Really, it isn't a question of which one will help grow the left. Neither of them will help grow the left. They are both dedicated to a system which vows to eradicate the left.
Neither administration will lift a finger to make our task of organizing easier. Both candidates are in a pissing contest vowing to crack down on "aNtIfA" harder than the alternative in an effort to appease the suburban petit bourgeois fascists. The real answer is that it ultimately doesn't matter who wins. This is not a democratic process under any pretense. This country is not operating with "the consent of the governed" in any measurable fashion. The election is a charade, and to get caught up in the outcome one way or another is a waste of precious sanity.
The "Trump may be better for the left" takes are cringe. The "Biden may be better for the left" takes are cringe. They are both good for capital, they are both bad for us, and the whole circus is so far removed from the things the masses actually have control over.
Sure, we need to take whatever we can get. I remain convinced that there is absolutely nothing we can "get" here though, aside from opportunities to agitate.
If the left is going to grow in this country it's up to us to convert our friends and neighbors. The worsening of material contiditions under Trump is just as likely to drive people to the right as it is to the left. Biden might be scum and I personally won't be voting for him, but he will preserve the status quo giving us four more years to organize. Under Trump it's entirety possible that "far left" organization will be made a priority target. In fact he's doing right now by strawmaning Biden as an Antifa puppet.
Under Trump it’s entirety possible that “far left” organization will be made a priority target. In fact he’s doing right now by strawmaning Biden as an Antifa puppet.
Federal goons are already arresting DSA organizers.
Neither administration will lift a finger to make our task of organizing easier.
Of course they aren't going to actively help; the question is which will create an environment more conducive to recruiting leftists. I'm going to go out on a limb and say the side currently abducting leftists in unmarked vans (and that's openly discussing when they can order the military to shoot leftists) is not going to create the best environment for the left.
smashed windows disrupt brunch -> smashed windows are bad -> anarchists do mindless violence, right? -> these people smashing windows (who of course have no legitimate grievances) must be anarchists -> I'll say they should be arrested so people can get back to brunch
That's the extent of his ideological opposition to anarchists. It's standard conservative "law and order" stuff with less racial coding. Republicans, on the other hand, have spent decades building elaborate propaganda machines to equate anything left of Ronald Reagan with the worst shit you can think of.
That’s the extent of his ideological opposition to the left.
Did you just unironically post this?? After watching the same primaries i did? Joe "i didn't want my kids to grow up in a racial jungle of desegregation" biden? Joe "i voted for the Iraq war and i'd do it again" Biden? Joe "there was no problems at all with the crime bill" biden?
Ah you changed to anarchists, that's fair but i still don't agree. I don't think Biden knows what an anarchist actually is, but i'm sure he thinks anarchists are literally terrorist. Which is still really fucking bad for us.
Right before you posted this I edited my comment to say "anarchists" instead of "the left." The point is he doesn't have a fucking clue what "anarchism" or any other type of leftism is. If he were made king for a day he wouldn't march leftists into death camps; many Republicans would.
Joe “i didn’t want my kids to grow up in a racial jungle of desegregation” biden?
Joe “there was no problems at all with the crime bill” biden?
This is just garden-variety racism or indifference to racism, not any sort of deep-seated ideological hatred of the left.
It doesn't matter what he personally believes, all his actual actions have had the result of weakening or attacking the left. Whether it's his handlers making the decisions based on money or just outright hate is irrelevant.
Either Biden or Trump is going to hurt the left, sure, but Trump right now is ordering federal goons to kidnap DSA organizers. Trump is doing material harm to the left right now. It's hard to believe a party less ideologically opposed to the left is going to somehow do worse if put in power.
Whether it’s his handlers making the decisions based on money or just outright hate is irrelevant.
On the contrary, examining their motivations tells you how far they're willing to go. It absolutely matters whether "we're going to arrest these people" is made as a generic "law and order" bit or made as part of a broader strategy that would have no problem going full Pinochet.
Biden's certainly not opposed to leftism on any sort of deep ideological level the way Republicans are. Republicans made Pinochet into a meme; libs at worst just want to stop property destruction so they can go back to ignoring protests.
He's not ideological about anything. He doesn't have any surface-level policies he really gives a shit about, let alone anything resembling an ideology.
Almost all of the most excessive crackdowns on the American left have happened under liberals not conservatives.
Going to need a source on that one, especially as right now the feds are stuffing DSA organizers into unmarked vans. There's no history that's more relevant than what's going on today.
Trump would probably help the left grow more than Biden
I don't think many people who say this are actually serious about it, because if they were they'd vote Trump. After all, voting is not some moral referendum; it's a (heavily limited) political tactic. Trump = acceleration, and for the reasons stated above the left is not ready for acceleration. You don't seek out a conflict when you're small and disorganized.
Please take a look who gutted M4A and GND, and tell me if Trump can even top that.
You're talking about "gutting" policies that don't even exist and that likely wouldn't exist even if Bernie was the nominee, won, and somehow got a Democratic majority, too. M4A and GND are imaginary at this point, so gutting them doesn't mean anything in the real world. Literally anything Trump does that has real-world consequences is worse.
pretend like everything is OK
What part of "the left needs to grow and organize and needs the best possible environment for that" is "pretending like everything is OK?"
It's not necessarily accelerationism to think that the liberals in a Biden administration would use every ounce of political power to crush the left, rather than the right. Whereas if Biden loses, the liberals will be split between playing defense and punching left. The right doesn't understand the difference between the left and liberals in the first place.
There is also a strong argument to be made that if Biden wins, the Republicans will make gains in state and local, and in congress. It happened extensively under Obama. Then you are weighing one office, the presidency, against a slew of other parts of government. If we're being honest your state and local government has a lot more impact on your day to day life than the president. The people from whom the president matters most are people who live in red states, and not in the city. The people for whom the downballot matters most are people in the swing states. So if you live in Michigan, you might wonder, are you willing to risk getting another Rick Snyder running your state just so Biden can do fuck all in the White House for 4 years, and set Kamala up to lose to Tom Cotton or Josh Hawley or Nikki Haley or some other asshole who is much more competent ghoul than Trump?
There is also a strong argument to be made that if Biden wins, the Republicans will make gains in state and local, and in congress.
Why wouldn't that happen under a hypothetical Sanders administration? "We're better off with the GOP in office because otherwise the GOP will win more lower seats" can't be the logic all the time, or else we'd just willingly hand over the keys to them every four years. I'd wager at least part of the answer is that a black man with an exotic-sounding name breaks chud brains in a way a white guy named "Joe" won't.
Who can know for sure, but I think the fact that the Sanders administration would be doggedly focused on addressing all of the pain points and kitchen table issues people are experiencing. If he was the "organizer in chief" I think is a radically different scenario from what Obama did (he basically dismantled his massive grassroots apparatus when he won) and surely would be different from what Biden will do if he wins.
doggedly focused on addressing all of the pain points and kitchen table issues
Another part of what got Democrats beaten badly in 2010 was Obama promising the moon and then disappointing. He was Hope and Change, and instead we got a bare-minimum economic recovery and zero movement on ending our forever wars. Even Obamacare was a letdown -- it was the mildest reform he could get away with and the dismantling of it was started almost immediately.
No one is expecting anything from Biden other than "not Trump."
Doesn’t that say something about how good or bad he really is for the left? There’s a lot of tension between “Trump would be better than Biden for the left” and “no fucking way would I ever vote for Trump.”
"Better" implies Trump would actually good. I don't like to use that word. I prefer to say "Trump would be slightly less apocalyptically bad than Biden" for the left.
There's two bad choices for the left, which is why I'm not participating. But if we're spinning out which future scenario would more likely lead to less shitty outcomes for leftists, it's the one that gets us closer to wiping out the Democratic Party completely, since they are the more immediate threat to leftists having viable political alternatives, far more than Republicans are.
No self respecting leftist is going to vote for Trump
Doesn't that say something about how good or bad he really is for the left? There's a lot of tension between "Trump would be better than Biden for the left" and "no fucking way would I ever vote for Trump."
So you really think the corporate elites are going to let even a center left soc dem like Bernie Sanders come close to power again?
You could have said the same thing after 2016, yet there he was as the Democratic frontrunner in 2020 through the first four primaries. Corporate elites have enormous sway over elections, but they can't just determine the outcome by flipping a switch. To kneecap Bernie they needed (1) the left not to be too strong, (2) a centrist politician with at least some credible public support, and (3) some coordinating force -- Obama, in this case -- to persuade centrist candidates to drop out on cue. There were other factors that helped them pull it off in 2020, and there are a dozen random things that could have wrapped it up for Bernie no matter what they did (imagine if covid or the Tara Reade story hit two months earlier). And don't forget, Bernie is not an especially strong candidate. He's old, he's not particularly charismatic, he had to create a political base from scratch, he had no allies in the party, and he comes from a state too tiny to have much of an electoral impact. If anything about that situation changes in the future, there's no guarantee they'll be able to job another candidate the way they jobbed Bernie.
But now if his supporters capitulated, the bourgeoisie will not be afraid anymore.
No matter what the left does, the left doesn't get to decide how that's portrayed in the media because the left's media arm is still in its infancy. They're going to try to blame the left for any negative outcome no matter what we do. We can't control the narrative, so the discussion is about what little influence we do have on the end result, and what result we'd prefer.
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Really, it isn't a question of which one will help grow the left. Neither of them will help grow the left. They are both dedicated to a system which vows to eradicate the left.
Neither administration will lift a finger to make our task of organizing easier. Both candidates are in a pissing contest vowing to crack down on "aNtIfA" harder than the alternative in an effort to appease the suburban petit bourgeois fascists. The real answer is that it ultimately doesn't matter who wins. This is not a democratic process under any pretense. This country is not operating with "the consent of the governed" in any measurable fashion. The election is a charade, and to get caught up in the outcome one way or another is a waste of precious sanity.
The "Trump may be better for the left" takes are cringe. The "Biden may be better for the left" takes are cringe. They are both good for capital, they are both bad for us, and the whole circus is so far removed from the things the masses actually have control over.
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Sure, we need to take whatever we can get. I remain convinced that there is absolutely nothing we can "get" here though, aside from opportunities to agitate.
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If the left is going to grow in this country it's up to us to convert our friends and neighbors. The worsening of material contiditions under Trump is just as likely to drive people to the right as it is to the left. Biden might be scum and I personally won't be voting for him, but he will preserve the status quo giving us four more years to organize. Under Trump it's entirety possible that "far left" organization will be made a priority target. In fact he's doing right now by strawmaning Biden as an Antifa puppet.
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The libs don't actually like Biden the way they like Obama. He's just "not Trump" to them.
Federal goons are already arresting DSA organizers.
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Of course they aren't going to actively help; the question is which will create an environment more conducive to recruiting leftists. I'm going to go out on a limb and say the side currently abducting leftists in unmarked vans (and that's openly discussing when they can order the military to shoot leftists) is not going to create the best environment for the left.
biden literally said anarchists should be prosecuted. not gonna count on him stopping that shit.
In Biden's pudding/lib brain:
That's the extent of his ideological opposition to anarchists. It's standard conservative "law and order" stuff with less racial coding. Republicans, on the other hand, have spent decades building elaborate propaganda machines to equate anything left of Ronald Reagan with the worst shit you can think of.
Did you just unironically post this?? After watching the same primaries i did? Joe "i didn't want my kids to grow up in a racial jungle of desegregation" biden? Joe "i voted for the Iraq war and i'd do it again" Biden? Joe "there was no problems at all with the crime bill" biden?
Ah you changed to anarchists, that's fair but i still don't agree. I don't think Biden knows what an anarchist actually is, but i'm sure he thinks anarchists are literally terrorist. Which is still really fucking bad for us.
Right before you posted this I edited my comment to say "anarchists" instead of "the left." The point is he doesn't have a fucking clue what "anarchism" or any other type of leftism is. If he were made king for a day he wouldn't march leftists into death camps; many Republicans would.
This is just garden-variety racism or indifference to racism, not any sort of deep-seated ideological hatred of the left.
It doesn't matter what he personally believes, all his actual actions have had the result of weakening or attacking the left. Whether it's his handlers making the decisions based on money or just outright hate is irrelevant.
Either Biden or Trump is going to hurt the left, sure, but Trump right now is ordering federal goons to kidnap DSA organizers. Trump is doing material harm to the left right now. It's hard to believe a party less ideologically opposed to the left is going to somehow do worse if put in power.
On the contrary, examining their motivations tells you how far they're willing to go. It absolutely matters whether "we're going to arrest these people" is made as a generic "law and order" bit or made as part of a broader strategy that would have no problem going full Pinochet.
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Biden's certainly not opposed to leftism on any sort of deep ideological level the way Republicans are. Republicans made Pinochet into a meme; libs at worst just want to stop property destruction so they can go back to ignoring protests.
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He's not ideological about anything. He doesn't have any surface-level policies he really gives a shit about, let alone anything resembling an ideology.
Going to need a source on that one, especially as right now the feds are stuffing DSA organizers into unmarked vans. There's no history that's more relevant than what's going on today.
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I don't think many people who say this are actually serious about it, because if they were they'd vote Trump. After all, voting is not some moral referendum; it's a (heavily limited) political tactic. Trump = acceleration, and for the reasons stated above the left is not ready for acceleration. You don't seek out a conflict when you're small and disorganized.
You're talking about "gutting" policies that don't even exist and that likely wouldn't exist even if Bernie was the nominee, won, and somehow got a Democratic majority, too. M4A and GND are imaginary at this point, so gutting them doesn't mean anything in the real world. Literally anything Trump does that has real-world consequences is worse.
What part of "the left needs to grow and organize and needs the best possible environment for that" is "pretending like everything is OK?"
It's not necessarily accelerationism to think that the liberals in a Biden administration would use every ounce of political power to crush the left, rather than the right. Whereas if Biden loses, the liberals will be split between playing defense and punching left. The right doesn't understand the difference between the left and liberals in the first place.
There is also a strong argument to be made that if Biden wins, the Republicans will make gains in state and local, and in congress. It happened extensively under Obama. Then you are weighing one office, the presidency, against a slew of other parts of government. If we're being honest your state and local government has a lot more impact on your day to day life than the president. The people from whom the president matters most are people who live in red states, and not in the city. The people for whom the downballot matters most are people in the swing states. So if you live in Michigan, you might wonder, are you willing to risk getting another Rick Snyder running your state just so Biden can do fuck all in the White House for 4 years, and set Kamala up to lose to Tom Cotton or Josh Hawley or Nikki Haley or some other asshole who is much more competent ghoul than Trump?
Why wouldn't that happen under a hypothetical Sanders administration? "We're better off with the GOP in office because otherwise the GOP will win more lower seats" can't be the logic all the time, or else we'd just willingly hand over the keys to them every four years. I'd wager at least part of the answer is that a black man with an exotic-sounding name breaks chud brains in a way a white guy named "Joe" won't.
Who can know for sure, but I think the fact that the Sanders administration would be doggedly focused on addressing all of the pain points and kitchen table issues people are experiencing. If he was the "organizer in chief" I think is a radically different scenario from what Obama did (he basically dismantled his massive grassroots apparatus when he won) and surely would be different from what Biden will do if he wins.
Another part of what got Democrats beaten badly in 2010 was Obama promising the moon and then disappointing. He was Hope and Change, and instead we got a bare-minimum economic recovery and zero movement on ending our forever wars. Even Obamacare was a letdown -- it was the mildest reform he could get away with and the dismantling of it was started almost immediately.
No one is expecting anything from Biden other than "not Trump."
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Does living in a swing state count as a gun? My liberal vote shaming family and friends are afraid of guns.
"Better" implies Trump would actually good. I don't like to use that word. I prefer to say "Trump would be slightly less apocalyptically bad than Biden" for the left.
There's two bad choices for the left, which is why I'm not participating. But if we're spinning out which future scenario would more likely lead to less shitty outcomes for leftists, it's the one that gets us closer to wiping out the Democratic Party completely, since they are the more immediate threat to leftists having viable political alternatives, far more than Republicans are.
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Doesn't that say something about how good or bad he really is for the left? There's a lot of tension between "Trump would be better than Biden for the left" and "no fucking way would I ever vote for Trump."
You could have said the same thing after 2016, yet there he was as the Democratic frontrunner in 2020 through the first four primaries. Corporate elites have enormous sway over elections, but they can't just determine the outcome by flipping a switch. To kneecap Bernie they needed (1) the left not to be too strong, (2) a centrist politician with at least some credible public support, and (3) some coordinating force -- Obama, in this case -- to persuade centrist candidates to drop out on cue. There were other factors that helped them pull it off in 2020, and there are a dozen random things that could have wrapped it up for Bernie no matter what they did (imagine if covid or the Tara Reade story hit two months earlier). And don't forget, Bernie is not an especially strong candidate. He's old, he's not particularly charismatic, he had to create a political base from scratch, he had no allies in the party, and he comes from a state too tiny to have much of an electoral impact. If anything about that situation changes in the future, there's no guarantee they'll be able to job another candidate the way they jobbed Bernie.
No matter what the left does, the left doesn't get to decide how that's portrayed in the media because the left's media arm is still in its infancy. They're going to try to blame the left for any negative outcome no matter what we do. We can't control the narrative, so the discussion is about what little influence we do have on the end result, and what result we'd prefer.
Should the KDP have worked with the SDP in Weimar Germany is a timeless question and it manifests itself today in our choices.
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