Well regarding slavery, I believe Abraham Lincoln was (public policy wise) a gradualist on slavery and therefore a moderate anti-slavery Republican. As I recall he did not run for election on the platform of ending slavery in the south, but rather to not allow it the new territories opening up in the west, and in the primaries he defeated more radical candidates who would have stood for immediate abolition. So one could say the analogy to your position with respect to slavery is refusing to vote for Abraham Lincoln because he would not stop slavery in the south. Of course he did end it, but only after the southern states rebelled because they saw his gradualist approach as a threat and wouldn’t accept the compromise position, not sure how easy that was to predict at the time of the election.secret squirrel wrote: ↑Fri Apr 10, 2020 2:52 pmWhat kind of advanced dementia do you have that you cast voting for Biden vs Trump as voting to abolish rather than keep slavery? Voting for Biden is like voting for a 5% reduction in slavery. But by all means pat yourself on the back for it.dyqik wrote: ↑Fri Apr 10, 2020 2:10 pmThat's because you are projecting onto other people. You just declared that you wouldn't vote against slavery if the alternative wasn't pure enough for you.secret squirrel wrote: ↑Fri Apr 10, 2020 2:00 pmI see a lot of people in this thread who definitely would have defended slavery.
I have no idea if that fits with 5% and anyway don’t think it is a fair or particularly useful analogy for Biden vs trump though. I think* I would have voted for the Lincoln in the presidential election on the basis that his policy would avoid many people in the new territories enduring slavery and that it went in the right direction, even though it meant voting for someone whose policy platform was to leave chattel slavery legal in the south. I would also vote for Biden over trump on the grounds that it’s possible trump will do a great deal of harm and this is worth the compromise of giving a vote for a platform that is far from ideal and may be interpreted as support for some pretty sh.tty stuff. I do think there is a judgement call to be made though, and it depends on the particular circumstances, so I don’t think the historical analogies are that illuminating.
*of course this is all ridiculous speculation, very few of us will think we would have been pro-slavery, but unless there has been some radical change in the populations DNA, in those circumstances a large percentage of us would have.