COMMUNITY/MODS: want this post gone, it’s gone - would remove ASAP.
Please be excellent to each other here. We have to self moderate or I’ll delete without being asked. Assume good intent.
I’m pro human which is why I’d rather have some people in office here in the US than others, and why I’m pro human rights.
Trans rights are human rights.
After reading criticism of the dems, this question resurfaced in my mind. I know we don’t have time machines, I know it’s easy to claim a false equivalency is being drawn. So note this question doesn’t represent reality. It represents a curiosity of a hypothetical.
Trans rights are human rights! Thank you.
PS: I hope neither this post nor its comments represent/produce any content that bad people will use to make arguments to further evil causes. Have I already erred? Yes I’m worried, I’m also curious enough to hit this post button here… gulp
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Imagine you have a time machine that lets you peek into the future, specifically the 2024 election. You can see two possible pathways:
Pathway 1: Democrats go all-in on trans rights.
They champion inclusive policies, fight for trans healthcare, and actively challenge anti-trans legislation. However, this galvanizes the opposition and they lose the election.
Pathway 2: Democrats stay completely silent on trans rights.
They avoid the issue entirely, focusing on other policy areas. This strategy helps them win the election, but trans rights are left in a vulnerable position.
The question is: which pathway would you choose?
Would you prioritize a Democrat win, even if it means sacrificing progress on trans rights? Or would you fight for trans rights, even if it means risking a loss?
I reject the premise of your question.
I agree, the job of politicians is to reframe Trans rights as policies that benefit everyone. If everyone at a negotiation feels like they are winning you have a successful negotiation. Who cares if the new policy disproportionately benefits one group, we are all better off because of it, and in the case of Trans rights give them the same (non-codified) protections as everyone else.
(This is if course ignoring the oft used tactic of the far right which is to do the opposite and reframe beneficial policies (eh. ACA) as something that only benefits one group by calling it a funny name (eg. Obamacare), so it’s easier said than done, but that is what the democrats should be doing more of, imho)
Is this Pic you, how you reject the premise?
Democrats are already sacrificing climate targets, asylum seekers, and Palestinians. Yet another sacrifice on the pyre?
At some point you’re just voting for Republicans.
Unfortunately I think a good percentage of people on Lemmy, especially in lemmy.world, are quite comfortable with that
This kind of post just shows why I think politicians are spineless cowards. If winning is everything to anyone, they should stick to investing in a stock market.
But American politicians can invest in the stock market with insider knowledge.
The politicians may want the win for selfish reasons. You just want the best representatives for yourself, your loved ones, and your country.
This hypothetical allows you to weigh a party taking the moral high ground against representatives the average Lemming does not want making four years of policy decisions being in a position to do so.
You can give the party you want to win a spine, but it comes at a cost.
Your final claim is the one that’s in question. You think it’s true, but maybe it’s totally false. For example, I think Al Gore and Hillary Clinton got the results they got because of their spinelessness, in part.
To some degree, the principle that I’m talking about is quite clear. In a situation where a large percent of the population doesn’t vote at all, it’s the candidates job to get people excited enough to cast their vote. One way of doing that is to have a firm position, to show that you have integrity, to show that your values mean something. Of course when people get elected then they might have to cut deals in order to pass legislation, and we all understand that, but if you throw your values out the window before the election even happens, I’m not going to vote for you.
So, in this hypothetical we have a time machine, and can see not just if Dems lose but also what the consequences of that loss are. Further GOP court-packing? Loss of human rights for other vulnerable groups? Or maybe just a continuation of the status quo? With the time machine, we would know. Because the Dems winning or losing is not a good or evil in itself, but the consequences could be.
But, real word time now, we can’t know all the consequences of our actions. We should always try to achieve the best results we can, of course, but you can’t do something you know is wrong (like stay silent on trans rights) in the hopes that an evil now will lead to a greater good later, or prevent a greater evil. That’s my take, but what else can you expect from a virtue ethicist?
As a Dutch citizen I just want to kick the shit out of this post and all it stands for. Seriously your system is broken. Period.
I’ll give you a different perspective. I don’t vote in the US elections (given the impact on people in other countries maybe we should) so I won’t focus on the Democrat/Republican thing but on the reasons for selecting a specific candidate.
Step 1 - deal breakers. Determine if the proposed policies cause any immediate regression in what is already achieved. Rolling back existing trans rights, banning abortion, stuff like that.
Step 2 - vibes. This is the critical one. Don’t immediately look at positive policies you want implemented. Look at how a candidate winning would move the Overton Window .
After this election there will be more, and who wins today moves the general vibe of the entire political system. It sets a base for policies of future candidates who might not even know it yet.
Step 3 - narrowing down. Now if you have several candidates that pass step 2 equally, you can look at the specific policies. Generally you can expect any politician to overpromise (khm lie), but usually they try to achieve at least some of the stated goals.
In two-party electoral systems basically you can’t often reach the step 3, but you do have primaries so it can be applied there.
This post feels a little like bait, but that said:
To me, this is not even a question. It doesn’t feel great to say, but the only correct response is to choose Pathway 2. There’s a lot of things at stake in this election but one of the things on the chopping block if the GOP wins is trans rights. We’ve seen what they do when they have full control (look at Florida - that’s their vision for the whole country); securing a win for them just to maintain a moral high ground on this one issue will only make things worse for trans people. Trans rights being left “in a vulnerable position” is far better than trans rights being eliminated completely. That’s not even taking into account any of the other problems this would cause.
Anyone choosing Pathway 1 is not thinking through the ramifications of their choice. That said, it’s a stupid premise for a discussion, for exactly the above issue. For there to be an interesting moral dilemma, there has to be a dilemma, and there’s only one here if you’re not thinking about it past the surface.
To be clear this is purely in response to a hypothetical and I’m not in any way suggesting actually taking that course of action in reality. I in no way believe there’s enough single-issue swing voters for the democratic party being pro-trans-rights to make a lick of difference in the actual outcome.
The idea that actual swing voters, who are largely tuned out of 99% of available information, actually care about specific policies is overstated on all but a tiiiny subset of issues (which trans rights are not one of). Virtually no specific policy actually impacts electoral success on non-base turnout voting on its merits, it’s all campaign organization and media vibes, so I’d argue this is a false choice, largely. Nobody who isn’t already on a side cares about your platform, they care if you’re visibly embarrassed about your own platform (as democrats usually are about the 1% deviation from the GOP free market absolutism they dare in most cycles).