I'm talking about Democrat voters or low information Republican voters who somehow aren't in a right-wing information silo. Trump voters, who have been watching Fox News and similar programs, have been brained washed for decades. They need mandated cult deprogramming at this point with help from specialists.
What we need to overcome is so widespread and ubiquitous that even people who aren't particularly politically engaged have the idea in their head. Bring up socialism to people, and they reflexively say 'socialism doesn't work'. Maybe they give a passing reference to the Soviet Union. If a person believes their society's institutions are infallible and that they are at the end of history it's hard for them to understand we need systemic change and wealth redistribution.
Neoliberalism needs to be fully internalized as a scam so people can look for other answers to their problems like socialism. The only changes that neoliberals are able to accept are changing the people who are in charge of institutions. It's why fascists are able to appeal to them where socialists and even progressives struggle. The fascists only have to make the leap from changing the people in our institutions to changing the people in our society, primarily by getting rid of them. edit: typos
All of that is true too. But we can't control Biden or Harris or DNC consultants. And I doubt they will listen to us. We can choose to make a case to voters and delay fascism for four more years. We can use that time to create a populist campaign.
It's going to be a lot harder to do that now. Criticism isn't the issue. It's the inability to detach a person's ego, their self-image, from what needs to be done in the moment. The people we are arguing with cannot seem to do that. It didn't help them during the election. It's not helping them now.
I'm not perfect at this. And there's a limit to how good at minimize our egos, anyone can be. We can't get out of our egos, it's a part of the human condition. But we can focus on being useful over being moral.
Rather than scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds a more useful statement would be today's neoliberals can be tomorrow's socialists. But to do that we have to do the work of convincing people to be socialists. Teaching people neoliberalism is a scam is the first step in that.
If any neoliberal can't get on board that neoliberalism is dead, then obviously they are no use to us. But they are an easier pool of people to convince than the fascists who want to kill us. And if the Democratic Party still exists in future elections and there somehow are future elections, both seem unlikely, it's still worth voting for them because it gives us time to get a populist campaign off the ground assuming there isn't already one that's ready to go. edit: typo
That's all true. But her campaign is the tool that we had in that moment. We did it before with Biden. We could have done it again with Harris. In the months leading up to the election we've got to care less about the quality of our tool and more how we use it. We can push the Democrats all we want further to the left up until then.
But the campaign we get after the DNC convention is the campaign we have to use. Some people couldn't put aside their moral self-image to do that. Now they're beating a dead horse, when Trump has threatened to send those Democrats to prison. We could all be heading to death camps starting next year, and I'm hoping I can reach some people to get their heads in the game before that.
Neoliberal ideology leads to fascism. The actual neoliberals themselves are not fascists. We can work with neoliberals. The problem with scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds is that it's a mindset that creates enemies out of people who are our allies.
Don't get me wrong. Neoliberals need to abandon their ideology in favor of socialism. And a populist narrative wouldn't hurt the Democrats either. But if we blind ourselves to the difference between neoliberals and fascists, we are making things harder for ourselves.
I think we actually agree on this, we just phrase it slightly differently.
I mean finding ways to attack the MAGA movement that convinces people to vote for Harris. There are people on lemmy who aren't as politically engaged or as far left as we would hope. But more importantly, this is a space to spread ideas which can then be spread to the wider internet.
Biden is complicit, because he's the president and it was his decision. She's the vice president, who does not have that power, so she's not.
We have a democracy for as long as we can keep it. There's a good chance we just lost it. There's no sense in giving up our agency because neoliberals are institutionalists. We knew what the Democrats were. Our options this cycle ended up being Harris or fascism. The goal was to get Harris elected to stop fascism for four more years. Instead of doing everything in their power to help get Harris elected, accelerationists did everything in their power to sink Harris's campaign. We broke our only tool over our knee and threw it away because it wasn't a better tool. Doing so wasn't useful. edit: typo
Now people are beating a dead horse. Neoliberals are neoliberals. Fascists are fascists. Spend this energy attacking the MAGA movement.
I highly recommend you swap out subjective moral reasoning for utility. You've already convinced yourself that it is morally right that we all go to the death camps. But it's not useful. There's a chance we do something that's useful between now and the death camps, but not if we care about being decent people more than we care about people.
Biden wasn't running for president. Harris wanted to end the war. Trump wanted Israel to finish the job. Accelerationist rhetoric hurt the Democratic Party's chances of winning at the expense of your goal to help the Palestinians. Now the genocide will be allowed to continue indefinitely.
You're free to debilitate yourself as much as you want. Could you like, stop though. Please?
A lot of the contradictions are resolved by remembering the Republican party don't want to lead, they want to rule. So Republican politicians say things like states' rights when they are out of power in the federal government. Because they don't want a Democratic Party administration to have power over their state. Then we they are in they power in the federal government they stop saying states' rights because they want power over every state.
Our democracy is flawed because of its flawed political institutions such as the electoral college that enables minority rule. What you're describing is know as direct democracy which is a kind of democracy.
Even though we have representatives who vote on our behave that is also still democracy. Representatives are an innovation that allow democracies to scale to hundreds of millions of people.
Disproportionate representation to small states however, is another example of a flaw in our democracy that causes it to favor minority rule. This favoring of minority rule is also part how we got here. We needed record breaking turnout to correct for this and we the people did not deliver that.
People can only hold one set of beliefs in their heads at a time. By not fully internalizing neoliberalism as a scam people are unable to internalize socialism as the answer to their problems. They can't accept systemic change or wealth redistribution if their institutions are infallible.
And with all the people pining for a dictator that agrees with them, democracy needs all the love it can get.
What people need is organization and mutual aid to help them survive another Trump admin.
Yes, because instead of socialism and democracy we got late-stage capitalism and christo-fascism.
No, it was a federal presidential constitutional republic which is a kind of democracy. The way a beagle is a kind of dog. Our democracy still intact until the inauguration at least.
If we lie about history we will be doomed to repeat it. We had a democracy and fascists took it. Organize to take it back. Tell people the truth so they don't repeat the mistakes that got us here.
America was a democracy, but we had late-stage capitalism that was terminal. Neoliberalism was the scam that conned generations of Americans into clinging to flawed political institutions and capitalism long after they had demonstrated themselves to be ineffective.
Neoliberalism was so deeply rooted in the minds of the American people that they rejected socialism, the means of their liberation, without learning what it was and allowed fascism to flourish in their minds instead.
But we aren't all dead yet. So as long as people are still alive we can organize against fascism. It may even be possible to take our democracy back. A good place to start is to tell people how great socialism and democracy are.
If you have seen Adventure Time, I suspect the sea lards are probably based on blob fish. I don't have a source to back it up other than the sea lard's visual aesthetic and my recollection that Adventure Time and Blob Fish were both in the public consciousness as memes around the same time a decade ago.
I'm talking about Democrat voters or low information Republican voters who somehow aren't in a right-wing information silo. Trump voters, who have been watching Fox News and similar programs, have been brained washed for decades. They need mandated cult deprogramming at this point with help from specialists.
What we need to overcome is so widespread and ubiquitous that even people who aren't particularly politically engaged have the idea in their head. Bring up socialism to people, and they reflexively say 'socialism doesn't work'. Maybe they give a passing reference to the Soviet Union. If a person believes their society's institutions are infallible and that they are at the end of history it's hard for them to understand we need systemic change and wealth redistribution.
Neoliberalism needs to be fully internalized as a scam so people can look for other answers to their problems like socialism. The only changes that neoliberals are able to accept are changing the people who are in charge of institutions. It's why fascists are able to appeal to them where socialists and even progressives struggle. The fascists only have to make the leap from changing the people in our institutions to changing the people in our society, primarily by getting rid of them. edit: typos