Comment on Stay Mad
retrospectology@lemmy.world 5 months agoPeople do understand that concept, but it’s literally what Democrats have been doing for the past 40 years and it has put us right here where we are right now. The “lesser of two evils” thing just has no propellant left, no one is buying that line anymore. Neoliberalism needs to go before Democrats can start winning again.
You need to understand that people have been saying “just put the neolibs in power again and we’ll work to improve things” every election cycle, and now we are closer to fascism than we’ve literally ever been. You at least understand why people see that strategy as a failure, right? Like, you understand why no one believes it anymore?
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 5 months ago
A vote for neoliberals is a vote to not have fascism for four more years. America’s voting system doesn’t allow the never-have-fascism votes to be pooled with the delay-fascism votes, so unless there’s a decent chance for a mass swing of voters from delay-fascism to never-have-fascism, trying to encourage a small-scale swing only makes immediate fascism more likely by weakening the only thing with a chance to delay it.
If the plan is to try and encourage the Democrats to have primaries that actually have the power to move the party left, now is not the time to withhold a vote in protest as there’s a good chance that even if it did convince them, there’d never be another election that wasn’t rigged so they’d lose it no matter how popular they were.
retrospectology@lemmy.world 5 months ago
That’s an extremely hard case to make at this point though when the “not” fascist guy is funding a genocide and refusing to entertain the measures we’d need to take to actually take the fight to the fascists (ex. Championing an effort to pack the supreme court). Neoliberals are not truly acting like democracy is on the line, they say it a lot but it’s not what their actions communicate, which makes it difficult to believe they’d ever stop obstructing progress.
Neoliberals don’t stop or stall fascists by getting into power – they just soft sell it and give the general public time to acclimate to the slipping of the Overton window. They do this in service of corporate interests rather than theocracy the way the far-right does but it ends us up in the same place.
Now is the time that the Democratic establishment chooses to try to strong arm the left into voting for them, they do this every election; claim the sky is falling and that we must vote for them or else. So I guess my view is, if they have assessed that they can risk playing a game of chicken, so can voters.
I understand Project 2025 and its seriousness, but that problem is going to be there every election from here until such a time that the GOP dissolves. I’m skeptical that 4 years will allow them to achieve everything they want to without sweeping the house and senate too. The president cannot legally be crowned king, and if they try to do that perhaps that is what it will take to actually radicalize the self-sedated upper middle-class liberals and political fence-sitters.
I’m sick of defensive leadership, and any offensive needs to start with attacking the Democratic structure that’s making the party so ineffectual and complicit. More time is not enough in my opinion, people were talking about GOP plans to capture the supreme court as far back as Bush Jr. and giving Democrats wins achieved nothing. They need to be forced to take it seriously and I just don’t see that happening without some pain (for them and, unfortunately, us).