• root_beer@midwest.social
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    8 months ago

    What a charmed life you must lead. I wasn’t really affected by his policies either but have you noticed the way things have been turning for the people his goons have been targeting since the chuds became empowered?

    It is imperative that we bury the GOP first. Then, we absolutely can and should go knives out on Team Blue™️. I don’t disagree that Biden needs to go, and that most of the Democrats are obstacles at best to truly repairing our long-dead society. Hell, don’t just vote, actually fucking run for office, start somewhere where you aren’t so completely outgunned by the moneyed interests but you also actually make a difference. But for now, we need to take down the more immediate threat.

    Throw rocks at me for saying it, but the Dems’ fecklessness is our fault too, to an extent. The problem is complacency when the pendulum appears to have swung in our direction, like “yeah we got the job done!* Let’s have pizza and congratulate ourselves and go back home!” Fortunately, it may finally no longer be the case. But for christ’s sake, can we not throw the baby out with the bathwater? The upcoming, inevitable fight will be less harrowing if we can keep from actively making the battlefield more hazardous, which absolutely will happen with a Trump win.

    *christ, I remember when Obama was elected and there was a false prospect of healthcare reform, Newsweek published a rather insulting cover saying, “we are all socialists now”, simultaneously feeding the right’s paranoia and patronizing the left in such an insulting way

    • Linkerbaan@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      You’re not going to bury the GOP by voting Democrat. You will just worsen the situation.

      Biden is continuing to build the wall, jailed twice as many immigrants as Trump, is committing Genocide, and so much more. Biden is just a GOP candidate with D in front of his name. He is one of the biggest establishment democrats who has built his career on empowering the elites.

        • go_go_gadget@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Probably not. But maybe the moderate and liberal voters will finally wake the fuck up and realize they need to compromise with leftists or progressives if they want to win elections.

          • root_beer@midwest.social
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            8 months ago

            Ehh, I think it’s more that we have to be a better electorate and put better people in office in the first place, even (and especially) when there is a dem majority. Like I said, we have had the tendency to get complacent when that’s the case. It also doesn’t help that, for a long time, we didn’t have a cohesive message—when Occupy was happening, everyone’s demands were all over the damn place and just came off as diffuse and disorganized. But like I also said, it sounds like we’re getting better about it, though I don’t know whether that’s because this place really does lean heavily left, not reflecting the population at large. That may not be such a bad thing though, this place could be a good place for planning action.

            I don’t disagree that the democrats are, at best, milquetoast, feckless do-nothings, but fighting everyone at once seems like it’s going to be an abject disaster with any victories being pyrrhic, if existent at all. I hope I’m wrong. I just don’t want my daughter, anyone’s daughter, to become a brood mare for the dominionist state.

            • go_go_gadget@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              I think it’s more that we have to be a better electorate

              Who’s “we”? I know exactly which race and generation is to blame for all this pro-corporate trash that keeps making it’s way through the Democratic primaries. And even people who say “Well more of you show up to the primaries!” argue that liberal and moderate voters won’t vote for progressive or leftist candidates or even a liberal or moderate candidate who dares materially compromise with progressive or leftist policy. So we’ll win the primary only to lose the general.

              • root_beer@midwest.social
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                8 months ago

                “We”, in a much larger sense than this community here. There is so much preaching to the choir here that one would think there’s a much larger movement than there really is, but what proportion of the electorate at large is properly informed even about Palestine, let alone everything else, beyond the processed shit they’re allowed to consume by the mainstream media [christ I’m so sick of that term] and social media? The public at large is ignorant as hell because they’re being lied to, progressive policy is popular and yet so many don’t even fucking know it.

                This needs to go beyond voting, there needs to be actual outreach instead of this endless internet posturing, and it needs to be more than sanctimonious finger wagging, on both sides (not in the blue vs red sense, but referring to our own infighting). We need to dial back on both the “paving the way for the fascists to win” and the “you support genocide” rhetoric. I cannot seriously believe that anyone who argues in good faith wants any of this to happen, but we’re I, for one, am goddamned terrified and know full well that no matter who wins, we lose. It’s just that one route to fascism is the autobahn and the other is a backroad with a slightly reduced speed limit, by which nobody abides anyway.

                Again, maybe I’m wrong. I hope to high hell that I’m wrong, both that everyone outside the terminally online is as distracted and ignorant as I think they are, and that the redhat ghouls will be less incompetent and succeed in turning this into an authoritarian dictatorship. My wife, who has been on the left but fairly hands-off as it relates to activism, is charged up as hell over this disaster, as are the vanishingly few people with whom we still actually socialize. The craven overreach on women’s rights is bringing more people into the fold, has actually made a small difference, and could continue to do so so long as everyone avoids becoming complacent. I desperately want to be wrong but I am a terminal pessimist and my hope was murdered a long, long time ago, as was my faith not only in our institutions but also in society as a whole. Nothing fucking matters anymore.

                Mostly unrelated and entirely tangential, we could learn a few things from that fucking scumbag Trump, in that we (again, the larger population “we” and our useless nonrepresentative representatives) aren’t loud enough, we’re not nearly vicious enough, and we don’t brag about our victories enough. Enough of this “when they go low we go high”, Patagonia vest-wearing, tepid granola-in-oatmilk horseshit. I don’t believe that sewage golem has the charisma everyone says he does but [a] his fucking rubes are certainly in his thrall and [b] I’m a terrible judge of charisma anyway because I have absolutely none of it myself, otherwise I’d be running for something here. But we need someone like that, except not a murderous tinpot.