And I’m being serious. I feel like there might be an argument there, I just don’t understand it. Can someone please “steelman” that argument for me?
And I’m being serious. I feel like there might be an argument there, I just don’t understand it. Can someone please “steelman” that argument for me?
Steelman:
The US is currently a fascist, imperialist state. It has brutalized the global south, indigenous people, and POCs generally since its founding and will continue to do so unless the status quo is disrupted and changed significantly.
The Democratic party supports the same militaristic policies and the same neoliberal economic system that the Republicans do. The primary difference between the parties are various social issues that may make life somewhat better or worse for US citizens, but will never address the core problems of fascism, imperialism, and capitalism. Both parties support and protect the status quo. This status quo only benefits the bourgeois class and rich white people and harms literally hundreds of millions of others around the world.
The Democratic party is the only one of the two major parties that the Left has any degree of leverage over since the Democrats want the Left to vote for them. So, organizing to essentially boycott the Democratic party is a powerful method of protest that could effect real policy change. It is possibly the only effective method of protest left since the US police & surveilance state is cracking down on protests and the Left has no chance protesting violently against the most powerful military the world has ever seen.
The only way to make that threat matter to the Democratic party is to follow through if the demands aren’t met, even - or especially - if it means a second Trump term.
The liberal establishment has ignored and abandoned the working class for decades while dangling the carrot of milktoast social democratic reforms that rarely come to pass, but they blame the same people they abandoned for not energetically voting for them. They say it is a moral imperative to vote for them, but they are incapable of bettering the lives of working class people.
Strawman:
It would hurt my feelings too much to vote for COPmala Harm-us. Plus, Trump would let Putin annex Ukraine. Also, I’d risk touching grass if I went outside to participate in bourgeois electoralism. Gross.
Reality:
You can, and should, do more than one thing. Voting for Kamala is effectively playing defense against outright, full-throated fascism a la Mussolini even if you’d still consider the US fascist - it is clearly worse under Republicans. So vote, play defense, AND organize to raise class consciousness, provide mutual aid, protest when possible, and contribute to socialist causes. Letting Trump win would be a bad move. But, ultimately it is not the Left’s fault that he won. He won the popular vole and the electoral college vote by a large margin - larger than all third party socialist/socialist-adjacent candidates’ votes combined.
This is a great explanation, well done.
Buddy, you haven’t seen American fascism yet. Part of the problem is that people like you scream “fascist” so much that it’s lost it’s power. A fascist like Trump would have never been able to pull this off if that word hadn’t been trivializec.
Lemme tell the millions of children that have gone through the migrant camps, separated from their family, some of whom have disappeared, that their jailors aren’t fascists. Let me tell the latino women who have been forcibly neutered without their knowledge or consent that they’re trivializing fascism. Let’s go to those who were detained in Abu Ghraib, if any of them are still alive, that their abduction, rape, and torture by laughing US soldiers doesn’t count, it’s what happens to americans that’s worrying.
Honestly, this is the fucking smugness of somebody who knows they’re safe as long as they mask, because they’ve been safe as fascists have massively incarcerated and enslaved black people, as they’ve made ghettos of bipoc neighborhoods, as far right terrorists have shot up black churches and gay bars and lynchings are back on the up and up. Because that was trivial, what’s not trivial is if it can happen to them. Fuck dems fr.
Latinos voted heavily in favor of trump. They seem to want to be victimized.
The ones who voted for Trump voted because they think they’re not talking about them. The horrible violence will be visited upon whomever is to blame, and they don’t know anyone who’s to blame, so they have nothing to fear.
Dems do that shit too, what they’re ok with are death squads in Gaza, Nicaragua, Ukraine, because the Americans orchestrating and perpetrating those crimes against humanity would certainly never come back and apply their knowledge at home, where they live, surely. What’s more american than that?
This was a thread about making the specific argument you’re mad at me for making