https://twitter.com/JStein_WaPo/status/1323242395031478272?s=19
It's going to be a very deep depression. I don't know why people aren't talking about this. It's like they're distracted by the election and looking at retail and stocks doing "fine" as a total bellwether for the economy. Shit's about to get real weird and the world won't look the same when this is over.
It's exactly that they're distracted by the election, and most people think it will be solved once Their Guy wins
I don't know if I necessarily agree with you, and I will say that because I think this reading is a bit too, let's say terminally online - like jack said above, they think "their guy" will flip the script, but that's going to be slowly whittled down as they watch their favorite restaurants close down and death/case figures rise and fall just ass they did under Trump. Don't underestimate the power of dissonance to instill panic.
I don't know why so many of you on this site think you can radicalize liberals.
They just spent 4 years telling us a return to the Obama style Status Quo is all that is needed to fix this country.
They aren't going to radicalize, nor are they ever going to help you. Liberalism is the moderate wing of fascism and we're about to witness that when Biden and Harris are pushing to jail protesters indefinitely and push for more bipartisanship with the GOP to screw us with austerity and bailing out banks in the middle of a depression.
Libs will be OK with all this cause at the end of the day, their ideology revolves around capitalism and the system, as well as upholding the status quo.
The people you should be trying to radicalize are the regular working class average joes, and talking to conspiracy theorists who actually are pissed off at the government and want change. Liberals don't want change, other than Team Blue being in charge.
Because the people we usually think of when we talk about liberals aren’t the people we’re hoping to radicalize. Most “liberals” aren’t hardcore Hillary stans or whatever, they’re left-leaning working class people who lean toward the democrats in elections if they vote at all. They’re not really liberals cause most of them don’t have any real ideological adherence to capitalism or liberal democracy, but they’re the kinda people who’ll be voting for Biden tomorrow cause they desperately want things to go back to “normal.” When things don’t go back to normal, a lot of them will lose faith in the Democratic Party and the electoral process as a whole. Sure the PMC libs will go back to brunch once Biden wins, but they’re not the liberals we’re hoping to radicalize
Have a little faith in the working class. We were all libs once
I encourage you to consider that the majority of the people we refer to as libs have never had their material conditions threatened by a crisis, personal or national or otherwise. They will panic when the messiah does not come.
You must not remember the 2009 recession all that well and how Obama bailing out the banks and wall street didn't lead libs to panic at all. He's still their messiah whom they've built a cult of personality around.
The 2009 financial crisis and subsequent recession was frankly far too abstract and removed from most people's lives past a blip in their 401ks. Do you think the current situation is in any way similar to the recession in severity / scope of impact to assume that "libs" will react in the same way? Will bends before it breaks, but you are arguing that libs have both the strongest and weakest wills side-by-side. That they are fastitiously devoted to capital, able to ignore their material conditions, and yet rely wholly on predetermined figureheads to make their decisions. I don't buy it. The proletariat and petit bourgeois (by and large your libs) are far more complex and varied than you give them credit. And it's not about radicalizing, to your post above. It's about acknowledging that people have the ability to change their mind, and accepting that they can have agency in a system that is designed to deny them agency.
The 2009 financial crisis and subsequent recession was frankly far too abstract and removed from most people’s lives past a blip in their 401ks.
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one on this site who watched their family suffer through the 2009 recession and had their own hopes and dreams destroyed from it. It was one of the most radicalizing moments of my life, yet according to you it didn't really do anything.... You must live quite comfortably, I take it.
The proletariat and petit bourgeois (by and large your libs) are far more complex and varied than you give them credit.
Who do you think voted for Trump back in 2016? It was the petit bourgeoise small business tyrants. Trump got most of his support from the middle class. I can drive right now into the suburbs and find all the support for Trump in my local area, where I don't find any signs in yards with trailer parks. The liberal media created a myth that it was the "white working class" that voted for him, despite the overwhelming evidence that it wasn't.
Most working class, lower income households DON'T vote and there is a lot of data from state to state that prove this. They don't have candidates that represent them, yet people constantly call them libs for some reason like you are implying here.
It’s about acknowledging that people have the ability to change their mind, and accepting that they can have agency in a system that is designed to deny them agency.
Don't worry, libs will change their mind. They went from pretending to be anti-war back in the Bush era to suddenly backing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars once Obama was inaugurated. The first people they change their mind on will be the BLM protesters, whom they already hate but will be able to gleefully call for their imprisonment after Biden wins.
When the libs are screaming for Biden and Harris to jail protesters indefinitely, you'll be on here with a bunch of other posters arguing "wait, we can still radicalize libs".
Not to mention, over 50% unemployment rate; the highest since the great depression and an economy in complete shambles.
This is what Joe Biden is going to inherit and he has no plans to combat it whatsoever. His austerity measures will be the tipping point that sparks the next reactionary far right movement who are going to be a lot crazier and scarier this time around as neoliberalism paves the road to fascism.
I 100% agree with you and have been telling people this on here for over a fucking month since I registered. I get all these stupid arguments like "oh no, the liberals will finally radicalize! For real this time!" and "he isn't going to do anything, he'll make it worse by sitting there doing nothing".
Biden is the main Democrat from the 90s besides Bill Clinton who was pushing all this stuff. He has been trying to gut social security since the 80s. Long before he wrote the 1994 crime bill, he pushed for other insane measures, like his attempt at a bill that would've pushed to sterilize recently paroled prisoners of drug offenses (a bill that was considered too extreme by Ronald Reagan of all people). This mother fucker used to brag that he was more right wing than the Republicans back in the 90s. He helped get Scalia and Thomas on SCOTUS and is proud of this stuff.
Speaking of social security, his SS plan talks about "loop holes" and raising taxes on it. The "loop holes" are people with pre-existing medical conditions who will be the first ones he taxes. He isn't even waiting until after the election. All of this can be found in his platform policy points. There is some truth to the conservatives screaming that he's going to jack up taxes on everyone, cause it's in his plans. He's very open about all the austerity measures he wants to push.
As for the stimulus, Biden's staff were the main ones back in the summer who tried to convince Trump to just pass tax credits at the expense of defunding SS or medicaid, and Trump almost went for it. THAT is what we are going to get for a stimulus.
He is ABSOLUTELY going to accelerate us right to fascism, pedal to the metal, car slamming into the wall at 100 mph. And the right wing backlash to this is going to be so massive and insane, it will be unlike anything we have ever seen before.
Not to mention, scores of municipal governments that aren’t going to have the funds to keep the lights on through the winter if a stimulus package doesn’t pass Through Congress soon
Every time a politician or media person says "dark winter" it just reminds me of the operation.
