Or was it Biden's victory and liberal's exhaustion with politics in a Trump-era world?
I can't help but wonder if the presence of a Democrat in the presidency just sort of pacifies liberal, left, and radical mass movements and mobilization.
Or was it Biden's victory and liberal's exhaustion with politics in a Trump-era world?
I can't help but wonder if the presence of a Democrat in the presidency just sort of pacifies liberal, left, and radical mass movements and mobilization.
Absolutely his defeat shattered the nascent new American "left" into a million pieces, We're almost half way thru the decade and there's no sign of even the barest recovery
And Ukraine added a whole new decade on top of it, the American left won't enter a growth period again for decades, probably until climate change begins to collapse the state capacity to even mobilize at a national level, my educated guess is fifteen to twenty years
Similar to the length of time it took the country to get over 9/11
Antifa and the like spent all of 2015-2020 organizing against trump’s street thugs to protect minorities. And they were pretty successful. Just trying not to lose ground to fascists. And being encouraged and used/exploited by liberals to make trump/GOP look bad.
And arguably that anti-fascist organizing helped channel into and amplify and strengthen the BLM uprising after George Floyd’s murder. Which was one of the largest working class uprisings in America since the 1960s. Which is why it has been memory holed as much as possible by the media.
The left has not been in disarray since Bernie.
"were pretty successful" were being the operative verb tense
There's no point in suger-coating it, the George Floyd protests were defeated, police expansion is at record levels, liberals and chuds alike have normalized neo-nazism at a national and global level, explosion of incel rhetoric among the youth, anti-homless sentiment, warmongering politics, complete and total collapse of pro-immigrant organizing under Biden, unprecedented anti-trans hysteria
We haven't seen this level of rightward shift since the early 2000s and in some way it's almost worse
2020, 2021, 2022, 2023; these four years have put the left in retreat in every aspect except in local union organizing, but even that hasn't moved the needle in terms of overall union membership among the labor force
I think it would be way worse without all the anti-fascist organizing that happened from 2015-2020.
And BLM has resulted in better outcomes than would be the case if it had never happened. Which is why the right wing is engaging in a backlash against it currently.
Police expansion was a cornerstone of Biden's campaign, and always has been. Why would the left ever support him? And how many cities which painted Black Lives Matter on their streets did anything to reign in qualified immunity or declaw the FBOP?