supersquirrel , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I am a very vocal critic of Biden for supporting the Palestinian genocide.

I have railed on him in thread after thread for enabling the slaughter of Palestinians.

I am one single person but I want to vote for Biden, this genocide is just a red line for me.

I can really only speak for the left but mark my words if Biden genuinely stops this genocide (or starts taking meaningful action to stop it) the vast majority of those voters will come back because this isn’t about rejecting Biden (have y’all even been paying attention to leftists organizing around voting “uncommitted” in the primaries as a thoughtful way to mitigate splitting the party?), this is about rejecting neoliberalism’s stranglehold over the democratic party and the absolutely horrific consequences that happen when we don’t do the work to reject the intellectually suffocating and ideologically lazy environment created by neoliberalism and centrism (that inevitably plays directly into the hands of fascists as history has shown over and over again).

Barely anybody on the left who has indicated they don’t want to vote for Biden because of his appalling lack of desire to stop the genocide of the Palestinians is going to react to Biden genuinely creating a ceasefire by not changing their position and supporting Biden over Trump. Leftists understand just as well as centrists that Trump will be worse.

What centrists can’t wrap their mind around is that if we don’t fight existentially for Palestinians now than Gaza will be considered a successful prototype by rightwing fascist western parties/governments all over the world and we will see this kind of violence become the new world order. We need to stamp this shit out now, and many of us on the left feel that the only effective leverage point is setting Biden’s ego for desiring to win the presidency as an old piece of shit against his loyalty to Israel (along with most of the Republican and Democratic parties).

Is Biden directly complicit in the mass murder of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians no matter if he stops the genocide today? Of course, and he will always deserve the jeering insult “Genocide Joe” for it as a tiny penance to pay. However like the rest of y’all I understand that all US presidents are mass murderers. George Bush directly caused 1 million Iraqi citizens to die…. for what? How fucked up is it the way Obama escalated highly illegal unilateral drone strikes completely hidden from the scrutiny of the US public?

I don’t need Biden to be a good person I agree with to vote for him, I need him to come back over what is a very very very reasonable red line.