• hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
      arrow-down
      24
      ·
      4 years ago

      You're right, but we shouldn't adopt the right wing's "Democrat Party" (as opposed to Democratic Party) nomenclature in our criticisms of it. Using what's literally a Republican messaging tactic will only make horseshoe theory "Bernie's the same as Trump!" nonsense more believable.

      • anonymous_ascendent [none/use name]
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        edit-2
        4 years ago

        Literally who gives a shit about this other than libs like you? They are talking about incinerating you and you are just pedantically quibbling in their defense about the meany republican word. Why are you like this?

      • happybadger [he/him]
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        4 years ago

        They're not going to vote for Bernie regardless of messaging. Elizabeth Warren is too pRoGrEsSiVe for them. When you play their game you're enabling them setting the rules. Fuck every liberal, if they think horseshoe theory is a thing they can shove that horseshoe in their ass and then try to get some healthcare for it under the system they think you're worth.

        • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          4 years ago

          We are going absolutely nowhere unless we get tens of millions more people -- at minimum -- on our side. Many of those will be people who are libs today. If your mentality is "fuck every liberal" you might as well quit right now.

          • happybadger [he/him]
            arrow-down
            3
            ·
            4 years ago

            And that isn't our side. If you want to keep trying to change the party be my guest, but while you're at it you should become a cop so that there is an anti-racist one telling the others why they're wrong about the things that give them power.

            • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
              arrow-down
              4
              ·
              4 years ago

              And that isn’t our side.

              Where are you going to get the tens of millions more leftists it will take to get anything significant done? How do you plan on doing this without appealing to today's libs? If your answer is "look at all the people who don't vote/are apolitical," consider that Bernie just tried that strategy and it wasn't nearly enough.

              We're going to have to convince some libs -- a lot of them, actually -- to move left or else we're dead in the water. A lot of people here used to be libs, so pretending they're unreachable is ridiculous.

              • happybadger [he/him]
                arrow-down
                2
                ·
                4 years ago

                If your answer is “look at all the people who don’t vote/are apolitical,” consider that Bernie just tried that strategy and it wasn’t nearly enough.

                guess why :surprised-pika:

                • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
                  arrow-down
                  4
                  ·
                  4 years ago

                  Do tell.

                  If the theory is that the apolitical crowd is apolitical because no one ever promises them material improvements, Bernie did that pretty directly and it didn't work. If the theory is that they're disillusioned with electoralism, how are you going to get folks that apathetic to do harder non-electoral stuff if they won't even go to the polls for a candidate who offers something material?

                  Maybe the answer is that a big chunk of the population will always be more focused on their individual problems than on nationwide political problems. Maybe you'll never be able to build a socialist movement around people who just want to grill. Maybe some people who are already politically active and aren't proud reactionaries could be comrades if we talk to them a bit.

                  • happybadger [he/him]
                    arrow-down
                    2
                    ·
                    4 years ago

                    What is the ideological inclination of pretty much all media on the "left"? We've got CNN and Bloomberg on the far-right flank, MSNBC is solidly neoliberal, Vox and Vice might be more progressive toward individual issues but Comcast and NBC own Vox while Vice's is split between the creator with a minority stake, Disney, a hedge fund, and both George Soros and the son of Rupert Murdoch. Newspapers, if you can get past the paywall, are universally very neoliberal while we've only really got Jacobin as a mass media outlet. Maybe bread tube if you want to consider that wing of liberalism the ally wing even though their project is recuperating socialist ideas and language into things that reinforce capitalism, but they certainly fell in line as quickly as Bernie did.

                    You can have a great message. Eugene V. Debs appealed directly to the working class with "If I'm president you will not be blown up by weeks of artillery barrages in the War of the Large Cousins", but if that message does not have the same reach and same institutional acceptance as the things which benefit those institutions then it doesn't matter if Bernie promises healthcare during a pandemic because every other voice people are inundated with is paid to say otherwise.

                    Again I'm not discouraging you. Feel free to get out there and convince the democrats this time. I guess neither a decade of Reagan nor the Iraq War convinced democrats because they're ideologically tied to those things, but you're the one with a vision for the socialist future of the party and I have faith that you can achieve it. Those neoliberals are going to televise your revolution so good on you. Meanwhile I'm going to start a nonprofit that raises money from the rich to fight the problems of the rich in ways that shield them from taxes that could benefit public services ending that problem. I can abolish capitalism if I beg capital for scraps.

      • Fredward [he/him]
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        4 years ago

        I use it because there's nothing democratic about the organization. It's the world's oldest party of capital.

        • hogposting [he/him,comrade/them]
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          4 years ago

          I don’t see how petty semantic digs are going to convince anyone to be a leftist. I do see a way those petty semantic digs could be lumped in with existing anti-left messaging.