>She never said anything to indicate that, to my knowledge.

You did, in her defense.

>Maybe you could make an argument that the party leadership thought they could pick whomever they wanted to run, and people would "have" to vote for their pick.

That's exactly what happened. There is no argument.

>Ultimately it doesn't make a difference in this case, however, because, the facts being what they were, people chose an anti-democratic candidate over a democratic one.

That's incorrect.

>And originally I wasn't talking about policies, I was talking about whether the country is tending toward democracy or authoritarianism in ten, fifty, or a hundred years, not whatever policies are the topics du jour that the campaign would need to comment on.

Harris' policies on the border, incarceration, and many other topics appear as the accoutrements to authoritarianism, especially in the ways she intended to continue some of Biden's policies (which were continuations of Trump's policies).

>The "big idea" was that we don't like dictators, and that's all that should have been needed, but it wasn't.

That's not a "big idea." That's a basic tenet of democracy. If all you are going to fight for is the right to vote, and not anything worth voting for, you've given people no reason to care about voting.

>Ok, so no change on one side, and a descent into authoritarianism on the other side.

This assumes that we have not already descended to a state of demi-authoritarianism. The Supreme Court is stacked with radical, activist, ultra-conservatives, and so are lower courts. The legislature is ineffectual. The local police abuse and attack protestors and uninvolved citizens alike. The federal police gather all of our communications surreptitiously. Traveling has involved, "Papers, please," theater and secret no-fly lists since I was in elementary school. Every sporting event begins with a jingoistic morality play. Which side made any efforts to curtail any of this? Has any side succeeded?

>Choose Harris, and you will have time to work your problems out.

We've been out of time for 8 years, unless someone decides to embark on a radical campaign to reform the courts and whip legislators into meaningful action. That was why Biden was elected. He failed. There is apparently no appetite within the Democratic Party for any of that. Even if we "had time", the notion fails on its face, in its complete lack of substance. Buy time to do... What? Regain rights lost under Democratic rule (e.g., reproductive)? Stop climate change? (Utterly missing from her platform in any meaningful form.) What did she intend to change? What elite interests did she say she was going to throw under the bus, in order to do something for everyday Americans? ...You know, maybe that's the key. People feel hurt at the expense of the wealthy and well-connected. They wanted equivalent exchange: an elite's head on a pike, in the process of building something for Median Joe. Democrats see that as something unseemly to avoid when, for many, it's a feature. Harris couldn't provide one, so they took hers.

>The campaign's behavior was nothing special

That's a problem.

>and it shouldn't take anything special to vote against someone with a dictator's mindset.

Well, it does. Face reality.

>The Harris campaign made their stances clear to anyone who was listening

Quite. She wasn't as wishy-washy as Clinton. She was explicit about not having anything substantial in the works except the worst, most gross paeans to the right.

>Please don't waste our time trying to make this a political trolley problem.

...

>Abstaining from voting (while remaining in the US) is not walking away from Omelas. It's staying in Omelas and also not lifting a finger to change anything. Even this is a tortured analogy, because Omelas is about to burn too.

I disagree. Omelas, in this case, is not a place. it's a system. You walk away from it by not participating.

>In a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, the people reap the benefit, but they also must bear responsibility.

Woah, cool. You first.

Right. That's out of the way. I hope that this is not going to turn into a point-by-point essay-writing contest where the goal is to wear the other person out with paragraphs of pedantry. I hate feeling like I have to put energy into such things, but then, I also spent months filling a video game blog comment section with just such a tit-for-tat over Final Fantasy XIII. So, like, don't think that you can scare me with a wall of text.

I understand that you are shocked and upset about what happened Tuesday. I did not vote for Harris (or Trump), but I get that the outcome, in it's totality, is not the most ideal for the vast majority of American residents. However, here we are. The results are the results, and there are lessons to be learned from them.

I am telling you, emphatically, that that lesson cannot be, "The electorate just needs to suck less."

If that's your takeaway, we are just fucked right up the wing-wong. People (individually, but especially in groups) do not just become "better" spontaneously. They have experiences that change their outlook; they develop hopes which broaden their horizons and steel their resolve. A candidate curates the collective experience; they polymerize disparate hopes into a common movement and mission. They cannot conjure experiences people don't remember, or that people reject as painful; they cannot incorporate hopes that people don't have (or, in the case of Cheneypalooza et al., hopes that others have already claimed more effectively).

Harris generally couldn't manage the curation OR the polymerization process. In the few ways that she did, Trump did it better. Of course, for the latter, the experiences were horrible and violent, the hopes toxic and horrifying. So, many said, "Neither." No amount of haranguing or kvetching will change that. No one is going to torture themselves after making an intentional decision that they feel to have been moral. Certainly not just to make you, Stranger On The Internet, feel better.

For your own sake, primarily, but also for the sake of the hopes that you wish to survive four more years of Trump, that you desire to find fertile till in some future time: I'm asking you to find some other way of looking at this. The blame game wall-o-text, complete with trite trolley problem (that you introduced!) is profoundly useless.