this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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Apathy gets nothing done
Right, we need to be organizing, protesting, and working to destroy the current power structure.
true, but both sides do need to be criticizeable, not just the worse one.
Criticizing is great, putting it like OP with "they're the same, democrats just put on a hat" is dishonest and reductionist. This kind of thing actively causes harm and plays into the hands of the party that's objectively worse for anyone that's not rich.
It's really not. My favourite example is Roe v. Wade - how long did democrats have to fix it? How long did they use it in their campaigns in the lines of "if you don't vote democrats, republicans will overturn it"?
Yeah, they're the better choice, for sure, but they're not a good choice.
And your own words show exactly what I mean.
There's a marked difference between lazy fucks who didn't properly bring it across the finish line and people actively working to make things worse. Correct my believe if I'm wrong: unless it's a constitutional amendment, laws are fairly easy to overturn still.
And to 'how many years'.... How many years did people have to vote for progressive candidates in the lower levels to change the actual base of the party to where they want it to be? How many years have the voters not used to make it the party they want it to be?
This kinda shit is so fucking often due to progressives wanting things to be a certain way, but not putting in the legwork because "it's a lost cause anyway". With the democrats you have a chance to change the party into the progressive direction. Take an example from those maga assholes - it doesn't take a lot of them to shift the republicans to be even worse.
This argument would be fine if the DNC actually let people select progressive candidates. But they almost never do. The DNC is controlled by committee, not by democracy, ironically.
And who do they draw from? The active base. If the complaints are loud enough, broad enough, from inside the party, that's when they will have no choice.
"Oh there's the dnc, can't do anything, move on" is not a productive way to fight these things.
Neither is "The other side is worse, guess the DNC gets to do whatever the fuck they want." If I only have two choices, then I'm going to be loud and annoying when those choices aren't acceptable to me. I don't care what you say.
I didn't say don't be loud, I'm saying don't be a useful idiot for the other side at the same time. Apparently you want to misunderstand the point completely.
Fuck up the DNC libs, establishment democrats, etc! From the inside of possible.
Just don't play into the hands of the Nazis by using rhetoric that makes their job of "pretending to not be the worst humans possible" easier.
But the dems make it so easy for them when they all endorse a genocide. "That guy's the devil! He'd let his friends eat babies! What? No don't worry about my friend eating babies. They didn't do that, but if it was it was justified. And if it wasn't, it was an accident. And if it wasn't then it was justified."
Demand better. From the outside. I'm not a Democrat. I can't do anything from the inside. I vote for them because they are the closest, usually, to my beliefs. This time both parties feel equally, very far away from me. You're not required to agree with me. You just can't bully me into voting for someone who I find morally reprehensible.
Yes, there's a difference between perpetrators and bystanders who can help but choose not to.
But the bystanders keep expecting praise for helping when they haven't.
No, you.
https://truthout.org/articles/fascism-is-possible-not-in-spite-of-liberal-capitalism-but-because-of-it/
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/14/liberalism-and-fascism-partners-in-crime/
No shit, Sherlock. And that's why you're helping the fascists with this comparison. You're working in a two party system, being an idiot about how to actually change shit.
You're not changing the one party that can be used for change for the better, you're just whining and making them seek votes elsewhere.
You don't change anything when you are conveniently forbidden from criticism.
Use constructive criticism. Criticize the issues. Don't put false equivalencies first.
Fix something and you won't be accused of doing nothing.
US citizens need to destroy the first past the post voting system. It's fucked and undemocratic and it needs to be replaced.
The problem is that only people who came into power using the current system would have a chance to change the system. And why would anyone want to change the system that brought them to power?
This is broadly true, but it's not completely unheard-of for systems to change despite this.
Mostly though through revolutions, wars or some other extreme crisis.
Yeah, unfortunately. But let's think positive! How many such events in history can we think of that went relatively violence-free? I can think of two off the top of my head:
The end of apartheid in South Africa. All they did was to force them to free Nelson Mandela, who then promptly got elected. No major government overthrow.
East Germany. After the fateful press conference that caused everyone to storm the border crossings, the government basically accepted that their economy could no longer hold up, and they disbanded without a fight.
Honorable mention: The disbanding of the Soviet Union within Russia. There have certainly been violent revolutions in the other socialist republics, but Russia didn't need one because Yeltsin could just declare Russia independent from the Soviet Union.
Are there others I missed?
All of these happened in the wake of major crises.
Apartheit in South Africa ended, because of massive protests in the country (including violence), massive international pressure (the UN labelled apartheit as crime against humanity and lots of countries banned imports from South Africa), and the South African economy was collapsing due the price of gold dropping a lot.
East Germany collapsed because of massive economic problems. Storming the border crossings was just the last push. If that would have happened 10 years earlier, the police would just have shot the first row of people trying to cross the border and the rest would have fled. The DDR was already collapsing at that point. And the press conference that caused the storm on the border crossing was actually about East Germany opening the border in a month's time. So even without the storm on the border crossings, the same thing would have happend, just a month later.
The Sovjet Union, again, collapsed due to economic problems. Their economiy completely collapsed and with it their power over all the different SSRs. Russia, being the largest and most powerful SSR, being able declaring itself independent of all these other countries that really didn't want to be part of the USSR without having to use violence is really not surprising.
It's kinda as if Great Brittain declared itself independent of the Brittish Empire.
All these situations you mentioned where already under way for a decade or so, before the events you mentioned did the last push. And all of them where only possible to massive crises.
Right! So the two questions this raises to me are:
To the first point: no. There is no wide-spread hunger yet. People on the very low end of the income scale are suffering and many are homeless, but that's not what the majority of the people experience. The middle class currently mostly takes hits to their savings or to their comfort, but they still have a roof over their heads and they still don't suffer hunger.
To the second point, I can only speculate. I think the EU has a rather stable system. Individual countries might shift to the left or right, but the whole system of the EU is made to prevent anything really bad. Secession from the EU is something that no current member state of the EU can afford and after Brexit not even rightwing extremists want to seriously leave the EU.
The USA isn't setup nearly as stable, since they are still running one of the earliest democratic systems in the world. I see two (not mutually exclusive) options there.
It’s one of many things that need to be done to fix the US.
FTFY
https://web.archive.org/web/20230803021951/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/22/american-democracy-was-never-designed-to-be-democratic
I'm not sure I get you point.
This article is very US centric and it only talks about (the obvious) flaws in the US system. Other democracies might not be perfect, but many don't have the problems mentioned there.
We could completely abolish any system of government, but cooperating in societies of thousands and millions of people would be close to impossible.
That's what happens when you only have the choice between neo liberal and extreme right.
Neo-liberal doesn't mean what you think it means.
to be fair, it doesn't mean what anyone thinks it means
-wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism?wprov=sfla1