For far too long, our party has seen its job as managing decline instead of delivering material change for working people,” Mamdani said at a rally headlined by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. “It has seen its job as explaining why we cannot instead of showing how we can
And I don't think it is accidental. I think Schmuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are Manchurian MAGAs who sold out the Democrats a long time ago. Even if they aren't doing it purposefully, their cowardly and insipid behavior is 50% of the reason that MAGA regained power. They should be out of politics for that alone, they certainly haven't done ANYTHING to prove they deserve a second chance at punishing MAGA. They didn't do it when they had the chance, they aren't going to do it in the future.
We should all be calling our Democratic representatives, and strongly demand that they vote AGAINST Schmuck & Jeffries for leadership. Start now, so everybody knows going into the Midterms that they can expect substantial change by the new Democratic Party.
No one needed to sell out the Democrats. When Nixon was president, the entire time the Democrats held strong majorities in both bodies of the legislature. You know what they did with it? They joined Nixon in developing the war on drugs to turn normal legal behavior into felonies that would disenfranchise Black people and those that associated with them.
The Ds have ALWAYS been this evil. No one needed to sell them out. They have always been a faction of the elite collaborating with the other factions of the elite.
Sure, that's why Biden was different when he architected the crime bill and why Clinton was different when he went after Black "super predators" and spiked racialized incarceration and why Obama was different when he expanded DHS and ICE immensely and appointed Homan and deported 3M people and human rights organizations fought his policies and why Obama and Clinton devastated Libya. Very different
Niggas talk about change and working within the system to achieve that
The problem with always being a conformist is that when you try
To change the system from within, it's not you who changes the system
It's the system that will eventually change you
There is usually nothing wrong with compromise in a situation
But compromising yourself in a situation is another story completely
And I have seen this happen long enough in the few years that
I've been alive to know that it's a serious problem
Plus he has said some pretty misguided things around 2016, I don't like him. Even before I learned he fucked children with epstein and now is an israeli tool.
The resistance is about to get a whole lot bigger. No one likes these things. No one likes llm's.
There is no way these llm's pay for this either, this is going to be paid by federal government bailouts, because the rich can't lose money now apparently that's a thing. We should be ready for that to launch massive resistance.
During the 2008 crisis regular people lost everything and were financially devastated for generations. The wealthy got golden parachutes and the greatest transfer of wealth to their class in history. The working class got a homelessness crisis, expanding debt, a militarized police state, cia infiltration of occupy wall street and fascism. We need a revolution to fix this
First glimmer of hope in a long time has been Mamdani. Every week I feel like I hear about something new and great and it's weird actually seeing what someone can actually do.
It's also important to understand his limitations. The capitalist system cannot be changed out piece by piece into a socialist one. Mamdani is powerless against the capitalist class, at most he can pass welfare and social reforms. The benefit of Mamdani is that he helps prove that these reforms are actually pretty easy to establish, but at the same time we must understand that socialism without revolution is impossible.
That's why it's critical to educate ourselves and communities, agitate amongst the working classes, and organize for socialist revolution.
The biggest thing he should be showing you is that someone motivated can make noticeable positive change in a relatively short period of time. When you see another politician failing to make such noticeable changes, it's because they're not trying.
Yes, Mamdani still has a lot of work ahead of him - what we've seen so far is just a good first few steps, but they're obvious steps in the right direction. Whenever someone says "these things take time" and can't show any obvious first steps to prove that we're actually moving at all, then they're not actually doing anything - they're just saying they are and hoping you won't notice.
It's only weird if you assume Democrats and Republicans aren't both working for the same handful of billionaires and that all the culture war stuff they fight over is just window dressing to distract you from that simple fact.
Once you recognize that the purpose of the Democratic Party is not to govern, but to capture and neuter social movements dangerous to Wall St, and secondarily to give people enough faith in the system that they'll keep voting and not revolting, then all the supposed contradictions make perfect sense.
Pretty sure it was the Clinton administration in the 90s when the Dems sold out to the same Oligarchs who bought the Reagan era Republicans, but the end result today is basically the same either way.
I expect at best it'll be business as usual when typical Democrats are elected. They won't persecute and prosecute Trump, they won't reverse most of his abhorrent policies and POs, won't restuff the SCOTUS with people who think over follow entirely a rhetorical edict, etc. etc.
I'm convinced those people saying no to revolution, it could make things worse, don't realize it's about as bad as it can get right now. When you're starting to pound at bedrock, going up is much easier.
I think the controlled opposition theory is certainly true in-part, but it doesn't explain everything.
The other thing is that Republicans don't campaign on policy. They campaign on random culture war bullshit - much of which, while incredibly stupid and a waste of time, is popular.
So, sure, allowing Tesla to dump toxic waste into their constituents' groundwater is unpopular - but their constituents never hear about it until it's already happened, and then the politicians blame someone else.
Instead, they campaign on your parental rights to infect everyone in your kid's class with measels or to ensure your child isn't turned into a trans catgirl by public schoolteachers and trained to use a litterbox, or the competitive sanctity of the women's track and field team, or whatever other dumb bullshit they can come up with.
People can be made to care about that stuff easily. Then the politicians get elected, do some random bullshit culture war legislation to get re-elected, but focus on making their corporate donors happy by allowing them to more effectively fuck over the constituents.
Under capitalism, those are still not sufficient to change much, even if you could get those across. Politics and economics are, as Doc_Crankenstein said, intertwined, with the economic base having by far the largest impact.
Socialism is not necessary. I'm proposing reduced corporatism to remove the power of companies and their wealth generation capabilities to influence policy.
Politicians should respond to 1 person 1 vote. Not $1 per vote.
What you're asking for is a capitalist state to work against the interests of the class that controls the state, though. That's a practically impossible task, unless the ruling class fears revolt and allows minor concessions.
How would that work? Nobody is allowed to talk to a sitting Congress? They just go into seclusion every two years?
election spending caps
We don't even have proper candidate run elections anymore. It's all dark money running influence campaigns 24/7/365 from private think tanks and media companies.
Like, what are you going to do with FOX News or MSNBC during election season? What are you going to do with Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson? With Twitter and Facebook?
That's before we even get into the paradox of asking politicians to regulate themselves.
How would that work? Nobody is allowed to talk to a sitting Congress? They just go into seclusion every two years?
Communication is fine. All voters have the equal opportunity to talk to their representative (lottery system if too much demand).
Companies don't get the right to talk to representatives, except indirectly via voters.
Capped, controlled benefits are passed from voters to representative (mainly time Volunteered). No financial benefits from corporations. Election funding is centralised and limited.
We don't even have proper candidate run elections anymore. It's all dark money running influence campaigns 24/7/365 from private think tanks and media companies.
I'm saying we make this illegal.
Like, what are you going to do with FOX News or MSNBC during election season?
Ban election opinion pieces. Enforce only facts reported. Full speeches, not soundbites.
Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson? With Twitter and Facebook?
Anyone with over X followers has their political opinions censored unless they are registered as running for election.
Communication is fine. All voters have the equal opportunity to talk to their representative (lottery system if too much demand).
I'm reminded of the national media having a meltdown because Bill Clinton traded a few words with Loretta Lynch on the tarmac in Phoenix. Now I'm imagining this kind of scandal every time a Congressman trades words with a next-door neighbor.
Capped, controlled benefits are passed from voters to representative
You're going to cap the number of hours a voter can volunteer for a political campaign? Even setting aside how that could possibly be policed, I can't imagine how such a policy would be popular enough for anyone to endorse. Imagine a sitting AG ordering the state sheriffs to drag some little old lady out of a campaign office for overshooting her campaign volunteering hour cap and how that would play in the national news.
I’m saying we make this illegal.
We already have an abundance of illegality committed by these private institutions. Nobody is enforcing any of it, precisely because the judicial system is in the pocket of billionaire special interests.
Compare this to drug criminalization. Who gets busted more often? The corporate lawyer doing a line of coke in the Penthouse suite? Or the homeless vagrant melting spoons under the freeway?
Hell, compare it to the TikTok Ban that got advanced under Biden and implemented under Trump. Did TikTok become apolitical after it's American assets were divorced from ByteDance? Or did it become even more political in the hands of a domestic set of oligarchs?
Ban election opinion pieces.
Blatant First Amendment Violation.
Enforce only facts reported. Full speeches, not soundbites.
As impractical as it is unconstitutional.
Anyone with over X followers has their political opinions censored
By whom? You're going to tell the FCC to censor Elon Musk? You're going to tell the FCC to censor Sitting President Donald Trump? Before or after the head of the agency is fired and the organization is gutted by angry partisans?
Now I'm imagining this kind of scandal every time a Congressman trades words with a next-door neighbor.
Talking to politicians is fine. Buying them coffee is not.
Capped, controlled benefits are passed from voters to representative
You're going to cap the number of hours a voter can volunteer for a political campaign?
Yep. 24h.
I'm not worried about individual work. I'm trying to remove the effect of money.
We already have an abundance of illegality committed by these private institutions. Nobody is enforcing any of it, precisely because the judicial system is in the pocket of billionaire special interests.
Sort out paying off politicians and this will change.
Ban election opinion pieces.
Blatant First Amendment Violation.
Enforce only facts reported. Full speeches, not soundbites.
As impractical as it is unconstitutional.
Ok, I'll withdraw these. I can't see how these rules wouldn't be abused by fascist dictatorship. Maybe the media is less important with modern technologies.
Enforced by an independent judge.
No such judge exists
Remove the money (except for high salary), enforce disbarment for violation. It will take a decade or two but they will be independent.
I mean, I'd point you to Steve Balmer and the scandal with the Clippers in the NBA right now if you want to talk about ways to evade spending limits.
The fundamental problem with "getting money out of politics" is that you're dealing with a multi-trillion dollar annual budget running out of a country that prints the global reserve currency (for now). You cannot do politics in this country without moving around enormous volumes of money. It's comically easy for that kind of money to spill into your back pocket, either directly (self-dealing) or through kickbacks and bribes or through insider trading or through second or third order machinations (Dick Cheney getting rich off a ballooning Halliburton stock price because he'd accrued millions in stock compensation during his time as CEO).
CU and private donations are the tiny little tip of the iceberg. Underneath that, you've got the sprawling network of public-private partnerships that administer our bureaucratic state. And then you've got the massive private real estate holdings and capital improvements that benefit from spending decisions. And then you've got the bones of the public sector economy - the public sector amenities and security spending - that any government needs to preserve its legitimacy. All of these operate at the scale of billions and trillions of dollars. It's such that a seemingly banal decision - national standardized testing for public schools, shifts in regulation/subsidy for different kinds of energy infrastructure, where bureaucrats choose to build a highway exit or a train depot or an airport - can generate obscene fortunes downstream.
The problem isn't "money in politics", it's "consolidation of wealth in a bourgeois class".
Steve Balmer was busted. (But only because he broke the rules the other billionaires made.)
Money in politics and the billionaire class go hand in hand.
CU is not the tip of the iceberg, it was the opening of the floodgates.
The ability to form PACs is the vehicle that allows the uber wealthy to use their vast wealth to influence government/legislation.
Public/Private partnerships can be good, but I agree that they are heavily abused.
I had to look up bourgeois and now know that Marxists use it to reference the capitalist exploiters and not the middle class. I agree with you completely there.
Their very existence is proof that unfettered capitalism is not a functional or fair system. America's system has been routinely exploited by those with money and it is so fucking heinous now.
We just need to start eating some billionaires. Or at least feeding them to the pigs. Feed the pigs to the pigs too.
Steve Ballmer was busted. (But only because he broke the rules the other billionaires made.)
It took eight years, during several of which the facts of the case were known but Ballmer was treated as a victim of slander rather than a man guilty of massive fraud.
We just need to start eating some billionaires.
Figuratively or literally. But a one year suspension from slapping cheeks in the Congressional locker room and a sternly worded letter from the FEC isn't going to cut it.
The notion that you can just put up a sign that says "Tipping your elected representatives is against the rules" and leave it at that is a fantasy. And the notion that anyone from Kash Patel to James Comey is actually going after the rich and powerful is even more of a fantasy.
"Ah, but if the OWS movement had just People's Mic'd the correct words, elections would work properly by now" is just magical thinking. It isn't materialistic. You're not looking at the networks of social influence or the feedback loops of wealth aggregation that have produced people like Trump, Thiel, Dimon, and Epstein.
There was a referendum to tax the rich in Illinois and it fucking failed, by a lot. We don't live in a liberal country. We live in a center-right country with strong far right tendencies.
You can just search Wikipedia. I assume you have access to the Internet?
It's about the individual's liberty from oppression, equality and usually keeping corporations in check. Ideally. It's about things like the right to healthcare and education, the ability to have an abortion. The right wing of the democratic party is still neoliberals and even some conservatives though, which is why you'll see people say liberals (in the classic sense) aren't liberals (in the modern American sense) and the people arguing against liberals can then be seen as arguing FOR the fascists in that case.
And the shift goes back to the 1930s so not exactly a new definition of liberal either, just newer than the original.
👍, Kant, On the Metaphysics of Morals and Ethics, I assume you have access to the internet hmmm yes? lol
I know what liberalism is, I'm saying the colloquial use is meaningless because liberals have poisoned language intentionally to hamper critiques of liberalism. Strange that the people arguing against liberalism would be for fascists, and yet those are the only two (purportedly seperate) ideologies represented in federal US politics; wonder why that'd be if they're so incompatible.
Liberalism is about capital, that's it. The moral rights element functions to maintain the system, not actually enact some form of social justice. Rights are attributed on a legal basis within the state and are oriented around property not out of concern for the material security of vulnerable groups, but to enshrine property as the central value of human life. No, neoliberals are not fake liberals any more than welfare liberals are "good" liberals; both subscribe to the notion that capitalism is right despite the violence that is necessary for it to exist, and they differ only in the state policies they believe will most effectively maintain a system that relies on social inequities to function. Fascists do not disagree with any of that, they simply appeal to the aggrieved entitlement of privileged groups to critique the system as not working well enough for the people they agree should be privileged.
Fascists and liberals subscribe to the same genocidal values, but differ only in their tactics to achieve that genocide. Liberals, being in positions of power within the state, employ long-term, assimilationist strategies to curb dissent, such as appropriating the concept of social justice, as you've just done.
Can we pump up the bullying just enough for the americans to finally start using words they way the don't completely contradict their actual globally-acknowledged meaning?
When those Epstein files first dropped, it's like "Well the people in charge of every nation actually believe they work for Satan" and they've been shoving war and AI and shit so far down our throats in the hope they can get us all to forget that the curtain was actually pulled away for a second but I don't think I can forget that
I mean, “Eyes Wide Shut” basically did it, but people just took it as fiction though we all know for some reason and are told to look away or lose our jobs or something.
Makes sense if Republicans control how controversial something sounds. We should investigate which political direction the owners of main stream media leans
Why are there no populist socialists? I mean people like Milei or Trump, but unapologetically radical far-left, who bring a chain saw to slash landlords, or implement a myriad of taxes that hit the wealthy. They would be incredibly popular. I don't want timid liberals who worry that capitalists emigrate to evade taxes. I want dyed-in-the-wool Marxists who confiscate their property and let them flee to whatever country wants them or put them in camps if they don't behave.
Like look at hispanic trump voters. He campaigned on deporting their family. They voted for him anyway because they want to make it financially, and they have been told that voting Republican is how you do that.
Same with other conservative voters. They vote against their best interests because they are miseducated. They have been told their whole lives that government spending is irresponsible, taxation is theft, immigrants are stealing their jobs, that the Republican party is the party of fiscal responsibility, and that the Democrats are communists (spooky!) who want to make you poor and want to eliminate personal property.
So say Comrade Trump ran on a populist far-left platform. There is no way to really communicate the economic benefits in a way people would understand or believe. They are conditioned against it.
The DSA is attempting this now with folks like Mamdani and El-Sayed. Trying to frame generally left wing economic ideas in terms of "affordability" and making the policies directly applicable to their lived experience. But it is an uphill battle to cut through the conditioning.
Democrats lost Hispanic voters by running to the right on immigration and giving up on any sort of rhetoric about how "building the wall" is racist. The anti-immigrant people still voted Republican, while conservative Hispanics no longer saw a reason to look past culture war issues based on immigration, since there wasn't that much difference between what the two parties were saying.
People love to go all "leopards ate their face" and just attribute it to stupidity but it's really a failure on the part of the Democratic party's messaging and tactics. They caved to the right's rhetoric and it backfired, just like it always does.
Oh no, that is totally correct. I'm not even really blaming them entirely, because the Democrats really fucked up.
But the Republicans were obviously running to the right of the Dems. With trump and friends openly saying they wanted essentially more concentration camps and more deportations and to expand ICE to enact that policy. Democrats maintained the system of concentration camps and deportations, but Republicans were obviously still worse on that issue. And many voters, including hispanic voters, cited trump as being the better economic choice.
There are, they just are gatekept from the electoral system, and censored or are too small without mass billionaire backing to spread their message that far yet. Parties like the Party for Socialism and Liberation do exist and do do work as Marxist-Leninists, but actually growing parties is extremely difficult, with or without state oppression.
Cuz they all complicit. Democrats just argue about how fast and how much damage to do to get there. Rich ppl on both sides have rich ppl personality traits in common, they are just less or more psychopathic or narcissistic. They could all be like Dolly Parton and they choose, everyday, to be something else.
Unless it's building concentration camps and surveillance infrastructure, then the Dems seem to be great at building and really struggle to destroy any
They should take a break from all that hard work they do building up the country and try tearing down some oil or silicon valley cartels. Maybe try destroying paramilitary police forces killing citizens.
Dismantle a single man's political future for attempting a coup.
I don't think this is a rational explanation. What makes Republicans hateful and greedy? What makes Democrats squabble over everything? These are not innate traits we are born with, they are representative of broader motive forces. What are these forces?
Democrats, for the most part, are complicit. There is too much money in politics... Sometimes the Democrats think of others instead of money.... But modern Republicans never make a move that costs them or their donors money.
That's the most rational "explanation" i have found.
I'm not sure we disagree on the broader points... But I'm not sure what you mean by "innate traits." That's like asking why do those who covet power seek power? Why do those without empathy attain desires regardless of harm to others? Why do cowards go with the pack mentality instead of standing on principal? What are the fundamental principals? Does morality really matter? If so, why? I suppose those are the "broader forces" you referenced.
My point is, it's reductive to search for innate traits of modern American politics or to identify the broader forces of evil. What you believe is "innate" is likely the multitude of motivations that have driven humanity for millennia. Sometimes it is used to construct shelter for the village... Other times it's used to burn the villagers who stand in your way. I think it's more useful to examine who or what institutions can we support as the masses to establish a firewall between unchecked lust for power and greed and the halls of influence.
The broader forces are the capitalist system. I don't believe these are innate traits, my point is explicitly that trying to identify specific actions based on the perceived traits of Republicans and Democrats is an inaccurate view of why they do what they do. The actual reason is simply that they support different wings of the capitalist class.
What we need to support is a revolutionary socialist party.
It's much easier to make a bill that says "we cut research funding to tax billionaires less" and get your cult members to vote for it than it is to make a comprehensive healthcare bill without loopholes that may have to rework an entire industry, while having a thin majority.
Do-nothing democrats is a lie spread by conservative media, their job is just significantly harder, and they don't have a propagandized cult behind them.
Trying to explain Statesian politics on the basis of "cult/non-cult" is irrational. It substitutes materialist analysis in favor of an aristocratic view that sees Republicans as stupid, and non-Republicans as intelligent. This, however, isn't how society works. Instead, the importance is in the class struggle, and the self-interested competing groups of capitalists that head the DNC and GOP. The DNC has a "harder" time because they both try to gain the votes of the working classes while never actually addressing working class issues, nor even codifying social protections properly despite having the ability.
Trying to pretend Marxists are simply duped by conservative media again isn't a materialist analysis. Socialist critique of imperialist parties, DNC or GOP, is consistent, not an inorganic phenomenon.
În that case, what you are describing there is a system with a strong inherent bias against working class interests. What purpose do the 'change from within the system' party actually serve then? Merely to find ways of keeping the masses mollified without stepping on the toes of power too much?
I’d be interested in a community on Lemmy that was more interested into diving into the specifics on public policy. E.g. is the CHIPs act subsidy of US semiconductor manufacturing a good idea strategically, let alone a public good.
I find the nuts and bolts more interesting than waxing poetic on political theory terms like the other person who replied to you lol
Yep I agree, it's very frustrating because I feel like I'm getting the same "media" politics on lemmy as you'd get from mainstream news. I think you kinda just have to find a trustworthy expert that was interviewed and look at their analysis.
The last 2 years of Ford, the first 2 years of Carter, 2009 under Obama. California has a bullet prof dem supermajority and they dont have livable wages, affordable housing, high COL, universal healthcare.
Why should we expect the democrats to have a successful election, let alone a strong mandate? Part of why they lost 2024 was because they failed to meaningfully appeal to anyone.
"Tepid" is debatable. The problem here is capitalism, and the moribund status of the imperialist stage of capitalism. Swapping out the rudder doesn't patch the holes, nor can the holes be patched. Even with the DNC in charge, the US Empire will continue to slowly decay until it collapses or revolutionaries succeed in establishing socialism. This is assuming no republican ever wins again.
No, I'm not an accelerationist. I both don't believe what you claim, nor is that even what accelerationism is. I am a communist, I seek and organize for socialist revolution, which both has occurred in history and is a practical necessity.
I do not believe making the world worse is a path to socialism. I believe that capitalism regularly runs into crisis, which frequently expands the scale of each successive crisis, and that at these points the masses of the people can take matters into their own hands and establish a socialist society if they are sufficiently educated, class conscious, and organized.
Accelerationism is entirely different. The accelerationist view is that we should expedite this crisis by supporting the biggest, most effective capitalists, so that concentration of capital accelerates most efficiently, bringing about the collapse of capitalism sooner. The accelerationist doesn't want to elect Republicans and sabotage socialists, the accelerationist wants to support the Democrats as the more effective and stable stewards of imperialism.
I support neither the Republicans or Democrats. I support workers organizing outside of the electoral system, employing the time-tested revolutionary strategy I outlined above. I'm a communist.
I believe it was made worse by this administration.
And that belief is based on nothing but blind faith to the democratic party. You're a genocide apologist; perfectly happy to downplay genocide when it's your team doing it.
"Tepid"
You're absolutely disgusting. As bad as any Maga chud
We do. Some people only seem to_notice_ around election times. I wonder why that is?
Alternately, I've been told, "now's not the time," in on and off season, by the same people who said the same thing in the other season. So when is the time? Next Nevuary?
One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: "Why didn't you give the new city administration time to act?" The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."
The time to made this cry is ahead of primaries. Everyone coming out of the woodwork complaining about how the Dems are just as bad right before the general election are plants trying to sleep us from voting the GOP out.
Fuck them. Vote Democrat in the general, and make the party more progressive in the primaries. Voting third party or refusing to vote just supports the GOP.
Never forget that if just 1% of the Nader voters had voted for Gore instead in Florida, George W Bush would never have been President.
You cannot implement socialism through reformism. This is a dead-end. Marxists are not GOP plants for consistently advocating for revolutionary means over the well-established failures of reformism.
So trying to vote in supporters of socialism is a waste of time? Note they explicitly mentioned primaries.
What precisely do you propose, and if not voting, then why bother getting all energized during election season when the only outcome of voting doesn't matter is voter suppression?
If your primary means of political engagement is through the electoral system, then yes, it's a waste of valuable organizing energy. Socialist parties should run candidates to advertise their platform and recruit, not as an actual way of getting change.
I propose what Marxists have proposed since the beginning: revolutionary organizing. This is a constant process that doesn't depend on the electoral cycle, it's more that those that only really tune into politics around election season don't notice it as much until election season. You can go back into my comment history, and I have been enormously consistent with what I have said, and when I have said it.
The actual revolutionary strategy is to educate the working classes on political theory and history, struggle alongside them in the realm of unionizing, indigenous sovereignty, strikes, and in so doing build up a worker party capable of leading revolution whenever capitalism hits crisis points.
Taking a few hours twice in an election cycle to cast a vote is not some intolerable wast of organizing energy.
It's at least worth a try to influence the elections and candidates.
"It's not possible to reform so don't even try" is a stupidly bad take. It seems accelerationist, that you hope for a civilization wide disaster that would leave hundreds of millions desperate in hopes that it will at least open up the path to some non-democratic result which you somehow hope will be your desired result as opposed to a myriad of competing interests that is likely to institute any number of even worse results.
First, I don't really give a shit if people vote or not. My issue isn't with the few hours people spend on election day, it's with the days, weeks, months, even years spent on electoral campaigns, canvassing, and overall redirecting the problems people are already identifying with capitalism into elections. This creates a pressure valve, where people sit complicit for a few years at a time, perhaps agitating here or there to vote blue. It's an enormous waste of time at this scale for socialists to be doing this.
Second, that's not accelerationism. Acceletationism is the belief that we should support the most stable and competent stewards of imperialism and capitalists, so that capital concentrates at a faster rate and collapses sooner. This means that the Democrats, as the party where profits and stock market growth are generally higher, are the actual accelerationist candidate. Accelerationism isn't deliberately blowing up the system by voting for Republicans, nor is revolution accelerationism.
The fact is, capitalism systemically results in crisis about once a decade. This is built into capitalism, it's how it functions, and each time the biggest capitalists come out with far more of the capital than they had before as the smaller capitalists die off or are acquired. To prepare for crisis is not to expedite it, we need to get organized in anticipation of something we already know happens. Here's a handy chart:
We need to build up that organized revolutionary core, and educate and agitate amongst the masses to bring about revolution. Not redirect their attention towards the DNC as their sole means of political life.
It's because Republican voters are conditioned to vote ( R ) no matter what, whereas Democratic voters will actually use their brains and vote for opposition (or not at all) if the ( D ) option is for any reason unfavorable, so Dems are more gunshy over anything that could be seen as rocking the boat. This is also why "vote blue no matter who" became a mantra, as an effort to tip the scales back.
I'm not saying this this the only factor, but in solid red areas Republican incumbents are basically bulletproof, giving them a degree of impunity that doesn't translate to even to solid blue areas.
Edit: unrelated, but does anyone know how to override Lemmy formatting? "( R )" without the spaces becomes (R), but I don't want it to.
It’s because Republican voters are conditioned to vote ( R ) no matter what, whereas Democratic voters will actually use their brains and vote for opposition
I don't think there's actual evidence to back up this supposed conventional wisdom. It seems to me that Republican voters are a lot more likely to draw lines in the sand over things like abortion or guns, and to denounce anyone who doesn't take a hard line on their stance as a "RINO." The Libertarian party has often gotten more votes than the Greens, and the last major third party candidacy was Ross Perot who drew mostly from the right. I rarely see any of the same kind of vote-shaming, lesser-evilist discourse on the right. In right-wing circles, if someone says they firmly believe abortion is murder so they refuse to vote for a center-right candidate who's pro-choice, that's a lot more likely to be respected. The right doesn't have the same commitment towards "reasonableness" that liberals do and don't shy away from "my way or the highway" rhetoric.
It seems to me that what's actually different is that the Republican party has acknowledged and responded to the demands of their base. The right has no reason to abstain because their politicians are giving them exactly what they asked for, while the Democrats have followed the logic that elections are won by appealing to the center, and that the left will simply fall in line regardless. That logic is another piece of "conventional wisdom" that isn't actually supported by the evidence.
On average the best predictor of your beliefs is what your parents and peers believe, regardless of intelligence. I've seen people argue for a six thousand year old Earth who are clearly very intelligent in almost every other respect, not only is intelligence a variable of many axes it's more or less unrelated to the capacity to avoid self-delusion and motivated reasoning in my opinion. Stupidity is the easy analysis, but there's clearly much more influential factors going on.
You're correct, but mistaking the source. The reason people's peers and parents are so influential is because class is overwhelmingly inherited, and this gets reinforced through upbringing. At a societal scale, this still returns us to class analysis.
Again, this is reductive and not very explanatory. What determines if someone's thinking process "gets kicked on?" Is this a post-facto analysis, where you see someone vote R, and think that they must not have thought? As socialists, we must understand that people generally are not stupid, but instead self-interested. This returns us to class.
People generally are reactionaries without long term thinking, you have to teach that out of them. For your example, emotional intelligence and education are both strong predictors of voting D vs R. Long-term thinking is not our baseline, because that generally wasn't useful for millions of years of evolution.
People generally think, but are not rational actors unless educated, otherwise you wouldn't see trump be so popular among Mexican and black men, and advertising/propaganda wouldn't exist. Humans are not rational actors working from outside the realm of animals, we are one step removed from monkeys. We ARE capable of long-term critical thinking, but it takes more energy so by default we don't use it.
I think what you're trying to get at is false consciousness, the identification of people within one class with the interests of another. This explains both Democrat and Republican voting, as both are capitalist parties that do not represent the working classes. The crucial part I am getting at, however, is that propaganda works by appealing to felt interests, which are generally formed by people's own class interests. We must do away with the idea that everything would be solved if education systems taught critical thinking, because this ignores the class components of society.
I do agree that education is necessary. The working class needs its own political party that can educate, agitate, and organize the rest of this class. However, the idea that the working classes are stupid is one that directly runs counter to the task of building a mass movement.
There is no class interest that makes Republicans vote to ban Muslim immigrants, that's a reactionary position based on propaganda and fearmongering. Not everything would be solved with critical thinking because people would still vote for their own interests, but it would stop people voting directly against their own interests and also harming others because of their racism and homo/transphobia.
People in general are not well-informed rational actors. Intelligence does not equal critical thinking, which is why you'll see doctors saying climate change is fake. I am stupid and so is the working class and so is everyone else when they are first born. I was just taught many times over not to be a reactionary and take my time to learn something before having an opinion on it. It's not their fault they weren't taught (or had lead poisoning in the 60s) but they're still not using critical thinking.
Opposition to immigrants is based on the requirements of the capitalist class to maintain both a source of intra-class conflict (to divide the working class) as well as to create a desparate sub-category of the working class that fears systemic violence and expulsion, and is thus more easily exploitable by capitalists. Critical thinking isn't the barrier, republican voters buy into this as a party primarily backed by a combination of the petite bourgeoisie and the haut bourgeoisie.
You're placing too much of an emphasis on the ideas of society without looking at where these ideas come from. It isn't lead poisoning, it's from the way we produce and distribute. That doesn't mean ideas do not play a part, that would be reductive, but the primacy exists with the base of society, the economic foundation.
Even if the working class voted in their self-interest, they would not be able to establish socialism, which is necessary. It would lead to a third party victory, and a failure of the third party to change capitalism into socialism piece by piece.
167 Comments
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today · 129 pts · 10d
My favorite Mamdani quote:
And I don't think it is accidental. I think Schmuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are Manchurian MAGAs who sold out the Democrats a long time ago. Even if they aren't doing it purposefully, their cowardly and insipid behavior is 50% of the reason that MAGA regained power. They should be out of politics for that alone, they certainly haven't done ANYTHING to prove they deserve a second chance at punishing MAGA. They didn't do it when they had the chance, they aren't going to do it in the future.
We should all be calling our Democratic representatives, and strongly demand that they vote AGAINST Schmuck & Jeffries for leadership. Start now, so everybody knows going into the Midterms that they can expect substantial change by the new Democratic Party.
frisbird@lemmy.ml · 58 pts · 10d
No one needed to sell out the Democrats. When Nixon was president, the entire time the Democrats held strong majorities in both bodies of the legislature. You know what they did with it? They joined Nixon in developing the war on drugs to turn normal legal behavior into felonies that would disenfranchise Black people and those that associated with them.
The Ds have ALWAYS been this evil. No one needed to sell them out. They have always been a faction of the elite collaborating with the other factions of the elite.
grue@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 10d
When Nixon was around, conservative Dixiecrats were still a thing. You can't really compare across different party systems.
TRAHR@quokk.au · 14 pts · 10d
Now the default Dem is a conservative further to the right of Nixon.
frisbird@lemmy.ml · 10 pts · 9d
Sure, that's why Biden was different when he architected the crime bill and why Clinton was different when he went after Black "super predators" and spiked racialized incarceration and why Obama was different when he expanded DHS and ICE immensely and appointed Homan and deported 3M people and human rights organizations fought his policies and why Obama and Clinton devastated Libya. Very different
kestrel7_7@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 9d
I mean, both Clintons are conservative dixiecrats, and they’re pretty involved in mainstream Democratic politics
jtrek@startrek.website · 7 pts · 10d
I think it's like squares and rectangles. All republicans are absolute shitheads. Some Democrats are, too.
Maeve@kbin.earth · 4 pts · 10d
They're all rotten.
Malica@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 10d
Yeah Chomsky spoke about it in the 70s as well, I think
TRAHR@quokk.au · 10 pts · 10d
Chomsky was personal friends with Epstein and defended him. Let’s stop caring what he said.
bedwyr@piefed.ca · 7 pts · 9d
Plus he has said some pretty misguided things around 2016, I don't like him. Even before I learned he fucked children with epstein and now is an israeli tool.
Maeve@kbin.earth · 4 pts · 10d
Chomsky who flew to pedo island and thought so highly of a Mossad asset.
nullspace@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 9d
I think Cuck Schumer is more fitting as he sits in his little cuck chair while the opposition fucks democracy.
bedwyr@piefed.ca · 0 pts · 9d
Ha ha, Cuck Schumer, that's a good one I'm using that. How did I not think of that?
Maeve@kbin.earth · -18 pts · 10d
Formfiller@lemmy.world · 66 pts · 10d
It’s also weird how fascist policy like mass surveillance is going up at the same pace in blue states.
nullspace@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 9d
Nationwide rollouts, small pockets of local resistance.
ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works · 8 pts · 9d
Or with considerable support. Current WA governor for instance ran specifically on more cops and expanding the police state.
bedwyr@piefed.ca · 5 pts · 9d
The resistance is about to get a whole lot bigger. No one likes these things. No one likes llm's.
There is no way these llm's pay for this either, this is going to be paid by federal government bailouts, because the rich can't lose money now apparently that's a thing. We should be ready for that to launch massive resistance.
Formfiller@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 9d
During the 2008 crisis regular people lost everything and were financially devastated for generations. The wealthy got golden parachutes and the greatest transfer of wealth to their class in history. The working class got a homelessness crisis, expanding debt, a militarized police state, cia infiltration of occupy wall street and fascism. We need a revolution to fix this
HeyJoe@lemmy.world · 53 pts · 9d
First glimmer of hope in a long time has been Mamdani. Every week I feel like I hear about something new and great and it's weird actually seeing what someone can actually do.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml · 16 pts · 9d
It's also important to understand his limitations. The capitalist system cannot be changed out piece by piece into a socialist one. Mamdani is powerless against the capitalist class, at most he can pass welfare and social reforms. The benefit of Mamdani is that he helps prove that these reforms are actually pretty easy to establish, but at the same time we must understand that socialism without revolution is impossible.
That's why it's critical to educate ourselves and communities, agitate amongst the working classes, and organize for socialist revolution.
Signtist@bookwyr.me · 11 pts · 9d
The biggest thing he should be showing you is that someone motivated can make noticeable positive change in a relatively short period of time. When you see another politician failing to make such noticeable changes, it's because they're not trying.
Yes, Mamdani still has a lot of work ahead of him - what we've seen so far is just a good first few steps, but they're obvious steps in the right direction. Whenever someone says "these things take time" and can't show any obvious first steps to prove that we're actually moving at all, then they're not actually doing anything - they're just saying they are and hoping you won't notice.
Kurtismayfield@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 8d
If he keeps getting this good PR, Mandami won't be around for long. Otherwise people might expect things to change.
DudleyMason@lemmy.ml · 27 pts · 9d
It's only weird if you assume Democrats and Republicans aren't both working for the same handful of billionaires and that all the culture war stuff they fight over is just window dressing to distract you from that simple fact.
Once you recognize that the purpose of the Democratic Party is not to govern, but to capture and neuter social movements dangerous to Wall St, and secondarily to give people enough faith in the system that they'll keep voting and not revolting, then all the supposed contradictions make perfect sense.
SapphironZA@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 8d
Yep, that became the norm with the Obama betrayal. That's when the democrats sold out the the same oligarchs that bought the bush era republicans.
DudleyMason@lemmy.ml · 7 pts · 8d
Pretty sure it was the Clinton administration in the 90s when the Dems sold out to the same Oligarchs who bought the Reagan era Republicans, but the end result today is basically the same either way.
sapphironZA@lemmy.world · 26 pts · 9d
Because Republicans are paid by the elite to make people suffer
And Democrats are paid by the elite to make people suffer.
Duhtocqueville@ttrpg.network · 6 pts · 9d
Ahh that’s the problem. We need to elect people who believe in suffering for its own sake. Remove all that corruption.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 8d
Libertarians
BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 18 pts · 9d
I expect at best it'll be business as usual when typical Democrats are elected. They won't persecute and prosecute Trump, they won't reverse most of his abhorrent policies and POs, won't restuff the SCOTUS with people who think over follow entirely a rhetorical edict, etc. etc.
I'm convinced those people saying no to revolution, it could make things worse, don't realize it's about as bad as it can get right now. When you're starting to pound at bedrock, going up is much easier.
ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml · 17 pts · 8d
I think the controlled opposition theory is certainly true in-part, but it doesn't explain everything.
The other thing is that Republicans don't campaign on policy. They campaign on random culture war bullshit - much of which, while incredibly stupid and a waste of time, is popular.
So, sure, allowing Tesla to dump toxic waste into their constituents' groundwater is unpopular - but their constituents never hear about it until it's already happened, and then the politicians blame someone else.
Instead, they campaign on your parental rights to infect everyone in your kid's class with measels or to ensure your child isn't turned into a trans catgirl by public schoolteachers and trained to use a litterbox, or the competitive sanctity of the women's track and field team, or whatever other dumb bullshit they can come up with.
People can be made to care about that stuff easily. Then the politicians get elected, do some random bullshit culture war legislation to get re-elected, but focus on making their corporate donors happy by allowing them to more effectively fuck over the constituents.
realworldschlitz@lemmy.world · -6 pts · 8d
Cowbee@lemmy.ml · 5 pts · 7d
Why are you complaining about tankies on an explicitly socialist community?
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 16 pts · 8d
It's not weird at all. It's completely normal. Both "parties" serve the same system designed by literal enslavers.
sartalon@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 9d
The long standing joke has been the Republicans are the party of bad ideas and Democrats are they party of no ideas.
If we could get the money out of the politics, then maybe things would be different. But both parties are just greedy cocksucking bootlickers.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 19 pts · 8d
Democrats are the party of promising a New Deal every election cycle and delivering Reaganomics every Congressional cycle
BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 0 pts · 8d
Still counts as no ideas, they're just following the conservative playbook.
Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net · 4 pts · 9d
Getting money out of politics is a naive goal as it fails to account that economics are intrinsically linked to politics. They cannot be separated
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 9d
Banning lobbying and implementing election spending caps would go a long way without even slightly affecting the economy.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml · 7 pts · 8d
Under capitalism, those are still not sufficient to change much, even if you could get those across. Politics and economics are, as Doc_Crankenstein said, intertwined, with the economic base having by far the largest impact.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 8d
Not sufficient to fix the problem, but it would be a step in the right direction.
A governments success largely tied to it's economic performance, but that doesn't mean the direct links to bribery can't be severed.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml · 6 pts · 8d
What is the right direction? Is socialism necessary in your view?
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world · -3 pts · 8d
Socialism is not necessary. I'm proposing reduced corporatism to remove the power of companies and their wealth generation capabilities to influence policy.
Politicians should respond to 1 person 1 vote. Not $1 per vote.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml · 9 pts · 8d
What you're asking for is a capitalist state to work against the interests of the class that controls the state, though. That's a practically impossible task, unless the ruling class fears revolt and allows minor concessions.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 8d
How would that work? Nobody is allowed to talk to a sitting Congress? They just go into seclusion every two years?
We don't even have proper candidate run elections anymore. It's all dark money running influence campaigns 24/7/365 from private think tanks and media companies.
Like, what are you going to do with FOX News or MSNBC during election season? What are you going to do with Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson? With Twitter and Facebook?
That's before we even get into the paradox of asking politicians to regulate themselves.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 8d
Communication is fine. All voters have the equal opportunity to talk to their representative (lottery system if too much demand).
Companies don't get the right to talk to representatives, except indirectly via voters.
Capped, controlled benefits are passed from voters to representative (mainly time Volunteered). No financial benefits from corporations. Election funding is centralised and limited.
I'm saying we make this illegal.
Ban election opinion pieces. Enforce only facts reported. Full speeches, not soundbites.
Anyone with over X followers has their political opinions censored unless they are registered as running for election.
Certainly not. Enforced by an independent judge.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 8d
I'm reminded of the national media having a meltdown because Bill Clinton traded a few words with Loretta Lynch on the tarmac in Phoenix. Now I'm imagining this kind of scandal every time a Congressman trades words with a next-door neighbor.
You're going to cap the number of hours a voter can volunteer for a political campaign? Even setting aside how that could possibly be policed, I can't imagine how such a policy would be popular enough for anyone to endorse. Imagine a sitting AG ordering the state sheriffs to drag some little old lady out of a campaign office for overshooting her campaign volunteering hour cap and how that would play in the national news.
We already have an abundance of illegality committed by these private institutions. Nobody is enforcing any of it, precisely because the judicial system is in the pocket of billionaire special interests.
Compare this to drug criminalization. Who gets busted more often? The corporate lawyer doing a line of coke in the Penthouse suite? Or the homeless vagrant melting spoons under the freeway?
Hell, compare it to the TikTok Ban that got advanced under Biden and implemented under Trump. Did TikTok become apolitical after it's American assets were divorced from ByteDance? Or did it become even more political in the hands of a domestic set of oligarchs?
Blatant First Amendment Violation.
As impractical as it is unconstitutional.
By whom? You're going to tell the FCC to censor Elon Musk? You're going to tell the FCC to censor Sitting President Donald Trump? Before or after the head of the agency is fired and the organization is gutted by angry partisans?
No such judge exists.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world · -2 pts · 8d
Talking to politicians is fine. Buying them coffee is not.
Yep. 24h.
I'm not worried about individual work. I'm trying to remove the effect of money.
Sort out paying off politicians and this will change.
Ok, I'll withdraw these. I can't see how these rules wouldn't be abused by fascist dictatorship. Maybe the media is less important with modern technologies.
Remove the money (except for high salary), enforce disbarment for violation. It will take a decade or two but they will be independent.
sartalon@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 8d
I agree with you with the fact that lobbying is protected by the first amendment.
You get money out of politics by repealing Citizens United and putting a severe cap on the amount of money that can be donated.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 8d
I mean, I'd point you to Steve Balmer and the scandal with the Clippers in the NBA right now if you want to talk about ways to evade spending limits.
The fundamental problem with "getting money out of politics" is that you're dealing with a multi-trillion dollar annual budget running out of a country that prints the global reserve currency (for now). You cannot do politics in this country without moving around enormous volumes of money. It's comically easy for that kind of money to spill into your back pocket, either directly (self-dealing) or through kickbacks and bribes or through insider trading or through second or third order machinations (Dick Cheney getting rich off a ballooning Halliburton stock price because he'd accrued millions in stock compensation during his time as CEO).
CU and private donations are the tiny little tip of the iceberg. Underneath that, you've got the sprawling network of public-private partnerships that administer our bureaucratic state. And then you've got the massive private real estate holdings and capital improvements that benefit from spending decisions. And then you've got the bones of the public sector economy - the public sector amenities and security spending - that any government needs to preserve its legitimacy. All of these operate at the scale of billions and trillions of dollars. It's such that a seemingly banal decision - national standardized testing for public schools, shifts in regulation/subsidy for different kinds of energy infrastructure, where bureaucrats choose to build a highway exit or a train depot or an airport - can generate obscene fortunes downstream.
The problem isn't "money in politics", it's "consolidation of wealth in a bourgeois class".
sartalon@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 8d
Steve Balmer was busted. (But only because he broke the rules the other billionaires made.)
Money in politics and the billionaire class go hand in hand.
CU is not the tip of the iceberg, it was the opening of the floodgates.
The ability to form PACs is the vehicle that allows the uber wealthy to use their vast wealth to influence government/legislation.
Public/Private partnerships can be good, but I agree that they are heavily abused.
I had to look up bourgeois and now know that Marxists use it to reference the capitalist exploiters and not the middle class. I agree with you completely there.
Their very existence is proof that unfettered capitalism is not a functional or fair system. America's system has been routinely exploited by those with money and it is so fucking heinous now.
We just need to start eating some billionaires. Or at least feeding them to the pigs. Feed the pigs to the pigs too.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 8d
It took eight years, during several of which the facts of the case were known but Ballmer was treated as a victim of slander rather than a man guilty of massive fraud.
Figuratively or literally. But a one year suspension from slapping cheeks in the Congressional locker room and a sternly worded letter from the FEC isn't going to cut it.
The notion that you can just put up a sign that says "Tipping your elected representatives is against the rules" and leave it at that is a fantasy. And the notion that anyone from Kash Patel to James Comey is actually going after the rich and powerful is even more of a fantasy.
"Ah, but if the OWS movement had just People's Mic'd the correct words, elections would work properly by now" is just magical thinking. It isn't materialistic. You're not looking at the networks of social influence or the feedback loops of wealth aggregation that have produced people like Trump, Thiel, Dimon, and Epstein.
bold_atlas@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 9d
Well Hakim Jeffries has been SECRETLY meeting with an UNELECTED SON OF THE DICTATOR to discuss the fate of OUR FUCKING republic.
ya don't say...
kablez@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 10d
Once you reach elected politician levels of wealth and power, red and blue is more of an aesthetic than a conviction.
Politics is all about maintaining the interests of the wealthy and powerful. Parties are just branding designed to entice people.
That's why it seems like there's a disconnect but there isn't, the system is working as intended.
Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 8d
ITT: Excuses from people who like that the only thing democrats are willing to accomplish is weapons sales for genocide.
cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works · 11 pts · 8d
There was a referendum to tax the rich in Illinois and it fucking failed, by a lot. We don't live in a liberal country. We live in a center-right country with strong far right tendencies.
orioler25@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 8d
Liberal as in?
boonhet@lemmy.zip · 7 pts · 8d
The American meaning probably
orioler25@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 8d
Whatever that is.
boonhet@lemmy.zip · 0 pts · 5d
You can just search Wikipedia. I assume you have access to the Internet?
It's about the individual's liberty from oppression, equality and usually keeping corporations in check. Ideally. It's about things like the right to healthcare and education, the ability to have an abortion. The right wing of the democratic party is still neoliberals and even some conservatives though, which is why you'll see people say liberals (in the classic sense) aren't liberals (in the modern American sense) and the people arguing against liberals can then be seen as arguing FOR the fascists in that case.
And the shift goes back to the 1930s so not exactly a new definition of liberal either, just newer than the original.
orioler25@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 5d
👍, Kant, On the Metaphysics of Morals and Ethics, I assume you have access to the internet hmmm yes? lol
I know what liberalism is, I'm saying the colloquial use is meaningless because liberals have poisoned language intentionally to hamper critiques of liberalism. Strange that the people arguing against liberalism would be for fascists, and yet those are the only two (purportedly seperate) ideologies represented in federal US politics; wonder why that'd be if they're so incompatible.
Liberalism is about capital, that's it. The moral rights element functions to maintain the system, not actually enact some form of social justice. Rights are attributed on a legal basis within the state and are oriented around property not out of concern for the material security of vulnerable groups, but to enshrine property as the central value of human life. No, neoliberals are not fake liberals any more than welfare liberals are "good" liberals; both subscribe to the notion that capitalism is right despite the violence that is necessary for it to exist, and they differ only in the state policies they believe will most effectively maintain a system that relies on social inequities to function. Fascists do not disagree with any of that, they simply appeal to the aggrieved entitlement of privileged groups to critique the system as not working well enough for the people they agree should be privileged.
Fascists and liberals subscribe to the same genocidal values, but differ only in their tactics to achieve that genocide. Liberals, being in positions of power within the state, employ long-term, assimilationist strategies to curb dissent, such as appropriating the concept of social justice, as you've just done.
boonhet@lemmy.zip · -3 pts · 5d
orioler25@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 5d
I love how you're talking like you know more, but you are obviously just working on vibes. This site gets more like reddit every day dude.
Take a read and come back: Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism; Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality; Jasbir Puar Terrorist Assemblages.
realworldschlitz@lemmy.world · -5 pts · 8d
It’s clearly too much for you to handle.
orioler25@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 8d
What?
ddplf@szmer.info · 2 pts · 8d
Can we pump up the bullying just enough for the americans to finally start using words they way the don't completely contradict their actual globally-acknowledged meaning?
orioler25@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 8d
Euros use it the same way, liberals have always obscured the specificity of liberalism.
realworldschlitz@lemmy.world · -2 pts · 8d
Sounds more like you are obscured more than others.
orioler25@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 8d
I don't think you know what you're saying to be honest.
boonhet@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 5d
They've been using it that way for close to a hundred years, I doubt they'll be changing it now.
cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works · -1 pts · 8d
Big L Liberal, if it has to be specified. I'm speaking from an amerocentric perspective. Not talking about liberalism the philosophical concept.
orioler25@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 8d
It should be specified, because your use here matches neither of those.
realworldschlitz@lemmy.world · -4 pts · 8d
“Liberal” as in you’re in a different world that can’t see straight and words make you very slow…
Orioler as in???
Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net · 3 pts · 8d
You do understand that Liberalism (nowadays neoliberalism) is a center-right ideology, right?
brownsugga@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 9d
When those Epstein files first dropped, it's like "Well the people in charge of every nation actually believe they work for Satan" and they've been shoving war and AI and shit so far down our throats in the hope they can get us all to forget that the curtain was actually pulled away for a second but I don't think I can forget that
heartSagan5@lemmy.zip · 7 pts · 9d
I mean, “Eyes Wide Shut” basically did it, but people just took it as fiction though we all know for some reason and are told to look away or lose our jobs or something.
deifyed@lemmy.wtf · 8 pts · 9d
Makes sense if Republicans control how controversial something sounds. We should investigate which political direction the owners of main stream media leans
CedricWhaley@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 7 pts · 9d
It's not all that hard. There are like 6 companies that own all of mainstream media at this point.
Maeve@kbin.earth · 3 pts · 8d
I think some merged.
uszo165@futurology.today · 5 pts · 8d
Why are there no populist socialists? I mean people like Milei or Trump, but unapologetically radical far-left, who bring a chain saw to slash landlords, or implement a myriad of taxes that hit the wealthy. They would be incredibly popular. I don't want timid liberals who worry that capitalists emigrate to evade taxes. I want dyed-in-the-wool Marxists who confiscate their property and let them flee to whatever country wants them or put them in camps if they don't behave.
ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml · 6 pts · 8d
Propaganda mostly.
Like look at hispanic trump voters. He campaigned on deporting their family. They voted for him anyway because they want to make it financially, and they have been told that voting Republican is how you do that.
Same with other conservative voters. They vote against their best interests because they are miseducated. They have been told their whole lives that government spending is irresponsible, taxation is theft, immigrants are stealing their jobs, that the Republican party is the party of fiscal responsibility, and that the Democrats are communists (spooky!) who want to make you poor and want to eliminate personal property.
So say Comrade Trump ran on a populist far-left platform. There is no way to really communicate the economic benefits in a way people would understand or believe. They are conditioned against it.
The DSA is attempting this now with folks like Mamdani and El-Sayed. Trying to frame generally left wing economic ideas in terms of "affordability" and making the policies directly applicable to their lived experience. But it is an uphill battle to cut through the conditioning.
Objection@lemmy.ml · 5 pts · 8d
Democrats lost Hispanic voters by running to the right on immigration and giving up on any sort of rhetoric about how "building the wall" is racist. The anti-immigrant people still voted Republican, while conservative Hispanics no longer saw a reason to look past culture war issues based on immigration, since there wasn't that much difference between what the two parties were saying.
People love to go all "leopards ate their face" and just attribute it to stupidity but it's really a failure on the part of the Democratic party's messaging and tactics. They caved to the right's rhetoric and it backfired, just like it always does.
ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 8d
Oh no, that is totally correct. I'm not even really blaming them entirely, because the Democrats really fucked up.
But the Republicans were obviously running to the right of the Dems. With trump and friends openly saying they wanted essentially more concentration camps and more deportations and to expand ICE to enact that policy. Democrats maintained the system of concentration camps and deportations, but Republicans were obviously still worse on that issue. And many voters, including hispanic voters, cited trump as being the better economic choice.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml · 3 pts · 7d
There are, they just are gatekept from the electoral system, and censored or are too small without mass billionaire backing to spread their message that far yet. Parties like the Party for Socialism and Liberation do exist and do do work as Marxist-Leninists, but actually growing parties is extremely difficult, with or without state oppression.
minorkeys@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 8d
Cuz they all complicit. Democrats just argue about how fast and how much damage to do to get there. Rich ppl on both sides have rich ppl personality traits in common, they are just less or more psychopathic or narcissistic. They could all be like Dolly Parton and they choose, everyday, to be something else.
SomeRandomNoob@discuss.tchncs.de · 4 pts · 8d
Well ... most of the so called "Democrats" are also corrupt conservatives. They just don't follow the Orange Fellon Rapist Turd
MedicPigBabySaver@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 9d
Dems are such pussies. I occasionally need to hold my breath when voting Blue, in hopes that the person doesn't turn into the next Fetterman.
postmateDumbass@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 9d
The next Schumer is far more terrifing.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 10d
What the republcans can’t win on their own because it’s shitty the democrats will lose to them.
clifmo@programming.dev · 2 pts · 8d
It takes more to build than to destroy. Not weird at all
BrainInABox@lemmy.ml · 9 pts · 8d
Unless it's building concentration camps and surveillance infrastructure, then the Dems seem to be great at building and really struggle to destroy any
Kaligalis@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 9d
Sadly not wrong.
Harmless@piefed.social · 1 pts · 9d
Counting vote v. Counting money
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 10d
Fekkin wild innit...
Bane_Killgrind@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 9d
Conservatives typically are authoritarian, so they all "do what the boss says"
Liberals or leftists are generally consensus driven, and god damn will all these people bikeshed any good policy to death
BrainInABox@lemmy.ml · 12 pts · 9d
This is just an excuse liberals have to try to justify why Democrats don't do anything
InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world · -5 pts · 9d
BrainInABox@lemmy.ml · 7 pts · 9d
Going to start stalking me around again?
InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world · -3 pts · 9d
SaltyAmerican@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 8d
Dont lump us in with liberals, we are polar opposites on the political scale
Bane_Killgrind@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 0 pts · 7d
Kinda funny, you proved my point arguing semantics instead of against the point I was making.
SaltyAmerican@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 6d
Liberals are not consensus driven, they allow their party to dictate what voters will support, and voters fall in line
Bane_Killgrind@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 6d
Ok if you insist.
btsax@reddthat.com · 0 pts · 8d
Its easier to destroy than to build
PyroNeurosis@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 5 pts · 8d
They should take a break from all that hard work they do building up the country and try tearing down some oil or silicon valley cartels. Maybe try destroying paramilitary police forces killing citizens.
Dismantle a single man's political future for attempting a coup.
adarza@lemmy.ca · 0 pts · 8d
republicans are united in their hate and greed.
in their fight against that, democrats are not. they squabble over everything and enough of them bail when they don't get their way.
they are not the same.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml · 11 pts · 8d
I don't think this is a rational explanation. What makes Republicans hateful and greedy? What makes Democrats squabble over everything? These are not innate traits we are born with, they are representative of broader motive forces. What are these forces?
MJKee9@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 8d
Democrats, for the most part, are complicit. There is too much money in politics... Sometimes the Democrats think of others instead of money.... But modern Republicans never make a move that costs them or their donors money.
That's the most rational "explanation" i have found.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml · 8 pts · 8d
Again, though, these aren't innate traits. My point is that each represents different wings of the capitalist class.
MJKee9@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 8d
I'm not sure we disagree on the broader points... But I'm not sure what you mean by "innate traits." That's like asking why do those who covet power seek power? Why do those without empathy attain desires regardless of harm to others? Why do cowards go with the pack mentality instead of standing on principal? What are the fundamental principals? Does morality really matter? If so, why? I suppose those are the "broader forces" you referenced.
My point is, it's reductive to search for innate traits of modern American politics or to identify the broader forces of evil. What you believe is "innate" is likely the multitude of motivations that have driven humanity for millennia. Sometimes it is used to construct shelter for the village... Other times it's used to burn the villagers who stand in your way. I think it's more useful to examine who or what institutions can we support as the masses to establish a firewall between unchecked lust for power and greed and the halls of influence.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml · 8 pts · 8d
The broader forces are the capitalist system. I don't believe these are innate traits, my point is explicitly that trying to identify specific actions based on the perceived traits of Republicans and Democrats is an inaccurate view of why they do what they do. The actual reason is simply that they support different wings of the capitalist class.
What we need to support is a revolutionary socialist party.
SaltyAmerican@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 8d
They are exactly the same
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · -2 pts · 10d
SuperNovaStar@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 4 pts · 9d
They seem pretty good at it to me - they've convinced (some of) the working class they represent their interests
DudleyMason@lemmy.ml · 3 pts · 8d
The fact that you think that's the problem indicates the Dems have mastered that propaganda apparatus quite well, actually.
starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works · -5 pts · 9d
It's much easier to make a bill that says "we cut research funding to tax billionaires less" and get your cult members to vote for it than it is to make a comprehensive healthcare bill without loopholes that may have to rework an entire industry, while having a thin majority.
From the 117th congress wiki:
Do-nothing democrats is a lie spread by conservative media, their job is just significantly harder, and they don't have a propagandized cult behind them.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml · 12 pts · 9d
Trying to explain Statesian politics on the basis of "cult/non-cult" is irrational. It substitutes materialist analysis in favor of an aristocratic view that sees Republicans as stupid, and non-Republicans as intelligent. This, however, isn't how society works. Instead, the importance is in the class struggle, and the self-interested competing groups of capitalists that head the DNC and GOP. The DNC has a "harder" time because they both try to gain the votes of the working classes while never actually addressing working class issues, nor even codifying social protections properly despite having the ability.
Trying to pretend Marxists are simply duped by conservative media again isn't a materialist analysis. Socialist critique of imperialist parties, DNC or GOP, is consistent, not an inorganic phenomenon.
Cyanova@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 9 pts · 9d
În that case, what you are describing there is a system with a strong inherent bias against working class interests. What purpose do the 'change from within the system' party actually serve then? Merely to find ways of keeping the masses mollified without stepping on the toes of power too much?
BigDiction@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 9d
I’d be interested in a community on Lemmy that was more interested into diving into the specifics on public policy. E.g. is the CHIPs act subsidy of US semiconductor manufacturing a good idea strategically, let alone a public good.
I find the nuts and bolts more interesting than waxing poetic on political theory terms like the other person who replied to you lol
Cowbee@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 9d
The nuts and bolts are just as important as broader political theory. Being broad isn't really being "poetic" IMO.
starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 7d
Yep I agree, it's very frustrating because I feel like I'm getting the same "media" politics on lemmy as you'd get from mainstream news. I think you kinda just have to find a trustworthy expert that was interviewed and look at their analysis.
Dnb@lemmy.dbzer0.com · -6 pts · 9d
It's much easier to break than build. Especially when doing so illegally
BrainInABox@lemmy.ml · 7 pts · 9d
Meaningless thought terminating cliche
Oppopity@lemmy.ml · 6 pts · 9d
Why don't democrats build illegally of hold republicans accountable for breaking the law?
Dnb@lemmy.dbzer0.com · -7 pts · 9d
What?
Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 8d
I think "of" is supposed to be "or".
Dnb@lemmy.dbzer0.com · -1 pts · 8d
Ah well that's an easy answer:
its illegal and they'd be breaking the law so that's stupid af
they can't because idiots voted them out of power to do so
Why so you think they are afraid of dems coming back into control and winning seats?
Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 7d
The Leahy law was no impediment to biden doing the only thing he was put on this planet to do.
Hikermick@lemmy.world · -6 pts · 8d
When have Democrats held supermajorities?
SaltyAmerican@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 8d
The last 2 years of Ford, the first 2 years of Carter, 2009 under Obama. California has a bullet prof dem supermajority and they dont have livable wages, affordable housing, high COL, universal healthcare.
clifmo@programming.dev · -7 pts · 8d
I'm sorry, what is this community? And why is it upvoting sirota?
SaltyAmerican@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 8d
Genetic fallacy
Cowbee@lemmy.ml · 3 pts · 7d
It's an anticapitalist, pro-socialist community.
TheFinn@discuss.tchncs.de · -7 pts · 8d
rumimevlevi@sh.itjust.works · 18 pts · 8d
Why would they listen to you after they win?
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 8d
Obviously, they wouldn't. That's why they desperately beg you to wait.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml · 16 pts · 8d
Why should we expect the democrats to have a successful election, let alone a strong mandate? Part of why they lost 2024 was because they failed to meaningfully appeal to anyone.
TheFinn@discuss.tchncs.de · -11 pts · 8d
Cowbee@lemmy.ml · 12 pts · 8d
"Tepid" is debatable. The problem here is capitalism, and the moribund status of the imperialist stage of capitalism. Swapping out the rudder doesn't patch the holes, nor can the holes be patched. Even with the DNC in charge, the US Empire will continue to slowly decay until it collapses or revolutionaries succeed in establishing socialism. This is assuming no republican ever wins again.
TheFinn@discuss.tchncs.de · -9 pts · 8d
Cowbee@lemmy.ml · 12 pts · 8d
No, I'm not an accelerationist. I both don't believe what you claim, nor is that even what accelerationism is. I am a communist, I seek and organize for socialist revolution, which both has occurred in history and is a practical necessity.
I do not believe making the world worse is a path to socialism. I believe that capitalism regularly runs into crisis, which frequently expands the scale of each successive crisis, and that at these points the masses of the people can take matters into their own hands and establish a socialist society if they are sufficiently educated, class conscious, and organized.
Accelerationism is entirely different. The accelerationist view is that we should expedite this crisis by supporting the biggest, most effective capitalists, so that concentration of capital accelerates most efficiently, bringing about the collapse of capitalism sooner. The accelerationist doesn't want to elect Republicans and sabotage socialists, the accelerationist wants to support the Democrats as the more effective and stable stewards of imperialism.
I support neither the Republicans or Democrats. I support workers organizing outside of the electoral system, employing the time-tested revolutionary strategy I outlined above. I'm a communist.
K1nsey6@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 8d
Hows that incrementalism working out for you? The slow, unnoticeable march to the right.
Nonconfrontational@lemmy.ml · 11 pts · 8d
Was the Gaza genocide tepid, to you?
TheFinn@discuss.tchncs.de · -6 pts · 8d
BrainInABox@lemmy.ml · 10 pts · 8d
And that belief is based on nothing but blind faith to the democratic party. You're a genocide apologist; perfectly happy to downplay genocide when it's your team doing it.
"Tepid"
You're absolutely disgusting. As bad as any Maga chud
Nonconfrontational@lemmy.ml · 3 pts · 8d
How did they make the genocide worse?
Maeve@kbin.earth · 15 pts · 8d
We do. Some people only seem to_notice_ around election times. I wonder why that is?
Alternately, I've been told, "now's not the time," in on and off season, by the same people who said the same thing in the other season. So when is the time? Next Nevuary?
TheFinn@discuss.tchncs.de · -9 pts · 8d
Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 8d
And there's always an excuse for every now.
TheFinn@discuss.tchncs.de · -3 pts · 8d
Maeve@kbin.earth · 4 pts · 8d
Well do you. I'm not you.
Kurtismayfield@lemmy.zip · 10 pts · 8d
2008 called to remind you of what happened.
Objection@lemmy.ml · 9 pts · 8d
electric_nan@lemmy.ml · 7 pts · 8d
Why do they care what you want after they're elected? It's not like you can recall them before the next election. You've got politics backwards.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world · -10 pts · 8d
The time to made this cry is ahead of primaries. Everyone coming out of the woodwork complaining about how the Dems are just as bad right before the general election are plants trying to sleep us from voting the GOP out.
Fuck them. Vote Democrat in the general, and make the party more progressive in the primaries. Voting third party or refusing to vote just supports the GOP.
Never forget that if just 1% of the Nader voters had voted for Gore instead in Florida, George W Bush would never have been President.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml · 9 pts · 8d
You cannot implement socialism through reformism. This is a dead-end. Marxists are not GOP plants for consistently advocating for revolutionary means over the well-established failures of reformism.
jj4211@lemmy.world · -6 pts · 8d
So trying to vote in supporters of socialism is a waste of time? Note they explicitly mentioned primaries.
What precisely do you propose, and if not voting, then why bother getting all energized during election season when the only outcome of voting doesn't matter is voter suppression?
Cowbee@lemmy.ml · 9 pts · 8d
If your primary means of political engagement is through the electoral system, then yes, it's a waste of valuable organizing energy. Socialist parties should run candidates to advertise their platform and recruit, not as an actual way of getting change.
I propose what Marxists have proposed since the beginning: revolutionary organizing. This is a constant process that doesn't depend on the electoral cycle, it's more that those that only really tune into politics around election season don't notice it as much until election season. You can go back into my comment history, and I have been enormously consistent with what I have said, and when I have said it.
The actual revolutionary strategy is to educate the working classes on political theory and history, struggle alongside them in the realm of unionizing, indigenous sovereignty, strikes, and in so doing build up a worker party capable of leading revolution whenever capitalism hits crisis points.
jj4211@lemmy.world · -5 pts · 8d
Taking a few hours twice in an election cycle to cast a vote is not some intolerable wast of organizing energy.
It's at least worth a try to influence the elections and candidates.
"It's not possible to reform so don't even try" is a stupidly bad take. It seems accelerationist, that you hope for a civilization wide disaster that would leave hundreds of millions desperate in hopes that it will at least open up the path to some non-democratic result which you somehow hope will be your desired result as opposed to a myriad of competing interests that is likely to institute any number of even worse results.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml · 8 pts · 8d
There are several things wrong with this.
First, I don't really give a shit if people vote or not. My issue isn't with the few hours people spend on election day, it's with the days, weeks, months, even years spent on electoral campaigns, canvassing, and overall redirecting the problems people are already identifying with capitalism into elections. This creates a pressure valve, where people sit complicit for a few years at a time, perhaps agitating here or there to vote blue. It's an enormous waste of time at this scale for socialists to be doing this.
Second, that's not accelerationism. Acceletationism is the belief that we should support the most stable and competent stewards of imperialism and capitalists, so that capital concentrates at a faster rate and collapses sooner. This means that the Democrats, as the party where profits and stock market growth are generally higher, are the actual accelerationist candidate. Accelerationism isn't deliberately blowing up the system by voting for Republicans, nor is revolution accelerationism.
The fact is, capitalism systemically results in crisis about once a decade. This is built into capitalism, it's how it functions, and each time the biggest capitalists come out with far more of the capital than they had before as the smaller capitalists die off or are acquired. To prepare for crisis is not to expedite it, we need to get organized in anticipation of something we already know happens. Here's a handy chart:
We need to build up that organized revolutionary core, and educate and agitate amongst the masses to bring about revolution. Not redirect their attention towards the DNC as their sole means of political life.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net · -7 pts · 9d
Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 8d
Stop pretending democrats run honest primaries.
fireweed@lemmy.world · -9 pts · 9d
It's because Republican voters are conditioned to vote ( R ) no matter what, whereas Democratic voters will actually use their brains and vote for opposition (or not at all) if the ( D ) option is for any reason unfavorable, so Dems are more gunshy over anything that could be seen as rocking the boat. This is also why "vote blue no matter who" became a mantra, as an effort to tip the scales back.
I'm not saying this this the only factor, but in solid red areas Republican incumbents are basically bulletproof, giving them a degree of impunity that doesn't translate to even to solid blue areas.
Edit: unrelated, but does anyone know how to override Lemmy formatting? "( R )" without the spaces becomes (R), but I don't want it to.
Objection@lemmy.ml · 10 pts · 9d
I don't think there's actual evidence to back up this supposed conventional wisdom. It seems to me that Republican voters are a lot more likely to draw lines in the sand over things like abortion or guns, and to denounce anyone who doesn't take a hard line on their stance as a "RINO." The Libertarian party has often gotten more votes than the Greens, and the last major third party candidacy was Ross Perot who drew mostly from the right. I rarely see any of the same kind of vote-shaming, lesser-evilist discourse on the right. In right-wing circles, if someone says they firmly believe abortion is murder so they refuse to vote for a center-right candidate who's pro-choice, that's a lot more likely to be respected. The right doesn't have the same commitment towards "reasonableness" that liberals do and don't shy away from "my way or the highway" rhetoric.
It seems to me that what's actually different is that the Republican party has acknowledged and responded to the demands of their base. The right has no reason to abstain because their politicians are giving them exactly what they asked for, while the Democrats have followed the logic that elections are won by appealing to the center, and that the left will simply fall in line regardless. That logic is another piece of "conventional wisdom" that isn't actually supported by the evidence.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml · 8 pts · 9d
I don't think it's particularly useful to explain voting tendencies by mental capacity, rather than looking at it from a class perspective.
mobyduck648@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 9d
On average the best predictor of your beliefs is what your parents and peers believe, regardless of intelligence. I've seen people argue for a six thousand year old Earth who are clearly very intelligent in almost every other respect, not only is intelligence a variable of many axes it's more or less unrelated to the capacity to avoid self-delusion and motivated reasoning in my opinion. Stupidity is the easy analysis, but there's clearly much more influential factors going on.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml · 6 pts · 8d
You're correct, but mistaking the source. The reason people's peers and parents are so influential is because class is overwhelmingly inherited, and this gets reinforced through upbringing. At a societal scale, this still returns us to class analysis.
fireweed@lemmy.world · -3 pts · 9d
It's not about mental capacity, it's about whether the thinking process gets kicked on at all.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml · 7 pts · 9d
Again, this is reductive and not very explanatory. What determines if someone's thinking process "gets kicked on?" Is this a post-facto analysis, where you see someone vote R, and think that they must not have thought? As socialists, we must understand that people generally are not stupid, but instead self-interested. This returns us to class.
starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works · 0 pts · 9d
People generally are reactionaries without long term thinking, you have to teach that out of them. For your example, emotional intelligence and education are both strong predictors of voting D vs R. Long-term thinking is not our baseline, because that generally wasn't useful for millions of years of evolution.
People generally think, but are not rational actors unless educated, otherwise you wouldn't see trump be so popular among Mexican and black men, and advertising/propaganda wouldn't exist. Humans are not rational actors working from outside the realm of animals, we are one step removed from monkeys. We ARE capable of long-term critical thinking, but it takes more energy so by default we don't use it.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml · 8 pts · 9d
I think what you're trying to get at is false consciousness, the identification of people within one class with the interests of another. This explains both Democrat and Republican voting, as both are capitalist parties that do not represent the working classes. The crucial part I am getting at, however, is that propaganda works by appealing to felt interests, which are generally formed by people's own class interests. We must do away with the idea that everything would be solved if education systems taught critical thinking, because this ignores the class components of society.
I do agree that education is necessary. The working class needs its own political party that can educate, agitate, and organize the rest of this class. However, the idea that the working classes are stupid is one that directly runs counter to the task of building a mass movement.
starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works · 0 pts · 9d
There is no class interest that makes Republicans vote to ban Muslim immigrants, that's a reactionary position based on propaganda and fearmongering. Not everything would be solved with critical thinking because people would still vote for their own interests, but it would stop people voting directly against their own interests and also harming others because of their racism and homo/transphobia.
People in general are not well-informed rational actors. Intelligence does not equal critical thinking, which is why you'll see doctors saying climate change is fake. I am stupid and so is the working class and so is everyone else when they are first born. I was just taught many times over not to be a reactionary and take my time to learn something before having an opinion on it. It's not their fault they weren't taught (or had lead poisoning in the 60s) but they're still not using critical thinking.
Cowbee@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 9d
Opposition to immigrants is based on the requirements of the capitalist class to maintain both a source of intra-class conflict (to divide the working class) as well as to create a desparate sub-category of the working class that fears systemic violence and expulsion, and is thus more easily exploitable by capitalists. Critical thinking isn't the barrier, republican voters buy into this as a party primarily backed by a combination of the petite bourgeoisie and the haut bourgeoisie.
You're placing too much of an emphasis on the ideas of society without looking at where these ideas come from. It isn't lead poisoning, it's from the way we produce and distribute. That doesn't mean ideas do not play a part, that would be reductive, but the primacy exists with the base of society, the economic foundation.
Even if the working class voted in their self-interest, they would not be able to establish socialism, which is necessary. It would lead to a third party victory, and a failure of the third party to change capitalism into socialism piece by piece.