Choices and Consequences

Yeah. Seeing them come out of the woodwork to say "Yeah but Gore was just another rich white blah blah Lieberman blah blah center-right, all the same" really throws it into sharp relief how little connection there is to reality there.

It would literally have changed the world. At this point we're scrabbling around from the outside desperately trying to get the leaders to care, when it's already too late for a lot of the semi-good outcomes. We missed a chance to have a guy in charge who understood the science, and cared a lot about it, back when there was some time to change the trajectory.

Edit: Now a bunch of different users have independently come to the conclusion that it wouldn't have mattered anyway, because the Republicans would have defeated anything he did in congress, and now they all want to share that message with all of us, as their current explanation for why it is that elections don't matter anyway.

(Edit 2: Guys. You get to vote for congress in elections, too.)

IDK, maybe I am reading too much into it and it really is a bunch of people who are motivated to post about politics, but whose brains are also just wired to search for defeatism wherever they can find it, and that's the message they want to share. Maybe.

As someone who's guilty of thinking 'both sides are the same' I think you're definitely right.

For context I am Australian and while I still think our labor party is better than our liberal party the differences are small, which is why I always vote for our further left party whose votes ultimately go to labor anyway.

Would the world have been different with Al Gore? Probably. But it’s easy to make up perfect hypotheticals. Look at what the Democrats actually did in the years after. They basically all voted for the Iraq war, and then when they had a filibuster proof majority in 08, they did practically nothing on climate change.

Cool, then explain what he could have done that Obama and Biden didn't do already. You're massively overrating the impact one president has. It's not like he even campaigned on climate change in the first place. He didn't pull that schtick until after he lost the election.

There's no chance whatsoever that an Al Gore presidency would have averted the climate crisis. Absolutely none. I'm actually shocked that any adult could be this naive.

Yeah, but we did get the War on Terror, so... That was fun /s

Except that the Republicans would shit-can any legislative initiatives - because they controlled both chambers - and would hamstring any executive actions. Hell, they'd probably have impeached Gore for it.

Our system of government is simply incapable of dealing with a problem on the scale of climate change.

One thing that I learned from that election is the small perforated dot in the ballot that is punched out with the little pokey thing is called a chad.

Some ballots were thrown out because of the “hanging chad”; meaning the chad was still attached to the back of the ballot. Pretty sure all those ballots were for Gore.

Supposedly he lost because he asked for recounts only in counties where he was polling well, but then they should have ordered a general recount.

I'd also like to complain about the electoral college again. Anything but going by popular vote is anti-democratic. The American system is so damn infuriating to me and it's not even my country. But it affects us globally.

If it makes you feel any better, they absolutely will live the difference if Trump wins. Even Trump 1 didn't really make a life difference to most Lemmy-poster-demographic people until Covid hit; it was mostly vulnerable people inside or coming to the US. Trump 2 will hurt everyone, right away.

Every 4 years is really a choice between conquest or making the economy go brrr.

Hey now, killing all those people in the Middle East was worth it, wasn't it? I mean, if the US hadn't invaded Afghanistan, it would probably still be controlled by the Taliban to this very day! Good thing we avoided that scenario, right?

A calm and rational discussion and response to 9/11 instead of making up lies, going on the war path, and telling allies that they're either with us or against us? Lame. Pass. (/s)

I keep comparing Casablanca to New York City. One reason is that they're both the biggest cities in their respective country without being the capital, and that they suck, but also because before 2001, they both had twin towers (the ones in Casablanca are still standing btw).

It's also the old story, the same that many governments faced during COVID, if you do a lot and actually stop something from happening, people say it was a waste of time, nothing happened, you over reacted etc.

If you don't do anything and it all goes badly, people say you didn't do enough etc.

So theoretically even if Gore did start to fix climate change, if he had real impact, there's a chance the world would've turned against climate change as a hoax and waste of time.

The sad part is, we'd still probably be better off overall.

Citizens United and Voting Rights Act both. Even with Trump's nominees we would currently have a 5-4 Liberal court.

We would still have Roe Vs. Wade.

were basically trying to out-center the other

I mean that is and has been the post Reagan political paradigm. It worked once for Democrats (Clinton), every other election before and after (at least as far back as Carter), Democrats win when they step to the left. Yet they still think they should be fighting for some imagined center.

Yeah this - people tout Al Gore today as if he was the same back then. He learned from what happened, and became better, but it was that failure that caused that process... or something like that, maybe?

Like, didn't he say that he invented the internet? Actually, supposedly he never said that, only that he played a key role in it (which he did), but that is the kind of thing that a "modern" politician simply cannot ever do: give comedians a reason to make fun of him, like Biden's "then you ain't black" comment. Obama understood this well: the President is mostly a face on television (these days, the internet), so portrayal is the main part of the job.

Unfortunately, Trump used that same feature to his own benefit. i.e., Trump understood this one feature better than Gore. Before everyone downvotes me to oblivion, I invite people to think about how it is correct, no matter how desperately we wish it were not, or how disgusted it makes all of us feel:-(.

At the time you didn't have to be major disruptor like we need major disruption now. What you needed to do was move the needle, which could be done. Moving the needle early on drastically changes the path decades later.

There's also what you say during the election and what you do. I'm pretty sure Bush played it up (I'm amazed at what I see him say in old videos). Gore played down what he intended to do, or didn't make a big deal about it, because that's not what got votes at the time. So they may sound similar but not actually be similar.

Could have if more people voted though

also, he did win and then there was a coup

Brett Kavanaugh helped with that coup and now sits on the supreme court.

And? Whet exactly is the point of this post? You might not get EVERYTHING you want, but you'll get SOMETHING, VS voting for assholes who'll actually be working AGAINST fixing the problem.

From civil rights, to healthcare, to climate, to pretty much any issue that matters Republicans will ONLY make it worse.

In my decades of living I have not seen Republicans offer a solution to a single issue. It's always just fear mongering and hate.

Having someone who understands the problem is no guarantee that they'll be able to actually do anything about it.

Having someone who doesn’t understand (or, more likely does but doesn’t give a shit) IS a guarantee that nothing is done about it.

We must make this system untenable if we want to save ourselves.

Great! Lemme just let the trans folks in my life know that alls we gotta do is elect the fuck who threatens to erase their existence entirely!

Bc the untenable systems at play in Russia, S Arabia, DPRK, RSA, etc. have done wonders towards the citizenry in those countries rising up and rebelling... oh... wait... thats right... its damn near impossible to rise up the closer your state is to the fascist mark. Congrats, ur right that the liberal system blows. Replacing it with something worse will only make things worse.

How successful have you been at bringing ur fellow comrades together to organize for direct action? And thats going to go better after we go full fascist?! After our minority allies are straight up outlawed?

He did put effort into fighting it, Jeb blocked the recount after it was found Gore had negative votes and Bush had more votes than people in a county then when it got to the Supreme Court they ruled that it took too long to get to them for them to allow a recount

You realise that debt of the government is equal to wealth in the private sector? Being debt-free would mean that there is no central bank money in circulation. How would this help the actual economy?

Should be very clear that both parties are very equal in the growth of the debt.

Oh c’mon it’s not like they passed a law making it okay to profiteer off of war so they could gouge the taxpayers for - checks earpeice ohhh. That’s right, they did.

The resolution to illegally attack Iraq purposefully left out the war profiteering.

Still though. Both sides bad, let’s all listen to the FSB and not vote.

Gore won both the popular vote and the electoral college, and while a staged right-wing riot caused significant confusion, and ultimately the Democratic party decided that 'decorum' was more important than stopping the conservative movement.

History isn't inevitable, but nothing has fundementally changed about how Liberals and Democrats view strategy and politics; this should cause to to strongly consider the value or wisdom of statements like Blue No Matter Who, if even when victorious, they refuse to take it.

Its not a long shot. It actually is the timeline we should be on and Gore was *impeccably clear about climate change being his priority. He won, by both the electoral college final count and the popular vote. The election was stolen from the American people but is relegated to a modern folk tale, in-spite of it actually being reality.

As the world's financial powerhouse, the United States has both an outsized effect on climate change relative to our population, but also power to do something about it that extends far beyond our borders. Both treaties and commercial agreements can be used to lever other nations into responsible climate policies; we've been doing this with just about everything else for our entire existence. You ever wonder why weed is illegal everywhere in the world at about the same time? Or copyright laws that destroy the public domain? We did that. We could use that power for good, as well.

It seems like most other developed countries have been taking it more seriously. We could have been part of that group

In developing world, think of all the energy projects since then, that could have leapfrogged the technology directly to renewables. Heck, the extra decade or two of “free” energy could well have altered their economies

The thing is this is China too. I do buy their point that in many ways they have still been a developing country, they still have had so much population to bring forward, so much progress to make, while also being the worlds manufacturer. And when they’re in, they’re all in. Yeah they’ve continued to build coal, and maybe the US being serious about climate change could have influenced that for the last few decades, but everyone needs to remember that while they continued to build coal, they also were taking the worlds biggest steps in Renewables. This could have happened earlier.

Of course, but a country with the means the US have should lead by example. They don't have a "big" responsibility, they have the greatest.

This is an extreme exaggeration. Supposing you could wave a magic wand and zero out all US emissions and waste beginning in the year 2000, we'd still be just as fucked due to China and India's emissions. And guess what, neither of those nations give a fuck about sticking to climate treaties. China manipulates its stats on virtually every useful metric, and India has a position that they deserve to finish industrializing.

And was controlled entirely by Republicans.

Good luck with that. I doubt there's one single thing for which that is possible besides maybe "George Washington was the first president".

What, are you a fucking alien that lives outside the earth?

That's pretty disingenuous given his term started in the middle of covid. US carbon emissions are still well below what they were in 2019.

We're also drilling more oil than ever before.

You do understand things take time right?

Assuming that all democrats across the last 24 years are all the same is utterly unreasonable.

And being aware of a problem and flatly denying that it exists are also two very different things. OPs greater point holds; 'both sides' arguments are fallacies.

Nobody mentioned millennials or boomers.

Do you think George W. Bush did any amount of damage to the world?

Forget the world, do you not think US has had an outsized affect on the environment and climate change specifically?

But yes, having lived through that, so many times other countries had no need to take the environment seriously because the US didn’t. Sometimes there was influence. Sometimes it was merely the biggest polluter

It absolutely, 100% no-doubt, are-you-even-joking would have been better. But my idiot friends all voted Nader to register their displeasure. Stupid fucks.

No Iraq War, "No Child Left Behind" never becomes a thing, Bin Laden gets caught in Afghanistan if the 9/11 plot even manages to happen since Bush is known to have ignored a report containing a warning about the attacks being planned.

You really wanna tell me that a world without the war on terror would be exactly as bad as the one we live in today? Especially one without the war on terror where the century kicks off with a president who takes the climate crisis seriously?