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On August 30 2023 06:13 Zambrah wrote:Show nested quote +On August 30 2023 04:11 Mohdoo wrote:
I am realizing a big disconnect in this conversation regarding activism and workers gaining weekends is historical accuracy.
I want to be clear that none of you are to blame for the education you were given, since I had the same issue once upon a time. I used to think "MLK was the well behaved activist, so people listened to him because he was polite, but malcolm X was a net negative to black rights because he was rude about asking people to not lynch black people" and similar US history class in the 90s stuff.
We are taught history regarding child labor and weekends and other similar things that realllly brushes certain stuff under the rug and over-emphasizes other things. When you drill down into how the history actually went down, each of these rights we have gotten in the last 100 years has been achieved through either physical or economic violence. And people were killed by those in power to try to prevent it.
The weekend was fought against using violence. The weekend was fought FOR with violence. I will just word it like this: Violence was a crucial ingredient to workers being granted the weekend.
If you believe concrete progress has been achieved with pamphlets, outreach, organizing, grassroots conversations to get folks on board, you are the victim of an intentional effort to keep workers from realizing how powerful they are. There is an intentional effort to make workers less powerful and less capable of improving their lives. Stuff like "MLK gave black people rights by doing sit ins in libraries while folks ate cookies" is disinformation intended to make you less powerful. Diverting your attention into pamphlets, polls, petitions and whatnot is intended to prevent you from doing what has been NECESSARY evvvvvvery single time throughout history. This right here. Voting matters when the violence has happened and theres no choice but to cement the change because the violence needs to stop. Voting doesnt stop shit, voting is basically the final enshrinement once the violence has reached a point of being too far and too threatening for the people in power. Voting gets far too much credit, voting doesnt beat fascism, violence beats fascism, voting doesnt earn you human rights, violence earns you human rights, all voting does is put the final stamp on the paper to acknowledge the human rights for a little while (certainly not forever as we've seen with women's rights!) Key word to all of this is violence. We didn't vote the Nazis out of power, we didn't vote Child Labor laws, we beat the Nazis by making the Nazis into Dead Nazis and we have Child Labor laws because people were pissed about their dead and mutilated children and made Capitalists into Dead or Very Afraid of Dying Capitalists. EDIT: I'm convinced we'd see more progress from throwing a few fucking bricks through a some politician and capitalist's residences when they're home than ten years of voting. Why would the people in power give two shits about anyone they consider beneath them unless they're afraid of the consequences? Our society pretty clearly rewards sociopathic behaviors, so empathy ain't happening, but fear? Yeah, a sociopathic congressperson might be less inclined to fuck their people over if their people will throw rocks at their cars and beat their asses if they catch them in public. Would be nice to not have to get to the ass beatings and brick throwing, but voting sure as shit isn't going to prevent us from getting there.
The effectiveness of direct action is directly proportional with how sympathetic a government is. Both the intensity of repression and willingness to compromise are on spectrums.
A choice between direct action and voting is completely unnecessary. Neither precludes one from the other, and not voting for leadership that will put the least amount of resistance in the way of your causes (when leadership that supports your causes isn't on the table) is self-sabotage for no benefit.
For example, compare the recent progress made for abortion in Ireland with the regress in Poland. Can anyone say with a straight face that Poles didn't protest as hard? So why are the outcomes different? The suggestion that voting doesn't enter the equation boggles the mind.
It's not just about whether you have to fight for something, how hard you have to fight is of critical importance. Guess what determines that?
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United States7316 Posts
On August 30 2023 06:55 Dan HH wrote:Show nested quote +On August 30 2023 06:13 Zambrah wrote:On August 30 2023 04:11 Mohdoo wrote:
I am realizing a big disconnect in this conversation regarding activism and workers gaining weekends is historical accuracy.
I want to be clear that none of you are to blame for the education you were given, since I had the same issue once upon a time. I used to think "MLK was the well behaved activist, so people listened to him because he was polite, but malcolm X was a net negative to black rights because he was rude about asking people to not lynch black people" and similar US history class in the 90s stuff.
We are taught history regarding child labor and weekends and other similar things that realllly brushes certain stuff under the rug and over-emphasizes other things. When you drill down into how the history actually went down, each of these rights we have gotten in the last 100 years has been achieved through either physical or economic violence. And people were killed by those in power to try to prevent it.
The weekend was fought against using violence. The weekend was fought FOR with violence. I will just word it like this: Violence was a crucial ingredient to workers being granted the weekend.
If you believe concrete progress has been achieved with pamphlets, outreach, organizing, grassroots conversations to get folks on board, you are the victim of an intentional effort to keep workers from realizing how powerful they are. There is an intentional effort to make workers less powerful and less capable of improving their lives. Stuff like "MLK gave black people rights by doing sit ins in libraries while folks ate cookies" is disinformation intended to make you less powerful. Diverting your attention into pamphlets, polls, petitions and whatnot is intended to prevent you from doing what has been NECESSARY evvvvvvery single time throughout history. This right here. Voting matters when the violence has happened and theres no choice but to cement the change because the violence needs to stop. Voting doesnt stop shit, voting is basically the final enshrinement once the violence has reached a point of being too far and too threatening for the people in power. Voting gets far too much credit, voting doesnt beat fascism, violence beats fascism, voting doesnt earn you human rights, violence earns you human rights, all voting does is put the final stamp on the paper to acknowledge the human rights for a little while (certainly not forever as we've seen with women's rights!) Key word to all of this is violence. We didn't vote the Nazis out of power, we didn't vote Child Labor laws, we beat the Nazis by making the Nazis into Dead Nazis and we have Child Labor laws because people were pissed about their dead and mutilated children and made Capitalists into Dead or Very Afraid of Dying Capitalists. EDIT: I'm convinced we'd see more progress from throwing a few fucking bricks through a some politician and capitalist's residences when they're home than ten years of voting. Why would the people in power give two shits about anyone they consider beneath them unless they're afraid of the consequences? Our society pretty clearly rewards sociopathic behaviors, so empathy ain't happening, but fear? Yeah, a sociopathic congressperson might be less inclined to fuck their people over if their people will throw rocks at their cars and beat their asses if they catch them in public. Would be nice to not have to get to the ass beatings and brick throwing, but voting sure as shit isn't going to prevent us from getting there. The effectiveness of direct action is directly proportional with how sympathetic a government is. Both the intensity of repression and willingness to compromise are on spectrums.A choice between direct action and voting is completely unnecessary. Neither precludes one from the other, and not voting for leadership that will put the least amount of resistance in the way of your causes (when leadership that supports your causes isn't on the table) is self-sabotage for no benefit. For example, compare the recent progress made for abortion in Ireland with the regress in Poland. Can anyone say with a straight face that Poles didn't protest as hard? So why are the outcomes different? The suggestion that voting doesn't enter the equation boggles the mind. It's not just about whether you have to fight for something, how hard you have to fight is of critical importance. Guess what determines that?
I understand that, if this was Scandinavia we were talking about Id probably be less inclined to believe violence was the most important thing to major societal changes, but we're talking about the US and the US has proven to be pretty brutal about repressing mass movements.
We've got psychotic violent trigger happy cops flinging tear gas willy nilly and shoving old people to the street and leaving them there as the bleed on the concrete. The US is not kind to the common rabble trying to exercise power to secure their rights and other things they need or want to actually live happy healthy lives.
The powerful in the US don't want to compromise their power or enrichment for the people they're supposed to represent, the voting system is so bastardized that they know they don't have to worry about voting being a meaningful way for people to exercise serious power, so the only thing they need to do is brutally crack down on anything that might actually work and make sure that people feel that the only power they really have is to vote, and that violence is definitely certainly not viable or successful.
Also, not saying voting and direct action is a choice, its very possible and Id almost say easy to do both save for voting if we compare how much work direct action is vs. voting.
What I am saying is voting has not historically been a particularly significant instrument of power for major societal change, and relying on it almost at all is not going to work out well until the people you're voting for understand they will face some visceral consequences (and not just boo hoo now Im not a congress person Im only a six figure consultant where I do no work boo hoo consequences) for being shitty and awful and not making an effort to make the lives of their constituents better.
Would be quite nice to throw a brick through my landlord’s residence after 2 years of literally refusing to do any maintainence they’re liable for and hiking rent up 40%
Hey every legal channel wouldn’t do shit.
Not getting the deposit back because you never do, had considered just letting the damp we’re beating back just infest the place but all that will do is fuck over the next tenant.
Im confident a few good bricks would do a lot to incentivize your slumlord to start doing his job and really think hard on whether he wants to precipitiously raise rent.
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On August 30 2023 05:56 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On August 30 2023 05:07 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 04:04 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 03:29 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 02:56 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 02:40 GreenHorizons wrote:I also wanted to highlight this from mohdoo: it is important to note that many of the "luxuries" we now enjoy (like weekends) were forcibly taken from capitalists and people were killed fighting for that right. The idea that the positive changes in the US have come from people voting "less evil" people into power and then those elected officials make the changes is a convenient myth, but wrong. That's simply not how it works. How it has actually worked is that people organized beyond electoralism, fought tooth and nail (sometimes literally) the status quo, and eventually the "typically evil" politicians had to follow/toss them some crumbs or lose control altogether. But those "luxuries" came from voters on the left, not voters on the right. It would be ideal if the Democratic nominee was further to the left, but the fact of the matter still remains that the Democratic nominee will always be more to the left than the Republican nominee. Not from "voters" voting, but from workers that may or may not have voted for either party or neither (like voting for Eugene Debs) forcing their concession despite the persistent threat/practice of social/political ostracism, grave harm and incarceration. If you measure Democrats against today's Republicans you'll end up standing to the right of yesterday's Republicans and calling it "to the left". On August 30 2023 03:27 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 03:25 Zambrah wrote:On August 30 2023 02:56 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 02:40 GreenHorizons wrote:I also wanted to highlight this from mohdoo: it is important to note that many of the "luxuries" we now enjoy (like weekends) were forcibly taken from capitalists and people were killed fighting for that right. The idea that the positive changes in the US have come from people voting "less evil" people into power and then those elected officials make the changes is a convenient myth, but wrong. That's simply not how it works. How it has actually worked is that people organized beyond electoralism, fought tooth and nail (sometimes literally) the status quo, and eventually the "typically evil" politicians had to follow/toss them some crumbs or lose control altogether. But those "luxuries" came from voters on the left, not voters on the right. It would be ideal if the Democratic nominee was further to the left, but the fact of the matter still remains that the Democratic nominee will always be more to the left than the Republican nominee. Those luxuries didnt come from voters, they came from fighters, people threatening to burn their bosses homes down, people getting shot and beaten by cops, strikers, etc. And they were on which side? a. left b. right. Hint: answer is a. Semantics isn't going to change this fact. Edit: Same response for GH's post below. Moving to the right can't possibly be the ideal move. The question/edit is an asinine semantic non sequitur as alluded to by the fact that you're using left and right relatively where what is "to the right" today can be "to the left" tomorrow and doesn't address the issue of the "luxuries" not being the product of voters voting. Like what? What are some current Republican talking points ("to the right today") that you think will be "to the left tomorrow"? Do you think that being against climate change, women's rights, education, or LGBTQ+ will suddenly be Democratic platforms, instead of Republican ones? Is there sufficient precedent for this? Historically, the opposite of what you're saying tends to be true. What was deemed progressive a generation or two ago (e.g., interracial marriage, rights to vote) is now so common sense that even most conservatives are okay with them. Over several decades, we see that many controversially-left positions end up becoming the norm and moderate and centrist. It's why we keep pushing to the left, even if that means incrementally. We certainly don't push to the right today and assert that it could end up being how best to get to the left tomorrow. One prominent historical example that comes to mind is is the ACA. All the propaganda paints it as some massive achievement of "the left" but it's not only to the right of what Kennedy (D) proposed decades earlier, it is to the right of what Nixon and Republicans were countering with. So basically the most celebrated legislation in decades "on the left" is more rightwing than Nixon. I totally agree with you that the ACA is not as progressive or left or beneficial as, say, M4A, but the ACA was still a step in the ideal direction relative to what directly preceded it. Maybe M4A would have been 20 steps to the left while the ACA was just 1 step to the left, but it's still better than what existed beforehand, and I think that jumping from Kennedy/Nixon to Romney/Obama is skipping a few decades of watching the healthcare system get progressively worse. It's not like Obama came right after Nixon, so we're not comparing today vs. tomorrow anymore; a lot happened between those two presidents. What happened after Nixon, over several decades, moved our healthcare system even further to the right, so when Obama supported the ACA - which may have been more to the right than Nixon - it was still to the left of the status quo. Could Obama have pushed even more to the left? Possibly. Is the ACA the best we can do? I sure hope not. Do people generally like the idea of M4A? Yeah, according to polls. But are they voting for it? Currently, they aren't - which means we can't have it - which is why it frustrates me when people don't give the voters any credit. Voters aren't just talking the talk; they're also walking the walk. A person saying they like M4A doesn't mean it's going to magically happen; we need the votes. Show nested quote +An obvious one we're seeing unfolding currently is policing where Democrats are increasingly picking up Republican perspectives to rationalize/ignore things like Cop City. I'm not quite sure what this means. Do you mean that Democrats aren't protesting (and even rioting) over police brutality, or promoting slogans and groups like BLM, ACAB, and Defund the Police? Because clearly, they're doing all that. Not every Democrat is doing that, of course, but I still wouldn't say that Democrats and Republicans have identical perspectives when it comes to cops (e.g., Black vs. Blue/All).
It seems you missed that the point is this relative "right vs left" stuff leaves Democrat supporters saying policy too right wing for Nixon era Republicans is "on the left" (Whether it takes days or decades) and that the voting comes after the people already forced the same old politicians hand and they've failed to dole out the crumbs/keep the promises that dissuaded the country from going revolutionary to get the crumbs they were demanding and much more in the first place.
Then we're back on the Hamster Wheel:
1. There's a problem
2. Politicians won't fix it
3. Need to replace the politicians with ones that will
4. Can't replace the politicians because of how the system works ("only option is to vote Biden")
5. Need to fix the system
6. Politicians wont fix it (because it benefits them)
7. Repeat ad nauseam.
In the midst of the George Floyd uprising a Cop City like project would have been something for the Democrat party to rally together to oppose, let electoralism throw people back on the hamster wheel and today it's something the party wants to ignore, "tomorrow" (I didn't/don't mean literally) they will be pushing for their own Cop Cities while insisting it's "to the left" of the "Republican corporate slave mines proposal" or whatever to reduce crime, "so the choice is obvious".
Just as Democrats pushing the type of propaganda you are now did to get 1970's Nixon/Republican policy (actually legislation to the right of that policy) praised as basically the best thing Democrats & Progressives combined have accomplished in the decades since Republicans proposed it.
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On August 30 2023 07:38 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On August 30 2023 05:56 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 05:07 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 04:04 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 03:29 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 02:56 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 02:40 GreenHorizons wrote:I also wanted to highlight this from mohdoo: it is important to note that many of the "luxuries" we now enjoy (like weekends) were forcibly taken from capitalists and people were killed fighting for that right. The idea that the positive changes in the US have come from people voting "less evil" people into power and then those elected officials make the changes is a convenient myth, but wrong. That's simply not how it works. How it has actually worked is that people organized beyond electoralism, fought tooth and nail (sometimes literally) the status quo, and eventually the "typically evil" politicians had to follow/toss them some crumbs or lose control altogether. But those "luxuries" came from voters on the left, not voters on the right. It would be ideal if the Democratic nominee was further to the left, but the fact of the matter still remains that the Democratic nominee will always be more to the left than the Republican nominee. Not from "voters" voting, but from workers that may or may not have voted for either party or neither (like voting for Eugene Debs) forcing their concession despite the persistent threat/practice of social/political ostracism, grave harm and incarceration. If you measure Democrats against today's Republicans you'll end up standing to the right of yesterday's Republicans and calling it "to the left". On August 30 2023 03:27 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 03:25 Zambrah wrote:On August 30 2023 02:56 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 02:40 GreenHorizons wrote:I also wanted to highlight this from mohdoo: it is important to note that many of the "luxuries" we now enjoy (like weekends) were forcibly taken from capitalists and people were killed fighting for that right. The idea that the positive changes in the US have come from people voting "less evil" people into power and then those elected officials make the changes is a convenient myth, but wrong. That's simply not how it works. How it has actually worked is that people organized beyond electoralism, fought tooth and nail (sometimes literally) the status quo, and eventually the "typically evil" politicians had to follow/toss them some crumbs or lose control altogether. But those "luxuries" came from voters on the left, not voters on the right. It would be ideal if the Democratic nominee was further to the left, but the fact of the matter still remains that the Democratic nominee will always be more to the left than the Republican nominee. Those luxuries didnt come from voters, they came from fighters, people threatening to burn their bosses homes down, people getting shot and beaten by cops, strikers, etc. And they were on which side? a. left b. right. Hint: answer is a. Semantics isn't going to change this fact. Edit: Same response for GH's post below. Moving to the right can't possibly be the ideal move. The question/edit is an asinine semantic non sequitur as alluded to by the fact that you're using left and right relatively where what is "to the right" today can be "to the left" tomorrow and doesn't address the issue of the "luxuries" not being the product of voters voting. Like what? What are some current Republican talking points ("to the right today") that you think will be "to the left tomorrow"? Do you think that being against climate change, women's rights, education, or LGBTQ+ will suddenly be Democratic platforms, instead of Republican ones? Is there sufficient precedent for this? Historically, the opposite of what you're saying tends to be true. What was deemed progressive a generation or two ago (e.g., interracial marriage, rights to vote) is now so common sense that even most conservatives are okay with them. Over several decades, we see that many controversially-left positions end up becoming the norm and moderate and centrist. It's why we keep pushing to the left, even if that means incrementally. We certainly don't push to the right today and assert that it could end up being how best to get to the left tomorrow. One prominent historical example that comes to mind is is the ACA. All the propaganda paints it as some massive achievement of "the left" but it's not only to the right of what Kennedy (D) proposed decades earlier, it is to the right of what Nixon and Republicans were countering with. So basically the most celebrated legislation in decades "on the left" is more rightwing than Nixon. I totally agree with you that the ACA is not as progressive or left or beneficial as, say, M4A, but the ACA was still a step in the ideal direction relative to what directly preceded it. Maybe M4A would have been 20 steps to the left while the ACA was just 1 step to the left, but it's still better than what existed beforehand, and I think that jumping from Kennedy/Nixon to Romney/Obama is skipping a few decades of watching the healthcare system get progressively worse. It's not like Obama came right after Nixon, so we're not comparing today vs. tomorrow anymore; a lot happened between those two presidents. What happened after Nixon, over several decades, moved our healthcare system even further to the right, so when Obama supported the ACA - which may have been more to the right than Nixon - it was still to the left of the status quo. Could Obama have pushed even more to the left? Possibly. Is the ACA the best we can do? I sure hope not. Do people generally like the idea of M4A? Yeah, according to polls. But are they voting for it? Currently, they aren't - which means we can't have it - which is why it frustrates me when people don't give the voters any credit. Voters aren't just talking the talk; they're also walking the walk. A person saying they like M4A doesn't mean it's going to magically happen; we need the votes. An obvious one we're seeing unfolding currently is policing where Democrats are increasingly picking up Republican perspectives to rationalize/ignore things like Cop City. I'm not quite sure what this means. Do you mean that Democrats aren't protesting (and even rioting) over police brutality, or promoting slogans and groups like BLM, ACAB, and Defund the Police? Because clearly, they're doing all that. Not every Democrat is doing that, of course, but I still wouldn't say that Democrats and Republicans have identical perspectives when it comes to cops (e.g., Black vs. Blue/All). It seems you missed that the point is this relative "right vs left" stuff leaves Democrat supporters saying policy too right wing for Nixon era Republicans is "on the left" (Whether it takes days or decades) and that the voting comes after the people already forced the same old politicians hand and they've failed to dole out the crumbs/keep the promises that dissuaded the country from going revolutionary to get the crumbs they were demanding and much more in the first place. Then we're back on the Hamster Wheel: 1. There's a problem 2. Politicians won't fix it 3. Need to replace the politicians with ones that will 4. Can't replace the politicians because of how the system works ("only option is to vote Biden") 5. Need to fix the system 6. Politicians wont fix it (because it benefits them) 7. Repeat ad nauseam. In the midst of the George Floyd uprising a Cop City like project would have been something for the Democrat party to rally together to oppose, let electoralism throw people back on the hamster wheel and today it's something the party wants to ignore, "tomorrow" (I didn't/don't mean literally) they will be pushing for their own Cop Cities while insisting it's "to the left" of the "Republican corporate slave mines proposal" or whatever to reduce crime, "so the choice is obvious". Just as Democrats pushing the type of propaganda you are now did to get 1970's Nixon/Republican policy (actually legislation to the right of that policy) praised as basically the best thing Democrats & Progressives combined have accomplished in the decades since Republicans proposed it.
I agree with you that the hamster wheel steps 1-7 are hard to overcome, but we know they can be overcome. The most recent example is Trump and the Republicans overcoming it with Trump supporters winning their primary and then Trump winning the general election. A primary can be hard to win, and a general election can also be hard to win, but those 2 victories can get anyone into the presidency, provided they have enough support from one of the two major parties. And on a similar note, Bernie was pretty close to winning on the Democratic side too (I know that he needed to overcome the political machine and superdelegates against Hillary; he almost succeeded).
I know that we need to deal with local redistricting, state gerrymandering, and the electoral college at the national level that prohibit elections from being more fair, but I still think it's a problem that either more politicians aren't running on progressive platforms and/or those progressive politicians aren't receiving as many votes as informal polls about progressive policies might suggest.
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You can't just keep hitting your head against the wall that is GH. He doesn't care about reality and would be just as happy to see trump elected as biden. We keep going in these circles time and time again for year's now trying to explain to gh the reality of his situation when the only lesson to learn is that he doesn't care. He's just a leftist libertarian, he doesn't actually want to make anything better he just wants other people to feel worse. He doesn't think he's crazy he just thinks he's ahead of the curve.
Just accept that he's a lost cause and will never be relevant to the conversation about politics in the United states.. Nothing of value will be gained by talking to him like he cares about elections when he keeps telling you he doesn't. You can talk about issues with him all you want but when he keeps screaming about none of this matters just believe him. He doesn't care about arguments involving reality he's already given up on democracy because it's too hard for him. He's never going to move from his position because there's nowhere for him to move. He doesn't have to play defense because there's nothing to defend. He doesn't lose anything if he's wrong because he has no stake in the outcome. He's not interested in how to make things better because he thinks they just should be.
There's a tree in my backyard that has grown almost perpendicular to the ground. It's done this because all the other trees are older the only way it can find sunlight is to keep going horizontal to find it. It doesn't care if this doesn't make sense and will lead it to breaking under it's weight. It doesn't care and neither does gh. He's been saying the same thing for years now and it's time we listen to him.
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Even though I disagree with some of what GH says, I also agree with him on other things, and I find his perspective to be far more interesting and informative than, say, a token Trump loyalist.
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I think the main issue is an enormous part of our government relies on donations. It is totally nuts that elected officials need to fund raise. It is such a profound conflict of interests.
Sinema and Manchin are democrats. I think most of us "left leaning" posters agree they are shitbags. If the entire democratic party was equivalent to Sinema and Manchin, we would agree the party blows ass. But its not a 1 or 0 kinda deal. Its not that everyone is either Karl Marx or Manchin. So we get a bunch of similar but not quite as bad democrats. It is a big spread. And a lot of it comes down to the dynamics associated with fund raising. Capitalists are able to bankroll a candidate and inject them into a position that they retain for a long time. Fund raising and other institutional advantages favor the incumbent and they are able to continue to reap the rewards from their investment.
Some positions are more competitive than others. Some are more vulnerable to capitalist deviance. I truly do not think these situations would happen if all elections were simply publicly funded. As we have all discussed many times, progressive policies are popular, even among "blue dog democrats". They want universal health care, parent leave, various things like that. The issue is that fund raising, lobbying, and various other dynamics that just come down to bribery really shit the whole thing up. And some positions more than others.
fund raising as a critical component of elections also ends up making it easy for people to gaslight with "both sides are the same" because of how many positions on both sides end up corrupted by bribery.
Generally speaking, I think it is unacceptable for fund raising and lobbying to be referred to as anything other than bribery. It is bribery. There should not be political donations for senators and congresspeople. The funding should be universal, minimal, and serve the purpose it needs with nothing more.
If democrat senators and congress accurately reflected the beliefs of their constituents, this conversation would be extremely different. Many of these dynamics simply wouldn't exist.
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United States42817 Posts
On August 30 2023 04:33 Uldridge wrote:
It's very telling that one if the reasons people should vote for a party is 'not fascism' instead of the actual ideals they supposedly hold.
Let me ask the Democrats in here the following:
What do you care about in the Democratic party and what do you actually think are they striving for? What can they accomplish so that they deserve your vote?
It doesn't matter. It's a referendum on fascism. You get your progressive goals achieved by means outside of the ballot box. You use the ballot box to defer the fascist takeover for a few more years.
You can think voting Democrat is completely meaningless in terms of achieving your political objectives and still do it as a basic moral obligation as part of society.
If you saw your neighbour beating his wife you'd call the police or otherwise intervene, even if doing so didn't ultimately achieve a socialist revolution in the US. Not all social responsibility can be evaluated in terms of "does this help bring about a socialist revolution? If no, don't do it". That's just not a good framework to operate in.
The argument "we shouldn't spend 15 minutes every 4 years preventing a fascist takeover of the US because it doesn't ultimately result in my niche political philosophy being imposed on the population" is actually a stupider argument than just being unapologetically pro-fascist.
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On August 30 2023 08:01 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On August 30 2023 07:38 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 05:56 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 05:07 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 04:04 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 03:29 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 02:56 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 02:40 GreenHorizons wrote:I also wanted to highlight this from mohdoo: it is important to note that many of the "luxuries" we now enjoy (like weekends) were forcibly taken from capitalists and people were killed fighting for that right. The idea that the positive changes in the US have come from people voting "less evil" people into power and then those elected officials make the changes is a convenient myth, but wrong. That's simply not how it works. How it has actually worked is that people organized beyond electoralism, fought tooth and nail (sometimes literally) the status quo, and eventually the "typically evil" politicians had to follow/toss them some crumbs or lose control altogether. But those "luxuries" came from voters on the left, not voters on the right. It would be ideal if the Democratic nominee was further to the left, but the fact of the matter still remains that the Democratic nominee will always be more to the left than the Republican nominee. Not from "voters" voting, but from workers that may or may not have voted for either party or neither (like voting for Eugene Debs) forcing their concession despite the persistent threat/practice of social/political ostracism, grave harm and incarceration. If you measure Democrats against today's Republicans you'll end up standing to the right of yesterday's Republicans and calling it "to the left". On August 30 2023 03:27 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 03:25 Zambrah wrote:On August 30 2023 02:56 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 02:40 GreenHorizons wrote:
I also wanted to highlight this from mohdoo:
[quote]
The idea that the positive changes in the US have come from people voting "less evil" people into power and then those elected officials make the changes is a convenient myth, but wrong. That's simply not how it works. How it has actually worked is that people organized beyond electoralism, fought tooth and nail (sometimes literally) the status quo, and eventually the "typically evil" politicians had to follow/toss them some crumbs or lose control altogether. But those "luxuries" came from voters on the left, not voters on the right. It would be ideal if the Democratic nominee was further to the left, but the fact of the matter still remains that the Democratic nominee will always be more to the left than the Republican nominee. Those luxuries didnt come from voters, they came from fighters, people threatening to burn their bosses homes down, people getting shot and beaten by cops, strikers, etc. And they were on which side? a. left b. right. Hint: answer is a. Semantics isn't going to change this fact. Edit: Same response for GH's post below. Moving to the right can't possibly be the ideal move. The question/edit is an asinine semantic non sequitur as alluded to by the fact that you're using left and right relatively where what is "to the right" today can be "to the left" tomorrow and doesn't address the issue of the "luxuries" not being the product of voters voting. Like what? What are some current Republican talking points ("to the right today") that you think will be "to the left tomorrow"? Do you think that being against climate change, women's rights, education, or LGBTQ+ will suddenly be Democratic platforms, instead of Republican ones? Is there sufficient precedent for this? Historically, the opposite of what you're saying tends to be true. What was deemed progressive a generation or two ago (e.g., interracial marriage, rights to vote) is now so common sense that even most conservatives are okay with them. Over several decades, we see that many controversially-left positions end up becoming the norm and moderate and centrist. It's why we keep pushing to the left, even if that means incrementally. We certainly don't push to the right today and assert that it could end up being how best to get to the left tomorrow. One prominent historical example that comes to mind is is the ACA. All the propaganda paints it as some massive achievement of "the left" but it's not only to the right of what Kennedy (D) proposed decades earlier, it is to the right of what Nixon and Republicans were countering with. So basically the most celebrated legislation in decades "on the left" is more rightwing than Nixon. I totally agree with you that the ACA is not as progressive or left or beneficial as, say, M4A, but the ACA was still a step in the ideal direction relative to what directly preceded it. Maybe M4A would have been 20 steps to the left while the ACA was just 1 step to the left, but it's still better than what existed beforehand, and I think that jumping from Kennedy/Nixon to Romney/Obama is skipping a few decades of watching the healthcare system get progressively worse. It's not like Obama came right after Nixon, so we're not comparing today vs. tomorrow anymore; a lot happened between those two presidents. What happened after Nixon, over several decades, moved our healthcare system even further to the right, so when Obama supported the ACA - which may have been more to the right than Nixon - it was still to the left of the status quo. Could Obama have pushed even more to the left? Possibly. Is the ACA the best we can do? I sure hope not. Do people generally like the idea of M4A? Yeah, according to polls. But are they voting for it? Currently, they aren't - which means we can't have it - which is why it frustrates me when people don't give the voters any credit. Voters aren't just talking the talk; they're also walking the walk. A person saying they like M4A doesn't mean it's going to magically happen; we need the votes. An obvious one we're seeing unfolding currently is policing where Democrats are increasingly picking up Republican perspectives to rationalize/ignore things like Cop City. I'm not quite sure what this means. Do you mean that Democrats aren't protesting (and even rioting) over police brutality, or promoting slogans and groups like BLM, ACAB, and Defund the Police? Because clearly, they're doing all that. Not every Democrat is doing that, of course, but I still wouldn't say that Democrats and Republicans have identical perspectives when it comes to cops (e.g., Black vs. Blue/All). It seems you missed that the point is this relative "right vs left" stuff leaves Democrat supporters saying policy too right wing for Nixon era Republicans is "on the left" (Whether it takes days or decades) and that the voting comes after the people already forced the same old politicians hand and they've failed to dole out the crumbs/keep the promises that dissuaded the country from going revolutionary to get the crumbs they were demanding and much more in the first place. Then we're back on the Hamster Wheel: 1. There's a problem 2. Politicians won't fix it 3. Need to replace the politicians with ones that will 4. Can't replace the politicians because of how the system works ("only option is to vote Biden") 5. Need to fix the system 6. Politicians wont fix it (because it benefits them) 7. Repeat ad nauseam. In the midst of the George Floyd uprising a Cop City like project would have been something for the Democrat party to rally together to oppose, let electoralism throw people back on the hamster wheel and today it's something the party wants to ignore, "tomorrow" (I didn't/don't mean literally) they will be pushing for their own Cop Cities while insisting it's "to the left" of the "Republican corporate slave mines proposal" or whatever to reduce crime, "so the choice is obvious". Just as Democrats pushing the type of propaganda you are now did to get 1970's Nixon/Republican policy (actually legislation to the right of that policy) praised as basically the best thing Democrats & Progressives combined have accomplished in the decades since Republicans proposed it. I agree with you that the hamster wheel steps 1-7 are hard to overcome, but we know they can be overcome. The most recent example is Trump and the Republicans overcoming it with Trump supporters winning their primary and then Trump winning the general election. A primary can be hard to win, and a general election can also be hard to win, but those 2 victories can get anyone into the presidency, provided they have enough support from one of the two major parties. And on a similar note, Bernie was pretty close to winning on the Democratic side too (I know that he needed to overcome the political machine and superdelegates against Hillary; he almost succeeded). I know that we need to deal with local redistricting, state gerrymandering, and the electoral college at the national level that prohibit elections from being more fair, but I still think it's a problem that either more politicians aren't running on progressive platforms and/or those progressive politicians aren't receiving as many votes as informal polls about progressive policies might suggest.
If you think Trump was an escape from the Republican version of the hamster wheel you got duped like his supporters. As for Bernie, he's just a social democrat that genuinely believes some of the typical Democrat propaganda and might actually want to do it. For that crime Democrats did everything they possibly could to stop and coopt him, and they ultimately did. Anyone actually advocating solutions beyond the social democrat policy Democrats pretend to support gets treatment that makes Democrats treatment of Bernie look like their treatment of Hillary. The coordinated assassination of Fred Hampton by various parts of US government was a bipartisan affair for example.
It's the same story for generations of "change em from the inside" social democrat types that ultimately just become the perpetuators of the policies they were ostensibly elected/platformed to change while hiding behind "pragmatism" and other rationalizations for their complicity in these horrific/devastating policies and complacency with that reality.
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On August 30 2023 10:25 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On August 30 2023 08:01 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 07:38 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 05:56 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 05:07 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 04:04 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 03:29 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 02:56 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 02:40 GreenHorizons wrote:I also wanted to highlight this from mohdoo: it is important to note that many of the "luxuries" we now enjoy (like weekends) were forcibly taken from capitalists and people were killed fighting for that right. The idea that the positive changes in the US have come from people voting "less evil" people into power and then those elected officials make the changes is a convenient myth, but wrong. That's simply not how it works. How it has actually worked is that people organized beyond electoralism, fought tooth and nail (sometimes literally) the status quo, and eventually the "typically evil" politicians had to follow/toss them some crumbs or lose control altogether. But those "luxuries" came from voters on the left, not voters on the right. It would be ideal if the Democratic nominee was further to the left, but the fact of the matter still remains that the Democratic nominee will always be more to the left than the Republican nominee. Not from "voters" voting, but from workers that may or may not have voted for either party or neither (like voting for Eugene Debs) forcing their concession despite the persistent threat/practice of social/political ostracism, grave harm and incarceration. If you measure Democrats against today's Republicans you'll end up standing to the right of yesterday's Republicans and calling it "to the left". On August 30 2023 03:27 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 03:25 Zambrah wrote:On August 30 2023 02:56 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
[quote]
But those "luxuries" came from voters on the left, not voters on the right. It would be ideal if the Democratic nominee was further to the left, but the fact of the matter still remains that the Democratic nominee will always be more to the left than the Republican nominee. Those luxuries didnt come from voters, they came from fighters, people threatening to burn their bosses homes down, people getting shot and beaten by cops, strikers, etc. And they were on which side? a. left b. right. Hint: answer is a. Semantics isn't going to change this fact. Edit: Same response for GH's post below. Moving to the right can't possibly be the ideal move. The question/edit is an asinine semantic non sequitur as alluded to by the fact that you're using left and right relatively where what is "to the right" today can be "to the left" tomorrow and doesn't address the issue of the "luxuries" not being the product of voters voting. Like what? What are some current Republican talking points ("to the right today") that you think will be "to the left tomorrow"? Do you think that being against climate change, women's rights, education, or LGBTQ+ will suddenly be Democratic platforms, instead of Republican ones? Is there sufficient precedent for this? Historically, the opposite of what you're saying tends to be true. What was deemed progressive a generation or two ago (e.g., interracial marriage, rights to vote) is now so common sense that even most conservatives are okay with them. Over several decades, we see that many controversially-left positions end up becoming the norm and moderate and centrist. It's why we keep pushing to the left, even if that means incrementally. We certainly don't push to the right today and assert that it could end up being how best to get to the left tomorrow. One prominent historical example that comes to mind is is the ACA. All the propaganda paints it as some massive achievement of "the left" but it's not only to the right of what Kennedy (D) proposed decades earlier, it is to the right of what Nixon and Republicans were countering with. So basically the most celebrated legislation in decades "on the left" is more rightwing than Nixon. I totally agree with you that the ACA is not as progressive or left or beneficial as, say, M4A, but the ACA was still a step in the ideal direction relative to what directly preceded it. Maybe M4A would have been 20 steps to the left while the ACA was just 1 step to the left, but it's still better than what existed beforehand, and I think that jumping from Kennedy/Nixon to Romney/Obama is skipping a few decades of watching the healthcare system get progressively worse. It's not like Obama came right after Nixon, so we're not comparing today vs. tomorrow anymore; a lot happened between those two presidents. What happened after Nixon, over several decades, moved our healthcare system even further to the right, so when Obama supported the ACA - which may have been more to the right than Nixon - it was still to the left of the status quo. Could Obama have pushed even more to the left? Possibly. Is the ACA the best we can do? I sure hope not. Do people generally like the idea of M4A? Yeah, according to polls. But are they voting for it? Currently, they aren't - which means we can't have it - which is why it frustrates me when people don't give the voters any credit. Voters aren't just talking the talk; they're also walking the walk. A person saying they like M4A doesn't mean it's going to magically happen; we need the votes. An obvious one we're seeing unfolding currently is policing where Democrats are increasingly picking up Republican perspectives to rationalize/ignore things like Cop City. I'm not quite sure what this means. Do you mean that Democrats aren't protesting (and even rioting) over police brutality, or promoting slogans and groups like BLM, ACAB, and Defund the Police? Because clearly, they're doing all that. Not every Democrat is doing that, of course, but I still wouldn't say that Democrats and Republicans have identical perspectives when it comes to cops (e.g., Black vs. Blue/All). It seems you missed that the point is this relative "right vs left" stuff leaves Democrat supporters saying policy too right wing for Nixon era Republicans is "on the left" (Whether it takes days or decades) and that the voting comes after the people already forced the same old politicians hand and they've failed to dole out the crumbs/keep the promises that dissuaded the country from going revolutionary to get the crumbs they were demanding and much more in the first place. Then we're back on the Hamster Wheel: 1. There's a problem 2. Politicians won't fix it 3. Need to replace the politicians with ones that will 4. Can't replace the politicians because of how the system works ("only option is to vote Biden") 5. Need to fix the system 6. Politicians wont fix it (because it benefits them) 7. Repeat ad nauseam. In the midst of the George Floyd uprising a Cop City like project would have been something for the Democrat party to rally together to oppose, let electoralism throw people back on the hamster wheel and today it's something the party wants to ignore, "tomorrow" (I didn't/don't mean literally) they will be pushing for their own Cop Cities while insisting it's "to the left" of the "Republican corporate slave mines proposal" or whatever to reduce crime, "so the choice is obvious". Just as Democrats pushing the type of propaganda you are now did to get 1970's Nixon/Republican policy (actually legislation to the right of that policy) praised as basically the best thing Democrats & Progressives combined have accomplished in the decades since Republicans proposed it. I agree with you that the hamster wheel steps 1-7 are hard to overcome, but we know they can be overcome. The most recent example is Trump and the Republicans overcoming it with Trump supporters winning their primary and then Trump winning the general election. A primary can be hard to win, and a general election can also be hard to win, but those 2 victories can get anyone into the presidency, provided they have enough support from one of the two major parties. And on a similar note, Bernie was pretty close to winning on the Democratic side too (I know that he needed to overcome the political machine and superdelegates against Hillary; he almost succeeded). I know that we need to deal with local redistricting, state gerrymandering, and the electoral college at the national level that prohibit elections from being more fair, but I still think it's a problem that either more politicians aren't running on progressive platforms and/or those progressive politicians aren't receiving as many votes as informal polls about progressive policies might suggest. If you think Trump was an escape from the Republican version of the hamster wheel you got duped like his supporters. As for Bernie, he's just a social democrat that genuinely believes some of the typical Democrat propaganda and might actually want to do it. For that crime Democrats did everything they possibly could to stop and coopt him, and they ultimately did. Anyone actually advocating solutions beyond the social democrat policy Democrats pretend to support gets treatment that makes Democrats treatment of Bernie look like their treatment of Hillary. The coordinated assassination of Fred Hampton by various parts of US government was a bipartisan affair for example. It's the same story for generations of "change em from the inside" social democrat types that ultimately just become the perpetuators of the policies they were ostensibly elected/platformed to change while hiding behind "pragmatism" and other rationalizations for their complicity in these horrific/devastating policies and complacency with that reality.
The only way Trump is an example of that hamster wheel is if you move the goalposts so far back that any/every successful candidate perpetuates the hamster wheel, which makes the claim unfalsifiable and absurd.
Trump beat the Republican machine at their own game, replaced some of the traditional Republican politicians with Trump loyalists, and completely overhauled the right. He literally broke 4, 5, and 6 in the hamster wheel, after succeeding at 3. He flipped off Cruz, Rubio, McConnell, superdelegates, and anything else that represented the old guard. Now the Republican establishment, and most Republican constituents, bow to him.
It's difficult to break the cycle of the hamster wheel, but it's already happened once in the last decade, and almost happened a second time with Bernie.
If you don't consider Trump to be an example of breaking the hamster wheel, then I suppose we'll just have to disagree on that.
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On August 30 2023 11:16 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On August 30 2023 10:25 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 08:01 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 07:38 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 05:56 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 05:07 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 04:04 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 03:29 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 02:56 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 02:40 GreenHorizons wrote:
I also wanted to highlight this from mohdoo:
[quote]
The idea that the positive changes in the US have come from people voting "less evil" people into power and then those elected officials make the changes is a convenient myth, but wrong. That's simply not how it works. How it has actually worked is that people organized beyond electoralism, fought tooth and nail (sometimes literally) the status quo, and eventually the "typically evil" politicians had to follow/toss them some crumbs or lose control altogether. But those "luxuries" came from voters on the left, not voters on the right. It would be ideal if the Democratic nominee was further to the left, but the fact of the matter still remains that the Democratic nominee will always be more to the left than the Republican nominee. Not from "voters" voting, but from workers that may or may not have voted for either party or neither (like voting for Eugene Debs) forcing their concession despite the persistent threat/practice of social/political ostracism, grave harm and incarceration. If you measure Democrats against today's Republicans you'll end up standing to the right of yesterday's Republicans and calling it "to the left". On August 30 2023 03:27 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 03:25 Zambrah wrote:
[quote]
Those luxuries didnt come from voters, they came from fighters, people threatening to burn their bosses homes down, people getting shot and beaten by cops, strikers, etc. And they were on which side? a. left b. right. Hint: answer is a. Semantics isn't going to change this fact. Edit: Same response for GH's post below. Moving to the right can't possibly be the ideal move. The question/edit is an asinine semantic non sequitur as alluded to by the fact that you're using left and right relatively where what is "to the right" today can be "to the left" tomorrow and doesn't address the issue of the "luxuries" not being the product of voters voting. Like what? What are some current Republican talking points ("to the right today") that you think will be "to the left tomorrow"? Do you think that being against climate change, women's rights, education, or LGBTQ+ will suddenly be Democratic platforms, instead of Republican ones? Is there sufficient precedent for this? Historically, the opposite of what you're saying tends to be true. What was deemed progressive a generation or two ago (e.g., interracial marriage, rights to vote) is now so common sense that even most conservatives are okay with them. Over several decades, we see that many controversially-left positions end up becoming the norm and moderate and centrist. It's why we keep pushing to the left, even if that means incrementally. We certainly don't push to the right today and assert that it could end up being how best to get to the left tomorrow. One prominent historical example that comes to mind is is the ACA. All the propaganda paints it as some massive achievement of "the left" but it's not only to the right of what Kennedy (D) proposed decades earlier, it is to the right of what Nixon and Republicans were countering with. So basically the most celebrated legislation in decades "on the left" is more rightwing than Nixon. I totally agree with you that the ACA is not as progressive or left or beneficial as, say, M4A, but the ACA was still a step in the ideal direction relative to what directly preceded it. Maybe M4A would have been 20 steps to the left while the ACA was just 1 step to the left, but it's still better than what existed beforehand, and I think that jumping from Kennedy/Nixon to Romney/Obama is skipping a few decades of watching the healthcare system get progressively worse. It's not like Obama came right after Nixon, so we're not comparing today vs. tomorrow anymore; a lot happened between those two presidents. What happened after Nixon, over several decades, moved our healthcare system even further to the right, so when Obama supported the ACA - which may have been more to the right than Nixon - it was still to the left of the status quo. Could Obama have pushed even more to the left? Possibly. Is the ACA the best we can do? I sure hope not. Do people generally like the idea of M4A? Yeah, according to polls. But are they voting for it? Currently, they aren't - which means we can't have it - which is why it frustrates me when people don't give the voters any credit. Voters aren't just talking the talk; they're also walking the walk. A person saying they like M4A doesn't mean it's going to magically happen; we need the votes. An obvious one we're seeing unfolding currently is policing where Democrats are increasingly picking up Republican perspectives to rationalize/ignore things like Cop City. I'm not quite sure what this means. Do you mean that Democrats aren't protesting (and even rioting) over police brutality, or promoting slogans and groups like BLM, ACAB, and Defund the Police? Because clearly, they're doing all that. Not every Democrat is doing that, of course, but I still wouldn't say that Democrats and Republicans have identical perspectives when it comes to cops (e.g., Black vs. Blue/All). It seems you missed that the point is this relative "right vs left" stuff leaves Democrat supporters saying policy too right wing for Nixon era Republicans is "on the left" (Whether it takes days or decades) and that the voting comes after the people already forced the same old politicians hand and they've failed to dole out the crumbs/keep the promises that dissuaded the country from going revolutionary to get the crumbs they were demanding and much more in the first place. Then we're back on the Hamster Wheel: 1. There's a problem 2. Politicians won't fix it 3. Need to replace the politicians with ones that will 4. Can't replace the politicians because of how the system works ("only option is to vote Biden") 5. Need to fix the system 6. Politicians wont fix it (because it benefits them) 7. Repeat ad nauseam. In the midst of the George Floyd uprising a Cop City like project would have been something for the Democrat party to rally together to oppose, let electoralism throw people back on the hamster wheel and today it's something the party wants to ignore, "tomorrow" (I didn't/don't mean literally) they will be pushing for their own Cop Cities while insisting it's "to the left" of the "Republican corporate slave mines proposal" or whatever to reduce crime, "so the choice is obvious". Just as Democrats pushing the type of propaganda you are now did to get 1970's Nixon/Republican policy (actually legislation to the right of that policy) praised as basically the best thing Democrats & Progressives combined have accomplished in the decades since Republicans proposed it. I agree with you that the hamster wheel steps 1-7 are hard to overcome, but we know they can be overcome. The most recent example is Trump and the Republicans overcoming it with Trump supporters winning their primary and then Trump winning the general election. A primary can be hard to win, and a general election can also be hard to win, but those 2 victories can get anyone into the presidency, provided they have enough support from one of the two major parties. And on a similar note, Bernie was pretty close to winning on the Democratic side too (I know that he needed to overcome the political machine and superdelegates against Hillary; he almost succeeded). I know that we need to deal with local redistricting, state gerrymandering, and the electoral college at the national level that prohibit elections from being more fair, but I still think it's a problem that either more politicians aren't running on progressive platforms and/or those progressive politicians aren't receiving as many votes as informal polls about progressive policies might suggest. If you think Trump was an escape from the Republican version of the hamster wheel you got duped like his supporters. As for Bernie, he's just a social democrat that genuinely believes some of the typical Democrat propaganda and might actually want to do it. For that crime Democrats did everything they possibly could to stop and coopt him, and they ultimately did. Anyone actually advocating solutions beyond the social democrat policy Democrats pretend to support gets treatment that makes Democrats treatment of Bernie look like their treatment of Hillary. The coordinated assassination of Fred Hampton by various parts of US government was a bipartisan affair for example. It's the same story for generations of "change em from the inside" social democrat types that ultimately just become the perpetuators of the policies they were ostensibly elected/platformed to change while hiding behind "pragmatism" and other rationalizations for their complicity in these horrific/devastating policies and complacency with that reality. The only way Trump is an example of that hamster wheel is if you move the goalposts so far back that any/every successful candidate perpetuates the hamster wheel, which makes the claim unfalsifiable and absurd. Trump beat the Republican machine at their own game, replaced some of the traditional Republican politicians with Trump loyalists, and completely overhauled the right. He literally broke 4, 5, and 6 in the hamster wheel. He flipped off Cruz, Rubio, McConnell, superdelegates, and anything else that represented the old guard. Now the Republican establishment, and most Republican constituents, bow to him. It's difficult to break the cycle of the hamster wheel, but it's already happened once in the last decade, and almost happened a second time with Bernie. If you don't consider Trump an example of breaking the hamster wheel, then I suppose we disagree there.
I'd probably use something besides the hamster wheel to describe the ride Republican/Trump voters are being taken on in the first place.
The "hamster wheel" is meant to be a truncated description of the cyclic apologist refrain of the Democrat party, their supporters, and social democrats generally, not the con games Republicans/Trump are running.
The Republican party/Trump's con game is a different animal. But if we force Republicans/Trump into the analogy (you basically replace "politicians" with "Democrats/RINOs"), Trump fails to break the wheel because he's obviously not actually going to 3. fix their problems. Instead he's perpetuated and exacerbated them while Republicans/his supporters blame Democrats/RINOs for it, keeping Republicans on their version of the hamster wheel.
The idea that Trump broke the hamster wheel is the one of the most ubiquitously cited core reasons his supporters support him and would vote for him even if he was in prison. You're basically arguing they are right when you know they got sold a bill of goods.
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On August 30 2023 09:36 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On August 30 2023 04:33 Uldridge wrote:
It's very telling that one if the reasons people should vote for a party is 'not fascism' instead of the actual ideals they supposedly hold.
Let me ask the Democrats in here the following:
What do you care about in the Democratic party and what do you actually think are they striving for? What can they accomplish so that they deserve your vote? It doesn't matter. It's a referendum on fascism. You get your progressive goals achieved by means outside of the ballot box. You use the ballot box to defer the fascist takeover for a few more years. You can think voting Democrat is completely meaningless in terms of achieving your political objectives and still do it as a basic moral obligation as part of society. If you saw your neighbour beating his wife you'd call the police or otherwise intervene, even if doing so didn't ultimately achieve a socialist revolution in the US. Not all social responsibility can be evaluated in terms of "does this help bring about a socialist revolution? If no, don't do it". That's just not a good framework to operate in. The argument "we shouldn't spend 15 minutes every 4 years preventing a fascist takeover of the US because it doesn't ultimately result in my niche political philosophy being imposed on the population" is actually a stupider argument than just being unapologetically pro-fascist.
It was simply to illustrate that the Democrats have very little going for them other than "at least they're not them".
If I had the choice between a neglectful caretaker or an abusive one, I'd run away. Maybe your point is that you can't run away, and that's fair to a certain extent, but that doesn't sit well with me. Falling in line because there's a 2 party system that can't be uprooted is not the correct answer here, no matter how lesser-of-two-evils it seems we need to choose. Uprooting the 2-party system and getting an actual representative democracy is what needs to be fought for.
Personally, I would probably be pragmatic and vote Democrat if I feel like they have something to say. Also I was just going to say that I would vote "None of the above" if I felt they were adding nothing this cycle, but it seems like that's not even an option in the USA.
But then again, the entirety of it is ridiculous, because you have less than half (or around half) of the people voting and that's a basis to choose a leader/ruling party from.
Make voting mandatory and make it a civic duty. Put an age limit (and maybe a term limit) on congressional representatives.
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On August 30 2023 12:37 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On August 30 2023 11:16 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 10:25 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 08:01 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 07:38 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 05:56 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 05:07 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 04:04 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 03:29 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 02:56 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
[quote]
But those "luxuries" came from voters on the left, not voters on the right. It would be ideal if the Democratic nominee was further to the left, but the fact of the matter still remains that the Democratic nominee will always be more to the left than the Republican nominee. Not from "voters" voting, but from workers that may or may not have voted for either party or neither (like voting for Eugene Debs) forcing their concession despite the persistent threat/practice of social/political ostracism, grave harm and incarceration. If you measure Democrats against today's Republicans you'll end up standing to the right of yesterday's Republicans and calling it "to the left". On August 30 2023 03:27 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
[quote]
And they were on which side?
a. left
b. right.
Hint: answer is a.
Semantics isn't going to change this fact.
Edit: Same response for GH's post below. Moving to the right can't possibly be the ideal move. The question/edit is an asinine semantic non sequitur as alluded to by the fact that you're using left and right relatively where what is "to the right" today can be "to the left" tomorrow and doesn't address the issue of the "luxuries" not being the product of voters voting. Like what? What are some current Republican talking points ("to the right today") that you think will be "to the left tomorrow"? Do you think that being against climate change, women's rights, education, or LGBTQ+ will suddenly be Democratic platforms, instead of Republican ones? Is there sufficient precedent for this? Historically, the opposite of what you're saying tends to be true. What was deemed progressive a generation or two ago (e.g., interracial marriage, rights to vote) is now so common sense that even most conservatives are okay with them. Over several decades, we see that many controversially-left positions end up becoming the norm and moderate and centrist. It's why we keep pushing to the left, even if that means incrementally. We certainly don't push to the right today and assert that it could end up being how best to get to the left tomorrow. One prominent historical example that comes to mind is is the ACA. All the propaganda paints it as some massive achievement of "the left" but it's not only to the right of what Kennedy (D) proposed decades earlier, it is to the right of what Nixon and Republicans were countering with. So basically the most celebrated legislation in decades "on the left" is more rightwing than Nixon. I totally agree with you that the ACA is not as progressive or left or beneficial as, say, M4A, but the ACA was still a step in the ideal direction relative to what directly preceded it. Maybe M4A would have been 20 steps to the left while the ACA was just 1 step to the left, but it's still better than what existed beforehand, and I think that jumping from Kennedy/Nixon to Romney/Obama is skipping a few decades of watching the healthcare system get progressively worse. It's not like Obama came right after Nixon, so we're not comparing today vs. tomorrow anymore; a lot happened between those two presidents. What happened after Nixon, over several decades, moved our healthcare system even further to the right, so when Obama supported the ACA - which may have been more to the right than Nixon - it was still to the left of the status quo. Could Obama have pushed even more to the left? Possibly. Is the ACA the best we can do? I sure hope not. Do people generally like the idea of M4A? Yeah, according to polls. But are they voting for it? Currently, they aren't - which means we can't have it - which is why it frustrates me when people don't give the voters any credit. Voters aren't just talking the talk; they're also walking the walk. A person saying they like M4A doesn't mean it's going to magically happen; we need the votes. An obvious one we're seeing unfolding currently is policing where Democrats are increasingly picking up Republican perspectives to rationalize/ignore things like Cop City. I'm not quite sure what this means. Do you mean that Democrats aren't protesting (and even rioting) over police brutality, or promoting slogans and groups like BLM, ACAB, and Defund the Police? Because clearly, they're doing all that. Not every Democrat is doing that, of course, but I still wouldn't say that Democrats and Republicans have identical perspectives when it comes to cops (e.g., Black vs. Blue/All). It seems you missed that the point is this relative "right vs left" stuff leaves Democrat supporters saying policy too right wing for Nixon era Republicans is "on the left" (Whether it takes days or decades) and that the voting comes after the people already forced the same old politicians hand and they've failed to dole out the crumbs/keep the promises that dissuaded the country from going revolutionary to get the crumbs they were demanding and much more in the first place. Then we're back on the Hamster Wheel: 1. There's a problem 2. Politicians won't fix it 3. Need to replace the politicians with ones that will 4. Can't replace the politicians because of how the system works ("only option is to vote Biden") 5. Need to fix the system 6. Politicians wont fix it (because it benefits them) 7. Repeat ad nauseam. In the midst of the George Floyd uprising a Cop City like project would have been something for the Democrat party to rally together to oppose, let electoralism throw people back on the hamster wheel and today it's something the party wants to ignore, "tomorrow" (I didn't/don't mean literally) they will be pushing for their own Cop Cities while insisting it's "to the left" of the "Republican corporate slave mines proposal" or whatever to reduce crime, "so the choice is obvious". Just as Democrats pushing the type of propaganda you are now did to get 1970's Nixon/Republican policy (actually legislation to the right of that policy) praised as basically the best thing Democrats & Progressives combined have accomplished in the decades since Republicans proposed it. I agree with you that the hamster wheel steps 1-7 are hard to overcome, but we know they can be overcome. The most recent example is Trump and the Republicans overcoming it with Trump supporters winning their primary and then Trump winning the general election. A primary can be hard to win, and a general election can also be hard to win, but those 2 victories can get anyone into the presidency, provided they have enough support from one of the two major parties. And on a similar note, Bernie was pretty close to winning on the Democratic side too (I know that he needed to overcome the political machine and superdelegates against Hillary; he almost succeeded). I know that we need to deal with local redistricting, state gerrymandering, and the electoral college at the national level that prohibit elections from being more fair, but I still think it's a problem that either more politicians aren't running on progressive platforms and/or those progressive politicians aren't receiving as many votes as informal polls about progressive policies might suggest. If you think Trump was an escape from the Republican version of the hamster wheel you got duped like his supporters. As for Bernie, he's just a social democrat that genuinely believes some of the typical Democrat propaganda and might actually want to do it. For that crime Democrats did everything they possibly could to stop and coopt him, and they ultimately did. Anyone actually advocating solutions beyond the social democrat policy Democrats pretend to support gets treatment that makes Democrats treatment of Bernie look like their treatment of Hillary. The coordinated assassination of Fred Hampton by various parts of US government was a bipartisan affair for example. It's the same story for generations of "change em from the inside" social democrat types that ultimately just become the perpetuators of the policies they were ostensibly elected/platformed to change while hiding behind "pragmatism" and other rationalizations for their complicity in these horrific/devastating policies and complacency with that reality. The only way Trump is an example of that hamster wheel is if you move the goalposts so far back that any/every successful candidate perpetuates the hamster wheel, which makes the claim unfalsifiable and absurd. Trump beat the Republican machine at their own game, replaced some of the traditional Republican politicians with Trump loyalists, and completely overhauled the right. He literally broke 4, 5, and 6 in the hamster wheel. He flipped off Cruz, Rubio, McConnell, superdelegates, and anything else that represented the old guard. Now the Republican establishment, and most Republican constituents, bow to him. It's difficult to break the cycle of the hamster wheel, but it's already happened once in the last decade, and almost happened a second time with Bernie. If you don't consider Trump an example of breaking the hamster wheel, then I suppose we disagree there. I'd probably use something besides the hamster wheel to describe the ride Republican/Trump voters are being taken on in the first place. The "hamster wheel" is meant to be a truncated description of the cyclic apologist refrain of the Democrat party, their supporters, and social democrats generally, not the con games Republicans/Trump are running. The Republican party/Trump's con game is a different animal. But if we force Republicans/Trump into the analogy (you basically replace "politicians" with "Democrats/RINOs"), Trump fails to break the wheel because he's obviously not actually going to 3. fix their problems. Instead he's perpetuated and exacerbated them while Republicans/his supporters blame Democrats/RINOs for it, keeping Republicans on their version of the hamster wheel. The idea that Trump broke the hamster wheel is the one of the most ubiquitously cited core reasons his supporters support him and would vote for him even if he was in prison. You're basically arguing they are right when you know they got sold a bill of goods.
Can you please give a hypothetical example of what it would look like for the Democratic hamster wheel to be broken by someone or in some scenario? What would need to happen for you to say "What's happening right now is a counterexample to the Democratic hamster wheel"?
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Apparently, the Director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the United States Department of Agriculture may start to recommend that Americans have 2 or fewer beers per week, based on health research. Unsurprisingly, Fox News is insisting that this means Biden will make it illegal to drink 3 beers in a week.
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On August 30 2023 18:38 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On August 30 2023 12:37 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 11:16 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 10:25 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 08:01 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 07:38 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 05:56 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 05:07 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 04:04 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 03:29 GreenHorizons wrote:
[quote]
Not from "voters" voting, but from workers that may or may not have voted for either party or neither (like voting for Eugene Debs) forcing their concession despite the persistent threat/practice of social/political ostracism, grave harm and incarceration.
If you measure Democrats against today's Republicans you'll end up standing to the right of yesterday's Republicans and calling it "to the left".
[quote]
The question/edit is an asinine semantic non sequitur as alluded to by the fact that you're using left and right relatively where what is "to the right" today can be "to the left" tomorrow and doesn't address the issue of the "luxuries" not being the product of voters voting.
Like what? What are some current Republican talking points ("to the right today") that you think will be "to the left tomorrow"? Do you think that being against climate change, women's rights, education, or LGBTQ+ will suddenly be Democratic platforms, instead of Republican ones? Is there sufficient precedent for this? Historically, the opposite of what you're saying tends to be true. What was deemed progressive a generation or two ago (e.g., interracial marriage, rights to vote) is now so common sense that even most conservatives are okay with them. Over several decades, we see that many controversially-left positions end up becoming the norm and moderate and centrist. It's why we keep pushing to the left, even if that means incrementally. We certainly don't push to the right today and assert that it could end up being how best to get to the left tomorrow. One prominent historical example that comes to mind is is the ACA. All the propaganda paints it as some massive achievement of "the left" but it's not only to the right of what Kennedy (D) proposed decades earlier, it is to the right of what Nixon and Republicans were countering with. So basically the most celebrated legislation in decades "on the left" is more rightwing than Nixon. I totally agree with you that the ACA is not as progressive or left or beneficial as, say, M4A, but the ACA was still a step in the ideal direction relative to what directly preceded it. Maybe M4A would have been 20 steps to the left while the ACA was just 1 step to the left, but it's still better than what existed beforehand, and I think that jumping from Kennedy/Nixon to Romney/Obama is skipping a few decades of watching the healthcare system get progressively worse. It's not like Obama came right after Nixon, so we're not comparing today vs. tomorrow anymore; a lot happened between those two presidents. What happened after Nixon, over several decades, moved our healthcare system even further to the right, so when Obama supported the ACA - which may have been more to the right than Nixon - it was still to the left of the status quo. Could Obama have pushed even more to the left? Possibly. Is the ACA the best we can do? I sure hope not. Do people generally like the idea of M4A? Yeah, according to polls. But are they voting for it? Currently, they aren't - which means we can't have it - which is why it frustrates me when people don't give the voters any credit. Voters aren't just talking the talk; they're also walking the walk. A person saying they like M4A doesn't mean it's going to magically happen; we need the votes. An obvious one we're seeing unfolding currently is policing where Democrats are increasingly picking up Republican perspectives to rationalize/ignore things like Cop City. I'm not quite sure what this means. Do you mean that Democrats aren't protesting (and even rioting) over police brutality, or promoting slogans and groups like BLM, ACAB, and Defund the Police? Because clearly, they're doing all that. Not every Democrat is doing that, of course, but I still wouldn't say that Democrats and Republicans have identical perspectives when it comes to cops (e.g., Black vs. Blue/All). It seems you missed that the point is this relative "right vs left" stuff leaves Democrat supporters saying policy too right wing for Nixon era Republicans is "on the left" (Whether it takes days or decades) and that the voting comes after the people already forced the same old politicians hand and they've failed to dole out the crumbs/keep the promises that dissuaded the country from going revolutionary to get the crumbs they were demanding and much more in the first place. Then we're back on the Hamster Wheel: 1. There's a problem 2. Politicians won't fix it 3. Need to replace the politicians with ones that will 4. Can't replace the politicians because of how the system works ("only option is to vote Biden") 5. Need to fix the system 6. Politicians wont fix it (because it benefits them) 7. Repeat ad nauseam. In the midst of the George Floyd uprising a Cop City like project would have been something for the Democrat party to rally together to oppose, let electoralism throw people back on the hamster wheel and today it's something the party wants to ignore, "tomorrow" (I didn't/don't mean literally) they will be pushing for their own Cop Cities while insisting it's "to the left" of the "Republican corporate slave mines proposal" or whatever to reduce crime, "so the choice is obvious". Just as Democrats pushing the type of propaganda you are now did to get 1970's Nixon/Republican policy (actually legislation to the right of that policy) praised as basically the best thing Democrats & Progressives combined have accomplished in the decades since Republicans proposed it. I agree with you that the hamster wheel steps 1-7 are hard to overcome, but we know they can be overcome. The most recent example is Trump and the Republicans overcoming it with Trump supporters winning their primary and then Trump winning the general election. A primary can be hard to win, and a general election can also be hard to win, but those 2 victories can get anyone into the presidency, provided they have enough support from one of the two major parties. And on a similar note, Bernie was pretty close to winning on the Democratic side too (I know that he needed to overcome the political machine and superdelegates against Hillary; he almost succeeded). I know that we need to deal with local redistricting, state gerrymandering, and the electoral college at the national level that prohibit elections from being more fair, but I still think it's a problem that either more politicians aren't running on progressive platforms and/or those progressive politicians aren't receiving as many votes as informal polls about progressive policies might suggest. If you think Trump was an escape from the Republican version of the hamster wheel you got duped like his supporters. As for Bernie, he's just a social democrat that genuinely believes some of the typical Democrat propaganda and might actually want to do it. For that crime Democrats did everything they possibly could to stop and coopt him, and they ultimately did. Anyone actually advocating solutions beyond the social democrat policy Democrats pretend to support gets treatment that makes Democrats treatment of Bernie look like their treatment of Hillary. The coordinated assassination of Fred Hampton by various parts of US government was a bipartisan affair for example. It's the same story for generations of "change em from the inside" social democrat types that ultimately just become the perpetuators of the policies they were ostensibly elected/platformed to change while hiding behind "pragmatism" and other rationalizations for their complicity in these horrific/devastating policies and complacency with that reality. The only way Trump is an example of that hamster wheel is if you move the goalposts so far back that any/every successful candidate perpetuates the hamster wheel, which makes the claim unfalsifiable and absurd. Trump beat the Republican machine at their own game, replaced some of the traditional Republican politicians with Trump loyalists, and completely overhauled the right. He literally broke 4, 5, and 6 in the hamster wheel. He flipped off Cruz, Rubio, McConnell, superdelegates, and anything else that represented the old guard. Now the Republican establishment, and most Republican constituents, bow to him. It's difficult to break the cycle of the hamster wheel, but it's already happened once in the last decade, and almost happened a second time with Bernie. If you don't consider Trump an example of breaking the hamster wheel, then I suppose we disagree there. I'd probably use something besides the hamster wheel to describe the ride Republican/Trump voters are being taken on in the first place. The "hamster wheel" is meant to be a truncated description of the cyclic apologist refrain of the Democrat party, their supporters, and social democrats generally, not the con games Republicans/Trump are running. The Republican party/Trump's con game is a different animal. But if we force Republicans/Trump into the analogy (you basically replace "politicians" with "Democrats/RINOs"), Trump fails to break the wheel because he's obviously not actually going to 3. fix their problems. Instead he's perpetuated and exacerbated them while Republicans/his supporters blame Democrats/RINOs for it, keeping Republicans on their version of the hamster wheel. The idea that Trump broke the hamster wheel is the one of the most ubiquitously cited core reasons his supporters support him and would vote for him even if he was in prison. You're basically arguing they are right when you know they got sold a bill of goods. Can you please give a hypothetical example of what it would look like for the Democratic hamster wheel to be broken by someone or in some scenario? What would need to happen for you to say "What's happening right now is a counterexample to the Democratic hamster wheel"? Engaging in revolutionary socialism to enact a socialist revolution.
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Florida's education is an utter embarrassment. I believe this is linked to the fact that they also recently started using PragerU resources in their classrooms: "The Florida Department of Education is raising alarm with its recent approval of the conservative education platform PragerU, which touts itself as an alternative to progressive “indoctrination,” for use in classrooms this school year. The “supplemental curriculum” means educators can if they choose show PragerU materials in class without fear of repercussions, with video titles ranging from “Was the Civil War About Slavery?” to “The Inconvenient Truth About the Democratic Party.”" https://thehill.com/homenews/education/4141994-what-is-prageru-the-conservative-education-platform-now-in-florida-schools/
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On August 30 2023 23:51 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On August 30 2023 18:38 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 12:37 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 11:16 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 10:25 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 08:01 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 07:38 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 05:56 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:On August 30 2023 05:07 GreenHorizons wrote:On August 30 2023 04:04 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
[quote]
Like what? What are some current Republican talking points ("to the right today") that you think will be "to the left tomorrow"? Do you think that being against climate change, women's rights, education, or LGBTQ+ will suddenly be Democratic platforms, instead of Republican ones? Is there sufficient precedent for this?
Historically, the opposite of what you're saying tends to be true. What was deemed progressive a generation or two ago (e.g., interracial marriage, rights to vote) is now so common sense that even most conservatives are okay with them. Over several decades, we see that many controversially-left positions end up becoming the norm and moderate and centrist. It's why we keep pushing to the left, even if that means incrementally. We certainly don't push to the right today and assert that it could end up being how best to get to the left tomorrow. One prominent historical example that comes to mind is is the ACA. All the propaganda paints it as some massive achievement of "the left" but it's not only to the right of what Kennedy (D) proposed decades earlier, it is to the right of what Nixon and Republicans were countering with. So basically the most celebrated legislation in decades "on the left" is more rightwing than Nixon. I totally agree with you that the ACA is not as progressive or left or beneficial as, say, M4A, but the ACA was still a step in the ideal direction relative to what directly preceded it. Maybe M4A would have been 20 steps to the left while the ACA was just 1 step to the left, but it's still better than what existed beforehand, and I think that jumping from Kennedy/Nixon to Romney/Obama is skipping a few decades of watching the healthcare system get progressively worse. It's not like Obama came right after Nixon, so we're not comparing today vs. tomorrow anymore; a lot happened between those two presidents. What happened after Nixon, over several decades, moved our healthcare system even further to the right, so when Obama supported the ACA - which may have been more to the right than Nixon - it was still to the left of the status quo. Could Obama have pushed even more to the left? Possibly. Is the ACA the best we can do? I sure hope not. Do people generally like the idea of M4A? Yeah, according to polls. But are they voting for it? Currently, they aren't - which means we can't have it - which is why it frustrates me when people don't give the voters any credit. Voters aren't just talking the talk; they're also walking the walk. A person saying they like M4A doesn't mean it's going to magically happen; we need the votes. An obvious one we're seeing unfolding currently is policing where Democrats are increasingly picking up Republican perspectives to rationalize/ignore things like Cop City. I'm not quite sure what this means. Do you mean that Democrats aren't protesting (and even rioting) over police brutality, or promoting slogans and groups like BLM, ACAB, and Defund the Police? Because clearly, they're doing all that. Not every Democrat is doing that, of course, but I still wouldn't say that Democrats and Republicans have identical perspectives when it comes to cops (e.g., Black vs. Blue/All). It seems you missed that the point is this relative "right vs left" stuff leaves Democrat supporters saying policy too right wing for Nixon era Republicans is "on the left" (Whether it takes days or decades) and that the voting comes after the people already forced the same old politicians hand and they've failed to dole out the crumbs/keep the promises that dissuaded the country from going revolutionary to get the crumbs they were demanding and much more in the first place. Then we're back on the Hamster Wheel: 1. There's a problem 2. Politicians won't fix it 3. Need to replace the politicians with ones that will 4. Can't replace the politicians because of how the system works ("only option is to vote Biden") 5. Need to fix the system 6. Politicians wont fix it (because it benefits them) 7. Repeat ad nauseam. In the midst of the George Floyd uprising a Cop City like project would have been something for the Democrat party to rally together to oppose, let electoralism throw people back on the hamster wheel and today it's something the party wants to ignore, "tomorrow" (I didn't/don't mean literally) they will be pushing for their own Cop Cities while insisting it's "to the left" of the "Republican corporate slave mines proposal" or whatever to reduce crime, "so the choice is obvious". Just as Democrats pushing the type of propaganda you are now did to get 1970's Nixon/Republican policy (actually legislation to the right of that policy) praised as basically the best thing Democrats & Progressives combined have accomplished in the decades since Republicans proposed it. I agree with you that the hamster wheel steps 1-7 are hard to overcome, but we know they can be overcome. The most recent example is Trump and the Republicans overcoming it with Trump supporters winning their primary and then Trump winning the general election. A primary can be hard to win, and a general election can also be hard to win, but those 2 victories can get anyone into the presidency, provided they have enough support from one of the two major parties. And on a similar note, Bernie was pretty close to winning on the Democratic side too (I know that he needed to overcome the political machine and superdelegates against Hillary; he almost succeeded). I know that we need to deal with local redistricting, state gerrymandering, and the electoral college at the national level that prohibit elections from being more fair, but I still think it's a problem that either more politicians aren't running on progressive platforms and/or those progressive politicians aren't receiving as many votes as informal polls about progressive policies might suggest. If you think Trump was an escape from the Republican version of the hamster wheel you got duped like his supporters. As for Bernie, he's just a social democrat that genuinely believes some of the typical Democrat propaganda and might actually want to do it. For that crime Democrats did everything they possibly could to stop and coopt him, and they ultimately did. Anyone actually advocating solutions beyond the social democrat policy Democrats pretend to support gets treatment that makes Democrats treatment of Bernie look like their treatment of Hillary. The coordinated assassination of Fred Hampton by various parts of US government was a bipartisan affair for example. It's the same story for generations of "change em from the inside" social democrat types that ultimately just become the perpetuators of the policies they were ostensibly elected/platformed to change while hiding behind "pragmatism" and other rationalizations for their complicity in these horrific/devastating policies and complacency with that reality. The only way Trump is an example of that hamster wheel is if you move the goalposts so far back that any/every successful candidate perpetuates the hamster wheel, which makes the claim unfalsifiable and absurd. Trump beat the Republican machine at their own game, replaced some of the traditional Republican politicians with Trump loyalists, and completely overhauled the right. He literally broke 4, 5, and 6 in the hamster wheel. He flipped off Cruz, Rubio, McConnell, superdelegates, and anything else that represented the old guard. Now the Republican establishment, and most Republican constituents, bow to him. It's difficult to break the cycle of the hamster wheel, but it's already happened once in the last decade, and almost happened a second time with Bernie. If you don't consider Trump an example of breaking the hamster wheel, then I suppose we disagree there. I'd probably use something besides the hamster wheel to describe the ride Republican/Trump voters are being taken on in the first place. The "hamster wheel" is meant to be a truncated description of the cyclic apologist refrain of the Democrat party, their supporters, and social democrats generally, not the con games Republicans/Trump are running. The Republican party/Trump's con game is a different animal. But if we force Republicans/Trump into the analogy (you basically replace "politicians" with "Democrats/RINOs"), Trump fails to break the wheel because he's obviously not actually going to 3. fix their problems. Instead he's perpetuated and exacerbated them while Republicans/his supporters blame Democrats/RINOs for it, keeping Republicans on their version of the hamster wheel. The idea that Trump broke the hamster wheel is the one of the most ubiquitously cited core reasons his supporters support him and would vote for him even if he was in prison. You're basically arguing they are right when you know they got sold a bill of goods. Can you please give a hypothetical example of what it would look like for the Democratic hamster wheel to be broken by someone or in some scenario? What would need to happen for you to say "What's happening right now is a counterexample to the Democratic hamster wheel"? Engaging in revolutionary socialism to enact a socialist revolution.
And what would that look like? I'm not sure what "engaging in revolutionary socialism" looks like. Would it be done through voting in a majority of socialists into local, state, and national leadership positions, to pass pro-socialism / anti-capitalism laws and move the country in a socialist direction? Would it be done through strikes and protests and violent riots and threats from the workers who feel disenfranchised by their employers and/or the capitalist system as a whole? I'm assuming it would start with the latter (strikes, protests, etc.) and would be considered successful if it leads to the former (laws, leadership, etc.).
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EPT
