I know it's not actually a real thing because I'd never seen the phrase more than a month ago and it's getting thrown around as the new insult du jour but what is it supposed to mean?
It's short for "patriotic socialist". The term is a few years old but the people it describes are almost entirely on twitter.
It started from self proclaimed communists saying US communists should not talk about the evils of the US or denigrate its symbols because it would "alienate the proletariat" by which they mean conservative white guys. Said "communists" have since gone on to try to start #MAGAcommunism, spoken against LGBTQ+ rights and women's rights, put their full support into Russia in the war, go on Fox News, and come out as full conservatives, among many other embarrassments.
It's an attempt at restarting the Larouche movement. As such, there's only a handful of Patsocs because their policies are too right wing to pick up support of anyone left of Ronald Reagan and their use of communist aesthetic is alienating to anyone who'd agree with them politically.
This is the best answer, they are an organized operation with strong ties to the Schiller Institute.
It's worth pointing out how (sometimes to hilarious effect) they try to be sneaky about their Larouche associations. On social media, this usually takes the form of the patsoc sharing larouche propoganda while pretending that it's all new information to themselves, and they're "just trying to learn more about it." They're usually pretty easy to spot right away for any ML worth their salt, but I think their cult is more focused on converting baby leftists and center-rights.
Nazbols being so insufferable are the closest anyone has gotten to making me go back to a lolbert more than any argument from libertarians.
Look what you've done, Hexbear. You turned a tiny group of twitter posters into a brain worm now like a blackhole it's sucking everybody in and now this poor bastard gets to have brain worms
If only someone had warned us about the dangers of posting.
It's a kind of guy even more online than us that says they're socialists, but in the eagle tears burger Ram 1500 MURICA MAGA anti-communist way.
There are at least 7 of them.
They may be the worlds first true digital life form.
A lot of chuds do believe it though, but that's because they lack class analysis. I've had my idiot conservative cousins look me in the eye and say teachers are the elite whereas someone like Elon Musk is working class.
Remember all the 2016 4Chan meme nazis who got disillusioned and became Bernie communists? Well some of them backslid but forgot to take off the Ushanka. Fash trying to adopt communist aesthetics is an old ploy, this is just the newest form.
There's literally only like 5 or so of these people, the ones on here may all be alts made by Haz himself because he has zero actual fans.
It's an almost identical reassertion of Larouchite ideology. Capitalism presents us with two primary codependent cultural expressions corresponding to urban finance capital and rural "productive" capital. The friction caused by these interconnected cultural affects is the root cause of America's culture war.
Marxists generally understand that both of these expressions are not only fundamentally flawed, but inherently interconnected. "Patsocs" staunchly, overtly and obnoxiously side on every issue with the landed capitalists.
They advocate for socialism only after redefining it completely (like a certain prior brand of "National" Socialists). They believe that a worker is defined not by relation to capital, but by relation to the cultural affect of landed capital. To them, a truck driver who owns their truck, a factory wage worker, and a factory owner are all workers despite their wildly differing relationships to property. Baristas according to them are not, because they are urban and live in proximity to finance capital. They insist this loudly and at all opportunities. They have their own party line they insist on pushing above and to the exclusion of all others. Once you are bought in to this ideology, you have become an agent provocateur. You insist on absurdities and derail every conversation you can. You exist to discredit Marxists. You'll wave around a hammer and sickle and deny the holocaust, not knowing you're doing the bidding of the FBI.
Look at their ridiculous gatherings on youtube where a handful of 40 something pickup artists blankly stare at a giant 'Z' flag around a big plastic bust of Abraham Lincoln while the USSR Anthem plays. It's a COINTELPRO victory lap, an allocation of a couple of thousand of extra tax dollars dreamt up at Langley for a chuckle and lapped up by terrified libs who willingly mistake them for genuine Marxists.
I mean, I think there is a distinction between patriotism an nationalism, and I think Rorty's very compelling description in 'Achieving Our Country' of what the leftist approach to the US and it's (very bad) legacy should be has room for what might be described as 'patriotism' if you kinda squint.
some social democrats with the siege mentality of a bored suburb boomer
Okay you know there are radlibs, who are libs that call themselves leftists when they haven't read any theory and hold no leftist beliefs? Patsocs are that except fascists instead of libs.
Look at the lengths people go to for saying they don't want the machines and instruments of society to be used to promote the general welfare as agreed upon by the people who use them. The different adjectives and rationals they must concoct to say "I want subjugation to be a part of society." "This is why I can't use your pronouns." "This is why you can't create a union." All the appeals to nature, the necessity of this or that, and the half-baked reasons why collaboration has never and could never work. They give all that effort to glorify systems that threaten to annihilate us all. It's all a bunch of dog shit if it's not socialism or communism by some stripe.
