Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting!
NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.
On July 28 2026 12:47 Sermokala wrote: That insult hinges on you actually being a facist. I think if dyhb knew about that he would have cited it or quoted it, but it does prove that I was wrong I'll admit.
When I searched it said that she wasn't apart of it and that they considered her a democrat. i'm an adult and can admit that I was wrong.
On July 28 2026 12:13 oBlade wrote: For any industrial gaslighters who missed the links before because looking at stuff posted by fascists is icky, here is AOC herself explicitly explaining why she joined and stayed in the organization:
This was a question that could be answered in 1 second by typing "is AOC in DSA."
Interesting find. Let's see if that's the impetus for SermoBlade to stop dodging. He has secret intel that AOC is not in fact a DSA member, and I'm sure he has a theory about why AOC lied two years ago or silently left the org in the months following (despite rallying others to join).
How both of you aren't so embarrassed by that entire ordeal that you spontaneously combust is amazing in itself.
On July 28 2026 12:47 Sermokala wrote: That insult hinges on you actually being a facist. I think if dyhb knew about that he would have cited it or quoted it, but it does prove that I was wrong I'll admit.
When I searched it said that she wasn't apart of it and that they considered her a democrat. i'm an adult and can admit that I was wrong.
On July 28 2026 13:09 dyhb wrote:
On July 28 2026 12:13 oBlade wrote: For any industrial gaslighters who missed the links before because looking at stuff posted by fascists is icky, here is AOC herself explicitly explaining why she joined and stayed in the organization:
This was a question that could be answered in 1 second by typing "is AOC in DSA."
Interesting find. Let's see if that's the impetus for SermoBlade to stop dodging. He has secret intel that AOC is not in fact a DSA member, and I'm sure he has a theory about why AOC lied two years ago or silently left the org in the months following (despite rallying others to join).
How both of you aren't so embarrassed by that entire ordeal that you spontaneously combust is amazing in itself.
GH you didn't know that Salvary was on the ballot for your election until election day, you have no room to talk.
dyhb being so shocked that someone would admit that they're wrong that they keep going like I didn't is pretty funny tbh.
On July 28 2026 12:47 Sermokala wrote: That insult hinges on you actually being a facist. I think if dyhb knew about that he would have cited it or quoted it, but it does prove that I was wrong I'll admit.
When I searched it said that she wasn't apart of it and that they considered her a democrat. i'm an adult and can admit that I was wrong.
On July 28 2026 12:13 oBlade wrote: For any industrial gaslighters who missed the links before because looking at stuff posted by fascists is icky, here is AOC herself explicitly explaining why she joined and stayed in the organization:
This was a question that could be answered in 1 second by typing "is AOC in DSA."
Interesting find. Let's see if that's the impetus for SermoBlade to stop dodging. He has secret intel that AOC is not in fact a DSA member, and I'm sure he has a theory about why AOC lied two years ago or silently left the org in the months following (despite rallying others to join).
How both of you aren't so embarrassed by that entire ordeal that you spontaneously combust is amazing in itself.
I'll indulge the occasional asinine digression in the spirit of debate and curiosity. It was apparently some technical point about the woman campaigning with and recruiting for an organization that she wasn't a member of. The union organizer is a scab, so to speak. I've heard a lot of political whoppers in my time, but the American queen of democratic socialism from the most successful chapter of the DSA in the country hiding her non-membership and releasing no statement after the national org revoked her conditional endorsement is a big one. She strikes me as an intelligent political campaigner from the opposite wing of the party from me, and I based my view in that.
3 pages ago I linked DSA's "AOC is committed to the Democratic party, not DSA", this is from 2024, since then, AOC has become an even more prominent face of regular, Democratic party politics, likely because shes preparing for 2028 Presidential or Senate run.
She is an intelligent political operator and has since her rise to prominence obviously understood that a full DSA membership and full endorsement of their politics would be very bad for her, so she's obviously avoided doing that.
Everything beyond that is speculation, despite some very triggered folks trying to present things as facts.
On July 28 2026 12:13 oBlade wrote: For any industrial gaslighters who missed the links before because looking at stuff posted by fascists is icky, here is AOC herself explicitly explaining why she joined and stayed in the organization:
HOWS YOUR ECONOMY DOING LATELY MAGA FUCKERS? HOPE U DONT GET SICK WITH NO MEDICAID ANY FRIEND GOT ARRESTED BY ICE AND THROWN INTO A FUCKING CONCENTRATION CAMP MADE FOR INMIGRANTS AND HOMELESS PEOPLE? DOES YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS STILL TALK TO YOU? OR ARE THEY GHOSTING YOU FOR BEING A FUCKING PRO NAZI INMORAL RACIST IGNORANT PIECE OF SHIT?
YOU FUCKING DESERVE IT, YOU'RE LOSING THE WAR ON IRAN BTW...
BYE FUCKERS
just ban me already i will keep coming to spit their faces
I didn't think you'd have such a passionate response since you said voting for centrists was a "a defensive five minute tactical choice", but I'll give my thoughts.
On July 28 2026 06:40 GreenHorizons wrote: You're just ignoring the actual argument to rationalize your fixation on harm-reduction voting. That is part of what I'm pointing out the system is designed to manipulate you into doing. Your theory of electoral gravity is a key part of how the establishment keeps you in this hopeless Hamster Wheel.
I mean, sure? You could also say "Baseball is designed to manipulate you into swinging a bat", but that doesn't give any positive or negative moral value to swinging bats.
Your belief that centrists are less vicious and rarely deploy McCarthyist policies is misleading at best. Who launched the Palmer Raids against socialists? Woodrow Wilson, a progressive champion.
I phrased it like that because I knew there were some counter-examples, but this isn't one of them. "Progressives" in the early 20th century were not egalitarians, the core defining value that unites all leftists, since they supported eugenics, scientific racism, persecuting prostitutes, and so on. Woodrow Wilson hosted a viewing of Birth of a Nation at the White House. Fascist in morality. Wilson is one of those "vote for anyone but him" examples in history, not "vote for him to keep someone worse out".
Who signed the Smith Act to jail communists? The "best Democrat in history", Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Great example in my favor actually. Compare to what Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan were doing to communists in the same year (1940). Prosecuting 200-something people that had ties to the Soviet Union was considerably less harmful to socialism than pogroms and concentration camps.
Who ran COINTELPRO to assassinate Black Panthers and dismantle the Black Radical Tradition? Liberal darlings JFK and LBJ.
Sure, that's possibly a good counter-example. Though I'm not sure any of this is relevant at all since an actual fascist party wasn't really on the ballot at any point in this time period. And moreover, while both Democratic and Republican presidents kept J. Edgar Hoover in charge of the FBI (obviously a point of shame), only one side supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made the modern progressive movement possible.
Who militarized the modern police state and crushed Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter? Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Who cracked down on students opposing genocide? Joe Biden
😐
You think I am alienating 90% of the population because you view 'the population' as a collection of online pundits/posters obsessed with whether someone voted for Clinton or Harris or whatever (and my general disdain for that kind of engagement). Normal, working-class people do not join movements because of a voting scorecard. They join them because of material reality.
Quite the opposite. You're alienating the population because all of the evils the Trump administration is doing could've been avoided if just a small percentage more of the population mobilized against it. You don't want to entertain that notion because you alternate between saying saying "Democrats are useless because they couldn't stop Trump" which plays well for the crowd, but also "Democrats aren't that much worse than Trump", which doesn't. Your opinions would be a lot more credible if you picked one of those and stuck with it genuinely instead of trying to dip your toes in both pools.
When a family is getting evicted and a radical mutual aid network stops the landlord, they don't care who we voted for.
You should talk to more people. A lot of people care about that.
When an independent union wins them a living wage and healthcare through a brutal strike, they don't care about our presidential preferences (at least historically, going forward, yeah it comes up).
Yeah, it does come up.
The Black Panthers didn't build the most influential radical movement in modern US history by trying to look 'trustworthy' to moderate white liberals. They did it by feeding children and enlisting armed self-defense in the streets to protect it.
True. Unfortunate that they crippled themselves with all the in-fighting in addition to the cops and FBI murdering them.
The center-left will call us self-righteous idiots on social media? Fine. Let them create their vapid digital noise. While they are laughing/crying on Bluesky about the latest idiotic thing uttered by a Republican and voter apathy (or where/whatever), we will be on the ground building the literal networks of survival. When the system inevitably fractures under its own greed, the working class won't run to the liberals who spent decades telling them to compromise. They will run to the people who actually built the infrastructure to keep them alive.
Mutual aid is a wonderful thing but you're probably delusional if you think we're approaching a future where it provides a valid alternative to the state itself for enough of the country to manifest socialism. If fascists are in power, they will dismantle it by force and have no qualms doing so. Such a thing is only possible if fascists are kept out of power.
20 years ago I probably would've agreed with this wholeheartedly, but Republicans have shown they can use their leverage to repeatedly screw over their own voters (not just the rank-and-file either, they have screwed over their own megacorporate backers in the weapons, agricultural, etc. industries) and that doesn't lose them those votes or support. The goldfish-brained swing voters don't remember any of it on election day either, just whatever gas prices look like and whatever the most recent scandal the media was talking about.
There could be, it's hypothetically possible, but there just isn't at this time. Right now the strongest force in politics is social media and the ones owned by the far-right (Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter, Tiktok) completely mog all of the other ones (Reddit, Bluesky, the rest are barely even worth mentioning), which are still mostly owned by right-wingers, just not explicit Trump donors.
I support revolutionary socialism as the appropriate counter. The specific tactics that includes varies depending on perspective, but it starts in many ways, including with individuals recognizing the fundamental structures of US politics and capitalism. That's been at the core of my focus on leverage in US political history as I've described previously (rather than how you're thinking about it).
DSA is not that. But plenty of people I respect the work of think that it could(/must) be. So for those that think there's some sort of better reformist path option, DSA and the sort of uncomfortable infighting (that I would say you rightly/unintentionally point out is part of why the reformist path is a dead end) is the best version of that they're getting.
If all of the excesses and corruption of an Epstein accomplice POTUS didn't spur people into revolutionary socialism, then what will?
(ongoing) Deliberate and multi-generational efforts (like those I mentioned) by informed and dedicated workers aligning with circumstances ideally help brought about by those diligent efforts.
Nothing will magically 'spur' people into a revolution. Thinking a scandal will change the world is liberal idealism. As you pointed out, the Epstein Class owns the media, the algorithms, and the grocery stores (and in effect, the farms/factories that fill them). They know how to manage public anger and turn it into various forms of "harmless digital noise". The only thing that changes this is a brutal, multi-generational grind. We have to build/ramp up independent survival networks right now so people don't starve when they strike. We don't wait for the system to collapse. We diligently build the collective capacity to protect workers by choking off corporate profits, so that when the system finally fractures under its own greed, the working class has the raw physical leverage to take over instead of the fascists.
How do you or anyone think spending a couple pages arguing with Trump supporters about whether AOC is a member of DSA fits into this or your alternative preference (which would be nice to be seen explained)?
I don't have any criticisms. It's a fine outlook. I assume, since you said "We don't wait for the system to collapse", you therefore would agree that this multi-generational effort is more likely to succeed if socialists vote for centrists/liberals to keep fascists out of power whenever possible, i.e. the opposite of accelerationism. Correct?
You are fundamentally confusing the symptom with the disease. Corporate centrists do not stop fascism. Their policies explicitly manufacture the economic misery, desperation, and cynicism that breeds it. When liberals protect monopolies, bails out banks, and suppresses working-class wages, they lay down the foundations for the next right-wing strongman.Treating corporate Democrats as a 'shield' is a delusion. They are a political ratchet. The right moves the goalposts, and the center locks them into place. Voting for them doesn't defeat fascism, it just enables the slow motion decline of society while their corporate donors line their pockets."
I reject accelerationism in part because hoping for a catastrophic collapse without an organized alternative is suicidal. But you are misunderstanding the functionality/meaningfulness of voting as political engagement. It takes ~five minutes once every two years (at least it should in an industrialized country). If a worker decides that pulling the lever for a centrist buys a sliver of defensive breathing room for our independent unions and mutual aid networks to breathe, fine. Do it. If another worker decides the corporate party needs to be starved of votes to break its leverage, fine. Do that. But do not confuse a defensive five minute tactical choice inside a rigged capitalist system with the actual multi-generational work of building working-class power. The latter being how you actually keep fascists out of power.
One reason the Democratic establishment constantly drags progressives to the right is because of the exact logic you just laid out. They know they can give you objectively worse, corporate/Republican/lobbyist-written policies, and you will still fall in line because you are terrified of the alternative. You have given away all your leverage for free. By making 'harm reduction' one's political guidepost, you ensure that the center rarely has to concede a single thing to the working class (but for to keep the extraction going ala the New Deal). My outlook doesn't really care about your voting habits per se. It cares about what you are doing the other 364 days of the year. The only way to stop a fascist isn't to vote for a corporate puppet. It is to build the organized, independent capacity to shut down the economy when the state steps out of line. Which if you noticed, there was a bipartisan multi-generational effort to dismantle people's capacity to do that coming out of the Civil Rights Movement when they had a similar version of this discussion and falling in line behind centrists was the prevailing common sense. Which again, led us directly to Trump being president 2x (so far).
Even if all your criticisms of corporate centrism were true, that doesn't change the fact that every single thing fascists do in office makes the status quo worse than whatever a centrist would do.
Choosing not to vote for the most left candidate whenever possible, even if they aren't very left, is actually what gives away leverage. If a politician won't get votes from the left no matter what they can do (within reason), they're going to instead fish for the votes from the center and right. That moves the Overton window to the right and makes grassroots socialists even more alienated. But probably the most important consequence of this is that people operating the state can use their power to cripple all of the extra-state apparatuses like mutual aid and unions that socialists are capable of building. Right-wingers itch at every possible opportunity to roll out McCarthyist policies to prevent grassroots socialism from happening; centrists sometimes do this, but it's a lot more rare and a lot less vicious.
You can see from history that this almost never improves that status quo. It's about as rare as directly transitioning from absolute tsardom to Leninism.
And another point about this is: how much multi-generational work do you think you're actually going to succeed in building if you've successfully pissed off 90~% of the population by doing this? I mean, just going by the last election, if you hypothetically didn't vote for Harris: Trump voters already think you're a goddless commie, and the center/center-left folks that finds out you didn't vote for Harris are going to think you're untrustworthy, self-righteous, and an idiot. Not a good position to be in if you're trying to be the backbone that builds the future of society.
You're just ignoring the actual argument to rationalize your fixation on harm-reduction voting. That is part of what I'm pointing out the system is designed to manipulate you into doing. Your theory of electoral gravity is a key part of how the establishment keeps you in this hopeless Hamster Wheel.
Your belief that centrists are less vicious and rarely deploy McCarthyist policies is misleading at best. Who launched the Palmer Raids against socialists? Woodrow Wilson, a progressive champion. Who signed the Smith Act to jail communists? The "best Democrat in history", Franklin D. Roosevelt. Who ran COINTELPRO to assassinate Black Panthers and dismantle the Black Radical Tradition? Liberal darlings JFK and LBJ. Who militarized the modern police state and crushed Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter? Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Who cracked down on students opposing genocide? Joe Biden.
They've managed to confuse you into believing that supporting the people laying the foundations for fascism is the only way to protect yourself from fascism. It'd be funny if it weren't so catastrophic.
You think I am alienating 90% of the population because you view 'the population' as a collection of online pundits/posters obsessed with whether someone voted for Clinton or Harris or whatever (and my general disdain for that kind of engagement). Normal, working-class people do not join movements because of a voting scorecard. They join them because of material reality. When a family is getting evicted and a radical mutual aid network stops the landlord, they don't care who we voted for. When an independent union wins them a living wage and healthcare through a brutal strike, they don't care about our presidential preferences (at least historically, going forward, yeah it comes up). The Black Panthers didn't build the most influential radical movement in modern US history by trying to look 'trustworthy' to moderate white liberals. They did it by feeding children and enlisting armed self-defense in the streets to protect it.The center-left will call us self-righteous idiots on social media? Fine. Let them create their vapid digital noise. While they are laughing/crying on Bluesky about the latest idiotic thing uttered by a Republican and voter apathy (or where/whatever), we will be on the ground building the literal networks of survival. When the system inevitably fractures under its own greed, the working class won't run to the liberals who spent decades telling them to compromise. They will run to the people who actually built the infrastructure to keep them alive. Many of the liberals/Democrats/"vote blue no matter who" crowd will run to join the fascists and call it "pragmatism".
I didn't think you'd have such a passionate response since you said voting for centrists was a "a defensive five minute tactical choice", but I'll give my thoughts.
I mean, sure? You could also say "Baseball is designed to manipulate you into swinging a bat", but that doesn't give any positive or negative moral value to swinging bats.
I phrased it like that because I knew there were some counter-examples, but this isn't one of them. "Progressives" in the early 20th century were not egalitarians, the core defining value that unites all leftists, since they supported eugenics, scientific racism, persecuting prostitutes, and so on. Woodrow Wilson hosted a viewing of Birth of a Nation at the White House. Fascist in morality. Wilson is one of those "vote for anyone but him" examples in history, not "vote for him to keep someone worse out".
Great example in my favor actually. Compare to what Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan were doing to communists in the same year (1940). Prosecuting 200-something people that had ties to the Soviet Union was considerably less harmful to socialism than pogroms and concentration camps.
Sure, that's possibly a good counter-example. Though I'm not sure any of this is relevant at all since an actual fascist party wasn't really on the ballot at any point in this time period. And moreover, while both Democratic and Republican presidents kept J. Edgar Hoover in charge of the FBI (obviously a point of shame), only one side supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made the modern progressive movement possible.
😐
Quite the opposite. You're alienating the population because all of the evils the Trump administration is doing could've been avoided if just a small percentage more of the population mobilized against it. You don't want to entertain that notion because you alternate between saying saying "Democrats are useless because they couldn't stop Trump" which plays well for the crowd, but also "Democrats aren't that much worse than Trump", which doesn't. Your opinions would be a lot more credible if you picked one of those and stuck with it genuinely instead of trying to dip your toes in both pools.
You should talk to more people. A lot of people care about that.
Yeah, it does come up.
True. Unfortunate that they crippled themselves with all the in-fighting in addition to the cops and FBI murdering them.
Mutual aid is a wonderful thing but you're probably delusional if you think we're approaching a future where it provides a valid alternative to the state itself for enough of the country to manifest socialism. If fascists are in power, they will dismantle it by force and have no qualms doing so. Such a thing is only possible if fascists are kept out of power.
Yeah, leftists make life harder on themselves because in addition to fascists and other authoritarians wanting to kill them, they dilute their own power (their leverage, as you call it) with ideological micro-schisms and self-sabotage.
As someone who consistently preaches left unity with everyone except Stalinists/Maoists/Juchists, it's not against my worldview that a Maoist group crippled themselves.
On July 28 2026 01:08 LightSpectra wrote: [quote] If all of the excesses and corruption of an Epstein accomplice POTUS didn't spur people into revolutionary socialism, then what will?
(ongoing) Deliberate and multi-generational efforts (like those I mentioned) by informed and dedicated workers aligning with circumstances ideally help brought about by those diligent efforts.
Nothing will magically 'spur' people into a revolution. Thinking a scandal will change the world is liberal idealism. As you pointed out, the Epstein Class owns the media, the algorithms, and the grocery stores (and in effect, the farms/factories that fill them). They know how to manage public anger and turn it into various forms of "harmless digital noise". The only thing that changes this is a brutal, multi-generational grind. We have to build/ramp up independent survival networks right now so people don't starve when they strike. We don't wait for the system to collapse. We diligently build the collective capacity to protect workers by choking off corporate profits, so that when the system finally fractures under its own greed, the working class has the raw physical leverage to take over instead of the fascists.
How do you or anyone think spending a couple pages arguing with Trump supporters about whether AOC is a member of DSA fits into this or your alternative preference (which would be nice to be seen explained)?
I don't have any criticisms. It's a fine outlook. I assume, since you said "We don't wait for the system to collapse", you therefore would agree that this multi-generational effort is more likely to succeed if socialists vote for centrists/liberals to keep fascists out of power whenever possible, i.e. the opposite of accelerationism. Correct?
You are fundamentally confusing the symptom with the disease. Corporate centrists do not stop fascism. Their policies explicitly manufacture the economic misery, desperation, and cynicism that breeds it. When liberals protect monopolies, bails out banks, and suppresses working-class wages, they lay down the foundations for the next right-wing strongman.Treating corporate Democrats as a 'shield' is a delusion. They are a political ratchet. The right moves the goalposts, and the center locks them into place. Voting for them doesn't defeat fascism, it just enables the slow motion decline of society while their corporate donors line their pockets."
I reject accelerationism in part because hoping for a catastrophic collapse without an organized alternative is suicidal. But you are misunderstanding the functionality/meaningfulness of voting as political engagement. It takes ~five minutes once every two years (at least it should in an industrialized country). If a worker decides that pulling the lever for a centrist buys a sliver of defensive breathing room for our independent unions and mutual aid networks to breathe, fine. Do it. If another worker decides the corporate party needs to be starved of votes to break its leverage, fine. Do that. But do not confuse a defensive five minute tactical choice inside a rigged capitalist system with the actual multi-generational work of building working-class power. The latter being how you actually keep fascists out of power.
One reason the Democratic establishment constantly drags progressives to the right is because of the exact logic you just laid out. They know they can give you objectively worse, corporate/Republican/lobbyist-written policies, and you will still fall in line because you are terrified of the alternative. You have given away all your leverage for free. By making 'harm reduction' one's political guidepost, you ensure that the center rarely has to concede a single thing to the working class (but for to keep the extraction going ala the New Deal). My outlook doesn't really care about your voting habits per se. It cares about what you are doing the other 364 days of the year. The only way to stop a fascist isn't to vote for a corporate puppet. It is to build the organized, independent capacity to shut down the economy when the state steps out of line. Which if you noticed, there was a bipartisan multi-generational effort to dismantle people's capacity to do that coming out of the Civil Rights Movement when they had a similar version of this discussion and falling in line behind centrists was the prevailing common sense. Which again, led us directly to Trump being president 2x (so far).
Even if all your criticisms of corporate centrism were true, that doesn't change the fact that every single thing fascists do in office makes the status quo worse than whatever a centrist would do.
Choosing not to vote for the most left candidate whenever possible, even if they aren't very left, is actually what gives away leverage. If a politician won't get votes from the left no matter what they can do (within reason), they're going to instead fish for the votes from the center and right. That moves the Overton window to the right and makes grassroots socialists even more alienated. But probably the most important consequence of this is that people operating the state can use their power to cripple all of the extra-state apparatuses like mutual aid and unions that socialists are capable of building. Right-wingers itch at every possible opportunity to roll out McCarthyist policies to prevent grassroots socialism from happening; centrists sometimes do this, but it's a lot more rare and a lot less vicious.
You can see from history that this almost never improves that status quo. It's about as rare as directly transitioning from absolute tsardom to Leninism.
And another point about this is: how much multi-generational work do you think you're actually going to succeed in building if you've successfully pissed off 90~% of the population by doing this? I mean, just going by the last election, if you hypothetically didn't vote for Harris: Trump voters already think you're a goddless commie, and the center/center-left folks that finds out you didn't vote for Harris are going to think you're untrustworthy, self-righteous, and an idiot. Not a good position to be in if you're trying to be the backbone that builds the future of society.
You're just ignoring the actual argument to rationalize your fixation on harm-reduction voting. That is part of what I'm pointing out the system is designed to manipulate you into doing. Your theory of electoral gravity is a key part of how the establishment keeps you in this hopeless Hamster Wheel.
Your belief that centrists are less vicious and rarely deploy McCarthyist policies is misleading at best. Who launched the Palmer Raids against socialists? Woodrow Wilson, a progressive champion. Who signed the Smith Act to jail communists? The "best Democrat in history", Franklin D. Roosevelt. Who ran COINTELPRO to assassinate Black Panthers and dismantle the Black Radical Tradition? Liberal darlings JFK and LBJ. Who militarized the modern police state and crushed Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter? Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Who cracked down on students opposing genocide? Joe Biden.
They've managed to confuse you into believing that supporting the people laying the foundations for fascism is the only way to protect yourself from fascism. It'd be funny if it weren't so catastrophic.
You think I am alienating 90% of the population because you view 'the population' as a collection of online pundits/posters obsessed with whether someone voted for Clinton or Harris or whatever (and my general disdain for that kind of engagement). Normal, working-class people do not join movements because of a voting scorecard. They join them because of material reality. When a family is getting evicted and a radical mutual aid network stops the landlord, they don't care who we voted for. When an independent union wins them a living wage and healthcare through a brutal strike, they don't care about our presidential preferences (at least historically, going forward, yeah it comes up). The Black Panthers didn't build the most influential radical movement in modern US history by trying to look 'trustworthy' to moderate white liberals. They did it by feeding children and enlisting armed self-defense in the streets to protect it.The center-left will call us self-righteous idiots on social media? Fine. Let them create their vapid digital noise. While they are laughing/crying on Bluesky about the latest idiotic thing uttered by a Republican and voter apathy (or where/whatever), we will be on the ground building the literal networks of survival. When the system inevitably fractures under its own greed, the working class won't run to the liberals who spent decades telling them to compromise. They will run to the people who actually built the infrastructure to keep them alive. Many of the liberals/Democrats/"vote blue no matter who" crowd will run to join the fascists and call it "pragmatism".
I didn't think you'd have such a passionate response since you said voting for centrists was a "a defensive five minute tactical choice", but I'll give my thoughts.
I mean, sure? You could also say "Baseball is designed to manipulate you into swinging a bat", but that doesn't give any positive or negative moral value to swinging bats.
I phrased it like that because I knew there were some counter-examples, but this isn't one of them. "Progressives" in the early 20th century were not egalitarians, the core defining value that unites all leftists, since they supported eugenics, scientific racism, persecuting prostitutes, and so on. Woodrow Wilson hosted a viewing of Birth of a Nation at the White House. Fascist in morality. Wilson is one of those "vote for anyone but him" examples in history, not "vote for him to keep someone worse out".
Great example in my favor actually. Compare to what Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan were doing to communists in the same year (1940). Prosecuting 200-something people that had ties to the Soviet Union was considerably less harmful to socialism than pogroms and concentration camps.
Sure, that's possibly a good counter-example. Though I'm not sure any of this is relevant at all since an actual fascist party wasn't really on the ballot at any point in this time period. And moreover, while both Democratic and Republican presidents kept J. Edgar Hoover in charge of the FBI (obviously a point of shame), only one side supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made the modern progressive movement possible.
😐
Quite the opposite. You're alienating the population because all of the evils the Trump administration is doing could've been avoided if just a small percentage more of the population mobilized against it. You don't want to entertain that notion because you alternate between saying saying "Democrats are useless because they couldn't stop Trump" which plays well for the crowd, but also "Democrats aren't that much worse than Trump", which doesn't. Your opinions would be a lot more credible if you picked one of those and stuck with it genuinely instead of trying to dip your toes in both pools.
You should talk to more people. A lot of people care about that.
Yeah, it does come up.
True. Unfortunate that they crippled themselves with all the in-fighting in addition to the cops and FBI murdering them.
Mutual aid is a wonderful thing but you're probably delusional if you think we're approaching a future where it provides a valid alternative to the state itself for enough of the country to manifest socialism. If fascists are in power, they will dismantle it by force and have no qualms doing so. Such a thing is only possible if fascists are kept out of power.
I think that says much more than you intended.
Yeah, leftists make life harder on themselves because in addition to fascists and other authoritarians wanting to kill them, they dilute their own power (their leverage, as you call it) with ideological micro-schisms and self-sabotage.
As someone who consistently preaches left unity with everyone except Stalinists/Maoists/Juchists, it's not against my worldview that a Maoist group crippled themselves.
Since you've completely lost the plot talking about "infighting" and "micro-schisms and self-sabotage" to rationalize the Democrat "shield" murdering people that want human rights, I think it's worth trying to dig into this general idea of infighting. For it to be a fight, there has to be opposition.
What are some of the points you believe centrists must stop fighting about and concede to those to their left? Why?
On July 28 2026 01:23 GreenHorizons wrote: [quote] (ongoing) Deliberate and multi-generational efforts (like those I mentioned) by informed and dedicated workers aligning with circumstances ideally help brought about by those diligent efforts.
Nothing will magically 'spur' people into a revolution. Thinking a scandal will change the world is liberal idealism. As you pointed out, the Epstein Class owns the media, the algorithms, and the grocery stores (and in effect, the farms/factories that fill them). They know how to manage public anger and turn it into various forms of "harmless digital noise". The only thing that changes this is a brutal, multi-generational grind. We have to build/ramp up independent survival networks right now so people don't starve when they strike. We don't wait for the system to collapse. We diligently build the collective capacity to protect workers by choking off corporate profits, so that when the system finally fractures under its own greed, the working class has the raw physical leverage to take over instead of the fascists.
How do you or anyone think spending a couple pages arguing with Trump supporters about whether AOC is a member of DSA fits into this or your alternative preference (which would be nice to be seen explained)?
I don't have any criticisms. It's a fine outlook. I assume, since you said "We don't wait for the system to collapse", you therefore would agree that this multi-generational effort is more likely to succeed if socialists vote for centrists/liberals to keep fascists out of power whenever possible, i.e. the opposite of accelerationism. Correct?
You are fundamentally confusing the symptom with the disease. Corporate centrists do not stop fascism. Their policies explicitly manufacture the economic misery, desperation, and cynicism that breeds it. When liberals protect monopolies, bails out banks, and suppresses working-class wages, they lay down the foundations for the next right-wing strongman.Treating corporate Democrats as a 'shield' is a delusion. They are a political ratchet. The right moves the goalposts, and the center locks them into place. Voting for them doesn't defeat fascism, it just enables the slow motion decline of society while their corporate donors line their pockets."
I reject accelerationism in part because hoping for a catastrophic collapse without an organized alternative is suicidal. But you are misunderstanding the functionality/meaningfulness of voting as political engagement. It takes ~five minutes once every two years (at least it should in an industrialized country). If a worker decides that pulling the lever for a centrist buys a sliver of defensive breathing room for our independent unions and mutual aid networks to breathe, fine. Do it. If another worker decides the corporate party needs to be starved of votes to break its leverage, fine. Do that. But do not confuse a defensive five minute tactical choice inside a rigged capitalist system with the actual multi-generational work of building working-class power. The latter being how you actually keep fascists out of power.
One reason the Democratic establishment constantly drags progressives to the right is because of the exact logic you just laid out. They know they can give you objectively worse, corporate/Republican/lobbyist-written policies, and you will still fall in line because you are terrified of the alternative. You have given away all your leverage for free. By making 'harm reduction' one's political guidepost, you ensure that the center rarely has to concede a single thing to the working class (but for to keep the extraction going ala the New Deal). My outlook doesn't really care about your voting habits per se. It cares about what you are doing the other 364 days of the year. The only way to stop a fascist isn't to vote for a corporate puppet. It is to build the organized, independent capacity to shut down the economy when the state steps out of line. Which if you noticed, there was a bipartisan multi-generational effort to dismantle people's capacity to do that coming out of the Civil Rights Movement when they had a similar version of this discussion and falling in line behind centrists was the prevailing common sense. Which again, led us directly to Trump being president 2x (so far).
Even if all your criticisms of corporate centrism were true, that doesn't change the fact that every single thing fascists do in office makes the status quo worse than whatever a centrist would do.
Choosing not to vote for the most left candidate whenever possible, even if they aren't very left, is actually what gives away leverage. If a politician won't get votes from the left no matter what they can do (within reason), they're going to instead fish for the votes from the center and right. That moves the Overton window to the right and makes grassroots socialists even more alienated. But probably the most important consequence of this is that people operating the state can use their power to cripple all of the extra-state apparatuses like mutual aid and unions that socialists are capable of building. Right-wingers itch at every possible opportunity to roll out McCarthyist policies to prevent grassroots socialism from happening; centrists sometimes do this, but it's a lot more rare and a lot less vicious.
You can see from history that this almost never improves that status quo. It's about as rare as directly transitioning from absolute tsardom to Leninism.
And another point about this is: how much multi-generational work do you think you're actually going to succeed in building if you've successfully pissed off 90~% of the population by doing this? I mean, just going by the last election, if you hypothetically didn't vote for Harris: Trump voters already think you're a goddless commie, and the center/center-left folks that finds out you didn't vote for Harris are going to think you're untrustworthy, self-righteous, and an idiot. Not a good position to be in if you're trying to be the backbone that builds the future of society.
You're just ignoring the actual argument to rationalize your fixation on harm-reduction voting. That is part of what I'm pointing out the system is designed to manipulate you into doing. Your theory of electoral gravity is a key part of how the establishment keeps you in this hopeless Hamster Wheel.
Your belief that centrists are less vicious and rarely deploy McCarthyist policies is misleading at best. Who launched the Palmer Raids against socialists? Woodrow Wilson, a progressive champion. Who signed the Smith Act to jail communists? The "best Democrat in history", Franklin D. Roosevelt. Who ran COINTELPRO to assassinate Black Panthers and dismantle the Black Radical Tradition? Liberal darlings JFK and LBJ. Who militarized the modern police state and crushed Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter? Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Who cracked down on students opposing genocide? Joe Biden.
They've managed to confuse you into believing that supporting the people laying the foundations for fascism is the only way to protect yourself from fascism. It'd be funny if it weren't so catastrophic.
You think I am alienating 90% of the population because you view 'the population' as a collection of online pundits/posters obsessed with whether someone voted for Clinton or Harris or whatever (and my general disdain for that kind of engagement). Normal, working-class people do not join movements because of a voting scorecard. They join them because of material reality. When a family is getting evicted and a radical mutual aid network stops the landlord, they don't care who we voted for. When an independent union wins them a living wage and healthcare through a brutal strike, they don't care about our presidential preferences (at least historically, going forward, yeah it comes up). The Black Panthers didn't build the most influential radical movement in modern US history by trying to look 'trustworthy' to moderate white liberals. They did it by feeding children and enlisting armed self-defense in the streets to protect it.The center-left will call us self-righteous idiots on social media? Fine. Let them create their vapid digital noise. While they are laughing/crying on Bluesky about the latest idiotic thing uttered by a Republican and voter apathy (or where/whatever), we will be on the ground building the literal networks of survival. When the system inevitably fractures under its own greed, the working class won't run to the liberals who spent decades telling them to compromise. They will run to the people who actually built the infrastructure to keep them alive. Many of the liberals/Democrats/"vote blue no matter who" crowd will run to join the fascists and call it "pragmatism".
I didn't think you'd have such a passionate response since you said voting for centrists was a "a defensive five minute tactical choice", but I'll give my thoughts.
I mean, sure? You could also say "Baseball is designed to manipulate you into swinging a bat", but that doesn't give any positive or negative moral value to swinging bats.
I phrased it like that because I knew there were some counter-examples, but this isn't one of them. "Progressives" in the early 20th century were not egalitarians, the core defining value that unites all leftists, since they supported eugenics, scientific racism, persecuting prostitutes, and so on. Woodrow Wilson hosted a viewing of Birth of a Nation at the White House. Fascist in morality. Wilson is one of those "vote for anyone but him" examples in history, not "vote for him to keep someone worse out".
Great example in my favor actually. Compare to what Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan were doing to communists in the same year (1940). Prosecuting 200-something people that had ties to the Soviet Union was considerably less harmful to socialism than pogroms and concentration camps.
Sure, that's possibly a good counter-example. Though I'm not sure any of this is relevant at all since an actual fascist party wasn't really on the ballot at any point in this time period. And moreover, while both Democratic and Republican presidents kept J. Edgar Hoover in charge of the FBI (obviously a point of shame), only one side supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made the modern progressive movement possible.
😐
Quite the opposite. You're alienating the population because all of the evils the Trump administration is doing could've been avoided if just a small percentage more of the population mobilized against it. You don't want to entertain that notion because you alternate between saying saying "Democrats are useless because they couldn't stop Trump" which plays well for the crowd, but also "Democrats aren't that much worse than Trump", which doesn't. Your opinions would be a lot more credible if you picked one of those and stuck with it genuinely instead of trying to dip your toes in both pools.
You should talk to more people. A lot of people care about that.
Yeah, it does come up.
True. Unfortunate that they crippled themselves with all the in-fighting in addition to the cops and FBI murdering them.
Mutual aid is a wonderful thing but you're probably delusional if you think we're approaching a future where it provides a valid alternative to the state itself for enough of the country to manifest socialism. If fascists are in power, they will dismantle it by force and have no qualms doing so. Such a thing is only possible if fascists are kept out of power.
I think that says much more than you intended.
Yeah, leftists make life harder on themselves because in addition to fascists and other authoritarians wanting to kill them, they dilute their own power (their leverage, as you call it) with ideological micro-schisms and self-sabotage.
As someone who consistently preaches left unity with everyone except Stalinists/Maoists/Juchists, it's not against my worldview that a Maoist group crippled themselves.
Since you've completely lost the plot talking about "infighting" and "micro-schisms and self-sabotage" to rationalize the Democrat "shield" murdering people that want human rights, I think it's worth trying to dig into this general idea of infighting. For it to be a fight, there has to be opposition.
I'm not rationalizing anyone murdering anyone. I said J. Edgar Hoover was possibly a good counter-example against voting for liberals/centrists. It would be a vastly different world if Obama or Biden had their own Hoover that was assassinating Americans on American soil to impede civil rights, the moral case of voting against Republicans would be a lot harder if not impossible to make in that world.
While the Kennedys and LBJ were relatively progressive for their time despite COINTELPRO, there were some even more left-wing Democrats like Jesse Jackson and Eugene McCarthy (before the 80s) that you could argue made Democrats worth supporting just so they could pull the rest to the left. They probably would've sacked Hoover immediately. It might be easy to dismiss that because we know they didn't win in hindsight, but it would be a vastly different world if only a small percentage of the population moved to support them.
What are some of the points you believe centrists must stop fighting about and concede to those to their left? Why?
"Centrism" is not a universal position or ideology, so that question is too vague to answer. It's always a relative position to something else in a certain place and time. I could comment if you were more specific.
On July 28 2026 03:33 GreenHorizons wrote: [quote] How do you or anyone think spending a couple pages arguing with Trump supporters about whether AOC is a member of DSA fits into this or your alternative preference (which would be nice to be seen explained)?
I don't have any criticisms. It's a fine outlook. I assume, since you said "We don't wait for the system to collapse", you therefore would agree that this multi-generational effort is more likely to succeed if socialists vote for centrists/liberals to keep fascists out of power whenever possible, i.e. the opposite of accelerationism. Correct?
You are fundamentally confusing the symptom with the disease. Corporate centrists do not stop fascism. Their policies explicitly manufacture the economic misery, desperation, and cynicism that breeds it. When liberals protect monopolies, bails out banks, and suppresses working-class wages, they lay down the foundations for the next right-wing strongman.Treating corporate Democrats as a 'shield' is a delusion. They are a political ratchet. The right moves the goalposts, and the center locks them into place. Voting for them doesn't defeat fascism, it just enables the slow motion decline of society while their corporate donors line their pockets."
I reject accelerationism in part because hoping for a catastrophic collapse without an organized alternative is suicidal. But you are misunderstanding the functionality/meaningfulness of voting as political engagement. It takes ~five minutes once every two years (at least it should in an industrialized country). If a worker decides that pulling the lever for a centrist buys a sliver of defensive breathing room for our independent unions and mutual aid networks to breathe, fine. Do it. If another worker decides the corporate party needs to be starved of votes to break its leverage, fine. Do that. But do not confuse a defensive five minute tactical choice inside a rigged capitalist system with the actual multi-generational work of building working-class power. The latter being how you actually keep fascists out of power.
One reason the Democratic establishment constantly drags progressives to the right is because of the exact logic you just laid out. They know they can give you objectively worse, corporate/Republican/lobbyist-written policies, and you will still fall in line because you are terrified of the alternative. You have given away all your leverage for free. By making 'harm reduction' one's political guidepost, you ensure that the center rarely has to concede a single thing to the working class (but for to keep the extraction going ala the New Deal). My outlook doesn't really care about your voting habits per se. It cares about what you are doing the other 364 days of the year. The only way to stop a fascist isn't to vote for a corporate puppet. It is to build the organized, independent capacity to shut down the economy when the state steps out of line. Which if you noticed, there was a bipartisan multi-generational effort to dismantle people's capacity to do that coming out of the Civil Rights Movement when they had a similar version of this discussion and falling in line behind centrists was the prevailing common sense. Which again, led us directly to Trump being president 2x (so far).
Even if all your criticisms of corporate centrism were true, that doesn't change the fact that every single thing fascists do in office makes the status quo worse than whatever a centrist would do.
Choosing not to vote for the most left candidate whenever possible, even if they aren't very left, is actually what gives away leverage. If a politician won't get votes from the left no matter what they can do (within reason), they're going to instead fish for the votes from the center and right. That moves the Overton window to the right and makes grassroots socialists even more alienated. But probably the most important consequence of this is that people operating the state can use their power to cripple all of the extra-state apparatuses like mutual aid and unions that socialists are capable of building. Right-wingers itch at every possible opportunity to roll out McCarthyist policies to prevent grassroots socialism from happening; centrists sometimes do this, but it's a lot more rare and a lot less vicious.
You can see from history that this almost never improves that status quo. It's about as rare as directly transitioning from absolute tsardom to Leninism.
And another point about this is: how much multi-generational work do you think you're actually going to succeed in building if you've successfully pissed off 90~% of the population by doing this? I mean, just going by the last election, if you hypothetically didn't vote for Harris: Trump voters already think you're a goddless commie, and the center/center-left folks that finds out you didn't vote for Harris are going to think you're untrustworthy, self-righteous, and an idiot. Not a good position to be in if you're trying to be the backbone that builds the future of society.
You're just ignoring the actual argument to rationalize your fixation on harm-reduction voting. That is part of what I'm pointing out the system is designed to manipulate you into doing. Your theory of electoral gravity is a key part of how the establishment keeps you in this hopeless Hamster Wheel.
Your belief that centrists are less vicious and rarely deploy McCarthyist policies is misleading at best. Who launched the Palmer Raids against socialists? Woodrow Wilson, a progressive champion. Who signed the Smith Act to jail communists? The "best Democrat in history", Franklin D. Roosevelt. Who ran COINTELPRO to assassinate Black Panthers and dismantle the Black Radical Tradition? Liberal darlings JFK and LBJ. Who militarized the modern police state and crushed Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter? Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Who cracked down on students opposing genocide? Joe Biden.
They've managed to confuse you into believing that supporting the people laying the foundations for fascism is the only way to protect yourself from fascism. It'd be funny if it weren't so catastrophic.
You think I am alienating 90% of the population because you view 'the population' as a collection of online pundits/posters obsessed with whether someone voted for Clinton or Harris or whatever (and my general disdain for that kind of engagement). Normal, working-class people do not join movements because of a voting scorecard. They join them because of material reality. When a family is getting evicted and a radical mutual aid network stops the landlord, they don't care who we voted for. When an independent union wins them a living wage and healthcare through a brutal strike, they don't care about our presidential preferences (at least historically, going forward, yeah it comes up). The Black Panthers didn't build the most influential radical movement in modern US history by trying to look 'trustworthy' to moderate white liberals. They did it by feeding children and enlisting armed self-defense in the streets to protect it.The center-left will call us self-righteous idiots on social media? Fine. Let them create their vapid digital noise. While they are laughing/crying on Bluesky about the latest idiotic thing uttered by a Republican and voter apathy (or where/whatever), we will be on the ground building the literal networks of survival. When the system inevitably fractures under its own greed, the working class won't run to the liberals who spent decades telling them to compromise. They will run to the people who actually built the infrastructure to keep them alive. Many of the liberals/Democrats/"vote blue no matter who" crowd will run to join the fascists and call it "pragmatism".
I didn't think you'd have such a passionate response since you said voting for centrists was a "a defensive five minute tactical choice", but I'll give my thoughts.
I mean, sure? You could also say "Baseball is designed to manipulate you into swinging a bat", but that doesn't give any positive or negative moral value to swinging bats.
I phrased it like that because I knew there were some counter-examples, but this isn't one of them. "Progressives" in the early 20th century were not egalitarians, the core defining value that unites all leftists, since they supported eugenics, scientific racism, persecuting prostitutes, and so on. Woodrow Wilson hosted a viewing of Birth of a Nation at the White House. Fascist in morality. Wilson is one of those "vote for anyone but him" examples in history, not "vote for him to keep someone worse out".
Great example in my favor actually. Compare to what Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan were doing to communists in the same year (1940). Prosecuting 200-something people that had ties to the Soviet Union was considerably less harmful to socialism than pogroms and concentration camps.
Sure, that's possibly a good counter-example. Though I'm not sure any of this is relevant at all since an actual fascist party wasn't really on the ballot at any point in this time period. And moreover, while both Democratic and Republican presidents kept J. Edgar Hoover in charge of the FBI (obviously a point of shame), only one side supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made the modern progressive movement possible.
😐
Quite the opposite. You're alienating the population because all of the evils the Trump administration is doing could've been avoided if just a small percentage more of the population mobilized against it. You don't want to entertain that notion because you alternate between saying saying "Democrats are useless because they couldn't stop Trump" which plays well for the crowd, but also "Democrats aren't that much worse than Trump", which doesn't. Your opinions would be a lot more credible if you picked one of those and stuck with it genuinely instead of trying to dip your toes in both pools.
You should talk to more people. A lot of people care about that.
Yeah, it does come up.
True. Unfortunate that they crippled themselves with all the in-fighting in addition to the cops and FBI murdering them.
Mutual aid is a wonderful thing but you're probably delusional if you think we're approaching a future where it provides a valid alternative to the state itself for enough of the country to manifest socialism. If fascists are in power, they will dismantle it by force and have no qualms doing so. Such a thing is only possible if fascists are kept out of power.
I think that says much more than you intended.
Yeah, leftists make life harder on themselves because in addition to fascists and other authoritarians wanting to kill them, they dilute their own power (their leverage, as you call it) with ideological micro-schisms and self-sabotage.
As someone who consistently preaches left unity with everyone except Stalinists/Maoists/Juchists, it's not against my worldview that a Maoist group crippled themselves.
Since you've completely lost the plot talking about "infighting" and "micro-schisms and self-sabotage" to rationalize the Democrat "shield" murdering people that want human rights, I think it's worth trying to dig into this general idea of infighting. For it to be a fight, there has to be opposition.
I said J. Edgar Hoover was possibly a good counter-example against voting for liberals/centrists. It would be a vastly different world if Obama or Biden had their own Hoover that was assassinating Americans on American soil to impede civil rights, the moral case of voting against Republicans would be a lot harder if not impossible to make in that world.
While the Kennedys and LBJ were relatively progressive for their time despite COINTELPRO, there were some even more left-wing Democrats like Jesse Jackson and Eugene McCarthy (before the 80s) that you could argue made Democrats worth supporting just so they could pull the rest to the left. They probably would've sacked Hoover immediately. It might be easy to dismiss that because we know they didn't win in hindsight,
but it would be a vastly different world if only a small percentage of the population moved to support them.
What are some of the points you believe centrists must stop fighting about and concede to those to their left? Why?
"Centrism" is not a universal position or ideology, so that question is too vague to answer. It's always a relative position to something else in a certain place and time. I could comment if you were more specific.
You most definitely are, more importantly though, you're advocating supporting the murderers as a way to protect oneself from them. It'd be laughable if it wasn't so horrifying.
I think you know what I'm talking about. Democrat leadership (to the extent that's real), Establishment Democrats? Maybe you want me to call them moderate Democrats? Basically the kind of Democrats that refused to vote for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 primary?
What do you believe they need to stop fighting with people to their left about and just concede to them? Why?
The purity testing and infighting is something that GH engages in so much that calling it out and pointing it out to him would be like telling a fish that they are wet, I don't think he has an internal mechanism to be able to recognize that he's a huge part of that problem, thus the immediate deflection into centrists.
The purity tests happen much more on the left, centrists are pretty good at overlooking their glaring issues and banding together, it's the leftists who will mock and gawk, constantly at people they agree on 98 % of things.
On July 28 2026 04:26 GreenHorizons wrote: [quote]
You are fundamentally confusing the symptom with the disease. Corporate centrists do not stop fascism. Their policies explicitly manufacture the economic misery, desperation, and cynicism that breeds it. When liberals protect monopolies, bails out banks, and suppresses working-class wages, they lay down the foundations for the next right-wing strongman.Treating corporate Democrats as a 'shield' is a delusion. They are a political ratchet. The right moves the goalposts, and the center locks them into place. Voting for them doesn't defeat fascism, it just enables the slow motion decline of society while their corporate donors line their pockets."
I reject accelerationism in part because hoping for a catastrophic collapse without an organized alternative is suicidal. But you are misunderstanding the functionality/meaningfulness of voting as political engagement. It takes ~five minutes once every two years (at least it should in an industrialized country). If a worker decides that pulling the lever for a centrist buys a sliver of defensive breathing room for our independent unions and mutual aid networks to breathe, fine. Do it. If another worker decides the corporate party needs to be starved of votes to break its leverage, fine. Do that. But do not confuse a defensive five minute tactical choice inside a rigged capitalist system with the actual multi-generational work of building working-class power. The latter being how you actually keep fascists out of power.
One reason the Democratic establishment constantly drags progressives to the right is because of the exact logic you just laid out. They know they can give you objectively worse, corporate/Republican/lobbyist-written policies, and you will still fall in line because you are terrified of the alternative. You have given away all your leverage for free. By making 'harm reduction' one's political guidepost, you ensure that the center rarely has to concede a single thing to the working class (but for to keep the extraction going ala the New Deal). My outlook doesn't really care about your voting habits per se. It cares about what you are doing the other 364 days of the year. The only way to stop a fascist isn't to vote for a corporate puppet. It is to build the organized, independent capacity to shut down the economy when the state steps out of line. Which if you noticed, there was a bipartisan multi-generational effort to dismantle people's capacity to do that coming out of the Civil Rights Movement when they had a similar version of this discussion and falling in line behind centrists was the prevailing common sense. Which again, led us directly to Trump being president 2x (so far).
Even if all your criticisms of corporate centrism were true, that doesn't change the fact that every single thing fascists do in office makes the status quo worse than whatever a centrist would do.
Choosing not to vote for the most left candidate whenever possible, even if they aren't very left, is actually what gives away leverage. If a politician won't get votes from the left no matter what they can do (within reason), they're going to instead fish for the votes from the center and right. That moves the Overton window to the right and makes grassroots socialists even more alienated. But probably the most important consequence of this is that people operating the state can use their power to cripple all of the extra-state apparatuses like mutual aid and unions that socialists are capable of building. Right-wingers itch at every possible opportunity to roll out McCarthyist policies to prevent grassroots socialism from happening; centrists sometimes do this, but it's a lot more rare and a lot less vicious.
You can see from history that this almost never improves that status quo. It's about as rare as directly transitioning from absolute tsardom to Leninism.
And another point about this is: how much multi-generational work do you think you're actually going to succeed in building if you've successfully pissed off 90~% of the population by doing this? I mean, just going by the last election, if you hypothetically didn't vote for Harris: Trump voters already think you're a goddless commie, and the center/center-left folks that finds out you didn't vote for Harris are going to think you're untrustworthy, self-righteous, and an idiot. Not a good position to be in if you're trying to be the backbone that builds the future of society.
You're just ignoring the actual argument to rationalize your fixation on harm-reduction voting. That is part of what I'm pointing out the system is designed to manipulate you into doing. Your theory of electoral gravity is a key part of how the establishment keeps you in this hopeless Hamster Wheel.
Your belief that centrists are less vicious and rarely deploy McCarthyist policies is misleading at best. Who launched the Palmer Raids against socialists? Woodrow Wilson, a progressive champion. Who signed the Smith Act to jail communists? The "best Democrat in history", Franklin D. Roosevelt. Who ran COINTELPRO to assassinate Black Panthers and dismantle the Black Radical Tradition? Liberal darlings JFK and LBJ. Who militarized the modern police state and crushed Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter? Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Who cracked down on students opposing genocide? Joe Biden.
They've managed to confuse you into believing that supporting the people laying the foundations for fascism is the only way to protect yourself from fascism. It'd be funny if it weren't so catastrophic.
You think I am alienating 90% of the population because you view 'the population' as a collection of online pundits/posters obsessed with whether someone voted for Clinton or Harris or whatever (and my general disdain for that kind of engagement). Normal, working-class people do not join movements because of a voting scorecard. They join them because of material reality. When a family is getting evicted and a radical mutual aid network stops the landlord, they don't care who we voted for. When an independent union wins them a living wage and healthcare through a brutal strike, they don't care about our presidential preferences (at least historically, going forward, yeah it comes up). The Black Panthers didn't build the most influential radical movement in modern US history by trying to look 'trustworthy' to moderate white liberals. They did it by feeding children and enlisting armed self-defense in the streets to protect it.The center-left will call us self-righteous idiots on social media? Fine. Let them create their vapid digital noise. While they are laughing/crying on Bluesky about the latest idiotic thing uttered by a Republican and voter apathy (or where/whatever), we will be on the ground building the literal networks of survival. When the system inevitably fractures under its own greed, the working class won't run to the liberals who spent decades telling them to compromise. They will run to the people who actually built the infrastructure to keep them alive. Many of the liberals/Democrats/"vote blue no matter who" crowd will run to join the fascists and call it "pragmatism".
I didn't think you'd have such a passionate response since you said voting for centrists was a "a defensive five minute tactical choice", but I'll give my thoughts.
I mean, sure? You could also say "Baseball is designed to manipulate you into swinging a bat", but that doesn't give any positive or negative moral value to swinging bats.
I phrased it like that because I knew there were some counter-examples, but this isn't one of them. "Progressives" in the early 20th century were not egalitarians, the core defining value that unites all leftists, since they supported eugenics, scientific racism, persecuting prostitutes, and so on. Woodrow Wilson hosted a viewing of Birth of a Nation at the White House. Fascist in morality. Wilson is one of those "vote for anyone but him" examples in history, not "vote for him to keep someone worse out".
Great example in my favor actually. Compare to what Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan were doing to communists in the same year (1940). Prosecuting 200-something people that had ties to the Soviet Union was considerably less harmful to socialism than pogroms and concentration camps.
Sure, that's possibly a good counter-example. Though I'm not sure any of this is relevant at all since an actual fascist party wasn't really on the ballot at any point in this time period. And moreover, while both Democratic and Republican presidents kept J. Edgar Hoover in charge of the FBI (obviously a point of shame), only one side supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made the modern progressive movement possible.
😐
Quite the opposite. You're alienating the population because all of the evils the Trump administration is doing could've been avoided if just a small percentage more of the population mobilized against it. You don't want to entertain that notion because you alternate between saying saying "Democrats are useless because they couldn't stop Trump" which plays well for the crowd, but also "Democrats aren't that much worse than Trump", which doesn't. Your opinions would be a lot more credible if you picked one of those and stuck with it genuinely instead of trying to dip your toes in both pools.
You should talk to more people. A lot of people care about that.
Yeah, it does come up.
True. Unfortunate that they crippled themselves with all the in-fighting in addition to the cops and FBI murdering them.
Mutual aid is a wonderful thing but you're probably delusional if you think we're approaching a future where it provides a valid alternative to the state itself for enough of the country to manifest socialism. If fascists are in power, they will dismantle it by force and have no qualms doing so. Such a thing is only possible if fascists are kept out of power.
I think that says much more than you intended.
Yeah, leftists make life harder on themselves because in addition to fascists and other authoritarians wanting to kill them, they dilute their own power (their leverage, as you call it) with ideological micro-schisms and self-sabotage.
As someone who consistently preaches left unity with everyone except Stalinists/Maoists/Juchists, it's not against my worldview that a Maoist group crippled themselves.
Since you've completely lost the plot talking about "infighting" and "micro-schisms and self-sabotage" to rationalize the Democrat "shield" murdering people that want human rights, I think it's worth trying to dig into this general idea of infighting. For it to be a fight, there has to be opposition.
I said J. Edgar Hoover was possibly a good counter-example against voting for liberals/centrists. It would be a vastly different world if Obama or Biden had their own Hoover that was assassinating Americans on American soil to impede civil rights, the moral case of voting against Republicans would be a lot harder if not impossible to make in that world.
While the Kennedys and LBJ were relatively progressive for their time despite COINTELPRO, there were some even more left-wing Democrats like Jesse Jackson and Eugene McCarthy (before the 80s) that you could argue made Democrats worth supporting just so they could pull the rest to the left. They probably would've sacked Hoover immediately. It might be easy to dismiss that because we know they didn't win in hindsight,
but it would be a vastly different world if only a small percentage of the population moved to support them.
What are some of the points you believe centrists must stop fighting about and concede to those to their left? Why?
"Centrism" is not a universal position or ideology, so that question is too vague to answer. It's always a relative position to something else in a certain place and time. I could comment if you were more specific.
You most definitely are, more importantly though, you're advocating supporting the murderers as a way to protect oneself from them. It'd be laughable if it wasn't so horrifying.
I think you know what I'm talking about. Democrat leadership (to the extent that's real), Establishment Democrats? Maybe you want me to call them moderate Democrats? Basically the kind of Democrats that refused to vote for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 primary?
What do you believe they need to stop fighting with people to their left about and just concede to them? Why?
Without arbitrarily deleting words from post, show me where I said that.
The part of my post you deleted was where I said people should've supported a Democratic POTUS nominee that would've immediately sacked Hoover.
(I've actually gone out of my way to reinclude things you purposely removed)
, that's how you post (for reasons I think have become more obvious over the course of this discussion).
I find it amusing it's so hard for you (and a lot of other people) to just answer the simple request for those that lament the infighting among the left to list some of the policies/points that the corporate/establishment/moderate/thirdway/whatever Democrats need to stop infighting about and concede to those to their left in order to not self-sabotage.
EDIT: Funnily enough, this should actually be relatively easy for all of you because you have dyhb who probably voted for Clinton in the 2016 primary. It's seems LS is struggling, but surely some of you should be able to identify something?
EDIT2: I've agreed to disagree about that and am moving on to something more productive and less personal/petty/pedantic. I think your refusal to do so and your attempt at an ultimatum is comically illustrative of what I've been talking about.
I find it amusing it's impossible for you to substantiate that I'm "advocating supporting the murderers as a way to protect oneself from them."
Edit: I'll happily answer your question about the Democratic Party just as soon as you're able to substantiate that I'm "advocating supporting the murderers as a way to protect oneself from them." Until you do so I'm going to assume you're acting in bad faith.
On July 28 2026 05:00 LightSpectra wrote: [quote] Even if all your criticisms of corporate centrism were true, that doesn't change the fact that every single thing fascists do in office makes the status quo worse than whatever a centrist would do.
Choosing not to vote for the most left candidate whenever possible, even if they aren't very left, is actually what gives away leverage. If a politician won't get votes from the left no matter what they can do (within reason), they're going to instead fish for the votes from the center and right. That moves the Overton window to the right and makes grassroots socialists even more alienated. But probably the most important consequence of this is that people operating the state can use their power to cripple all of the extra-state apparatuses like mutual aid and unions that socialists are capable of building. Right-wingers itch at every possible opportunity to roll out McCarthyist policies to prevent grassroots socialism from happening; centrists sometimes do this, but it's a lot more rare and a lot less vicious.
You can see from history that this almost never improves that status quo. It's about as rare as directly transitioning from absolute tsardom to Leninism.
And another point about this is: how much multi-generational work do you think you're actually going to succeed in building if you've successfully pissed off 90~% of the population by doing this? I mean, just going by the last election, if you hypothetically didn't vote for Harris: Trump voters already think you're a goddless commie, and the center/center-left folks that finds out you didn't vote for Harris are going to think you're untrustworthy, self-righteous, and an idiot. Not a good position to be in if you're trying to be the backbone that builds the future of society.
You're just ignoring the actual argument to rationalize your fixation on harm-reduction voting. That is part of what I'm pointing out the system is designed to manipulate you into doing. Your theory of electoral gravity is a key part of how the establishment keeps you in this hopeless Hamster Wheel.
Your belief that centrists are less vicious and rarely deploy McCarthyist policies is misleading at best. Who launched the Palmer Raids against socialists? Woodrow Wilson, a progressive champion. Who signed the Smith Act to jail communists? The "best Democrat in history", Franklin D. Roosevelt. Who ran COINTELPRO to assassinate Black Panthers and dismantle the Black Radical Tradition? Liberal darlings JFK and LBJ. Who militarized the modern police state and crushed Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter? Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Who cracked down on students opposing genocide? Joe Biden.
They've managed to confuse you into believing that supporting the people laying the foundations for fascism is the only way to protect yourself from fascism. It'd be funny if it weren't so catastrophic.
You think I am alienating 90% of the population because you view 'the population' as a collection of online pundits/posters obsessed with whether someone voted for Clinton or Harris or whatever (and my general disdain for that kind of engagement). Normal, working-class people do not join movements because of a voting scorecard. They join them because of material reality. When a family is getting evicted and a radical mutual aid network stops the landlord, they don't care who we voted for. When an independent union wins them a living wage and healthcare through a brutal strike, they don't care about our presidential preferences (at least historically, going forward, yeah it comes up). The Black Panthers didn't build the most influential radical movement in modern US history by trying to look 'trustworthy' to moderate white liberals. They did it by feeding children and enlisting armed self-defense in the streets to protect it.The center-left will call us self-righteous idiots on social media? Fine. Let them create their vapid digital noise. While they are laughing/crying on Bluesky about the latest idiotic thing uttered by a Republican and voter apathy (or where/whatever), we will be on the ground building the literal networks of survival. When the system inevitably fractures under its own greed, the working class won't run to the liberals who spent decades telling them to compromise. They will run to the people who actually built the infrastructure to keep them alive. Many of the liberals/Democrats/"vote blue no matter who" crowd will run to join the fascists and call it "pragmatism".
I didn't think you'd have such a passionate response since you said voting for centrists was a "a defensive five minute tactical choice", but I'll give my thoughts.
I mean, sure? You could also say "Baseball is designed to manipulate you into swinging a bat", but that doesn't give any positive or negative moral value to swinging bats.
I phrased it like that because I knew there were some counter-examples, but this isn't one of them. "Progressives" in the early 20th century were not egalitarians, the core defining value that unites all leftists, since they supported eugenics, scientific racism, persecuting prostitutes, and so on. Woodrow Wilson hosted a viewing of Birth of a Nation at the White House. Fascist in morality. Wilson is one of those "vote for anyone but him" examples in history, not "vote for him to keep someone worse out".
Great example in my favor actually. Compare to what Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan were doing to communists in the same year (1940). Prosecuting 200-something people that had ties to the Soviet Union was considerably less harmful to socialism than pogroms and concentration camps.
Sure, that's possibly a good counter-example. Though I'm not sure any of this is relevant at all since an actual fascist party wasn't really on the ballot at any point in this time period. And moreover, while both Democratic and Republican presidents kept J. Edgar Hoover in charge of the FBI (obviously a point of shame), only one side supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made the modern progressive movement possible.
😐
Quite the opposite. You're alienating the population because all of the evils the Trump administration is doing could've been avoided if just a small percentage more of the population mobilized against it. You don't want to entertain that notion because you alternate between saying saying "Democrats are useless because they couldn't stop Trump" which plays well for the crowd, but also "Democrats aren't that much worse than Trump", which doesn't. Your opinions would be a lot more credible if you picked one of those and stuck with it genuinely instead of trying to dip your toes in both pools.
You should talk to more people. A lot of people care about that.
Yeah, it does come up.
True. Unfortunate that they crippled themselves with all the in-fighting in addition to the cops and FBI murdering them.
Mutual aid is a wonderful thing but you're probably delusional if you think we're approaching a future where it provides a valid alternative to the state itself for enough of the country to manifest socialism. If fascists are in power, they will dismantle it by force and have no qualms doing so. Such a thing is only possible if fascists are kept out of power.
I think that says much more than you intended.
Yeah, leftists make life harder on themselves because in addition to fascists and other authoritarians wanting to kill them, they dilute their own power (their leverage, as you call it) with ideological micro-schisms and self-sabotage.
As someone who consistently preaches left unity with everyone except Stalinists/Maoists/Juchists, it's not against my worldview that a Maoist group crippled themselves.
Since you've completely lost the plot talking about "infighting" and "micro-schisms and self-sabotage" to rationalize the Democrat "shield" murdering people that want human rights, I think it's worth trying to dig into this general idea of infighting. For it to be a fight, there has to be opposition.
I said J. Edgar Hoover was possibly a good counter-example against voting for liberals/centrists. It would be a vastly different world if Obama or Biden had their own Hoover that was assassinating Americans on American soil to impede civil rights, the moral case of voting against Republicans would be a lot harder if not impossible to make in that world.
While the Kennedys and LBJ were relatively progressive for their time despite COINTELPRO, there were some even more left-wing Democrats like Jesse Jackson and Eugene McCarthy (before the 80s) that you could argue made Democrats worth supporting just so they could pull the rest to the left. They probably would've sacked Hoover immediately. It might be easy to dismiss that because we know they didn't win in hindsight,
but it would be a vastly different world if only a small percentage of the population moved to support them.
What are some of the points you believe centrists must stop fighting about and concede to those to their left? Why?
"Centrism" is not a universal position or ideology, so that question is too vague to answer. It's always a relative position to something else in a certain place and time. I could comment if you were more specific.
You most definitely are, more importantly though, you're advocating supporting the murderers as a way to protect oneself from them. It'd be laughable if it wasn't so horrifying.
I think you know what I'm talking about. Democrat leadership (to the extent that's real), Establishment Democrats? Maybe you want me to call them moderate Democrats? Basically the kind of Democrats that refused to vote for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 primary?
What do you believe they need to stop fighting with people to their left about and just concede to them? Why?
Without arbitrarily deleting words from post, show me where I said that.
The part of my post you deleted was where I said people should've supported a Democratic POTUS nominee that would've immediately sacked Hoover.
(I've actually gone out of my way to reinclude things you purposely removed)
, that's how you post (for reasons I think have become more obvious over the course of this discussion).
I find it amusing it's so hard for you (and a lot of other people) to just answer the simple request for those that lament the infighting among the left to list some of the policies/points that the corporate/establishment/moderate/thirdway/whatever Democrats need to stop infighting about and concede to those to their left in order to not self-sabotage.
EDIT: Funnily enough, this should actually be relatively easy for all of you because you have dyhb who probably voted for Clinton in the 2016 primary. It's seems LS is struggling, but surely some of you should be able to identify something?
I think Bernie had a better chance against Trump than Clinton, simply because of Clinton’s baggage. That’s less to do with the policy positions than the specific individuals involved. There’s some real issues between sensible moderates and establishment “it’s her turn,” and there was no Obama this time around to send Clinton packing in the primaries. Tim Kaine was fine.
On July 28 2026 06:40 GreenHorizons wrote: [quote] You're just ignoring the actual argument to rationalize your fixation on harm-reduction voting. That is part of what I'm pointing out the system is designed to manipulate you into doing. Your theory of electoral gravity is a key part of how the establishment keeps you in this hopeless Hamster Wheel.
Your belief that centrists are less vicious and rarely deploy McCarthyist policies is misleading at best. Who launched the Palmer Raids against socialists? Woodrow Wilson, a progressive champion. Who signed the Smith Act to jail communists? The "best Democrat in history", Franklin D. Roosevelt. Who ran COINTELPRO to assassinate Black Panthers and dismantle the Black Radical Tradition? Liberal darlings JFK and LBJ. Who militarized the modern police state and crushed Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter? Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Who cracked down on students opposing genocide? Joe Biden.
They've managed to confuse you into believing that supporting the people laying the foundations for fascism is the only way to protect yourself from fascism. It'd be funny if it weren't so catastrophic.
You think I am alienating 90% of the population because you view 'the population' as a collection of online pundits/posters obsessed with whether someone voted for Clinton or Harris or whatever (and my general disdain for that kind of engagement). Normal, working-class people do not join movements because of a voting scorecard. They join them because of material reality. When a family is getting evicted and a radical mutual aid network stops the landlord, they don't care who we voted for. When an independent union wins them a living wage and healthcare through a brutal strike, they don't care about our presidential preferences (at least historically, going forward, yeah it comes up). The Black Panthers didn't build the most influential radical movement in modern US history by trying to look 'trustworthy' to moderate white liberals. They did it by feeding children and enlisting armed self-defense in the streets to protect it.The center-left will call us self-righteous idiots on social media? Fine. Let them create their vapid digital noise. While they are laughing/crying on Bluesky about the latest idiotic thing uttered by a Republican and voter apathy (or where/whatever), we will be on the ground building the literal networks of survival. When the system inevitably fractures under its own greed, the working class won't run to the liberals who spent decades telling them to compromise. They will run to the people who actually built the infrastructure to keep them alive. Many of the liberals/Democrats/"vote blue no matter who" crowd will run to join the fascists and call it "pragmatism".
I didn't think you'd have such a passionate response since you said voting for centrists was a "a defensive five minute tactical choice", but I'll give my thoughts.
I mean, sure? You could also say "Baseball is designed to manipulate you into swinging a bat", but that doesn't give any positive or negative moral value to swinging bats.
I phrased it like that because I knew there were some counter-examples, but this isn't one of them. "Progressives" in the early 20th century were not egalitarians, the core defining value that unites all leftists, since they supported eugenics, scientific racism, persecuting prostitutes, and so on. Woodrow Wilson hosted a viewing of Birth of a Nation at the White House. Fascist in morality. Wilson is one of those "vote for anyone but him" examples in history, not "vote for him to keep someone worse out".
Great example in my favor actually. Compare to what Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan were doing to communists in the same year (1940). Prosecuting 200-something people that had ties to the Soviet Union was considerably less harmful to socialism than pogroms and concentration camps.
Sure, that's possibly a good counter-example. Though I'm not sure any of this is relevant at all since an actual fascist party wasn't really on the ballot at any point in this time period. And moreover, while both Democratic and Republican presidents kept J. Edgar Hoover in charge of the FBI (obviously a point of shame), only one side supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made the modern progressive movement possible.
😐
Quite the opposite. You're alienating the population because all of the evils the Trump administration is doing could've been avoided if just a small percentage more of the population mobilized against it. You don't want to entertain that notion because you alternate between saying saying "Democrats are useless because they couldn't stop Trump" which plays well for the crowd, but also "Democrats aren't that much worse than Trump", which doesn't. Your opinions would be a lot more credible if you picked one of those and stuck with it genuinely instead of trying to dip your toes in both pools.
You should talk to more people. A lot of people care about that.
Yeah, it does come up.
True. Unfortunate that they crippled themselves with all the in-fighting in addition to the cops and FBI murdering them.
Mutual aid is a wonderful thing but you're probably delusional if you think we're approaching a future where it provides a valid alternative to the state itself for enough of the country to manifest socialism. If fascists are in power, they will dismantle it by force and have no qualms doing so. Such a thing is only possible if fascists are kept out of power.
I think that says much more than you intended.
Yeah, leftists make life harder on themselves because in addition to fascists and other authoritarians wanting to kill them, they dilute their own power (their leverage, as you call it) with ideological micro-schisms and self-sabotage.
As someone who consistently preaches left unity with everyone except Stalinists/Maoists/Juchists, it's not against my worldview that a Maoist group crippled themselves.
Since you've completely lost the plot talking about "infighting" and "micro-schisms and self-sabotage" to rationalize the Democrat "shield" murdering people that want human rights, I think it's worth trying to dig into this general idea of infighting. For it to be a fight, there has to be opposition.
I said J. Edgar Hoover was possibly a good counter-example against voting for liberals/centrists. It would be a vastly different world if Obama or Biden had their own Hoover that was assassinating Americans on American soil to impede civil rights, the moral case of voting against Republicans would be a lot harder if not impossible to make in that world.
While the Kennedys and LBJ were relatively progressive for their time despite COINTELPRO, there were some even more left-wing Democrats like Jesse Jackson and Eugene McCarthy (before the 80s) that you could argue made Democrats worth supporting just so they could pull the rest to the left. They probably would've sacked Hoover immediately. It might be easy to dismiss that because we know they didn't win in hindsight,
but it would be a vastly different world if only a small percentage of the population moved to support them.
What are some of the points you believe centrists must stop fighting about and concede to those to their left? Why?
"Centrism" is not a universal position or ideology, so that question is too vague to answer. It's always a relative position to something else in a certain place and time. I could comment if you were more specific.
You most definitely are, more importantly though, you're advocating supporting the murderers as a way to protect oneself from them. It'd be laughable if it wasn't so horrifying.
I think you know what I'm talking about. Democrat leadership (to the extent that's real), Establishment Democrats? Maybe you want me to call them moderate Democrats? Basically the kind of Democrats that refused to vote for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 primary?
What do you believe they need to stop fighting with people to their left about and just concede to them? Why?
Without arbitrarily deleting words from post, show me where I said that.
The part of my post you deleted was where I said people should've supported a Democratic POTUS nominee that would've immediately sacked Hoover.
(I've actually gone out of my way to reinclude things you purposely removed)
, that's how you post (for reasons I think have become more obvious over the course of this discussion).
I find it amusing it's so hard for you (and a lot of other people) to just answer the simple request for those that lament the infighting among the left to list some of the policies/points that the corporate/establishment/moderate/thirdway/whatever Democrats need to stop infighting about and concede to those to their left in order to not self-sabotage.
EDIT: Funnily enough, this should actually be relatively easy for all of you because you have dyhb who probably voted for Clinton in the 2016 primary. It's seems LS is struggling, but surely some of you should be able to identify something?
I think Bernie had a better chance against Trump than Clinton, simply because of Clinton’s baggage. That’s less to do with the policy positions than the specific individuals involved. There’s some real issues between sensible moderates and establishment “it’s her turn,” and there was no Obama this time around to send Clinton packing in the primaries. Tim Kaine was fine.
Hopefully Klobuchar or Shapiro this time around.
Not sure if that's hindsight or how you voted but given the Klobuchar/Shapiro I'd guess you at least supported Biden over Bernie in 2020?
I desperately want to see you and Sermokala discuss why we should all rally behind Klobuchar for 2028.
EPT![[image loading]](https://www.seaforces.org/wpnsys/AIRCRAFT/AGM-114_DAT/AGM-114-Hellfire-044.jpg)
