I saw these tags left on one of my anti-doomer posts. I'm not dragging this person by name publicly because it seems like they did vote for Harris at the end of the day, but you know what?
I am sick to death of "yeah both options were bad--"
No they fucking weren't. Trump wasn't simply significantly worse than Harris; they weren't even in the same universe. Kamala Harris was a great candidate and would have made a great president. It wasn't the lesser of two evils, it was pure evil vs a woman running the most progressive campaign in American history. The only way you can honestly engage with the campaign Harris was running on and walk away saying she was a bad option is if you're conservative or an insane tankie whose ideology hinges upon rejecting reality; if that isn't the case, then it's because you are not engaging with her platform in good faith and are instead falling back to a knee-jerk "well ya all politicians are bad and it's cringe to say otherwise, plz think I'm cool because I'm saying Dems are still bad." I didn't just vote for Harris because I wanted to stop Trump; I voted for her because she was a great pick, and I'm not irony-poisoned enough to avoid admitting that.
And I'm just making an example out of these tags, because I've seen the "I need to clarify to all the cool kids that I still think Dems are bad even if I vote for them" attitude countless times over the past decade. It isn't exclusive to these tags or the user who left them. I just think this kind of talk doesn't actually encourage a nuanced discussion of Democrats' actual policies, it just makes people think a better world isn't possible because there isn't a truly better option that goes a step beyond harm mitigation and actually tries to do good things, but that's what the current Democratic Party is--a party that actually tries to improve people's lives when it's in power, while the entire internet and our political ecosystem are dedicated to lying about that in order to make them lose (see the Biden-Harris administration basically getting no credit for any of the good things they did).