I do not feel good about voting for genociders. I feel fucking awful about it. But I know with absolute certainty that a democrat or a republican is going to be elected president, and yes democrats also defund schools but I’d way rather not have to start from square zero four years from now.
You will start from square zero either way. They don’t care about you or listen to you. One of the reasons they don’t need to is that there is no organized, disciplined opposition. Dems expect vaguely left people to fall in line, they don’t even pander most of the time. Look at the DNC where they brought in an Israeli to speak, denied a Palestinian, and brought in the daughter of a Contra to lie about Sandinistas. They didn’t even try pandering. They could have picked a comprador Palestinian to say some both sides BS but instead gave you the middle finger and lied about a ceasefire.
Square zero is organizing. You will have to organize just as much in 4 years. Dems will not slow or stop the degradation of conditions, their neoliberal policies are driving that process. And if there is no left, this only fuels an ascendant right. Every election is going to be “the most important one of your life” for the foreseeable future and Dems will be complicit in this. Our only hope is to organize a left opposition as quickly as possible. Part of that requires shedding the false idea that telling people to vote for genociders is helping. It isn’t. It just normalizes genocide.
Genuinely, with no wish to sound snarky or get an “own”: That awful feeling is your conscience and gut telling you that this is both terribly unnatural and entering dangerous territory, respectively. Regardless of how this election goes, the US and it’s vassals are going to get more fascist, and we are all going to be asked, politely at first, to go along with more and more atrocities. The sooner we stop swallowing our humanity and start listening to the blaring alarms in our minds that this is all wrong, the safer everyone will be.