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This should show everyone clearly, unambiguously, without a doubt that conservatives in America have zero idea what progressivism or leftism is about at all.
It’s just words to them. They do NOT care. It’s WWE wrestlemania. They want to paint their faces and get swept away in a stageplay and die as heartbroken as the hero if they don’t succeed and make all their enemies pay.
We need to like, mass-spam the entire Midwest america with historical romance novels with bodice-ripping sex scenes. I think if more guys just got lost in that shit, we would have a lot less tension and pain in the world.
We need to like, mass-spam the entire Midwest america with historical romance novels with bodice-ripping sex scenes. I think if more guys just got lost in that shit, we would have a lot less tension and pain in the world.
Doing that to somewhat compensate for harm from romantic chatbots and porn would be absolutely beneficial.
This + MDMA in the water supply
It’ll probably react badly with all the heroin and barbs they take out there
Now that you mention it I am a little thirsty…
What’s the old Trotskyite joke? Two members, three parties?
Man, I can’t even agree with myself most days.
I’m imagining you doing the Gollum thing arguing with yourself about theory and both sides accusing the other of being a revisionist
I wish you were further from the truth.
And you as well?
Some people are more in love with the process than the progress. It’s a common failing in organized people.
Unfortunately in this case, it’s projection. The right falls in line and they accomplish stuff because of that. The left could really learn from that.
The right falls in line because they’re fascists who are afraid of thinking for themselves. Diversity of thought causes discourse, that’s a natural fact, but it should be celebrated as a strength. Looking for leftists to shut up and fall in line is like peak “enlightened centrist” thinking.
There’s fascists, american monarchists, libertarians, religious nuts, the rare fiscally conservative, the 2A’ers, etc.
Who said “leftists to shut up”? Not me. You can bemoan the 2 party system all you want, but it’s what’s here. The way for the left to be actually effective in achieving at least some of its goals is to give Dems consistent and overwhelming victories.
Who said “leftists to shut up”?
People talking shit
Or just some Stalin stan
They definitely can. It’s been off putting lately that the left has a check list that I have to hit every mark on to not be seen as a right winger.
There are leftist who are Christian. There are leftists who are against abortion, but understand that education and reproductive health (including allowing abortions) is an important and productive way to reduce abortions, instead of bans. There are leftists who are still traditional, holding morals and ethics that aren’t fluid but also not rigid.
No one is truly happy about their political choices. Except for the insane 1/3 of Americans on the Maga train maybe.
What left?
The 1% of American politics who are ignored, Look for the pouty guy in the corner of a democratic campaign stop and you found him
It’s relative. Left of center is what most people mean when they say “the American Left” (ie, EVERYONE who doesn’t consider themselves wing or neutral, from centrist dems to communists and anarchists). What YOU folks call “the Left”, most Americans would call “the extreme Left”. Not extreme as in your ideas are extremist, but as in you’re just a tiny minority waaaay out there beyond what most people left of center believe.
A lack of free and critical thinking is probably the reason the Right have such an easy time falling in line with whatever their figurehead happens to be peddling at the time.
The Left as a single monolith is the work of fiction.
True. But it needs to be one to be an effective boogeyman in a speech like this.
As is The Right?
Authoritarians fall in line. Anarchists fall in love.
Yeah, authoritarians from either extreme. Big up to you, for your Anachro-evangelism once again.
Anachro-evangelism
Feel like I know more Anarchists who are pagan, but I’ve never stopped to count.
Ok, this guy sounds like a right wing moron, but he’s got a point. Among a lot of Leftists, ideology is fairly religious, especially the ones waiting for some revolution to broadly remake society. Or the accelerationists pushing for a purifying apocalypse.
Among a lot of Leftists, ideology is fairly religious
What?
Yeah. It’s got purity tests to separate the faithful from the nonfaithful. It has vicious infighting about heretics/apostates. It’s got a series of myths about a revolution and then a promised land.
Evangelism doesn’t only apply to those who push the story of that West Bank-ian born guy with the Mexican name… but I did wonder whether to wordswap before posting.
The Animist Evangelical showing up with an encyclopedia of deities?
Thanks. Now I’m having an existential crisis about whether an Encyclopaedia of Deities would be filed under Reference or Fiction. Animism is something I don’t know about; but each to their own I suppose. I remember one girl saying it was tantamount to paganism but the reception she got suggested the room didn’t agree with her. I can’t really comment.
If the left were even a fraction as organized as claimed, Bernie would have blown the primary out in 2016 and ridden into the whitehouse with solid majorities in both houses.
It honestly roils me how impotent the left is, because an active organized left could grab this country by the balls and drag it into a whole new era, but all we have is a million headed hydra with each neck pulling in a different direction because nobody can get over themselves for long enough to fall in line behind a common objective.
Yeah, a lot of the stuff that the “Left” fails on seems to be because it hits “well it’s not exactly perfect and good for absolutely anybody do we’re not gonna do it”
Whereas the “Right” is basically ‘well it came from my guy so… seems good’
I think we’re also over-estimating the strength of the left in the US. I think a century of propaganda and witch hunts is still weighing on the prospects of anything overly pro-labor making it to the mainstream.
They’re poor that’s why.
Uneducated, low resources, no time, no money or means.
Wealth has nothing to with it. A lot of them are middle ‘class’
That’s still working class. It isn’t wealth it is life. Wealthy people have time, working folk don’t. Can’t educate or organize the same and certainly don’t have financial capacity to act.
Many middle class folk do not have friends, a place to entertain or amass others or time.
Not saying impossible just that is why I think we have issues there, the progressive folks are busy holding society together. Too busy to organize.
Seriously the left would steam roll these yokals into oblivion
The Democratic party is still controlled by the rich just like the GOP. Different rich people, possibly with better morals, but they’re still protecting their financial interests even when it isn’t beneficial to the progressive policies they claim to support. So it wasn’t “the Left” that ended up letting Trump win and fucked us for generations with a corrupt SCOTUS but the rich donors controlling the Democratic party.
Yeah because all those people that had zero turnout energy during the primary were actually paid off by the rich. That’s why they didn’t vote in the primary!
Fuck right off with this DNC conspiracy bullshit. Progressives owe their cause turning out, you don’t get to blame everyone else for not doing the revolution for you while you’re sitting on the couch instead of doing the literal barest minimum to actually materially support what you claim you believe in.
Fuck your words. Give the cause your actions, or can your empty platitudes about how it’s everyone else’s fault your side refused to vote.
There’s no division like leftist unity
Still, makes us generally immune to a charismatic con man taking over the entire party.
Yeah, I once got interested like a bored person with a special interest in 70s sci-fi, Asimov, Star Wars, Wiener’s “Cybernetics”, all those aesthetics. Because leftist ideologies are kinda associated with them.
You come to trots, they seem fine and tolerant (they even consider tolerance and humanism as their main difference from stalinists), until you mention anarcho-syndicalism as something normal or ask questions (in the spirit of normal brainstorm) about the ideal society they describe in their articles. Here they either become hostile or ghost you.
Cause it’s their (trots) fucking religion that every cook can guide a state, that a military of a trot state looks like every adult having a gun at home, and in case of war them all assembling, making a shot each and going home (quoting that Swiss joke).
And that their direct democracy and planning system too should not be really designed. Some “modern technologies” will do that.
They are just not interested in discussing how to actually build that shit. Only in the daily activity of a couple of obscure trade unions and in hating “the rich” or/and “the bourgeoisie”.
You come to ansyns, they react like “you’re already one of us if you want, now get off us, we’re not interested in that shit”.
You come to ancoms, admittedly some conversations are interesting, but talking specifics with them is like Napoleon going into Russia - the conversation seems to be going on, but you’re increasingly feeling that you’re getting lost without gaining anything.
You come to stalinists, they tell you your opinions will be considered when they kill everyone they don’t like.
You come to usual left anarchists and may get a good conversation occasionally, but in the end realize that they are mostly interested in their hydroponic farms.
YMMV, but I don’t see much consolidation.
Every time a right wing pundit talks about the left wing hive mind it’s a clear tell that they have no understanding of their political rivals at all…
“The united front tactic is simply an initiative whereby the communists propose to join with all workers belonging to other parties and groups and all unaligned workers in a common struggle to defend the immediate, basic interests of the working class against the bourgeoisie.” - 4th World Congress of the Communist International
Basically the thing Trump does where he hears some antiquated information and then his brain re-interprets it into a pre-school level understanding.
Ah yes “please for the love of shit stop fighting each other and fight the people we all agree are the problem instead” “see the left has always been unified”
I think by “left” he means very slightly less right.
Yeah, I guess we do have one common goal, make life better for everyone?
No, it’s make everyone’s quality of life better! /j
Look, look… both of you make excellent points but I think the real important common goal is a better life for everyone and I will fistfight both of you until we all agree or some fascist assnugget comes by and makes us forget our pedantry.
Since nobody here has said anything about IMPROVING life for everyone, only making life better and other “Better centric” topics, I’m going to throw my vote in a shredder and actively tell everyone how awful you are.
I might be infuriated by your empty symbolic act, but I’m going to make DAMN sure you have every right to do it.
You still haven’t said anything about Improving life, so now I’m going to vote for the person who wants to throw me into a wood chipper, as a protest.
To be more realistic, in that case you would vote for the wildly irrelevant 3rd party ruskpuppet of the week in smug superiority
Oh damn yo, I do hate me some Facist assnuggets
Every sane person does
If this was a joke, I love the joke
Honestly I expect life to get worse for 0.1% of people.
Somewhere…a gaggle of dickless, peaked-in-highschool, douchenozzles wearing underarmor fReEdOm tshirts popped a blood vessel in their eye from getting so enraged that someone suggested minorities get closer to the number of rights and freedoms they have.
Funnily enough, many online leftists think something similar is true for the right.
The right may not have great organization, but they have an astounding ability to put their blinders on for the Ten Minutes’ Hate when it’s called for. The right’s problem is that when they smell blood in the water, THEN the unity falls apart. It’s power games for them.
Parts of the left, or what passes for it in this country, would prefer martyrdom to cooperating with heretics.
This is because “the left” tries to unite groups that ultimately are at odds with each other. Anarchists of all types work very well with each other usually, but not with Auth left because they have bad praxis and care about being in control of the movement. Likewise it’s difficult to align with social democrats who think electoralism and reformism is a solution and stifle direct action.
Likewise Auth left and social democrats tend to infight, even within themselves, because their hierarchical praxis causes power play friction.
It’s simpler than that - the left has principles, while the right has unity and message discipline driven by deference to authority, a victim complex fear, hate, and thirst for power.
Right. It doesn’t take long to find reasons that conservatives should be divided. Libertarians hyper-capitalists only care about taxes and eliminating government regulations, but are happy to ally with Christian Dominionists. Christian Dominionists, in turn, would only benefit from bringing traditionally black and latinx churches under their philosophy, but they’re also allied with racists who only care about religion and libertarian hyper-capitalism if it provides a way for white people to dominate all others. You can categorize any given conservative by which policy they choose when a contradiction comes up.
None of these groups fit together at all, and there are obvious contradictions between them. Racists will happily add regulations that black people can’t sit in the same diners as white people, which the libertarians ought to hate. Libertarians end social programs that help people, which Christians ought to hate. They’re masters of ignoring all that to get their party into power.
See also: Nazis and Zionists.
That one may be less contradictory than you think. Depends on the brand.
Historically, there were many Christian Zionists who thought “we should give the Jews their homeland so we can kick them out of Europe”. Likewise, certain white nationalists argue that every race should have their own homeland (granted, this may be a ploy more than a real conviction), and Bibi often finds himself in friendly company there.
Reasonable, but understanding that doesn’t solve for the core “sinister Jewish cabal” narrative, I think it comes down to simple ideological alignment - far-right fascist autocracy with genocidal tendencies. There’s not much they disagree on.
You’re mistaken that the right is unified. The fight among each other quite a lot. They can only manage to unite under a charismatic strongman, but quickly fall into infighting when that falters.
They’re not unified, they’re unified …now?
The fact that they have conflicting ideologies (e.g. Nazis and Zionists as I said below) and continue to push in the same direction is pretty straightforward evidence of this.
The unification pre-dates Trump - the rise of the tea party saw ideological rifts, but they all fell in line when the time came. Bush wasn’t a charismatic strongman… nor was McConnell for that matter.
You only think they’re pushing in the same direction because you’re on the outside looking in. As the op points out, they think the same about leftists.
What issues is the left actually coordinated on? The non-specific “weird” narrative. Access to reproductive healthcare maybe.
Where is there meaningful dissent on the right?
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It’s not the obvious “stolen” election bullshit
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Even the Nazis are backing Israel
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They’re fighting regulation of firearms
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They’re all pushing for austerity broadly
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They want to restrict immigration
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They want to deregulate companies
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They want to outlaw trans people
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They broadly support Russia with a bit of surface-level sabre-rattling
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I take great offense in you saying that tankies and socdems infight, lol. (I mean, I get it, they are both statists, but I feel on a emotional level most socdems feel more for anarchism than for leninism.)
I would be an anarchist if I weren’t socdem. The problem with anarchism is that it only works on a very small scale, where people know each other well enough to work on mutual understanding. That wouldn’t work on a very large scale due to people having their own ideas. I was told before that anarchism is basically the norm for most of human history and thus it could be implemented. Well, look around, aren’t we already living in anarchism under the nation-state model? Even though there is the United Nations, most of their power is non-binding and could easily be ignored by a more powerful member. And thus we are already living in anarchism; and it’s not working as idealised.
I’m more anarchistic in personal beliefs but am willing to embrace social democrats to get some benefit.
The idea of the greatest social good for the largest group is more important than trusting everyone to follow the correct policies when given power. I also personally think that state power is incompatible with anarchist beliefs.
Generally speaking, anarchy isn’t some lost golden age that anarchists want to return to, it’s something new that we want to create. Both past and present societies have anarchistic elements that we can draw inspiration from, but none of those societies really live up to our ideals.
There are some that characterize anarchism as equivalent to direct democracy. I disagree with that, but I do think it can be categorized as a further evolution of democracy. Autonomous democracy, if you will. It retains the idea that everyone is equal and that we don’t need monarchs to govern us. However, where democracy sets up a centralized apparatus for majoritarian, society-wide rule-making and enforcement, in anarchy the rules are created and applied in a decentralized fashion where they are needed, by mutual agreement.
anarchism isn’t the lack of rules. Nor is it many little kingdoms.
Well if meant to in the context of the occasional big tent movements. I don’t think most socdems think much about anarchists at all except when it comes time to scold us for not voting.
Yes, and I think that when together in a big tent, socdems would associate more easily with anarchists than with leninists. Especially with syndicalists, for example.
Was under the impression that most anarchists are aware that voting is still important. like it or not, we are still citizens of some state for the time being, but we can use that to promote useful change or to exercise damage control, as part of the overall praxis arsenal. especially with some organization within your local groups, it can be a good tool.
We are, surprisingly enough, not very unified on that point. I used to be a non-voter, annoyed at the anarchists that would harangue me to vote. Now I’m a grudging voter, annoyed at the anarchists that harangue me *not* to vote. xD
Both then and now, I maintain that anarchists should either vote or not, and then shut the hell up about it. The whole argument is just a lot of pointless bikeshedding about the most marginal effects.
I think there’s a lot more agreement among anarchists that we shouldn’t get involved in or donate to electoral campaigns. We have better things to do with our time and resources.
How does one then answer the question “If you think elections don’t work, then why do you participate?” by a non-anarchist?
You’ve made plenty of good points throughout the article about the problems with the system. I don’t see why that can’t be your answer. There’s no contradiction in acknowledging major problems and still exerting what little influence you do have.
But if they “work a little” for an anarchist, certainly they would work a lot for a non-anarchist.
How does that logic follow? Assuming you both have the same values and are trying to achieve the same thing, then a solution that works for one person will work just as well for another. The difference in opinions is on which solution will work, not on what you’re trying to achieve.
This post borders on sovcit levels of delusion.
I’m not particularly far left compared to the Lemmy Lunatics, but I suspect that is far more true for the right than it is for the left.
I’ve seen people go from “are all these COVID precautions necessary?”, and tumble down a rabbit-hole to “we need to kick the foreigners out, Trump is the best choice for the US, and Russia is entitled to Ukraine” in a matter of months.
They’re very good at keeping people on message. They grab people on one issue and make them go all-in.
The liberal to fascist pipeline is a thing ofc, but it doesn’t represent unity of action.
If that were true, Trump would have never had a chance to become president in the first place.
Organized left = isn’t part of the cult
Meanwhile there are 3 fractions for each 2 left wing people.
I’d say fuckers problem isn’t that we are organized but maybe; we’re not a bunch of rock sucker’s mixed in with a bag’o’rascists.
Is “rock” a typo? Don’t get me wrong not cursing is cool too, just curious.
I assumed it was slang for crack cocaine users.
I support this new saying. What’s wrong with people literally fitting the original label? I think we generally appreciate those people, right?
Well, I think that there’s actually something to this. I’ve been involved in a lot of organizing spaces, and there’s this “our backs are all up against a wall so we have to work towards a common goal of achieving a workers state and not dying due to climate change” vibe going around lately.
