On Democrats: Are They Still Less-Evil Enough?

*And when do we just say “fuck it” and go all the way to Cthulhu?*

It may give you some idea how old I actually am to know that I canvassed for Jesse Jackson at the state Democratic convention when I was in high school.

I’m old enough to know better than to expect much of the Democrats.

They’ve always been a milquetoast opposition to the Republicans, offering a weak alternative that was less bad but never actually good.

But I’ve never 100% given up on them. Yet.

Because, frankly, the Republicans have been pretty atrocious all of my life so the Democrats have stayed firmly in the “lesser evil” category for all that time.

Never actually a desirable choice when voting, but never bad enough that I would have voted third-party in an election where a Republican might actually win.

And I’m certainly not alone in this.

Estimates from polling are all over the place on this, but at least a third of U.S. voters are voting against a candidate rather than for one. That link is from 2016; if they did a similar analysis more recently I can’t find it, but given the trajectory I’d expect it to show over half of votes being negative in 2024’s presidential election.

So neither party actually has even a clear plurality of voters in favor of it. The U.S. electorate is really split into quarters, with roughly equal numbers of voters in each of four groups:

1/4 votes against Democrats
1/4 votes for Republicans
1/4 votes for Democrats
1/4 votes against Republicans

The exact situation will be different in different locations, of course. I suspect that the county I live in is actually closer to something like:

1/8 votes against Democrats
1/8 votes for Republicans
1/2 votes for Democrats
1/4 votes against Republicans

So at least I’m not alone in this; there are a _lot_ of people who only vote for Democrats to stop a Republican from winning. (And, interestingly, there’s a roughly equal number who only vote for Republicans to stop a Democrat from winning. Those folks are nuttier than squirrel poop, but there are a lot of them out there.)

But I’m starting to think the Democrats are no longer less-bad enough.

I’m not alone in this either; Trump almost certainly won at least two states in the last election because of voters rejecting the idea that the Democrats are no longer less-bad enough on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and those two states gave Trump the decisive Electoral College votes.

Yeah, Trump is actually President because the Democrats had already crossed that line for enough voters.

The Democrats seem to have not learned from that at all.

And that was before they rolled over to show their bellies to a fascist coup.

Which is kinda where I think we should be drawing the line.

So, when you next get a chance to vote consider: do you think the Democrats will actually fix the country’s underlying problems? Will they reform the electoral processes to prevent an insane minority from taking power again by gerrymandering and voter suppression? Will they remove the judges that enabled Trump’s illegal rampage through the federal government? Will they prosecute anyone?

Because if they won’t do all these things, then I’m starting to think that letting the country dissolve is probably a better option.