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.

[–] EndlessApollo 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

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

A political philosophy supporting the rights and power of the people in their struggle against the privileged elite.

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