Spineless liberals cant even hold the line much more than one month, in any collation they are the weakest link
So an independent, a dude that essentially went maga after a stroke, and 6 other centrist Democrats making a deal means liberals are “spineless”.
I guess we should all stop voting because both sides are the same right bro?!?!
Which side was against the genocide?
The cowardice is significantly deeper than those six Democrats, its also with Chuck Schumer and the entire party. Quite frankly if the party had even the semblance of a spine than they would have purged many of these politicans long ago. The party should uphold an absolute basic standard and if we had a real left wing party than it absolutely would.
It’s pretty obvious that without an institution there’s absolutely nothing that will be done to stop the Epstein class. A large enough institution will include some traitors.
“Let us remember that a traitor may betray himself and do good that he does not intend. It can be so, sometimes.”
Going by the recent bullshit in today’s senate, they are right-lite
Democrats are controlled opposition, which the belief is solidified by the recent senate vote. I’ll still vote blue, but if the politician option of it being a coward/establishment then I might as well vote for a rat. Absolute disgusted our elected leaders have no spine as Republicans continue on their quest to achieve fascism and white supremacy.
Fuck those 6 and fuck Schumer.
I’ll still vote blue, but if the politician option of it being a coward/establishment then I might as well vote for a rat.
why not vote for 3rd party instead of wasting your vote like this?
The republicans have a strong enough, brainwashed base that will vote for them come hell or high water. Around 35% of people who will vote are seriously engaged on their side and will do whatever they need to vote for them. That’s a pretty strong hurdle to overcome
The democrats also have a contingent of Better Blue than Red and will vote for them no matter what.
The largest party next in line would be the Green party, and honestly, they’re barely trying. I mean the head of the party has investments in Fossil Fuel companies supporting fracking. AOC rightfully critisized them for a lack of organiztional development. It’s just this mess of funding going in and our for visibility and the dilution of the “not republican” vote.
So voting for a third party, at best, lets the republicans continue their destruction of the country and sends a message to the democrats that we’re tired of their crap, which has happened twice now with zero changes.
If you want us to vote for 3rd party, you need to deliver us a 3rd party with enough leadership to campaign and win it.
For nationwide elections I agree there isn’t much of a choice, but I’d argue voting third party outside of swing states is still good to express dissatisfaction, and third parties and independents can still win in local elections.
but I’d argue voting third party outside of swing states
absolutely, and i’m a fan of this, let’s get congress full of third, as long as it’s not libretarian third :)
So voting for a third party, at best, lets the republicans continue their destruction of the country and sends a message to the democrats that we’re tired of their crap, which has happened twice now with zero changes
the democrats and republicans are 2 extremes of this same pro-late stage capitalist status quo system so expecting anything to change by vacillating between them is an unrealistic non-starter.
s are 2 extremes of this same pro-late stage capitalist status quo system so expecting anything to change by vacillating between them is an unrealistic non-starter.
I don’t disagree, but voting for a 3rd in a tw- party race will also be a useless non-starter.
history has given us several examples of this happening; with mexico being the most recent one and in our lifetimes.
those examples prove over and over again that it’s the self-reinforcing propaganda that keeps us back, not two-party; spoiler-vote; fptp; electoral-college; etc. nonsense.
Because the system currently only supports 2 parties for president. We would need current politicians to be selfless enough to make the necessary changes that would allow for a 3rd party to receive enough funding and media coverage for the vast majority of the American voters - who pay no attention at all to politics - to hear about them. Our politicians only work for themselves, and have no reason to work against their own interests by introducing a 3rd party - hell, they’ve almost condensed down to a single party, but at least one side of it is still keeping up appearances enough to only terrorize its people a little bit so that they can say they’re better than the other guys.
Presidential voting is just trying to use the system to change the system, which only works when the system itself works. The current system is broken to the point that presidential voting won’t fix it - the best we can do is make sure the lesser of the evils wins until we can garner enough support for an actual overthrowing of the system, then begin the work to make one that would allow for politicians that actually care about us. A presidential vote to make actual change is a wasted vote, because a vote no longer holds that much power in America. The best it can do on its own is hold back the greater evil.
For local elections you should absolutely vote for the most progressive person you can, because the voters that don’t pay attention don’t even show up to those votes, making them much more volatile to the point where a true leftist can win. Maybe we’d even be able to get a new generation of politicians to change the system from the ground up over the course of several decades, if the country lasts that long. But the presidential election is far too padded by people who would vote for their party’s candidate even if they killed their own mother - it can’t suddenly change, not in its current state.
You cant build popular support for dismantling the system as it is while you’re actively advocating for people to accept the lesser evil.
Imagine if Sanders got up on the senate floor and said “i believe we cannot compromise on ACA subsidies and let millions of americans lose health coverage, be forced to ration their insulin or die because they cant afford a doctor, but I’ll be voting to reopen the government without them anyway because i have no choice”.
Democrats rely on the inherent violence of a 2 party system. Playing into it isnt pragmatic, it’s denial. Either we’re in this together or we aren’t, and democrats have made it perfectly clear that they aren’t.
I’m not advocating for people to accept the lesser evil, I’m asking them to understand that their vote is no longer a form of acceptance - it doesn’t hold enough power for you to use it that way anymore. Your acceptance or rejection of the system comes from your actions outside of the polling place, in the form of protests and what inevitably comes after protests if they’re ignored for long enough.
A vote in the presidential election currently only holds the power to slightly shift the current power between bad and worse. It’s like the trolley problem - there’s no real 3rd track right now, no matter how much we want one. If we start building one now at the local level, maybe there will be one for someone later, but we’ve gotta make our own lever choice without it for now.
I’m not advocating for people to accept the lesser evil, I’m asking them to understand that their vote is no longer a form of acceptance
This is a fun rhetorical trick, but I’m not interested in playing a semantic game over the definition of ‘acceptance’. This:
A vote in the presidential election currently only holds the power to slightly shift the current power between bad and worse
is absolutely advocating for the lesser evil. Fine if you don’t want to call that ‘acceptance’, but what I’m pointing to is not the choice itself, it’s the act of advocating for it to begin with. Spending any amount of energy trying to convey the importance of voting for the moderate wing of fascism is a distraction from the message that both parties pose an existential threat to the working class. If your goal is to build support for radical systemic change, then there should be no ambiguity about what actions are necessary to achieve it. To use your bullshit trolly problem analogy- the ‘two tracks’ forced choice is a distraction from the fact that we need to stop the fucking trolly. Even if we end up pulling that lever in the end, you will never get enough people to get off to help derail it if you keep ensuring them that the worst will be averted even if they chose not to.
You can’t build a popular movement against the democratic coalition while openly admitting that you have no choice but to support them no matter how aligned they are with the fascists. Liberals will continue happily existing in the status quo until it’s made clear to them that their privileged position within it is threatened along with everyone else’s if they choose not to act.
I don’t understand your point. Voting is not a form of protest or revolution - you either overthrow the government, or you don’t; voting is just the thing you do in the meantime to hopefully keep living to eventually overthrow the government. If the system worked, sure, voting would keep it working, but thinking of voting as a way to change the system at this point is like thinking an oil change will fix a broken engine. I vote for the lesser evil not because I accept them or want them to be in charge, but because I know the person I want in charge will never be placed in charge by the current system. I advocate for revolution because I know we need it, and that the system cannot be fixed in my lifetime without it, but voting is an entirely separate thing, and can only be used as a tool to keep the world from falling apart quite as quickly as it would under the greater evil.
You can’t build shit for shit, when you’re being actively hunted by ICE for thought crimes, and like third of the Americans don’t know where their next meal will come from.
In order to build something you need to have a foundation, which you can’t do in a crisis. Democratic party as it is is not a party that people are exited about, and they need to be changed one way or another, but you can only do that if there is no Republicans actively hunting you for sports, and the way US is setup right now, you can either have one or another. Denying that is actively dangerous, acting as if it’s not the case brings objectively horrifying results.When the fascist boot is coming down on people’s necks is possibly the best time to be building popular resistance
There is nothing that can be improved by majority fighting tooth and nails to survive. What you need is generations of people who know what the better world looks like, and who’s will wasn’t destroyed by absolute power of a fascist boot on the neck. Accelerationism never was a viable idea, it was always a ruse to make less empathetic among the left to fight for the same cause fascists are fighting for.
presidential elections do seem like a really lofty goal, but history has given us plenty of examples to prove that it’s possible; with mexico being the most recent one with amlo & shienbaum.
i think it’s a testament to the power of american propaganda that a 3rd party candidate won a presidential election in not only one of the largest and most populous countries of the world; but one of the closest possible to the united states and most of americans are still completely unaware that it actually happened and that it happened in our lifetime.
That’s exactly what I’m saying. Our media has the vast majority of the voters’ sole attention - they don’t know and don’t care that other options exist. If a presidential candidate doesn’t have equal media coverage to the other 2 parties, they immediately lose more Americans than they would need to win the election.
the media and republican/democrat duopoly are powered by the same source, the american oligarchy; expecting the media to ever give airtime to 3rd party is unrealistic.
it’s self-fulfilling propaganda that we’re inflicting upon ourselves.
Correct, which is why the 3rd part is itself unrealistic. We need to change things from the ground-up at a local level, which will take decades, or overthrow everything and start over, which will lead to a huge amount of deaths regardless of whether or not we even win the battle. Regardless, to win the presidential election with a 3rd party right now, we need the media, and that’s not going to happen, so to put your vote in that hole is the same as not voting.
Democrats are like half the left tho, so we can either fight prog vs dem, or we can unite to actually take on an external foe
prog vs dem, or we can unite to actually take on an external foe
This.
Started seeing progs refer to dems as “demoncrats” and now I legitimately can’t tell them apart from MAGA online half the time.
You are the epitome of the suppressed class war you constantly criticize for being in favor of in-group fighting. At least try to remember who your real enemies are.
Leftists support moving onto socialism, democrats support maintaining capitalism and imperialism. This is a fundamentally irreconcilable difference, and is why leftists opposing the democrats isn’t infighting, it’s just fighting. It’s entirely different from MAGA, which also wishes to perpetuate capitalism and imperialism.
And what about what middle America wants? The voters, you know, that we have to get? “Socialism” is a non-starter for people outside of NYC.
Middle America has a lot of unmet needs, with a horrible health care system and food insecurity. Most will gladly embrace anything that may help.
What many see as crazy politics is a desperate attempt to latch onto anything remotely promising.
As the working class continues to slide into futher and further misery, more and more are awakened to the idea of radical politics, and are more understanding of socialism. Capitalism must decay, so the task of socialists is to organize and teach about socialism, not just vote in lock-step with the right-wing democrats.
Politics today:
-Far Left pretending they are normal Left wing, and everyone else are dumb fascists.
-Far Right pretending they are normal Right wing, and everyone else are woke communists.
You forgot:
-Centrists pretending they see through everyone by just picking the centerpoint on an arbitrary axis, without actually considering which side is actually correct
True, but is the A for anarchists? Anarchists are not left.
Edit: oh, I’m on .ml. I didn’t know yous had a thing going for anarchism as well, now I know.
Anarchism is left. Anarcho-capitalism is a meme ideology that is mostly an offshoot of liberalism, while actual anarchism has a rich history on the left, as the other major umbrella of leftist thought compared to Marxism.
This is a pretty biased way of putting it. The concept of anarchy predates the interpretation used by modern left-leaning self-identified anarchists by a couple of thousand years. In online circles such anarchists often seek to monopolize the term (like you are doing right now), but they factually weren’t the ones to coin it; when it was originally coined by Plato, nobody had any idea what the fuck capitalism or socialism even are, and in fact Plato used it as a cautionary example.
I am guessing your gut reaction will be to recoil at this grave attack on your ideology. I implore you to stop and consider that most people are not in fact at all familiar with left-wing anarchism as defined by Proudhon etc., but are vaguely familiar with the concept from many other sources. Therefore when you talk about anarchism without a qualifier to mean anarchic socialism, most people will assume you are talking about some Mad Max law of the jungle nonsense and then summarily dismiss anything you say as insane rambling.
I’m not an anarchist, I’m a Marxist-Leninist. Not sure where you got the idea that I’m an anarchist from. Secondly, I’m not referring to what the random person thinks anarchy is, but what actual anarchists believe, and among anarchists anarcho-capitalism is fringe, and an offshoot of liberalism. Plato having talked about anarchy at one point doesn’t suddenly mean that the entirety of anarchist history suddenly doesn’t matter.
Secondly, I’m not referring to what the random person thinks anarchy is, but what actual anarchists believe, and among anarchists anarcho-capitalism is fringe, and an offshoot of liberalism.
You’re doing the monopoly thing here again. When by “anarchist” you refer exclusively to left-leaning anarchists, of course anarcho-capitalism is going to be fringe among them.
Not to mention the fact that free-market anarchism is a distinct ideology from anarcho-capitalism and, to my understanding, much less fringe among self-described anarchists. The primary distinction seems to be that anarcho-capitalism exists at a lower energy state, a sort of a decay product that free-market anarchism would likely almost immediately decay into upon contact with the real world.
Plato having talked about anarchy at one point doesn’t suddenly mean that the entirety of anarchist history suddenly doesn’t matter.
One ideology misappropriating the term also doesn’t mean that all other meanings of the word suddenly don’t matter. Don’t get me wrong, I sympathize with many of the ideas of left-leaning anarchists, but they do suck at naming things. When the same concept covers both extreme right-wing libertarianism and extreme socialism, you really should be qualifying it with something to avoid confusion.
No, I mean among all anarchists. Anarcho-capitalism is fringe within anarchists, and has no real presence historically outside of a few extreme libertarians. Anarchism historically is tied to communalized production, and while I don’t personally think it has staying power practically, I also recognize it as a thoroughly left-wing ideology historically.
If you think it’s thoroughly left-wing then I think you must not be familiar with individualist and libertarian anarchist thinkers. I don’t think free-market anarchism involves much social production for example. In American political theory anarchism is what gave birth to libertarianism, which is pretty much a right-wing ideology.
I’m aware that they exist, being fringe implies that they do exist but are an extreme minority. Libertarianism is an extension of liberalism, and the anarchist offshoot of libertatianism is as such a more extreme offshoot of liberalism.
On the one hand, a totally unified party is clearly a problem. I don’t particularly want the Democrats to be united on everything, we can see from the Republicans that is a recipe for authoritarianism.
On the other hand, it would be nice if they could fucking unite against authoritarianism.
Unity is a good thing if it’s around a good idea, like climate change. Disciplined parties that openly discuss problems internally and come to a resolute conclusion on are far more effective at meeting the needs of the people. There isn’t a “recipe for authoritarianism,” we can see that it is through disunity that the Statesian working class is divided and oppressed.
I’m wondering when the rest of you guys are going to realize that electoralism is a huge waste of time, effort and energy. Elections are a distraction to make us think we can effect change through the system. But the problem IS the system. There is only one way forward, and it’s through a revolution that abolishes the entire existing structures of power.
We need to accept this reality, so we can actually start the long process of how to achieve that.
I think you’re correct. But if so, that means a lot of people are going to die and even after they die, we have no guarantee that the next power structure will be any better.
Socialist states have had a great track record in improving living conditions as compared to previous systems.
Yes, absolutely.
My fear is whether Americans will choose socialism right now. I’m in a very queer, anarchist bubble and I’m not sure how to tell how popular this sort of thought is.
My concern is how thoroughly Americans have rooted socialists out of power and how all of our media will insist that we need more fascism, not less.
As the spoils of imperialism dry up, conditions are getting worse in the States. The task of socialists is to organize, so that revolution can be steered in a positive, unified direction if it comes to pass. We cannot vote for socialism without capital using the state to crush that movement, but we can learn from successful revolutionaries and modify what worked for them to suit our conditions.
