- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
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cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/27972878
Counterpoint: It took 250 years for Trump to finish what was started.
It took 250 years of compacting garbage into a pit for the methane to reach self-ignition pressure
I’m always impressed with people who can make a good analogy.
The next Democratic president needs to be stubborn, machiavellian, and downright psychotic beyond even FDR. We need to purge Trump and Trumpism with an iron fist or we will never be rid of it. We never stamped out southern rebellion or completed reconstruction and we are still paying for that mistake today.
If we elect another tepid cross-the-isle institutionalist like Obama or Biden this country is toast - assuming we get the chance to elect any Democrat at all.
Unfortunately you won’t be handed an option better than a tepid cross-the-isle institutionalist and in order to get anything better you will have to convince die-hard democrats who refuse to break from the party line. That fight has been fought for decades. Electoralism will get you nowhere
Electoralism is insufficient, but it is also necessary. I totally agree that we can’t fix the problem with just electoralism, but every strategy that might work requires a parallel electoral effort. Abandoning electoralism is why we have Trump. Unless you are an accelerationist, in which case you should abandon any pretext that you give a shit about anyone or that you have any intention of making things better.
If you are an accelerationst, then you should understand that what happens when a large modern government collapses is about the worst humanitarian catastrophe imaginable. It would be like Gaza times 1000. Then, when things do get better, it will be under the control of warlords/oligarchs like Russia.
The Democratic party is full of genocidal Zionists whose opposition to Trump is either performative or they don’t like his mannerisms. They’re ghouls in suits who operate at the behest of the capitalist class. They’re shambling semi-humams who got into politics because they lack imagination and spines.
There are people like you mention. There are good people with conviction who want to help and change things. None of them are in the Democratic party. In fact, almost none of them are involved in electoral politics at all. You’ll find them at food banks and shelters. Or you’ll find them so distraught by daily American alienation that they’ve grown cynical and gave up decades ago.
None of them are in the Democratic party.
Tankie nonsense. There are plenty of good Democrats, they just aren’t the ones running the party. There is a huge tendency for activists to think that anyone who doesn’t act like an activist is insufficiently devout. We need activists, and we need politicians. Successful politicians can’t act like activists. What you demand will just lead to a permanently edgy and permanently irrelevant movement.
Tankie nonsense.
Any good Democrat would have left the party or started doing deliberate sabotage on the basis of the party’s unflinching Zionism. Successful politicians can’t act like activists? Yeah that’s why they keep capitulating to billionaires and the weapons industry.
This should be simple enough: the Democrats are an explicitly genocidal party. You know only 13 Democrats voted against the house bill to define anti-ziomism as antisemitism? Stop being a smug liberal and seriously take a look at this party. The greatest humanitarian crisis of the current day is the genocide in Gaza. It’s such a horrifying brutal catastrophe that I can’t even begin to use words to describe how much I hate the ghoulish freaks in the US state who perpetuate it.
Fuck off with your smug accusations of being a tankie. What are Democrats then? Dronies? Hospital-bombies? What do you call a party that authorized $18 billion in money and guns to a theocratic, ethnic supremacist nation that kept 2 million people in a cage?
Any democrat whose name isn’t Rashida Tlaib should be viewed with intense suspicion simply on the basis of their hesitancy in regards to Palestine.
Any good Democrat would have left the party
Oh yeah. They would be much more effective sitting on the sideline bitching like you than being in congress. /s
or started doing deliberate sabotage…
If you think they are capable of sabotaging the party more effectively than establishment Democrats have already been doing, I’d love to hear how.
You know only 13 Democrats voted against the house bill to define anti-ziomism as antisemitism?
Let me bring you back to the discussion we are having since zealots tend to put everyone in the “other” bucket and lose track. Your assertion that I disagreed with was that all “good people with conviction” are not in the Democratic party. Every one of those Democrats stood up to the millions of dollars that APAC will likely through into removing them from their seats. If just one is a good person of conviction than you are wrong. And that is just the US house. Also, if you are talking about the Antisemitism Awareness Act, it was actually 70 Democrats that voted against it.
Also relevant here is that you, like most outside strategists, seem to have forgotten the over 7000 state level representatives, not to mention governors and other elected officials. State level Democrats are, an average, far better than federal. These people are also important because they run all the elections. If you think the DNC primaries are bad, they don’t hold a candle to how locked down general elections are. If you want to replace the Democratic party, then you absolutely need to replace these people first before you will have any chance at all of replacing them at the federal level. You up to that?
It’s such a horrifying brutal catastrophe that I can’t even begin to use words to describe how much I hate the ghoulish freaks in the US state who perpetuate it.
I agree, but that is 100% irrelevant to the question of how best to replace them. Folks like you seem to think that the more edgy you make yourselves, the more effective you will be at opposing them. I’m guessing it probably works at the grocery store where your mommy buys you the sugar treats just to get you to shut up. However, in the grown-up world, sounding like an edgy radical just makes you irrelevant. You surrender all your power from beat 1.
What do you call a party that authorized $18 billion in money and guns to a theocratic, ethnic supremacist nation that kept 2 million people in a cage?
I call them shit. That’s why I want to oppose them with strength. Again, the question of how shitty the Democrats are and the question of how best to oppose them are entirely unrelated. We oppose them because they are shit, and we do it in the most effective ways we can - also because they are shit.
There are plenty of good Democrats, they just aren’t the ones running the party.
The lightning rod is not attached to the flammable portion of the house??
The Democratic party will never, ever let someone like this win the nomination.
The Democrats will use their propaganda arm at MSNBC and their army of talking heads to oppose it. I don’t think they have the guts to outright override voters. Democratic voters are fed up with the party in a way I don’t think we have seen before. I’m not giving up now.
On top of that, you have the kind of shenanigans they pulled in 2020 when Obama pulled strings to ensure Joe Biden had no competing moderates on Super Tuesday (of course, Warren stayed in).
And then there’s the fuckery in Iowa with the newly implemented voting app, connected to Pete’s family, that was only caught by Sanders supporters keeping an independent tally.
If you want to go even more conspiratorial, you can look at the huge discrepancies between pre-adjusted exit polling and the actual primary results.
They have no legal obligation, but they are not insane enough to override the winner of the primary. That is the one thing that could easily destroy the party. They will play their media games and I don’t doubt Obama could still pull strings for endorsements etc. All the rest of that is indeed conspiracy theory.
The DNC have complete, unilateral control over who they nominate. They don’t need to override any voters when all the candidates they offer you are just as toothless.
Not complete control. I’m absolutely certain that they would have preferred to keep Bernie out in 2016 and 2020. Besides being doomerism, that’s just not supported by the facts.
Bernie has been so useful to them, consistently, and they know he has no intention of disrupting the empire. He’s not a hawk, but he’s really good at keeping the war machine humming.
Sometimes I wish Bernie had won just so that people like you could have seen exactly how bad it would have been and lost all hope, but this is Bernie’s role, to sheepdog all the strays that would normally wonder off into revolutionary politics to make sure they firmly stay in the blue-no-matter-who camp, just waiting for the day that they’re definitely gonna kick that football
The next Democratic president
It could happen, but I’m not counting on it.
“We can’t lose because we’re not as awful” didn’t work for them the many times they tried it, and they’re openly - as a party platform - not on the side on the common person, or of people trying to save lives in hospitals while getting targeted with bombs.
My controversial stance: any individual unwilling to sat “bombing hospitals is some bullshit” publicly, isn’t on my side of any conflict. There’s too many of those in the Democratic party, for it to have real strength, today.
Whether the Democratic party has any purpose left to serve in the road to a solution is still an open question, I think.
The Democratic party needs to start jumping when the rest of us say “stop fucking supporting foreign wars” and “tax the rich”, if they want any part of whatever comes next.
The President I just described would not be running on a “not as awful” platform.
Whether the Democrats can be forced to step up is an open question. But if it’s not the Democrats then it’s nobody. Despite rising frustration with the party, they still have a massive loyal following. There is no avoiding a split with an outside strategy.
The President I just described would not be running on a “not as awful” platform.
Cool. And I think that president has a real shot. But I don’t know if the current Democratic party has any intention of putting that president forward.
But if it’s not the Democrats then it’s nobody.
Parties have waned and been replaced, even in two-party systems.
There is no avoiding a split with an outside strategy.
Agreed. And if the Democrats put forth a real candidate, with real values, there’s a chance the party continues.
In any case, I’m glad and proud to vote along with the majority of other voting non-billionaire non-assholes, as long as there’s a strategy.
But I’m still not convinced we’re better off dragging the Democratic party’s lately dead weight along for the ride.
Edit: To be clear, I’ll continue voting for whichever candidate my local union endorses. It’s a good enough solution, for me, to ensure my vote moves usefully and strategically.
I actually disagree. I don’t think maga needs to be stamped out. It needs to be out-narratived. The Trump voters you think of that are fully racist and believe absolutely insane shit will never vote Democrat. But he has attracted a lot of voters who are just voting for someone that’s addressing their concerns. The everyday American is dealing with rising prices, financial insecurity, and a general feeling that the government doesn’t represent them well. I think a left wing candidate could easily come up with narratives that directly counter Trump’s talking points.
- “We need high tariffs to bring back manufacturing jobs from overseas.” -> “We need a global minimum wage so foreign sweatshops can’t out-compete American manufacturing.”
- “The flood of illegal immigrants is taking jobs and not paying taxes” -> “The illegal immigrants need to pay their taxes and earn their path to citizenship”
- “The deep state is pushing unamerican ideologies from within the administration.” -> “corporations have poisoned government through regulatory capture.”
- “The elites are running this country behind the scenes.” This one actually doesn’t need to change. Just point to different people when you say elites.
- “We need to drill more oil to secure energy independence.” -> “We need more wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear power so we aren’t so dependent on fluctuating global oil prices.”
People are already primed to care about these issues. By just retooling Trump’s talking points, you can use them against him. I think this would work better than “stamping out” maga ideology. They already see themselves as the underdog and the government is out to get them. That would only embolden them and lend legitimacy to their claims. The more important thing is to make them seem like the weird assholes they are.
That article is a great summary of how Make America Great Again is making it objectively worse. More flim-flamming from this sensitive man.
The south will rise again!
I always thought that was racist bullshit wishful thinking. Looks more realistic now shockingly.