now we have a fascist rapist racist pedophile president who sucks israel's cock.

Who only became a viable candidate because of thirty years of lesser-evil voters covering for the Democratic Party to shift from slightly right of center to right of Reagan, but just slightly left of the "fascist rapist racist pedophile".

Nakedly fascist and white supremacist candidates have been in the Republic Primary forever. They never got the time of day from Republican voters until the bipartisan Neoliberal austerity had squeezed the working class so hard that a fascist strongman selling easy answers seemed attractive. And after the guy who ran on Hope and Change delivered Narratives and Crumbs instead, yeah a lot of disillusioned people who'd been first time voters during the Obama years went back to staying home. That's not because of "both sides" messaging depressing turnout, that's because of "both sides" reality showing them it didn't matter. They voted for a Public Option and got United Healthcare denying their claims. They voted to codify Roe and end the Bush Tax Cuts and got open air slave markets in North Africa and the Space Program handed over to Billionaires to cannibalize.

Then after Trump's first term, they watched the party push Biden from sixth to first without even trying to be subtle about it. And it was obvious even on Super Tuesday that Biden wasn't being annointed because he could stop Trump, but because he could stop Bernie Sanders. So why on Earth would anyone who finds the status quo untenable continue to support a party so obviously and totally devoted to defending the status quo against any attempts to improve it? Voting for the ratchet because you fear the wheel isn't going to motivate anyone. The only people still on your side are the ones too blind to see that ratchet effect policy and identity politics is the only thing the DNC has to offer.

My very first sentence categorized their comment as a misrepresentation of what caused the Harris loss. I had a paragraph in my "novel" originally that said that even if all protest votes went to Harris she still would have lost. But I guess my editor removed it in the final draft /s.

So, since I categorized the comment as a misrepresentation of what happened (protest votes having impact), provided evidence for why people stayed home, and provided an explanation of the campaigns failures; the quote you took was a defense of this conclusion in my "novel" and the actual actions of the people that spoke out against Harris for not standing against a genocide.

You can joke about the length of my comment. I am myself. But, don't quote a single sentence out of the context of "the novel" and pretend it was irrelevant to what I was explaining. Do you disagree with the protest vote being irrelevant? It doesn't sound like you do.

I've had this conversation for years now. The next step after I point to the protest vote as mathematically irrelevant is for Harris defenders to blame the "stay at home". It's why I addressed the reasons people stayed home and the failure of the campaign to win against "the couch". The problem was people staying home. But people stay home because they are apathetic, uninformed, misinformed, or aren't excited for either candidate.

We can be frustrated about why that is. But, if a presidential campaign doesn't run their campaign on how things actually are; and instead try to motivate this large voter base through morality or fear. They're going to fail like they did to have people "pokemen go to the polls".

Let's assume for a moment that what you're saying is true. I'll "steelman" you're argument. Let's assume that the criticism of Harris "from the left" played a large enough role for enough people to stay home.

What you are advocating for is that if a political campaign is bad, but "less bad" than the alternative, we should not criticize it. We should not demand the candidate for our party run on policy positions that we want.

You realize you are advocating for an increasingly worse and worse political choice over time. If no concessions are ever offered by politicians to their voters, and those voters still show up religiously, that is not democracy. That is a cult.

Not only that. But what you're advocating for is impossible. You will never live in a world in which people don't criticize a candidate that is "less bad" than the other candidate. You can, however, live in a world where the politicians that lose elections to historically unpopular candidates like Trump, are replaced by candidates that actually offer policies the voters of their party WANT. We are seeing this grow with DSA right now.

So, even if what you are saying was true, the solution would not be to shame voters. That literally will cause MORE of them to sit on the couch on election day. That's just people. You can't sustain a political party by being "less bad" than the alternative. People will stop showing up. People sitting on the couch when their politicians ignore their material needs is literally how democracy should work.

You're saying the same thing I am saying. But you're for some reason placing blame on potential voters doing exactly what they SHOULD do in a healthy democracy. You seem to want a party that has cult like loyalty as long as "the other guy is worse". Well, that's exactly how you get worse and worse political policy, constantly shifting rightward, for decades.

I think our biggest difference in opinion is that you seem to think Trump brought fascism to America. Would that be fair to say?

I can understand that belief. But, I don't blame Trump solely for the rise in fascism. He didn't bring it. We are talking about a country that had an apartheid state of white supremacy when many of the representatives in office today were already grown adults.

White supremacy is a fundamental part of the American political system. If you always analyze your politicals based on an single election between two presidential candidates then what you are saying makes sense in a vacuum.

But, that is not how we got Trump. We didn't get Trump just because he won the election in 2016. If Trump died from a heart attack in 2013 we very much would have gotten the same dominant Republican party. The Republican party and it's tea party was ripe for the conditions of a politician like Trump. Roe V. Wade would have still been overturned. ICE would have still been expanded.

The Democratic party has been running on "lesser evil" campaigns since they lost to Reagan and abandoned the working class party of FDR.

Trump is leading fascism in America. He didn't create it though.