this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
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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 Outside of relevant politicians in our cities, the party is obsolete.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
(this reply wasn't made in good faith and said some really hateful shit that I regret and don't mean)
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