• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    25 days ago

    You see I do have rights, and that’s something Americans are about to lose.

    I’ve seen this dogged insistence that Americans have rights but an election can take them away and all I can think of is the Iraq War Protesters, the OWS protesters, the Climate Change protesters, the Pro-Choice activists, LGBT activists, and the anti-Genocide protesters who have all seen police action against them.

    You’re not about to lose your rights. You’re simply going to be subjected to a level of enforcement traditionally reserved for ethnic, religious, social minorities, labor organizers, and other broadly defined “Leftists”.

    And chosing between two evils is a bad position to be in, but they can still chose.

    The choice is an illusion in a system as degraded as the American democracy. Even at the most superficial level, you’re telling people they have a choice of who to support when the Electoral College clearly denies them this privilege. If you live in Texas, you’ll be counted as a Trump supporter whether you are or not. If you live in California, you’re counted to Harris. The swing states are exactly that - all or nothing. Individual voices don’t matter.

    And that’s before you get into the decades of legalized disenfranchisement, vote caging, and voter intimidation that have shaped the results in states like Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina. Florida has the single largest number of disenfranchised voters - 1.1M people, roughly 1 in 14 eligible voters. They are legally disqualified from casting a ballot in the state, overwhelmingly biased against ethnicity. Then you’ve got places like DC and Puerto Rico, which are fully disenfranchised at the Congressional level and only tangentially represented in the EC, via ex-pat voters and the 23rd amendment.

    This isn’t lesser of two evils, its a ratchet. Dems backstop progress with legalistic delays and poor leadership. GOPs ram ahead in direct violation of law and precedent, then face no consequences other than a brief sabbatical from high office during wave years. The end result is a consistent march towards fascism.