Opinion | Don’t Think of It as a Contest Between Biden and Trump
www.nytimes.com
What matters even more than the candidates is the coalitions they lead.

Personality certainly matters. But it might be more useful, in terms of the actual stakes of a contest, to think about the presidential election as a race between competing coalitions of Americans. Different groups, and different communities, who want very different — sometimes mutually incompatible — things for the country.

The coalition behind Joe Biden wants what Democratic coalitions have wanted since at least the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt: government assistance for working people, federal support for the inclusion of more marginal Americans.

As for the coalition behind Trump? Beyond the insatiable desire for lower taxes on the nation’s monied interests, there appears to be an even deeper desire for a politics of domination. Trump speaks less about policy, in any sense, than he does about getting revenge on his critics. He’s only concerned with the mechanisms of government to the extent that they are tools for punishing his enemies.

If you’re an American, and you like what the Democratic coalition is after, then get involved, help with money if you can, and pay attention to downballot races too, not just the top.

  • LovingHippieCat@lemmy.world
    282·
    8 months ago

    A few people in these comments are essentially saying there are no real differences in the parties. Don’t get me wrong, there are 100% things that the parties agree on, like capitalism, supporting Israel, and continuing to fuck with countries that we really shouldn’t be messing with. But here’s the thing, if you think the parties are the exact same then you most likely aren’t having your rights to exist threatened by this election. Republicans want to ban books, want to have lgbt people put in prison for just existing, want to keep people of color from voting, want to have women getting illegal abortions so more of them die, want to force Christianity on the entire country because they think they’re the religion that’s “right”, want to make trans people illegal and force all of us to detransition or be put in prison, want to block all immigrants and deport the ones that currently exist in the country, want democratic lawmakers to be killed in a mob, want to go on a murderous rampage killing all they deem to be scum of the earth, want to literally bring on the rapture, want to establish death and work camps like what was done in nazi germany, want to have putin take over all of europe because he has dirt on them, want to remove all governmental assistance so that poor people die more often, want to eliminate all public education, want to take away voting power from women, want to make the internet as uniform and unsafe a place as possible, want to have disabled people be unable to afford to live so that they die, want to strip all workers rights and go back to before we had unions, want to criminalize homelessness to the point that they are literally dying because that’s easier, want to increase fossil fuel consumption because they don’t think that global warming is real, want to make life on earth as shitty as possible because they think they’re gonna be raptured up and won’t have to deal with the ramifications of their actions. I could go on but this is already a really long comment. There are important differences to the parties, even if you personally won’t be significantly impacted by those differences.