With so many elections coming up worldwide it's probably a good time to remind everyone that tumblr once got infested with agents trying to convince everyone not to vote, or not to vote left because the candidates weren't morally pure enough.
Also a reminder that they were better at tumblr than most of us, comrade interloper was great at memeing. Like, the talent!
Anyway don't fall for it. There is no morally pure option.
I was reading a book from 1945, where the writer describes being a 16-year old girl in 1930 Germany, contemplating what to vote if she were allowed but finding no morally pure option.
The Nazis, in 1933, only needed less than 44% of the vote to end democracy in Germany and start working towards a war that led to the most horrific genocide in memory.
It is normal, then, for young people everywhere, to look for a morally pure option. It's not new, it's simply the unwillingness to contribute towards evil and that is good and noble and beautiful.
But it can be weaponised.
If you do not vote for the greatest possible good...
That can be taken advantage of by the greatest possible evil. Because it gives them space.
Because those 44% was not, and I'm certain, 44% of the entire population elligible for voting.
It was 44% of the people willing to vote at all.
Some, I'm certain, didn't vote for moral reasons. Would that they had.
Hitler might have never become head of the German government.
Vote for the greatest good on offer, to help drown out the greatest evil.
"There is no morally pure option" --- i respectfully but emphatically disagree.
The morally pure option is to do whatever you can to prevent the morally abominable from achieving power.
If you prevent the raging bigot from being elected by voting instead for the candidate who's policies aren't perfect, but who is not actively trying to destroy entire sections of society, well, that's the morally pure option.
There are no morally pure candidates, sure. Theres not a single morally pure human being in the whole entire world. But the morally pure option is to vote for the least bad candidate, so that you prevent the election of literal evil.
I mean there have probably been a lot of other good ones but I don't catch them all.
If you consider yourself radical, please take a moment to think about why you see yourself that way. Is it because you do everything possible to change the world and real, working class people’s material conditions for the better? Or is it because you like the aesthetic of radicalism? If you are not willing to vote for a morally “impure” candidate, you are not working to improve material conditions, you are radical on an aesthetic level only. Also no, I am not talking about the presidency or other high levels of government that do not impact your personal life. I am talking about city council, county commission, state representatives, and anything else that will impact your community.
I'll just add that, on my recent post about Student Loan Forgiveness, I got a a good dozen empty bot blogs adding very inflammatory replies and reblogs, and another dozen or so "there's just no hope" ones. They're out there right now and they're working hard.
(All these people were reported, blocked, and had their replies deleted. Nothing I can do about the reblogs though, unfortunately.)
It's always important to remember that if voting were worthless, Republicans wouldn't work so damn hard to make it so fucking difficult.