- cross-posted to:
- mop@quokk.au
- cross-posted to:
- mop@quokk.au
cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/c/mop/p/828160/that-s-goofy
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Not liberals, democrats. Let’s use labels that actually describe the group that’s being discussed. Democrats for the most part are conservative, ever trying to maintain the status quo and unwilling to try anything else (meanwhile republicans are fascist not conservative).
Of course, democrats will continue to call themselves liberal and republicans will continue to call themselves conservative no matter how much I insist that they’re wrong, but I’ll continue to assert this point whenever a convenient opportunity arises.
Not liberals, democrats
Potato tomato. Neoliberalism (the kind of Liberals the DNC leadership are) is the ideology of Thatcher and Reagan and refers to laissez faire economic policy, not ACTUAL liberty for all.
Democrats for the most part are conservative, ever trying to maintain the status quo and unwilling to try anything else
Yup. Still Neoliberal.
meanwhile republicans are fascist not conservative
Yeah, those fascists are textbook ultra-regressive
Of course, democrats will continue to call themselves liberal
Because over 99% of them are. Liberalism ≠ Leftism.
They’ll also keep calling themselves progressive, though, which IS left wing and thus NOT what the vast majority of Democrat politicians are.
and republicans will continue to call themselves conservative
Because blatantly lying about what they are and what they do is THE pillar supporting all GOP election success since the 60s if not sooner.
no matter how much I insist that they’re wrong
I mean, you’re right about one of them and wrong about the other 🤷🏻
I’ll continue to assert this point whenever a convenient opportunity arises.
Which part(s)? The part you’re right about about, or both?
Part of what I’m complaining about is that groups following an ideology often give themselves names and descriptions that do not accurately describe the ideology. If we accept that and use the labels they gave themselves, then we distort what those words even mean and language is useless.
Imma cherry pick some definitions in order to best make my current point.
Liberal. Adjective.
Favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs.
Open-minded or tolerant, especially free of or not bound by traditional or conventional ideas, values, etc.
Conservative. Adjective.
Disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.
I don’t think I need to do a section on “fascist”.
Also also, the word “neoliberal” is absolute syllable salad to me. It’s like it’s trying to pretend to be one thing, but is actually the polar opposite of it. It’s a case of a movement naming itself without regard to what the fuck the word actually means and therefore it doesn’t mean a damn thing. Neoliberal is a name, not a description, for diet republicans.
Liberal. Adjective.
Favorable to progress or reform
That’s literally Progressivism. Which ISN’T Liberalism.
Open-minded or tolerant
That’s 1700s Classical Liberalism, when compared to the ultra-authoritarian norms of the time.
Modern Liberalism AKA Neoliberalism is an economic philosophy that is very much capitalist and authoritarian.
Conservative. Adjective.
Disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc
Correct
, or to restore traditional ones
Nope, that’s regression. Easy mistake to make when everyone calling themselves conservative for the past half century have actually been regressive.
and to limit change.
Correct.
Also also, the word “neoliberal” is absolute syllable salad to me.
Bolded the significant part. The “neo” part is there for a reason, as described above.
It’s like it’s trying to pretend to be one thing, but is actually the polar opposite of it.
Nope. Neoliberalism is economically Liberal and can be socially progressive, neutral (most of the DNC) or conservative (most “moderate” Republicans)
It’s a case of a movement naming itself without regard to
what the fuckwhether or not glitchdx understands what the word actually means and therefore it doesn’t mean a damn thing to glitchdxFixed it for you.
Fun fact, the guy who did the goofy goes to trial (from the meme here) ended up as the director of smiling friends
The guy who invented the Harlem shake was a firefighter on 9/11
And so was Steve Buschemi!
Removed by mod
They’re already out here trying to lay that groundwork for the next election with the shaming. They know all they have to do is get some actual decent candidates but that’s obviously a bridge too far and they’ll put forth some ungodly combination of Newsome, Harris, and don’t forget Klobuchar waiting in the wings.
Forgetting about Pete Buttigeig is both homophobic and a liberal hate crime. We have to remember that he emerges from the depths of some liberal think tank every four years to throw his hat in the ring. Come on, it’s 2026… Gay men can do crimes for the CIA too.
Pete exists to take enthusiasm from an actual progressive and move it to the front runner whenever he inevitably drops out of the race. He launders votes upstream by splitting votes downstream. Him and Elizabeth Warren play this role frequently.
Yeap, he’s basically the human embodiment of chase bank rainbow washing their image a month out of every year.
What the fuck?
Sarcasm…well except for the CIA thing. Buttigeig worked for the Mckimsey company in irag and Afghanistan after his military service. The McKinsey company is used as an operational front for a lot of CIA projects overseas.
shapiro, too. please don’t elect shapiro.
lay that groundwork for the next election
The fact that “next election” to you means the presidential election is very telling. There are more progressive candidates penciled on the midterm ballots (let alone the active primaries) than there have been in living memory. And that’s not counting local progressive candidates that are already in office from this election cycle.
But to hear everyone talk, anything short of a leftist presidency is a failure in the same way that anything short of a spontaneous revolution isn’t worth doing. A milquetoast neolib president shackled by a progressive Congress by far the best option in the realm of possibility.
This is what drives left infighting, a complete disconnect on what’s desired and what’s possible. Some limitations are just so obvious that I don’t know how people ignore them.
- All media is controlled by billionaire corporate interests who have a ton to lose from the left gaining power. The revolution will not be televised and your left political wave will not come through social media. This will not change and you don’t have the wallet to fight it.
- Related, there will never be a viable third party no matter how much wishcasting you project. FPTP firmly entrenched the two party system and it would take a herculean reform effort to uproot it. There’s a reason that the Republican and Democratic platforms have shifted all over the map since the 1800s, you can’t splinter and keep any power.
- Following that, the road map for usurping the DNC has already been shown to us. Power is displaced from the bottom up and a presidency is the last thing captured. Unfortunately, as they act as party of controlled opposition, the fight to disrupt that will be harder than it ever was.
- Finally, the floodgates have been opened to a fascist takeover of the USA. To a certain extent, there’s no closing Pandora’s box and expectations and plans need to be adjusted for the new world.
So look at those facts and ask simple questions. Can reform by electoralism be attempted in this environment? What is the best chance for harm reduction here? Do the old rules apply in the same way (eg. is not voting blue even an option now)? Can this regime even be removed from office by normal means? What battles will you pick?
If you’ve really thought through all of that and landed on complaining about Harris and Newsome then I don’t know what to say. That is so far down the branch of things we can’t change (media narrative control, DNC establishment power, nascent progressive bloc still solidifying) that it’s not worth discussing.
Wow, inspiring stuff 😂
All that text just to recycle the same old tired lesser evil argument, and tell us that any other form of “resistance” other than voting blue is useless.
FPTP firmly entrenched the two party system and it would take a herculean reform effort to uproot it.
And yet, Britain’s next election will likely be a contest between Reform and the Greens. The center has collapsed and both centrist parties revealed themselves to be incapable of meeting the challenges of the moment.
Yes, you’re right that FPTP produces a two party system. But what people who point this out miss is that those two parties can be switched out. And the nature of power structures means that it’s usually easier to just let one of the entrenched parties completely die than to try and reform it from within. Remember, the Republican Party started as a third party before becoming one of the two main parties. The abolitionists ultimately found that starting a new party was more practical than trying to work within the existing two party structure.
It was possible to reform the Republican party from within, but that likely isn’t possible with the Democrats. The MAGA wing was able to take over the GOP, but ultimately their message is no different than the same crap Republicans have been pushing for generations. They’re not fundamentally challenging the core beliefs of the party. Trump still takes his court nomination orders from the Federalist Society. He still gets his social policies from the Heritage foundation. Racism is still the primary party value. Very little has actually changed, aside from more nakedly fascist methods.
In contrast, reforming the Dems would require fundamentally uprooting their core values and power structure. And historically that just isn’t very practical. It’s easier to just create an entirely new party than to try to completely transform one. At that point, you’re basically creating a whole new party anyway, just within the shell of the old one. Even if you succeed in taking over the Democratic party, all their old financial backers and supporters of centrist policies will walk away and abandon the party. So you’re not even gaining control of the Party’s resources. You’ll have to build that from scratch anyway. And at that point, it’s easier to just build something entirely new.
And yes, the media is a problem. But that’s always been the case.
Britain’s next election…
The UK electoral system may as well be from Mars when compared to the USA.
- For one, they have 650 MPs representing a population of 67 million. The US has 535 total reps split across a bicameral legislature. Combining Texas + California, you have 90 house seats and 4 senators representing 70 million people! It’s incredibly important for all of those people to be on the same page when such high leverage seats are on the line.
- The byzantine system of the Senate and the Electoral College similarly fuck with election strategy. It doesn’t mean jack shit if your progressive candidates draw 30 million extra votes if those votes come from California and NY.
- A motion can dissolve the UK government and trigger a new vote at any time, the US can’t do shit until the next election cycle.
Keep running down the list and it becomes more and more obvious that US elections have extremely high stakes, keeping the establishment parties nice and comfy.
Remember, the Republican Party started as a third party…
It emerged at a time when both major parties were losing ground with their voter base, not spontaneously from one side of the political spectrum. In 1854, 5 new parties were vying for seats which gave them lots of room to maneuver. [They had even more room than today when you compare 1800s representation against the 435 rep cap we have now.]
Today there’s no MAGA splinter party; the GOP is in a firm lockstep and polls indicate that their core base will never waiver. Unless you can totally supplant the Dems on the left in one fell swoop, you’re still stuck at their negotiating table. You might get a new party logo on your name tag but you’re as much at the whims of fascist collaborators as before.
[MAGA did] not fundamentally challenging the core beliefs of the party
This is incredibly ironic because decades of grooming went into supplanting the old 20th century GOP platform. It feels like nothing changed but that’s due to how persistent and focused the campaign was. Look at John McCain. One of the last true, piece of shit, old school Republicans and he ended his long established career blocking MAGA.
reforming the Dems would require fundamentally uprooting their core values and power structure
The lack of core values has been a criticism for decades, they’re a blank slate in that department. Would it be a more drastic heel turn than shifting the “party of small government and tax cuts” into “record breaking debt, spending and raising taxes”?
Donors and DNC power structures only matter as tools of suppression. If you can break the seal and get the votes in spite of those roadblocks, you can keep the votes without them.
old financial backers and supporters of centrist policies will walk away
If the campaign money shifts away from a newly progressive Democrat party, where will it go to? A new center right party courting R votes? They’ve shown that strategy doesn’t work. A new spineless, controlled “leftist” opposition party? Well then they’re stuck building against all the two party roadblocks they put up themselves!
I mean when talking about presidential candidates running for a presidential election, it does kinda make sense to use “next” even though there is technically another one before then, because the “true next” one doesn’t involve presidential elections. It’s called context. That doesn’t mean that they’re not voting at midterm elections, it just means that they understand that presidents aren’t elected until presidential elections and we can disregard midterms when talking about presidential candidates.
It’s like saying “I’ll see you at the next baseball game” to your friend when leaving the stadium, and him understanding that you mean the next home game not flying to Chicago to see them play at Wrigley on Tuesday.
Reread the OP. There was no mention of presidential elections anywhere, just “liberal candidate” generally in “elections”. You made the same assumption, which just goes to show how the media landscape has conditioned us to think like that.
Well,
A) “Let’s dissuade people from participating in radical politics” is only during presidential election season, when’s the last time you saw an ad for midterms? The DNC barely participates themselves. Be real.
B) So? The comment you replied to chose to talk about the presidential election which is no less valid of an interpretation. Maybe they didn’t want to dox themselves more locally than “US,” you are the one who chose to reply to that comment specifically instead of making your own top level comment about midterms.
C) Almost everyone in this thread interpreted it to be directly about Kamala. It doesn’t mention her by name, no, and yes, all the rest in the DNC are just as incompetent of candidates, but people get mad when you remind them of that and if you agree with me, we’re the outliers here, as sad as that is for a supposed anarchist community. That said, it was likely OP’s intent even without naming her (or it’s an old meme about Biden or Hillary because tbh they KEEP doing it for presidential elections especially like they want to lose.)
To be fair, they are also doing work to discredit the left flank for the midterms, too.
American liberals deserve Trump until they get the damn message. You may be able to shame some people on the internet into voting for corporate captured candidates, but come voting day people simply won’t turn out for them.
It’s just bad strategy. They’re addicted to failure.
Oh. Are you not American?
Most media-defined liberals here are better called “neoliberals”. I really doubt they’re over a third of the population here.
We call the people that think healthcare is a human right, education should be affordable or even “free”, and wars are a total disaster progressives politely and woke libtards pejoratively, or just libs. These people make up about 70% of the population.
They are neo liberal, thats is, capitalists, just ok with people not being wasps. Thats the only difference.
Max left.
I think the frustration is their complete inability to compromise.
How many war crimes are permissable do you reckon?
Zero.
Yea… We were thinking a positive number closer to infinity.
No.
You’re assaulting me! I’m going to stand my ground!
…
Ending war crimes is actually cultural genocide. Its like exterminating the buffalo, but for zionists. How dare you be so antisemitic!
Oh they compromise all the time, just not with anyone left of Reagan.
The world’s smallest circle jerk.
Point.
They dont want to. They are getting what they want, money.
Its not just money. Its exploitation.
She wasn’t unelectable if people had actually looked at her voting history.
That must be why she won, eh?
I’m sorry your reading comprehension is bad.
I’m sorry your candidate got such a lukewarm reception despite running against the worst opponent ever. She should run again!
