexism among them. I haven’t written a definitive post-mortem, not yet; and this is not meant in the slightest to be such a thing.
But I am seeing a definite attempt by some to have it both ways: require that all people vote the way they demanded (even though in a democracy, a person’s vote is their own), then blame them even if they didn’t vote at all, lumping them in with Trump voters. Especial glee is expressed by many of these people for Arab-American and Muslim voters to suffer; coupled with a sudden burst of callousness shown toward non-Harris voters, this is a remarkable display of newly uncovered bigotry that I hadn’t expected to see in the Democratic camp.
Yes, I’m seeing justification for this rash of newly acquired sociopathy, and some people feel ducky in displaying this to the rest of the world. They are savoring the fantasy of seeing these non-Harris voters ground underfoot.
If those citizens didn’t even vote, wanting to avoid having the genocide on their consciences, these judging Democrats want to blame them all the more, saying that they will bear the blame for the surely increased death toll come Trump’s return to the Oval Office. Huh? What about the actual Trump voters? This is pretzel logic, meant to assuage their own consciences.
See, if enough Democrats had petitioned their elected leaders in the run-up to the election to change course in Gaza, implement an arms embargo, or at the very least simply state that Democrats would follow international law as it pertained to foreign policy, then there could have been movement on this issue. In such a scenario, those citizens wouldn’t have been despondent, feeling that no matter what action they took that their efforts would be in vain. They would have had reason to feel that a vote for Democrats would be a vote for a better future.
Saying that nothing was going to change was pretty much guaranteeing that demoralized voters would desert the ballot box this election cycle. Whose fault is that? That’s our fault as a party. We collectively should have done more to push our leaders.
But that’s a painful thing to confront and acknowledge. So much easier to scapegoat a minute segment of the voting populace and heap the entirety of Harris’s loss onto those folks’ shoulders so as to alleviate one’s own guilt.
But why are you surprised. These same folks were gleefully cheering unvaccinated people dying. They were GLOATING about it - (even though plenty of vaccinated folks were dying as well.) I don’t know exactly when my political tribe turned into a cult, but it seems like about 2015. I lost more friends than I can count for backing Sanders over Trump. People I’d known for a lifetime called me a Russian agent.
I'm very "conversational" to put it politely. The unpolite translation is, I could suck the oxygen out of a room in a matter of minutes. It would help if I had better understanding of you, in particular your Hitchcock reference in your profile, "A room with a sociological view." I thought perhaps you might be a sociologist.
We are animals of course, but we are, to our knowledge, the first species in 4.5 billion years that has had the opportunity to choose whether or not we go extinct. We have not yet made that choice.
When I write about the "predatory phase" of history I am using a phrase first coined by the sociologist Thorstein Veblen. For as long as we have been keeping records, approximately 4k years, or what historians call "history" as opposed to "pre- history" which defines events that took place before records were kept, larger civilizations have used conquest as a means to gather resources (wealth) into their own group. For the ancient empires, war making and slave retention was common place. All to enrich a regal that had a large army to feed and citizens to tax and slaves to administer. The further they spread their influence, the wealthier they became. However, through the advantage of hindsight, we now know that all empires self-destruct. Colonialism is self destructive.
Conquest as a means to gather wealth is what the USA has been doing from even before it was founded. This is not a surprise considering that the our founding fathers came from the British empire. This is simply how they learned to conduct business. It is still, by far, our biggest revenue generator and our favored method of wealth accumulation. We are a warrior nation.
"We’re humans, though, and aggressiveness is part of our nature." Yes, but now, due to the progressive development of our mental function (consciousness) as a species, we are not enslaved to the fight, flight, freeze mechanisms that are a part of our reptilian endowment. People will still act automatically to avoid being ran over by a speeding car, but that doesn't mean that we are automated to exercise wholesale slaughter of other human beings just to survive as a nation. War is not necessary function of contemporary societies. Humans on a global scale are beginning to realize our inherent interdependence on each other and have concluded that cooperation is a necessary function for us to survive on this planet. Veblen's contention was the we have to hurdle the hump of conquest, this predatory phase of human evolution, in order to survive. The longer we prey on other nations or groups of people (colonialism), this threatens not only global extinction but threatens our existence as a nation.
In the last election, which candidate of the 2 traditional parties was going to go to the podium at a campaign rally and talk about the elephant in the room i.e. the US/EU economic elites unipolar hegemonic plan to control the whole globe? Neither. Because they know that the quickest way to get fired or even exterminated, is to go against the plan of their bosses. So, no I don't vote for R's or D's at the federal level any more. I hope this helps.