this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
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Lashing out against neoliberals isn't useful. The MAGA movement are the fascists.
Yes it is. Fuck them. They're the reason we have fascism.
Neoliberal ideology leads to fascism. The actual neoliberals themselves are not fascists. We can work with neoliberals. The problem with scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds is that it's a mindset that creates enemies out of people who are our allies.
Don't get me wrong. Neoliberals need to abandon their ideology in favor of socialism. And a populist narrative wouldn't hurt the Democrats either. But if we blind ourselves to the difference between neoliberals and fascists, we are making things harder for ourselves.
I think we actually agree on this, we just phrase it slightly differently.
I'm a firm believer in providing answers to why we're here. The buck stops with power, and the rich had all the power. Neolibs did their bidding, and thus they deserve no kindness. I'm never listening to their arguments for business again. They need to be told to shut the fuck up. They have no goodwill from the public, so we don't need to pretend to like them.
They can be our allies because our interests might align, but we gain more by explaining why they failed than by letting them have respect. We need to build the left as an answer, and neolibs have no place with us.
Rather than scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds a more useful statement would be today's neoliberals can be tomorrow's socialists. But to do that we have to do the work of convincing people to be socialists. Teaching people neoliberalism is a scam is the first step in that.
Nah we need to start punching neoliberals until they stop organizing and start supporting actual left causes, because they will never, under any circumstances, allow anything close to socialism. It works with nazis, why not their best friends? Either way it'll be very fun :3
It’s a mistake to think liberal centrism is closer to the left than right. It’s not linear . More triangular.
It’s has been shown and writ large that the proletariat will move from left to right and vice versa, without going near liberal centrism
In the context of a 2-d, Euclidean geometry, x and y axis political compass putting neoliberals slightly right of center makes sense. In different models a different position could make sense. People don't need to move through neoliberalism. The issue is that many if not most people in our society have neoliberal ideas in their heads.
Regan, Bush Sr, Clinton, W, Obama were all some variation on neoliberal. Neoliberal rhetoric laid the ground work for Trump. Biden also being a neoliberal hasn't moved the needle on this while in office. We can't wait for someone to do it for us. We have to help people fully internalize neoliberalism as a scam. Then teach them about socialism.
i like this :)
Neoliberals rely on fascists to exist, there is no collaborating with them. Democrats will literally always side with the far right over the even remotely left, and will always collaborate with Republicans and recognize them as a legitimate party rather than a legitimate cancer that needs to be stopped. Neolibs (libs in general really) are the left wing of fascism, and can absolutely never be relied upon to fight fascism, because they will always work with fascists against the left until fascists kill them all
i will lash out against everyone unapologetically funding genocide, thank you very much ❤️
Biden wasn't running for president. Harris wanted to end the war. Trump wanted Israel to finish the job. Accelerationist rhetoric hurt the Democratic Party's chances of winning at the expense of your goal to help the Palestinians. Now the genocide will be allowed to continue indefinitely.
You're free to debilitate yourself as much as you want. Could you like, stop though. Please?
Harris was the candidate of liberal democracy. She was the status quo, which is not what we needed to beat fascism. We now know in hindsight that we needed an open primary from the start. By the time Biden decided to step down, it was too little too late.
That's all true. But her campaign is the tool that we had in that moment. We did it before with Biden. We could have done it again with Harris. In the months leading up to the election we've got to care less about the quality of our tool and more how we use it. We can push the Democrats all we want further to the left up until then.
But the campaign we get after the DNC convention is the campaign we have to use. Some people couldn't put aside their moral self-image to do that. Now they're beating a dead horse, when Trump has threatened to send those Democrats to prison. We could all be heading to death camps starting next year, and I'm hoping I can reach some people to get their heads in the game before that.
No. Harris did almost everything right. The only mistake she made was not being more radical. She needed to offer answers, but Trump offered more. She needed to admit where Biden fucked up, but she didn't. She needed to be a populist reformer, but that would never have happened from her. She tried her best, but was set up to fail.
Biden needed to be a 1 term president after the midterms, but nothing helped him realize that. He needed to accept his limitations earlier. An open primary from the start was needed. I was wrong about that myself.
All of that is true too. But we can't control Biden or Harris or DNC consultants. And I doubt they will listen to us. We can choose to make a case to voters and delay fascism for four more years. We can use that time to create a populist campaign.
It's going to be a lot harder to do that now. Criticism isn't the issue. It's the inability to detach a person's ego, their self-image, from what needs to be done in the moment. The people we are arguing with cannot seem to do that. It didn't help them during the election. It's not helping them now.
I'm not perfect at this. And there's a limit to how good at minimize our egos, anyone can be. We can't get out of our egos, it's a part of the human condition. But we can focus on being useful over being moral.
Why do we need the Democrats? Outside of relevant politicians in our cities, the party is obsolete. Elections are toast, and keeping them around when we can get rid of the worst of them is prudent. The accelerationists got what they wanted, so we need to do what the larpers wanted to do better than they can.
The old game is over, and while the new one doesn't yet have a meta, leaving the establishment behind when possible will benefit us the most.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo
Our first-past-the-post voting system mathematically leaves us with two parties. Bernie tried to hijack the Democratic Party which is what Trump did to the Republican Party. If the Democratic Party's leadership goes to prison during the next four years there might not be much of a party left to hijack. We might end up having to build our own party with its own populist narrative and then get it to be the one party that competes with the Republican Party, which is the harder of those two options.
The meta is populism. If the corpse of the Democratic Party has enough juice in it, then it can be used to forward a populist narrative. If it doesn't we'll have to make our own from scratch. edit: typos
Free palestine and also trans rights
Sup. I'm trans too.
I've seen the five comments you wrote. Be a bit easier if we do this in one comment chain yeah? I assume you meant neoliberalism is the left wing of fascism. Anyway, if you talk to people with neoliberal ideas in their head, you'll find they are perfectly capable of empathy.
Neoliberalism leads us to fascism because it elevates markets and corporations over people. Which means the rich are free to extract as much wealth from everyone else as they want. Neoliberalism also leads us to fascism because the only change it permits to a system is the people in that system. It's a lot easier for fascists to convince neoliberals to change the people in society than in it is for socialists or progressives to convince them to redistribute wealth or enact systemic change respectively.
This isn't a moral failing of neoliberals. It's a failure of education. We can teach people to identify flawed neoliberal ideas and rationalize how they got us to where we are now.
As far as Democrats are concerned criticizing them isn't the issue. The problem is trying to sink their campaign in the months leading up to the election when they were the only viable option to delay fascism. We need a populist narrative to push a socialist and progressive agenda to really turn the US around. But it takes time to get a campaign like that off the ground. It's going to be a lot harder to do now.
The Democrats were always going to run an incumbent this election, it's standard in US politics. Not a good standard as it turned out, but the incumbent advantage was a political fundamental for decades.
I would say an important take away from this election is that the Democratic Party is a tool. We can criticize and critique it as much as we want. But we aren't doing ourselves any favors if we snap our tool over our knee and throw it away because it isn't perfect.
If you think that populism is a viable tool that can be used for good and then discarded, one that won't be immediately turned on us the first chance you get, then you're just a useful idiot and I'm genuinely sorry I called you subhuman. But there is no benevolent populism, and any attempt to push democrats towards being more of a reactionary anti-trump party than they already are will severely backfire. Democrats will not wield the power of unquestioning loyalty and rabid antagonism any "better" than nazis do, because democrats aren't more virtuous than republicans, they just play a more helpful, less harmful angle. That changes the moment they realize their base is apathetic towards/actively craving genocide
What your argument is describing isn't populism in general. Trump's populism is christian nationalism which seems to be what your argument is referring to. Bernie's platform in 2016 and 2020 was a populist platform that was intended to forward a progressive agenda.
https://www.wordnik.com/words/populism
Why would we discard it later? Populism isn't inherently radical or reactionary as Bernie and Trump have demonstrated. It provides a narrative to contextualize what the campaign is for to the people. Which Democrats definitely needed in this election. It's highly unlikely Democrats will make their own populist campaign. We need to hijack the Democratic Party the way Bernie tried to do and Trump did to the Republican Party.
The strategy is to use the Democratic Party so we don't have to build our own party from scratch. It's not because we like or think highly of Democrats. Because of our first-past-the-post voting system we end up in a two-party system. The Democrats are the tool we have to use when the Republicans are fascists that want to kill us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo
(this reply wasn't made in good faith and said some really hateful shit that I regret and don't mean)
The amount of votes Harris lost compared to Biden 4 years ago can not be explained by accelerationism. Tbh I wish the left in the US was so big as to affect so many voters. Harris lost because she run a bad campaign. Her message did not appeal to the masses because it was centrist bullshit that would not improve anyone’s life in a meaningful way. She also alienated a huge part of her arab voterbase by clearly not giving a fuck about arab lives. Instead of condemning genocide she promised to keep supporting Israel. Trump also promised to end the war, that should tell you something about what those words mean.
We have a democracy for as long as we can keep it. There's a good chance we just lost it. There's no sense in giving up our agency because neoliberals are institutionalists. We knew what the Democrats were. Our options this cycle ended up being Harris or fascism. The goal was to get Harris elected to stop fascism for four more years. Instead of doing everything in their power to help get Harris elected, accelerationists did everything in their power to sink Harris's campaign. We broke our only tool over our knee and threw it away because it wasn't a better tool. Doing so wasn't useful. edit: typo
Now people are beating a dead horse. Neoliberals are neoliberals. Fascists are fascists. Spend this energy attacking the MAGA movement.
It’s useless to attack maga in a space where everyone agrees it’s shit. However I see lots of people on here acting like Harris isn’t complicit in genocide.
I mean finding ways to attack the MAGA movement that convinces people to vote for Harris. There are people on lemmy who aren't as politically engaged or as far left as we would hope. But more importantly, this is a space to spread ideas which can then be spread to the wider internet.
Biden is complicit, because he's the president and it was his decision. She's the vice president, who does not have that power, so she's not.
i understand you are emotionally invested in this. but me being critical of the fact that every time she was asked why your tax dollars were going to a nation performing a HOLOCAUST she opened by saying “Israel has a right to defend itself” does not make me an accelerationist. it makes me a decent fucking person.
look through all 2000+ of my comments and NOWHERE will you find me advocating accelerationism or a democratic loss. you are forcing an entirely made up narrative and position onto me that i do not accept. get it through your head that decent people might want to call it out when murder is supported without question. and lastly be fucking nice.
And now you (and us in the rest of the world) get democracy-dismantling Trump, who will continue to support Israel even more. That’s not even considering trans people, other demographics’ rights, or the climate. Good job being so virtuous in non-voting!
Said as someone not emotionally invested in her campaign.
when did i ever say something about non-voting? i did not. i never did. i will never. again look through my 2000+ commments, you will find dozens if not hundreds arguing against abstention and voter apathy.
you are literally making shit up to be angry with me, just like the other account. it’s super weird and i hope your recognize how wack that is lol.
like im not even upset? just concerned? you made up an entire character that doesn’t represent my opinion or words at all and are now engaging in an internet rant against your own imagination. take a deep breath homie. you deserve rest and internal peace—and goodness knows you probably won’t find that in politics so i hope you can find pause for a moment ❤️
Liberals can only attack leftists by lying about their positions, same as conservatives. Best to ignore them 🌸
I highly recommend you swap out subjective moral reasoning for utility. You've already convinced yourself that it is morally right that we all go to the death camps. But it's not useful. There's a chance we do something that's useful between now and the death camps, but not if we care about being decent people more than we care about people.
As someone who disagreed with the poster originally, you're the one not thinking in terms of utility. We can accept help from neoliberals, but they are the people who brought us here. We needed left wing populism, but the Dems wouldn't give it to us. They played by the book that got us fascism in the first place. The rich are responsible, and their enablers need to stfu. It's time for bold action, not denial.
If any neoliberal can't get on board that neoliberalism is dead, then obviously they are no use to us. But they are an easier pool of people to convince than the fascists who want to kill us. And if the Democratic Party still exists in future elections and there somehow are future elections, both seem unlikely, it's still worth voting for them because it gives us time to get a populist campaign off the ground assuming there isn't already one that's ready to go. edit: typo
You misunderstand current Trump voters. They were who we needed to sway. The neolibs are a tiny block compared to the disengaged poor people Trump reached. Neolibs must be pushed aside. They weren't who we target for socialism. We must target the poor who lost faith in the system and leave the system behind. They'll be more open than neolibs once they feel things are worse under Trump.
I'm talking about Democrat voters or low information Republican voters who somehow aren't in a right-wing information silo. Trump voters, who have been watching Fox News and similar programs, have been brained washed for decades. They need mandated cult deprogramming at this point with help from specialists.
What we need to overcome is so widespread and ubiquitous that even people who aren't particularly politically engaged have the idea in their head. Bring up socialism to people, and they reflexively say 'socialism doesn't work'. Maybe they give a passing reference to the Soviet Union. If a person believes their society's institutions are infallible and that they are at the end of history it's hard for them to understand we need systemic change and wealth redistribution.
Neoliberalism needs to be fully internalized as a scam so people can look for other answers to their problems like socialism. The only changes that neoliberals are able to accept are changing the people who are in charge of institutions. It's why fascists are able to appeal to them where socialists and even progressives struggle. The fascists only have to make the leap from changing the people in our institutions to changing the people in our society, primarily by getting rid of them. edit: typos
please take a deep breath homie. none of the things you are saying about me are true and it’s deeply misgiving how you are forcing some kind of made up characterization on me with no evidence. i’m gonna disengage now out of genuine concern i hope you can find some rest. it’s fucked out there ❤️
I can read what you wrote.
Being a decent person is not the goal. Helping people is the goal.
agree, take care.