I want to draw attention to the elephant in the room.
Leading up to the election, and perhaps even more prominently now, we’ve been seeing droves of people on the internet displaying a series of traits in common.
- Claiming to be leftists
- Dedicating most of their posting to dismantling any power possessed by the left
- Encouraging leftists not to vote or to vote for third party candidates
- Highlighting issues with the Democratic party as being disqualifying while ignoring the objectively worse positions held by the Republican party
- Attacking anyone who promotes defending leftist political power by claiming they are centrists and that the attacker is “to the left of them”
- Using US foreign policy as a moral cudgel to disempower any attempt at legitimate engagement with the US political system
- Seemingly doing nothing to actually mount resistance against authoritarianism
When you look at an aerial view of these behaviors in conjunction with one another, what they’re accomplishing is pretty plain to see, in my opinion. It’s a way of utilizing the moral scrupulousness of the left to cut our teeth out politically. We get so caught up in giving these arguments the benefit of the doubt and of making sure people who claim to be leftists have a platform that we’re missing ideological parasites in our midst.
This is not a good-faith discourse. This is not friendly disagreement. This is, largely, not even internal disagreement. It is infiltration, and it’s extremely effective.
Before attacking this argument as lacking proof, just do a little thought experiment with me. If there is a vector that allows authoritarians to dismantle all progress made by the left, to demotivate us and to detract from our ability to form coalitions and build solidarity, do you really think they wouldn’t take advantage of it?
By refusing to ever question those who do nothing with their time in our spaces but try to drive a wedge between us, to take away our power and make us feel helpless and hopeless, we’re giving them exactly that vector. I am telling you, they are using it.
We need to stop letting them. We need to see it for what it is, get the word out, and remember, as the political left, how to use the tools that we have to change society. It starts with us between one another. It starts with what we do in the spaces that we inhabit. They know this, and it’s why they’re targeting us here.
Stop being an easy target. Stop feeding the cuckoo.
Oh, fuck me this one is long. But I’m so worked up about this.
I’m not denying that truth. I’m saying it literally does not matter.
Nono, i’m not pointing to democrats. I’m pointing to almost 80 years of an american ecomonic ideology that has finally resulted in the failure of democracy (not hyperbole). Ask any non-voter why they decided not to vote, and probably 80% of them will tell you that their vote wouldn’t matter, anyway. Not because both candidates cause the same amount of harm, or even that their vote is literally not counted, but because they have so little faith in the democratic system that they think voting is a fake steering wheel on a trolley with no lever. People don’t suddenly turn into fascists and authoritarians out of thin-air, people resort to those when they feel there’s no other way to change things, and that same (IRRATIONAL) feeling that drives people to vote for a fascist is also what drives people to chose not to vote at all out of hopelessness.
No, it doesn’t, you just misunderstood what I was saying. Look:
Ignoring the hand-waving about Israel as an issue (it doesn’t matter to my point anyway). I’m not even trying to put everyone in a bucket and generalize about everyone who didn’t vote (i know you’re saying it’s probably a MIX of things), but it’s incredibly important to understand this sentiment because of what the implications are for how we rationalize our losses. The point is that even if the voters were completely in-tune with reality - hell, even if they were completely propagandized for the democratic message - that would still not change the feeling of despair about our democratic system. Just try to understand what I’m saying - it’s not because Biden didn’t deliver on incredibly valuable things, even popular things. It’s not even because people didn’t know about them or how impactful they were. It’s because those things do not change the way they feel about how our democracy represents their interests. All the people I know who were passionately in favor of voting have said that, yea, those were great policies and amazing in our current climate, but the problem is so much bigger than a few trillion dollars of infrastructure improvements that it still feels depressing to even be excited about them. That, and Biden being a ardent capitalist (and zionist) robs us of even the fantasy of this being progress toward a democratic socialist economy, since most of those funds will likely still contribute to the accelerating accumulation of wealth.
Biden passing MASSIVE climate and infrastructure initiatives does fuck all about wealth accumulating to such an extent that a single $50mil contribution to the next campaign can completely undo any progress made after years of dedicated grassroots organizing and fundraising. Biden presiding over the best-functioning economy in 20 years does nothing to improve the share of profit that goes to labor. Literally everything people feel desperate about only gets worse when the economy is doing well, because it accelerates a wealth disparity that makes it even less affordable to buy a house or groceries, let alone have time or money to contribute to a political project to make things better. The hole we feel we are in is so deep that leaps and bounds feel like tiny shuffling steps by comparison.
Democrats are simply not acknowledging the severity of the crisis we were already in. THAT’S why it wasn’t enough that Harris wasn’t a fascist dictator - because people had already lost hope that she could do anything to change what they feel is already hopeless. Her not selling her own vision of progress really only served as confirmation of what people already felt, which is that even if she wanted to make fundamental change, too, it was clear she couldn’t (or wouldn’t, out of political expedience) walk out and say so because there’s a mountain-sized pile of wealth and power poised to wash her and the democratic party away if she did. This is what a failure of democracy means - not that the totality of the votes resulted in something terrible happening, but the totality of the votes are no longer enough to fix what’s broken.
It could have been Christ incarnate vs Trump the antichrist - unless she gave people any hope of fixing a broken system, millions of people would still be in such despair and feel so jaded by past inadequacies that they likely would have stayed home anyway.
And it was still the second-highest turnout of any election on record.
Biden improved the share of profit that goes to labor. He also raised corporate taxes by a huge amount to fund all this stuff he was doing. Houses and groceries both got more expensive, because of Covid, but also, wages went up by this pretty large amount (particularly for the working class you are concerned about here) so that they both got more affordable for the average person overall. They got way more affordable for the average poor person.
I don’t know whether you know that or not. Almost no one does. That’s why I say that our systems of political education are extremely bad. Would it be better if he was Bernie Sanders? Abso fucking lutely. But he actually went to bat for the working class in a way that almost no one in America has for a long, long time.
Outside of that one detail point, which is somewhat pertinent to my whole point that I’m making here, I completely agree with you about the despair people feel about the system, Biden being part of that whole broken system regardless of the good that he did, and that being a key reason why people aren’t excited to vote for anyone, and pretty much 100% of the rest of it. I have no idea at all why you keep lecturing me on this and using bold and italics, as if somehow I’m not grasping the point.
We could be talking about issues of political propaganda, having a factual discussion about whether my assertion about Biden reducing income inequality for the first time in decades in America is even true, that kind of thing. But you seem like you’re absolutely committed to pretending I’m not grasping the point and just raising the volume of your messages until the speakers are rattling, pretending that I am not. Why are you doing that?
I was obviously getting worked up, because i’m 90% sure you were saying something completely different, but I’m fine with leaving it at tentative agreement at this point. I do not think voters should take any blame for an electoral system that has completely failed them, and I was very passionately making that case. Maybe I misunderstood your first comment, but:
spoiler
This is what I was reacting to. The idea that the rise of the NSDAP is entirely the fault of the KPD for ‘splitting the ticket’ in a country boiling over with populist sentiment due to the long deteriorating economic conditions and rife with division for more than 20 years. To say that the German population was feeling desperate and angry is a massive understatement, and while it’s fair to point out the clear miscalculation of the KPD in hindsight, it flies completely in the face of what the sentiment and conditions in the country were at the time, and where the sentiment is here right now.
I only railed on this so hard because it’s clear, to me at least, that democrats are losing -not due to an environment of propaganda- but because the political center is hollowing out due to a similar deterioration of economic conditions and a failing democratic system. I don’t consider the core issues of that failure to be ‘pet issues’, and I think by addressing them as such is a big part of the reason democrats find themselves increasingly alone in the center right. Far from ‘asking them to lose’, begging them to come to the left is the only way I think they will be able to win without trying to capture the reactionary sentiment of the right. Addressing the economic and democratic crisis is the only way they could possibly win, and the only way to (maybe) fix some of the failures people are feeling.
A blip on a shear cliff, and pales in comparison to the immense growth of wealth in the form of capital. Musk didn’t buy twitter with a pile of cash from years of profit.
They’re definitely not. They are foundational to the problems in America today. The KPD’s obsession with the SPD specifically and settling the scores of the past was a pet issue.
Agreed.
Agreed.
I’m not really trying to say “blame.” Like I said, most of the failure I think is a failure of media and education that failed the voters. You were the one that invented the idea that we had to “blame.” You also seem to be sticking implicitly, without really addressing it outright, to the idea that it can either be the voters’ “fault” or else the party’s “fault” but not both, and because I said that who won the election is partly a result of who it was that people voted for, you are still lecturing me sort of an infinite length about how it is the party’s “fault” that they got not enough votes, as if that’s not something I agree with already.
I have no idea why you keep repeating this or explaining it to me over and over again in different ways. For variety, would you like to try predicting what my response will be, to this message where you’re explaining it to me again?
That’s not what I was getting from your other comments:
You have a lot of theories about why the dems lost, but none of them seem to be touching the point I was making. I was being more pointed with identifying where the electoral shortfall was. But i’m glad you agree.
Yea, maybe I interpreted some of your characterization of the election as attributing blame, and I don’t really think that’s an unfair interpretation:
I think you and I disagree on what the most important takeaways from this election are, but I’m fine with letting it lie.
Wait. Are you telling me that I have a different opinion than you about why the Dems lost? And you found that whole concept confusing, to the point that you had to reboot and repeatedly just explain your entire thing, from start to finish, including getting more and more strident about explaining to me the things I did agree with even when I told you I agreed with them, and interpreting me disagreeing with you in any respect into wild mischaracterizations of what I was saying, repeatedly and even after I explicitly explained that I believed the opposite of those mischaracterizations?
Well, I’m terribly sorry. In the future I’ll strive to be better about “touching the point you are making” when I say things, so you won’t have to be disturbed by the concept of reading something you don’t already agree with. I can understand how that could be discombobulating and might make you start hitting the bold and all caps to just say over and over again what you think to the person you’re talking to. That sounds super productive, and like a gateway to an enjoyable and enlightening internet experience.
It is absolutely sending me that you just figured this out. Like that was the big mystery that you finally cracked, in this whole conversation, that finally made it make sense to you.
I think that would be best. I wish you the best in all your future endeavors.
You kept claiming that you agreed with me “100%” - the only allusion to a disagreement up until two comments ago was the qualifier of ‘pretty much’ 100% - but it wasn’t until just now that you say you disagree with the main thrust of my point. I clearly picked up on it, I don’t think I would have gotten so animated if it was clear that you agreed with me as you claimed.
Yea, good luck to the both of us.
Okay, I’ll work on my solution for better conversation on the internet. I think I’ve spent enough time aiming to help you with reading comprehension for today.
I said, “The Democrats can be ghouls who need replacement or foundational reform” and you spent like a short story’s worth of words screaming at me that the Democrats are ghouls who need replacement or foundational reform, and then when I tried for like the 10th time to express to you that you can calm down about expressing that like a street preacher shouting on a corner an inch from my face, you apparently heard “I agree with you about 100% of what you say and have no disagreement with anything” even though you had previously picked up and explicitly disagreed with the part where I said that propaganda and media also had something to do with it.
You seem like you are doing literal backflips to avoid the conversation of whether that propaganda is happening, in favor of just shrieking at me that the Democrats carry some blame for losing the election, no matter how many times I attempt to express that I, also, think that.
I have literally no idea why you are that way. I hope you come out of it someday. Let me know if you do, and we can talk about the propaganda thing.
I was saying AMERICA needed reform, that democrats are bleeding voters because they’ve lost faith that foundational reform is possible.
It is happening, but even if it wasnt I think the material conditions would be doing the same thing anyway. I don’t think its the reason dems lost. A clear difference, I now know.
I’m telling you they carry all the blame. That even if the cards were stacked in their favor they’d still lose, if they don’t propose foundational change.
Idk how else I could have communicated that without any less emphasis, but ‘shrieking’ is a bit hyperbolic.
I hope dems come out of it someday.
I had no idea 100% meant less than 100%, this is news to me.