ETA: I said most of this in the comments but to save people the scrolling I’ll say it here too.
This can be about elections but it isn’t exclusive to elections. If it wasn’t true between elections, I don’t think the situation would exist during elections.
The meme is specifically about the difference between the group that isn’t pretending to be good (100% evil) and the group that uses the other group as a threat to avoid pressure to become less evil themselves.
It does not offer a solution. It does not tell people what they should or could do. I think the problem is very broad and requires a diversity of tactics specific to local conditions, not a snappy easy fix that fits well in a meme. It does involve being able to discuss the parts of the machine that keeps the machine churning tho.
The only people this helps are fascists.
Voting is one activity and we all want to just vote our problems away in one day. But that’s wishful thinking and frankly, childish.
Work all year to improve the choices at the voting booth and make the best choice you can once you’re there. Rinse and repeat.
Slow and steady wins the race or whatever Aesop said.
How can people fix a problem if they are discouraged from talking about it (ETA: or are told they are helping fascists by talking about it).
I’d believe you were sincere if I saw the same kind of posts when elections weren’t right around the corner.
Anyway the answer is that you can talk about it responsibly, but you have to look at the end result or consequences for each of the choices available to help determine the way forward. You can’t frame it as whether the party meets a particular threshold of goodness before it’s worthy of your vote. While there is a lot of low hanging fruit, not everyone will agree about everything and people are naturally resistant to change. It takes sustained effort.
It’s the responsibility of everyone in a democracy to participate so that parties are more representative of their constituents. Only a tiny piece of that participation involves voting.
Both sides are fascist. Biden and Kamala enabled isreal’s genocide. If ending a genocide isn’t a priority for you then I don’t care what is.
This slow and steady strategy you’re describing got us here. The only thing it helps is fascists. Deluding yourself into thinking otherwise is quite frankly, childish.
No, what got us here is thinking one day of effort (voting) will get the job done.
The meme isn’t intended to be specifically about elections.
You only provided one example of effort in a misleading way.
Both sides are so obviously not the same that there is a concerted effort before every election to make people think that they are.
There is something about the US collective unconsciousness that reads “one side uses the other side to make themselves look better” as “they are the same” and I don’t know if I will ever understand.
I made this meme to highlight the difference between the “more evil” and “less evil” groups and how that difference is the mechanism that prevents things from getting better. Seeing them the same doesn’t explain why the situation doesn’t improve. To be extremely specific, the difference is that one of the two groups uses the other as a threat to get the public to accept a situation they do not want as the best option.
I don’t think it’s exclusive to the US or two party systems, but that’s off topic for this reply. I think what I want to say will be easier to follow if I specify R and D instead of % evil.
The Ds say “accept this imperfect approach or you actually support the Rs, which makes you the bad guy”. The Rs also use the idea of the Ds being in power as a threat to their base, but it’s more “you need to vote for us or these guys will do all these bad things you don’t want!” It’s not the same at all, which is what I am trying to say.
Maybe you (or others) can help me understand how this could be presented to be about the general relationship between the public (the guy with hat) and the Ds. What makes this appear to be about a general election between R and D and not about the efforts to make the D less evil? Maybe there is an implication I’m missing with the format that I’m not aware of. How could this meme be made more general?
Thanks. I am so tired of this moral purity bullshit. It’s just people trying to excuse themselves for letting trump happen.