899
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
899 points (92.0% liked)
Political Memes
11740 readers
1654 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
1) Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
2) No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
3) Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
4) No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
5) No AI generated content.
Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You're right.
I should give Democrats credit for all the times they held power and still didn't do jack shit about the VRA except wring their hands and pretend to be powerless to stop the judicial repeal of it. (2006, 2013, 2021, etc. etc. etc.)
After all. Actually doing stuff requires effort, and it's unreasonable of me to expect the opposition party to actually oppose things.
My favorite thing about these threads is anytime someone like you makes an actual argument for your position, rather than the ridiculous strawman argument from the le epic meme, the Kamalaposters just downvote and never reply. Probably curled up in a corner telling themselves you're just a bot and they don't need to listen to your evil words.
Kamalaposters means what, exactly?
Anyone posting stuff that insinuates that people who didn't vote for Kamala in the last election did the wrong thing, basically. Or sometimes just the idea that we must vote for lesser evil candidates in general, depending on how blanket the view is.
For example the OP here is a Kamalapost because the obvious implication is that people who didn't vote for Kamala due to her stance on the Palestine issue made a mistake because the other option did all the same bad things as her plus much more. This is a really solid argument against that reasoning for not voting Kamala. The problem is that, out of the people who didn't vote for Kamala, most of them have different reasoning than the kind this post criticizes - which is why I called it a strawman. There are non-strawman Kamalaposts too (albeit a lot rarer) and I can respect those, those are just good healthy discourse.
So is the implication that they are or were percieved as equivalent evils?
I think anyone rational would see that a man who would invade the capital of the country to overturn the results of an election isn't very trustworthy. Voting against him is a simple way to denounce and oppose a rapist who supports strongmen and other genocides.
Supporting Israel, or not publicly denouncing them, was certainly supportive of an evil country. AIPAC absolutely has too much power in this country. How does that relate to Trump also supporting the country? And, you know, idolizing Netanyahu amongst other fascist leaders and strongmen? (I believe we can easily say Netanyahu is as much a fascist as a gymnast is flexible)
Idolizing strongmen currently committing genocides in multiple countries, attempting to overthrow the government, spreading false information leading to millions of deaths because... horse dewormer was touted as a remedy is equivalent to a moderate pretend-democrat conservative with bad opinions that could be changed, and opposed, how exactly? Project 2025 was already public information prior to the election. Equating a solid plan for introducing and attempting to cement fascism in the USA to that is a little weird.
I cant quite recall the Carlin quote, forgive the extension, but its along these lines:
"Asking about the differences between the options we have right now is like being given 2 options of airline food: Shards of glass, or (airline, yuck) chicken, and asking how the chicken is cooked."
Like I said, poor paraphrasing. The obvious point is that a man who tripled the debt in one term and supports other genocides isnt going to attempt to stop a different genocide.
No, I don't want to angrily tell you how to vote. I just want affirmation from potentially reasonable people that they won't attempt to equate such obviously different candidates, and such obviously different parties. Schumer and a select few dinosaurs are not the democratic or republican party, but if you consider them a negative influence on our government and democracy, I would agree with you.
Stubbing your toe intentionally sucks. Intentionally sawing off your legs sucks a little more.
I would like to see how this post inverts its intended meaning, and how there are few reasons to vote against fascism which has repeatedly publicly announced itself as opposed to voting for it. Im truly curious how there are less pro-Trump or pro-fascist ideas and complaints with substance and more Kamala and liberal based complaints. If the message is inverted, you must be quite knowledgeable. I do want to learn, despite snarkiness, as I clearly do not understand their equivalence
I dont like her like I dont like airline chicken parm. Which is definitely equivalent to broken glass. 100%
And leftist voted against Trump by voting for Claudia De La Cruz. If you voted for Kamala, you have to spend the rest of your life knowing you supported genocide
The 600+ upvotes really makes me wonder how many are out there.
WorldNews doesn't even get that many on average in such a short time.
Always happens to the pro empire posts, very curious.
It is a ridiculous strawman as it ignores that in the last twenty five years the Democrats have only held real power for three months and they passed Obamacare with it. It's a bullshit argument based on deliberate misunderstanding of the federal government.
Maybe not deliberate in my case?
My first line of inquiry would be whether Republicans have only made substantial achievements of their goals while possessing the real power you described, or whether in your opinion they also make "progress" on their goals even when not possessing this real power?
And if you understand how much of the federal gov functions (or did previously) on tradition and good faith and expected norms instead of by law or regulation then you'll know already how the republicans managed this. Unless of course you're also participating in bad faith like republicans.
People frequently assume I'm participating in bad faith. From my perspective, I feel like it's just because I disagree with them, but maybe I'm approaching it wrong. Would love it if you could tell me if there's anything I can do to respectfully disagree and discuss while not coming off as bad faith. But I understand that's not your job lol, just curious.
Anyways, for sure a lot of the gov functions on good faith, that's been demonstrated very painfully the last few years! It still seems like that means the Democrats had opportunities and just didn't take them. Republicans don't need absolute power to get things done, but Democrats do? I mean, I respect that they want to uphold tradition and good practices, but at the very least they should probably have tried to codify some of that more when they could have. The whole argument for voting for dems anyways is that we've got to play the game the best we can with the cards we're given - so if that's the expectation for us voters I would hope it applies to our representatives as well.
This should tip you off. You keep uncritically repeating the same talking points used everywhere to blame democrats for things republicans do. They're all based on deliberate misunderstandings of how the gov functions, which helps the next point.
Democrats follow the letter and the spirit of the law insofar as how they conduct the affairs of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. The republicans, heritage foundation, and federalist society have spent the last half century fostering party over country and placing these idealogues in key parts of the executive, legislative, and judicial branch so that when they just break the fucking law and destroy from within every government agency it gets caught up in courts filled with activist republican judges that use the opportunity to destroy precedent and fully reinterpret laws and the Constitution to suit their fascist power grab. And you're asking why Democrats don't just do that too? Do I need to explain the part again where republicans rigged the fucking system by cheating and playing dirty the last fifty years so it's effectively rules for Dems but not for reps? How they literally have the supreme court to rule any which way they want in spite of decades and decades of various precedents they've fucked with recent decisions? The Dems don't have a deep state and they wouldn't have made one to take over, they're not even a united coalition, they're just everyone that isn't a full on fucking nazi and understand the two party system means any vote that isn't for a Dem is expressly for a republican. So why don't the Dems break the law and overthrow the fucking government like the republicans do, hmm gee tough one. And everyone that wants them to break the law like the republicans do, then you want America to die because that's what that will mean. If you want the holes that fascists exploit to take over the government you have to actually give legitimate power to the people who have tried to do this. Only Dems run on taxing rich, closing tax loopholes, codifying government function.
I think that, after decades of inaction at the incremental destruction of the VRA, one has to kinda admit that Democrats really just agree with Republicans. They own the policy too now, just as with every fascist policy they spoke out against and then either did nothing to stop or actively encouraged.
Honest take - if the Democrats are in agreement with Republicans about these kinds of rulings, then they are complicit with the slow-burn death of their own party, no? Some of them could be considered political double-agents in a sense, if that is true.
Like usual with liberals, they'd prefer losing to fascists than seeing the left defeat fascists
Yeah but why though
because they agree more with the fascists
Well, Fascism is a suicidal ideology, after all...
I tried to understand this but I couldn't figure out how to draw it as a trolley so I'm just gonna have to conclude you're a bot. Or if not that a shill. Or if not that just stupid. Sorry
And it's always the fucking trolley problem lmao. Libs can only hold like two surface level factoids about any given topic every four years or so.
Not to mention, the point about the trolley problem is how it has a million complicating factors but libs are like "no, I solved it, crank on that fuckin lever or you're a monster tankie Chinese ruzzian bot"
Yes I have enjoyed thinking about trolley problems since like 2010 so I feel like a bit of a hipster with them. Your point is hilarious and true. The entire thing the trolley problem is supposed to illustrate is how difficult-to-impossible it is to make a decision even in the literal trolley problem situation. Its supposed to be a fun intuition pump that shows how moral decisions are not straightforward. Yet seemingly for large groups of people the takeaway is that moral decisions are extremely straightforward because you just do what you already want to do, and also you have full authorship over the situation and its outcome for some reason. Man.... I never realized how ironic that is that people are getting exactly the opposite lesson out of it. Hilarious.
I've had people on here tell me I have blood on my hands and AM a baby murderer due to not voting Kamala. I pointed out that, just like them, I am trying to pick a lesser evil in the short term for a long term greater good, but just over a longer frame of time and a larger group of people than they took under consideration, which really means that they're the bigger bloody handed child murderer according to their method of assigning guilt, and they're just selfishly limiting their scope of concern to people they know here and now.
I got no response from them, and someone else just called me a stupid asshole. 🤷
Exactly - the claims of "harm reduction" make people feel smart, but ignore opportunity cost and that there's elections in the future as well.
Beep Bop Boop
R2D2 scream
Democrats: Pass landmark legislation to give minorities political power, eventually lose power
Republicans: Gain power, strip minorities of political power
You: "Why aren't the Democrats doing more?"
Every time the GOP burns the house down, they're politelt excused and Democrats get blamed for not bringing enough water. Explain exactly why you think the Democratic Party wanted the VRA to die.
Democrats have never made a single significant improvement that wasn't under explicit threat of violence from the organized masses, and even then only after dragging their feet and heavily negotiating it down.
Off the top of my head ,Obamacare, green energy investments, gay marriage, ending non-competes, antitrust, not ending lifesaving aid to the global south are all pretty neat.
Do you remember the armed militias organizing so Adam and Steve could get married? I don't. IG there were a lot of guns at the last Buck-and-Buck party I went to, but it was a hick town so...
Almost all of your examples are exactly what they mentioned
Obamacare - shitty mild reform forced after literal decades of working class begging for drastic reform. The essential “meat” of it in terms of progress was ending the ability of insurers to deny for pre-existing conditions. The cost of this was the individual mandate, forcing everyone to buy (still privatized and ridiculously expensive) insurance, which was ultimately a huge win for insurers. They sold a significantly higher amount of shit coverage high deductible plans, especially to young people, who generally never meet the deductible. So now they had the monthly premiums for those people while essentially paying $0 in coverage. In turn many of those people became extremely resentful and saw the gop as saviors when they eventually removed the individual mandate to pander to them. Romneycare, the original bill, did nothing to address the huge administrative overheads that plague our system (5-10x the rate of other countries), no regulatory controls for price gouging, etc because it was designed to look like something was being done while ultimately serving the corporate monopolies involved in health insurance, which the democrats were happy to adopt because they are corporatist in nature
Green energy investments were paltry and pathetically low considering the scale of the issue. Americas grid is not even 25% green energy. Meanwhile China has 3x the capacity of Americas entire grid in green energy alone
When has significant antitrust action occurred? Honestly? The last real movement was breaking up the telecoms in the late 80s/early 90s. Even that was pointless as the telecoms eventually re-convened through mergers and acquisitions over the next 10-15yrs and have reemerged as Internet monopolies with price fixing and everything. Monopolies exist everywhere in the USA - obviously in tech to an almost unprecedented level, health insurance through companies like Aetna and Cigna, mass media is overwhelmingly owned by 6 indicates/companies, even shit like the major music record labels have dwindled from like 14 to like 4 from 2000-now because no controversial merger is ever blocked. Even fucking grocery chains and food brands that have been demonstrably shown to price fix are either given a slap on the wrist fine or nothing at all
Gay marriage was not codified in a way that prevents repeal at any point, similar to abortion rights. As a result it is in a precarious situation where the republican evangelicals are actively funding court battles to challenge it
Aid abroad was to generate “soft power”, eg “I did you a favor so you now owe me the world”. While aid is good it was extremely often exploited for imperialist motives like perpetuating the military industrial complex
Every single one of these is an example where the democrats presented idealized progressivism, watered it down to something tolerable for the donor class (and sometimes even beneficial), and still went into it kicking and screaming (the complaints people have about fetterman, that they had about manchin and sinema, were about Lieberman in the ACA days). Neoliberals eat it up because it feels like progress with marketing and the democrats then leave the issue behind forever as “solved”, eg “we did the absolute bare minimum to appease enough of the masses to continue to secure power”
As an outsider, I feel like while democrats have done many things that you might be vocal about, the biggest factor of deteriorating quality of life wasn't sufficiently addressed.
This is some wild erasure of impact of the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s on pressuring Democratic politicians, including LBJ himself, who was more worried about pissing off southern Democrats than passing the VRA. It wasn’t until the threat of mass civil unrest was upon them that that it was passed with bipartisan support, with 20 of the 32 Republican Senators at the time (not a typo, Dems held a supermajority of the Senate) cosponsoring the bill to prevent southern Democrats from filibustering it. It also passed the House with bipartisan support and a 333–85 vote (Democrats 221–61, Republicans 112–24).
As always it is the people, not politicians, who get the goods.
The masses have never convinced the wealthy to something they haven't wanted to do. The publics desire for change has never been a motivating factor for policy.
If you have evidence that the Civil Rights Movement and civil unrest had no impact on the passage of the VRA please present it, because that is not current historical consensus.
The civil rights movement was a story I was taught but the reality of the government engaging in a slow burn genocide against minorities with the War on Drugs is my modern reality.
So was the appeasement of civil unrest and subsequent backlash again VRA and the Civil Rights Movement a net positive. Was it just appeasement or did the government actually bend to the will of the people. What do you think Martin Luther King or Malcom X would say about the state of things now considering the US has destroyed millions of minority families in the last 40 years.
I think this also gets at the perspective that things are getting progressively better. While some metrics such as poverty have shown some amazing progress with billion of people having access to fresh water and electricity, actual human rights have not faired so well.
I think you can take historical consensus and drop kick it off a cliff for what it is worth.
And let's not forget that Strom Thurmond, the man whose hatred for black people gave him the demonic fortitude to filibuster the Civil Rights Act for 24 hours and 18 minutes was a Democrat, until he and his ilk decided to all gather in the Republican Party.
I don't think liberals will ever quite understand why it was so easy for him to switch parties like that. Or why Trump made the same switch after being a Hillary supporter in 2008.
Not only was he a dem, he was personal friends with the Clintons. All that racist shit libs know he's been saying since the 90s? His buddies were pushing for the Crime Bill at the time
I see. So if our ideal candidate isn't possible anymore for the next election, we should always vote for the worse candidate, to drive people further towards public outcry, until civil unrest can get the real goal accomplished.
Makes perfect sense
The point is that it doesn't matter who you vote for, and pretending otherwise is a bit absurd. All we get are neoconservative politics no matter who we elect. The difference is one side pretends to be powerless and just lets the bad shit happen. (Except for genocide and poverty, which they enthusiastically aid and support.)
Your only power is local unless you're willing to commit a dramatic act of vigilantism.
You may wish there were a third track, but taking your hand off the lever gives up power.
Saying it doesn't matter is a naive position of privilege. Of course it matters. This is a "they're no different" argument that is just so obviously a false equivalence.
You're saying that voters should have no power and have to accept whatever the Democrats nominate. You don't seem to understand what power is.
No, not being allowed to rewrite history doesn’t mean that at all. You don’t get to erase the incredible violence faced by average people that was ultimately behind the passage of the VRA, or the cowardice of the politicians who wouldn’t act until the mob was literally on their doorstep.
If you think anything I’ve said about the VRA is inaccurate you need to go read a history book. Anyone telling you to be grateful to the Democrats for passing it out of the goodness of their heart is at minimum too ignorant about the actual history of the US to listen to, or they’re trying to con you.
I never said any of that? I said you can do both. They are not mutually exclusive
That isn't anything close to what I said.
But okay. If it makes you feel better. 🤟😎
Cool beans bud, great talk. 🤡
This is the highest of liberal thought. No retorts, just acting smug.
I know, right? Ya ask the kid to defend a stupid assertion and ya get an emoji dismissal. Pretty weak sauce!