The next time someone says “How can anyone vote for Trump”, you just gave the answer. You have to vote for the Democrat selected for you, no matter how awful, in order to oppose what you perceive to be a greater evil. That is exactly what the people who vote for Trump are doing, too.
I saw a quote just this morning from a Republican who said they were embarrassed by the candidate, but they had to vote for him because he would nominate conservatives for SCOTUS. No matter how awful the Democrat in question is, you will always vote for them, because they will always be running against a Republican, and the same issues of the Supreme Court, etc., will be there.
That’s not really an answer, because it doesn’t explain why any rational person would think Hillary is a greater evil than Trump. Even high-ranking members of the Republican Party are publicly decrying that he is flat-out unfit for office.
I can’t really think of a left-wing equivalent for Trump. But what if it was, say, Bill Maher (or some other manifestly unqualified leftwinger) vs. someone like Jon Huntsman, and there were 3 or 4 supreme court vacancies coming up.
Would you vote Huntsman as the more sensible candidate?
The people here on this thread are saying they don’t necessarily like Clinton, but it is imperative to vote for her because Republicans will nominate conservative supreme court justices to SCOTUS.
The Republicans are saying that while Trump is an embarrassing candidate, it is imperative to vote against Hillary to prevent liberal judges being nominated to SCOTUS.
Democrats are acting all confused why there has been no loss for Trump in the polls in the last couple of weeks, while making the exact argument that the people voting for Trump make.
When you laser focus on a few domains that virtually every president in US history has made many poor judgments in (foreign policy, business friendliness, transparency) it’s easy to make a lazy conflation and then draw an even lazier moral equivalence by dismissing a huge area of policy matters where there are vast differences. I would suggest trying not to though, you’re calling the person who’s vocally opposed to mass persecution and deportation of millions in the US the moral equivalent of someone promoting those as their top agenda item because their track record elsewhere’s bad. That’s worse than naive. You’re explicitly supporting great evils by pretending they are less important than reining in Wall Street and status-quo foreign policy. The things you’re upset about are bad in terms of human suffering, but not even one one thousandth as important as the things you’re choosing to ignore.
It seems just the opposite to me. It seems like what’s being said is
“oh, sure, she’s terrible on diplomacy, war, privacy, campaign finance, pandering policy to business and foreign interests, etc., etc., but since she will nominate liberal justices to SCOTUS, we can overlook the massive problems.”
The things you’re upset about are bad in terms of human suffering, but not even one one thousandth as important as the things you’re choosing to ignore.
The things I am upset about amount to millions displaced and killed around the world, our support of what amounts to genocide, entire regions falling into lawlessness and chaos, and the US being perceived as evil by most of the world. It’s hard for me to balance that as one thousandth the importance of anything.
You’re explicitly supporting great evils by pretending they are less important than reining in Wall Street and status-quo foreign policy.
Actually, I am rejecting the call to support evils, by supporting neither the bad, nor the worse.
Some level of ongoing global conflicts will be the outcome from anyone being elected. All you can hope for there is harm reduction. Nobody is going to make the Earth a happy peaceful place where we all get along, no matter how hard you visualize world peace.
The difference between Republicans and Dems in foreign policy is in how they approach dealing with international conflicts. Dems are Internationalists. Republicans aren’t. Bill Clinton’s military actions involved international actions to stop ongoing genocides than anything else, he was heavily involved in work towards the kind of conflict resolution and working towards peaceful resolutions of conflict through peaceful means. Clinton got the parties in conflict in Northern Ireland into negotiations, with remarkably positive outcomes. Clinton got the PLO and Israeili gov’t to the table and made progress on peaceful solutions.
Then Bush was elected, jettisoned the prior administration’s ME peace process efforts, and let the IDF invade and commit atrocities with no repercussions. Once Obama was in office the world was in an ongoing fire due to the Bush years’ massive irresponsibility, so there were burning conflicts being focused on. This is the cost of electing Republicans in many domains, really. While Obama and Sec. Clinton have made plenty of mistakes (esp. in Libya), their foreign policies has as its focus and goals substantially different ones than that of the GOP, which you could readily discern if you were to take a look instead of reading shallow left-wing propaganda.
Here’s a helpful list to clarify some things you may not have taken into account. In the past 40 years the US has invaded:
Grenada (R),
Panama (R),
Iraq (R),
Haiti (D),
Afghanistan (R),
Iraq (R)
You might notice a bit of a pattern if you stare for a while.
Have you seen the comments on Stuff recently? There are a bunch of folk here who love Love LOVE Drumpf.
/looks at knife
/looks at wrist
/contemplates future
With all due respect, his foreign policy positions killed his domestic policies after he got elected in 64, but prior to that he managed to get two of the most critical pieces of legislation passed (the civil rights bills). While his policy on Vietnam was horrific, he pushed for positive change here at home. That’s not nothing.
According to a poll in the linked WP article, it doesn’t look like gender is even that significant of a factor compared to others like race, party affiliation or education. That difference in certainty of voting based on skin colour is pretty scary though.
Any women I’ve heard from who plan to vote for Trump are doing it for reasons like the Supreme Court, abortion, dislike of Clinton’s policies or something similar, certainly not because they like him.
Come to think of it, the same goes for the men I know who are voting for Trump.
I might consider Huntsman, but I’d really have to see how each candidate presented their ideas during the campaign. Bill Maher may not be suited for the office but he’s still got a few serious advantages over Trump. For one thing, Maher has obviously spent a number of years thinking about political issues while Trump was focused on figuring out how to ensure that his name was featured on as many buildings, steaks, water bottles and Chinese-made suits as possible. For another, Maher has actually been pretty successful at his chosen field (comedian/political pundit) while it’s not at all clear that Donald Trump is actually very good at business—financial experts have estimated Trump’s net worth would be at least twice what it is today if he’d simply taken the fortune he inherited back in the 1970s and put it in an index fund instead of pursuing all his wacky business ventures.
I too am having a hard time coming up with a left-wing analog to Trump because even the looniest of left-wingers generally have some degree of human empathy. That’s why you never hear about “bleeding-heart conservatives.”
So, by choosing to do nothing, you choose to support both bad and worse by abdicating your ability to do anything. Refusing to make a choice is still a choice.
What a lot of people tend to forget is that Trump used to be a registered Democrat from 2001 to 2009, donated to democratic politicians over the years (including the current nominee), and in the past held a lot of “lefty” positions such as being in favor of abortion rights, universal healthcare, and better gun control. So I think that rather than racking our brains trying to think of an example of a “left wing analog of Trump,” why not just imagine that Trump himself ran as a Democrat before his most recent party switch? Would Democrats have supported that version of Trump for President? I hope not.
It’s convenient to put those R’s beside the conflicts, but you might wanna go back and see whether Democrats supported them, actively voting for them, funding them, and standing behind them. I understand starting post- Vietnam helps your argument, so long as readers don’t look deeper into the participation by Democrats or look at actual lives lost. Actual horror. Grenada? lolz…
Israel, just wow, I wouldn’t know where to begin. Every American President worked on the conflict there, Bush as well. He didn’t “allow” the IDF to do anything than Clinton hadn’t already “allowed” them to do. The very fact we think of it as “allowing” other nations to do things tells the world what kind of megalomaniacs we are as a nation. Palestine rejected Clinton’s efforts. He said directly to Arafat:
"I am not a great man, I am a failure, and you have made me one.”
You might try reading Clinton’s own memoir regarding the peace process there and his own failures. As to intervening in genocides he said we should only intervene when it directly served American interests. Peaceful resolutions overall, the activities of Democrats have generally been neither peaceful, nor resolved, and they continue to support a policy of global interference, bullying, and intimidation that has turned the world against us.
And this is war and peace. She’s awful in almost every area, and I won’t vote for an awful person just because they are running against someone debatably more awful.
