this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2024
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United States | News & Politics

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Blaming progressives for Harris' defeat would be good for a "progressive" voting bloc. The only leverage a voting bloc could ever hope to have is a credible threat to withhold a vote. Usually, those on the US "left" are not perceived as credibky threatening to withhold their vote and they can be safely ignored.

Of course voting is itself limited. If you want to develop political power for the good of humanity you need to do more than think about voting and stay far away from the Democratic Party.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Blaming progressives for Harris' defeat would be good for a "progressive" voting bloc

You are fucking scum. Working full time in other threads to sow discord, working (I believe literal) overtime to get people to vote for a candidate that will directly lead to the deaths of Palestinians as if you give a single shit about them...

Then here you are giving the fucking game away.

You're working overtime to push the one thing that you know will drive a wedge between the Democratic party and progressives.

You say this is in order to force the Democrats to lose because you think this puts progressives in a better position going forward, but I'm not even sure I believe that.

You're trash. Fuck off please.

Not that it matters. Trump wins, actual progressives will have more important things to worry about such as basic survival

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

You are fucking scum.

Please do your best to engage in good faith and refrain from namecalling.

Working full time in other threads to sow discord, working (I believe literal) overtime to get people to vote for a candidate that will directly lead to the deaths of Palestinians as if you give a single shit about them…

Sorry but no I don't get paid to have opinions against genocide.

You’re working overtime to push the one thing that you know will drive a wedge between the Democratic party and progressives.

Democrats doing genocide is what creates the wedge. I am trying to get you to not accept genocide rather than go to the other side and accept it. It is bad to normalize genocide.

You say this is in order to force the Democrats to lose because you think this puts progressives in a better position going forward, but I’m not even sure I believe that.

No, it is because I think it is bad for everyone for you and others to normalize genocide. I am simply responding to others' questions and points when they say things like what it means to get blamed for defeat and so on. I do not think anyone here is being organized or strategic. But they are normalizing genocide.

You’re trash. Fuck off please.

Please do your best to avoid namecalling.

Not that it matters. Trump wins, actual progressives will have more important things to worry about such as basic survival

I have already organized under several presidents, including Obama, Trump, and Biden. This "Trump sandwich" is revelatory. Of those three, it has been most difficult under Obama and Biden, as well as due to the local policies of Democrats.

Because I apparently need to explain it, this does not mean I am saying Trump is simply "better" or you should vote for him. Remember, I don't subscribe to "lesser evil" votes for genociders.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

It's irrelevant since the DNC has total control over which candidate matriculates to any position. In other words, the DNC ensures that any "threat" is already nipped before voters have any say at all.

Look at 2016: Debbie Wasserman-Schultz sabotaged Bernie Sanders' campaign in broad daylight and then flounced directly to the Hillary Clinton campaign to hide under her skirt. Total fucking impunity.

I'm glad Millennials and younger people are aware of how the machinations really work, but it's so, so disappointing to realize how many Democrats are really just 90s era Republicans.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Look at this election. Where the fuck did the democratic primary go?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago

President Biden unilaterally removed thet option by refusing to get with the program, either by design or unimpeded ego, until the 11th hour had passed, and VP Harris was in by default.

Appalled? Yes. We should be.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Oh yes, the Democratic Party is an antidemocratic capitalist party that will fight democratization to its death. There is actually an even better example, which is lefties taking over the party in Nevada via their own official process, simply organizing people to jump through the hoops Dems had set up. In response, the Dems defunded the party and built shadow campaigns with the money, then changed its rules so they could remove the lefties.

At the same time, Americans only understand politics in terms of electoralism. So the fact that they are doing the exact opposite of what a voting block should be doing to establish itself short circuits the pro-genocide "but actually it's smart to vote blue no matter who" self-defeating logic.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

This story sounds familiar but I'm struggling to remember when it happened? Was this a 2020 thing?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Yes! Thisis from when there was a primary fight for Bernie and there were a lot of new people trying to figure out how things work and organize. The DSA in the state did a decent job organizing people to follow the primary process to gain seats exactly by the rules. Dems fought them for years and years, making it very clear that there is no space in the party for any left contingent with any influence. The first thing they did was mass quit and then take/hide the funds. This was from the "unity" group in the state, too, lmao.

I had to go back and google a bit to find examples as I followed this in real time, more or less. I'm sure there are better ones. But here are some examples.

An article from 2021 talking about how the bureaucrats in the party mass-quit: https://theintercept.com/2021/03/08/nevada-democratic-party-dsa/

And a liberal follow-up of how the party reasserted itself two years later: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/democratic-socialists-swept-power-nevada-judith-whitmer-rcna72905

And a neo-Trotskyist take that from both periods: https://socialistcall.com/2021/04/24/dsa-democratic-party-nevada-takeover/ and https://socialistcall.com/2023/08/02/independent-party-dsa-convention-proposal/ . If you're not used to neo-Trotskyists, one of the things they love to do is write long essays and what "should be done" without funneling frustration into practical work. But they do have okay insider info sometimes.

And more neo-Trotskyists lol sorry for listing so many, other groups with better ideas are generally dismissive of the attempt and don't write long-winded articles on it like Trots do: https://www.socialistalternative.org/2023/06/29/pulling-out-the-rug-what-happened-after-dsa-and-bernie-supporters-took-over-the-nevada-democratic-party/

It's an important lesson that unfortunately must be taught over and over again, viscerally, for people to actually believe it: liberals will fight the left far harder than they will fight overt reactionaries.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Too bad it's not gonna matter, since if Trump wins, America will only have elections in the same sense that Russia does.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I heard this in 2016 as well, and famously, trump was voted out of office the very next election 🤔

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

He attempted a coup to stay in power and very nearly succeeded. He's trying even harder this time, with many MAGAs having been placed in position to sabotage the election. Fuck your delusional head-in-the-sand dismissal of the danger he poses!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

and very nearly succeeded

How can you say this? Do you think that there's some artifact in the Capitol that grants the power of Legitimate Governance? Do you think a dipshit protest-turned-walking-tour where the cops only saw fit to fire on like one person and only a couple of cops were killed by the rioters is enough to reverse an election in the country that is the global superpower? The country that overthrows governments abroad with much greater violence every few years?

Is it possible that a couple of politicians would have been beaten to death? Yeah, in a somewhat different world, but the rioters did not begin to approach doing anything in the same dimension as a "successful coup". There was no connection between what they did and what a group would need to do to take over the country, and imagining there was even anything in the Capitol that could be used for a bit of leverage (like if some pols got caught), that still wouldn't be a coup and the feds would send SWAT in to blow some brains out.

It's just classic American aggrievement politics, the hogs put on a show for you so now it's "1/6" like it's a new 9/11 combined with the fucking burning of the White House in 1814. It was never going to amount to anything on the magnitude that you're asserting, or even several orders of magnitude below it. There is no conflict in which like 6 people die (multiple from rank stupidity) that can connect even notionally to the outcome of overthrowing the most powerful country in the world!

Well, unless it's like a judicial coup or some other situation where people are exercising their political power directly, to be fair. But it's not like Trump was doing the smarter thing and using executive orders to lay the ground for toppling the government, and even then there are so many barriers he'd need to get over that he didn't even have the cognitive capacity back then to grapple with.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Well, unless it's like a judicial coup or some other situation where people are exercising their political power directly, to be fair. But it's not like Trump was doing the smarter thing and using executive orders to lay the ground for toppling the government

Sure would be awkward if fascists with more cognitive capacity spent the last 4 years developing and publishing a strategy to do basically exactly that, to take advantage of the record breaking appointment of sympathetic federal judges, including a SCOTUS majority.

They laughed at the idea of Hitler becoming fuhrer too.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

That would be improvement so no chance lol. If Trump wins America will only have elections in the same sense that America does.

Idk how this shit can be called "democracy" even formally, with how population density, massive gerrymandering, elector college, supreme court, disenfranchisement of vast population groups, swing states and differences in states in general influence it. And probably like a million little details i don't even know, every time i learn a new fact about US "democracy", any fact, it just point out a new argument why it isn't a democracy at all.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The well-being of my country isn't for you to place bets on, cumstain

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Do you... do you think I was literally placing a bet?