Phew, that's a whole dissertation. Let's break it down.
Alright, fair on the Tea Party. Koch money, FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity. Same donor class reshuffling to manufacture grassroots legitimacy. The analogy doesn't hold and I'll own that.
The voting/labor distinction is real too. You can't eat if you don't work. You can choose not to vote. Not the same thing. Point taken.
On limiting imagination to only what they approve: I'd push back there. I'm door knocking, building mutual aid, working with DSA and WFP, advocating for RCV, trying to build local alternatives to capitalism. That work exists alongside the electoral calculation, not instead of it. If your argument is that doing both dilutes organizing energy, make that case specifically. But "you're only doing what they approve" doesn't track against what I'm actually doing.
On Obama and Hillary still being untouchable: yeah, that's real and it's infuriating. People still can't reckon with Libya, with Homan, with ICE BORTAC, with the Pivot to Asia, because they're emotionally attached to those figures as proof the system works. I've watched that attachment short circuit every honest conversation about what the Democratic establishment actually does. That's the grief cycle failing in real time and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
On Platner: I'm not treating criticism of him as a cardinal sin. The tattoo, the Reddit posts, the kill comment, the mercenary history, those are documented and worth scrutinizing. What I've said is that both establishment Democrats and Republicans are spending money to stop him, that the scandals being amplified are the salacious ones rather than the substantive ones, and that Collins is a 30-year documented donor capture story whose voting record actively harms the people we're supposedly organizing to protect. That's not Blue No Matter Who. That's reading the specific conditions of a specific race. If those conditions don't justify the calculation then make that case. But collapsing it into general lesser evil sheepherding requires ignoring everything specific about it.
The grief cycle argument is the most interesting thing you've written and I'm not dismissing it. And yeah, the USA has been a white supremacist genocidal violent entity since day one. That's not fringe, that's history. People need to reckon with that fully instead of finding emotional exit ramps through hero figures.
On Bernie specifically: I don't think he demonstrated complicity in the sense you mean. He operates within the constraints of the system he exists in, he makes compromises that are sometimes genuinely wrong, and yeah, taking forever to call a genocide a genocide isn't defensible as playing politics. That one lands. But collapsing Bernie endorsing Biden into the same category as Obama building ICE BORTAC or Clinton turning Libya into a slave market is the same categorical error I've been calling out in your argument all along. Operating within a broken system under constraint isn't the same as actively building the infrastructure of harm. That distinction matters, because it's the same distinction I'm making about Platner, and about voting itself.
But the grief cycle theory is still making a bet. It's betting radicalization outpaces harm accumulation. And that bet has a historical test case that did not go well.
Weimar Germany. Massive radicalization. Demonstrated failure of liberal institutions. Widespread grief about the old system. Fascism still consolidated first because it had more organizational infrastructure ready when the window opened. The grief cycle doesn't just produce revolutionaries, it also produces fascists simultaneously from the same conditions. Whoever is more organized when the crisis peaks wins. And fascism is actively closing the space to organize right now. NSPM-7. Surveillance expansion. (I'm starting my own activist group here to push back locally against the age verification, flock cameras, etc.) Criminalization of dissent. Every month consolidation runs it gets harder to do the work you're saying is the only thing that matters. So I understand the urgency.
However, the people who get deported, lose healthcare, disappear into detention, or die while we wait for sufficient radicalization aren't theoretical. A movement that has fewer people because the conditions it was waiting to create killed them first isn't stronger. It's smaller and facing something more consolidated.
You haven't shown the grief cycle produces capacity faster than fascism closes the space for it. And the people paying the cost of being wrong about that timeline aren't the ones theorizing about it. (See: Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder - Vladimir Lenin)
