It is befuddling reading the sentiment for the majority of the comments on this post.
Having a chief executive in office in 2000 who was super concerned about climate change would have made a big difference.
But hey that's just like my opinion man
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.
Defeatism and cynicism are very effective defense mechanisms, and the internet has made some people absolute experts at both.
All we can do is keep loudly pointing out how daft and counter-productive these behaviors are. Even if it's true, saying "x is useless" is also useless unless you propose to do y instead.
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.
Australia has ranked choice voting, does it not? I'd vote for the farthest left option too if the US had RCV.
I'm voting every single far left party before I even hit labour. If you have ranked choice voting may as well use it.
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.
Gore won, but lost to a judicial coup.
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.
And the butterfly voting machine where candidates were on the left and right side of a centre column of buttons. Causing many people that intended to vote for Gore to vote for someone else
In 2000 they lost us the climate crisis, in 2016 they lost us women's reproductive rights, and now in 24 they're angling to lose us democracy itself all so they can feel morally superior to those of us that actually have to live the difference they can't see.
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.
Centrist Democrats will always blame progressive discontent for their losses, even if their losses are caused by the Supreme Court undermining democracy itself.
Quit moving to the right, and we'll quit pointing it out.
Yeah so what about Gore and climate crisis? We got a sweet ass pointless Iraq war with Bush. We got to do the most American thing ever, bully a small country for natural resources and stage a regime change. Would have Gore given us that? Pft no. We would have a serious conversation about climate and taken some steps to mitigate everything.
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?
There would also not have been an invasion of Iraq, things like Isis would have probably remained an unkicked hornet's nest.
License to torture at will would not have been granted to government goons.
The threat of hijacking airplanes and smashing them into iconic buildings would have been taken seriously. Which opens up the possibility that 9/11 could have been averted. Then maybe the mouth-breathers at TSA would not have been given the power to profile and harass at airports.
The list goes on: Katrina and New Orleans; the neutralizing of the Consumer Protection Bureau; the typically republican financial free-for-all that led to the collapse of Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac.
Then there are Supreme Court appointments, which we get to keep for life, like goddamned herpes.
But since so many ignorant and smug lazy assholes stayed home on Election Day bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe LoL aMiRiTe, everybody got a succession of utterly preventable shit sandwiches.
We can also imagine a reality where Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were collectively not elected and global neoliberalism failed to crystallize.
But this is just day dreaming. The reality is those things didn't happen and here we are.
Bush appointed Roberts and Alito.
I wonder if Citizens United would have come about to cause such damage had Gore been able to appoint two different justices.
I know that's not climate related, but it's a pretty big deal result of the 2000 election shenanigans.
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.
I was so disappointed as a Canadian to see Gore lose. That stolen election was stolen from all of us not just America.
Imagine how different the entire world would be now if Bush/Chaney had never happened.
Yeah I was one of those, was young and edgy, still feel bad about it sometimes but then remember AlGore was a pretty different dude then too. Like, he picked Joe fucking Lieberman as his running mate ffs, so I harbor no illusions that he would have been anything other than status quo. Better than GWB? Oh fuck yeah, in retrospect it's not close, but their campaigns they were basically trying to out-center the other, and both seemed like just slightly different versions of each other. Assuming he would have been a major disruptor in terms of climate initiatives is naive I think.
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.
Oh for sure, he was following Clinton's lead, so that's why it's somewhat funny to hear people talking about him like he was some kind of super environmental progressive, when that just wasn't the case, or it at least isn't how he ran, which was really quite the opposite.
Yes, I agree. I'm also not sure that running as a super environmental progressive would have been possible at the time. We were just coming out of the timber wars, where the timber industry had spent millions convincing the US that a few hippies chained to trees trying to prevent the last bits of old-growth redwoods from destruction were the problem.
It was a different time and we were very desensitized to the concept of hippy punching etc.
Also since Al Gore invented the internet (well not really, but it was something he did care about) so maybe there could've been some standards and requirements for inter-operation (which was the direction things were going before Bush) and maybe the internet wouldn't have become the shithole it is now. Yeah it would still be a shithole, but we might've had a shithole that corporations actually had to do a little competition.
Climate Commitment. We’ve been screwed since the ‘90’s. Gore may have mitigated the warming, but a certain amount of warming would have occurred regardless, and will continue even if we achieve net-zero emissions. There is an amount of latent heat already trapped in the atmosphere. The warming we are experiencing now is from the early 2000’s.
I know. I suck. But the science is clear. We done screwed up. Much love to all.
Tell that to SCOTUS. The people voting or debating each other didn't decide 2000.
Having someone who understands the problem is no guarantee that they'll be able to actually do anything about it. The US government, and all governments to a greater or lesser extent, fundamentally serve capital and are beholden to the interests of capitalists.
No president, no matter how far to the left, could possibly save us. They will always delay action as long as possible, when not actively accelerating climate change. We must make this system untenable if we want to save ourselves.
Voting does help, because a hostile government will systematically murder people who resist climate change while a "friendly" one will only imprison some of them. Voting is helpful, but not sufficient. We don't have any more time to waste begging for our lives.
Edit: also, he did win and then there was a coup. This was at least the third right wing coup in the last 60 years. So... Yeah...
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.
america's been fucking its education system in the ass (unconsentingly) since 1980, and now you're a country of redneck morons, exactly per the plan you made. Good job!
Another thing that might have been different with a Gore win: when Bill Clinton left office, the federal government did not have a balanced budget - it had an actual budget surplus of hundreds of billions of dollars. With a continuation of that type of fiscal "conservatism", we could today have been debt-free as a nation. Instead, we have a debt of $34 fucking trillion.
"choices" when the Supreme Court stepped in and decided a winner
Mmm yes but Gore winning wouldn't provide Cheney with lots of lucrative no-bid Halliburton contracts.
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.
Honestly doubt it. Money talks. Also the president doesn't make the laws.
Yeah, it's nice to think what could have been, but still feels like a long shot at best.
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.
There would still be a problem because while the USA have a big responsibility in the fight against climate change, they are far from the only country that needs to do something about it. It's an us problem, not just a U.S. problem.
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.
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