To be brief, it’s propaganda designed to keep rural voters red. Ie- "those big city folk don’t care about you."
Partly...
But also that the Dem party today is significantly more "conservative" economically than we used to be, as the article points out:
In 1910, Teddy Roosevelt thundered his warning that “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power” could destroy US democracy. Roosevelt’s answer was to tax wealth. The estate tax was eventually enacted in 1916, and the capital gains tax in 1922.
In the 1912 presidential campaign, Woodrow Wilson promised “a crusade against powers that have governed us … that have limited our development … that have determined our lives … that have set us in a straitjacket to do as they please”. The struggle to break up the giant trusts would be, in Wilson’s words, a “second struggle for emancipation”.
Wilson signed into law the Clayton Antitrust Act, which strengthened antitrust laws and protected unions. He also established the Federal Trade Commission to root out “unfair acts and practices in commerce”, and created the first permanent national income tax.
Years later, Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth-cousin, Franklin D Roosevelt, attacked corporate and financial power by giving workers the right to unionize, the 40-hour workweek, unemployment insurance, and social security. FDR instituted a high marginal income tax on the wealthy – those making more than $5m a year were taxed up to 75% – and he regulated finance.
Plus, Teddy was the first presidential platform that used universal healthcare....
So part of it is that Republicans lie and propaganda
But if the modern Dem party didn't think the Dem party platform from a fucking century ago wasnt "too extreme" the modern Dem party would be as popular as it was with FDR.
I think that's more of a symptom than a root cause. republicans' goal since the 70's has been to pull the lower and middle classes to them with wedge identity issues like abortion. the whole "elitism" thing is a part of that too. So now the parties are competing on those wedge issues and identity more than economic progress, as they were in FDR's time.
Like, you understand that if the Dem party wanted to, they could still be that economically progressive, right?
And that in doing so it mitigate Republicans lying?
The Dem party becoming more economically conservative is solely the fault of the people choosing to do what donors want over what Dem voters want....
Both parties focusing on the "wedge issues" is by design, that way the wealthy who donate to both parties always win...
The only people who control the Dem.platform is Dem party leadership, them choosing wealthy donors over voters is literally no one's fault except the people running the party who keep repeatedly making that choice.
I get wanting to blame Republicans, but we can't on this one.
It's literally as easy as Kamala deciding to do so at this point, it's a month from election and she's the candidate. But she's not, instead she keeps moving to the right economically the closer we get to the election.
The Dem party becoming more economically conservative is solely the fault of the people choosing to do what donors want over what Dem voters want…
Do not make the mistake of thinking nerds on the Internet represent the Democratic Party rank and file. They like neoliberal economics.
They like neoliberal economics
Then why did 08 Obama carry the party and flip red states when all those neo liberals voted R due to the PUMA movement?
The neo liberals are not a majority of voters, they just still have a death grip on party leadership positions at the DNC
Then why did 08 Obama carry the party
... because Obama was a moderate neoliberal.
Fortunately both Biden and Harris support an unrealized capital gains tax, which would be an absolutely huge move. If we can acquire both houses of Congress and thus the ability to pass laws, we may actually achieve it.
Also, have dems cut taxes or regulation on the wealthy at any point that you can remember?
the point is there would be more of a political mandate for economic change if our demographics looked more like this today. that map is never going to happen today no matter how progressive dems go on the economy, because of the work republicans have done to divide us over the last 50 years.
The point is there's been a political mandate for economic change for over a century...
The reason the Dems don't have the numbers to accomplish it, is them giving up on progressive economics.
Think of it like a restaurant. One that used to serve food people wanted and was always busy. Then the restaurant got kick backs from a differemt food supplier. One whose food was worse, and thus unpopular.
The restaurant loses business because the food gets worse, it takes a while because people only go out to eat every four years, and the only other restaurant serves shit sandwiches exclusively.
People won't still go out to eat and pick the shit sandwich, they'll just stop going out to eat. The patrons of the shit sandwich restaurant will eat anything, they'll keep showing up.
In this analogy, that explains the decrease in Dem voters while Republicans stay steady.
We can bitch and moan when the shit sandwich restaurant is the most popular, but bullying people to still patronize the restaurant that's a shadow of it's former self isn't going to work as well as that restaurant just serving the food customers want.
But they won't do that, because they make more serving cheap shitty food even if they get less customers
It's really as easy as running a Dem candidate that is as progressive as Dem voters.
Hell, Pennsylvania is an important battleground state where close to 60% of voters want to ban fracking...
If Kamala gave voters what they want on just that one single issue it would likely hand her the presidency. But she's not.
For some reason we only hear "this is what voters want" from the Dem.party when it's used to rationalize being more conservative. When the voters are more liberal than the party, the voters are told their views don't matter, and that depresses turnout which is why we don't have "the mandate" we used to.
I hope that makes sense.
People won’t still go out to eat and pick the shit sandwich, they’ll just stop going out to eat. The patrons of the shit sandwich restaurant will eat anything, they’ll keep showing up.
continuing with your analogy, people have NOT stopped going out to eat. a significant portion have absolutely gone over to the shit sandwich shop.
a greater percentage of voting-age people voted in 2020 compared to 1932. In 1932 they were much more unified under FDR, today we are more evenly split between R and D.
If the two restaurants both serve shitty food, there's not as much judgement for eating a shit sandwich. Because everyone eating at a restaurant is eating ahitry food. It becomes normalized.
The "good" restaurant becoming ahittier doesn't steal customers from Shit Sandwiches, it just makes people think that shit sandwiches isn't as crazy as it seems because both restaurants serv shit.
Which still fits.
Dems moving to the right year after year and adopting things like fracking and a border wall when a decade ago we said only a racist idiot would want those things... Makes the average American question if other "conservative" ideas are really as bad as Dems say they are, or if 5 years both parties would want them.
It only hurts the left and helps the right
I agree it absolutely hurts the left and helps the right, but we disagree on the cause. Remember in your analogy the food quality is not the only thing that diners care about. They are being lured to the shitty restaurant by stuff that has nothing to do with food at all.
Yep.
So making the "good" restaurants food shitty only hurts their business, and their the only ones with the power to set their menu.
We can protest, leave bad reviews, stop going to the restaurant, anything to communicate that we would eat there more if they had better food.
But at the end of the day it's up to the handful of people running the restaurant/party what they serve up.
So making the “good” restaurants food shitty only hurts their business
not if the customers they're losing don't care about food. I think we're gonna have to agree to disagree here.
how did McDonald's get into this conversation? 🤔
instead she keeps moving to the right economically
It's not all "Move to the right." Just this week she suggested expanding Medicare for in-home care.
Just this week she suggested expanding Medicare for in-home care
Which is like the most widely abused part of Medicare...
Not by people, by predatory providers who max out benefits while going months without even calling their "patients".
Jon Oliver just did an episode on it this season even, was just like a month ago I think.
As long as someone makes a profit on healthcare, it's going to be absurd by overcharging and undeserving.
We need a nationalized system lol kentge VA where there's no insurance middleman, Medicare gives us one middle man which just doesn't solve the root problem.
It's been 112 years since universal healthcare was part of a presidential platform, that being "too extreme" for today's candidat is making my point, not disputing it.
You need to look at the longer timeframe.
I also wish the Dems would promote more progressive policies. At the same time, the media does not celebrate the wins for Dems, such as the creation of the CFPB that Elizabeth Warren established. They don't celebrate the response to oligopoly through review of mergers and acquisitions by the FTC under Lina Kahn. They don't celebrate the reduced child poverty rate under the expanded child tax credit. Positive progress doesn't make it to mass media even when it does happen, which isn't often enough.
By the same token, they report everything trump says...
The report everything Vance says, but also Biden and Kamala too.
If Biden and Kamala talked about those things, then the media would too.
Kamala just went on an interview blitz, I watched some of it, didn't see her being up anything you mentioned. Did she in any of the recent interviews you e seen?
She was just on Colbert, he'd have let her say anything she wanted to...
Do you remember what she choose to discuss?
Edit:
Walz just talked about ending the Electoral college, and the media reported on it.
But they also reported on Kamala distancing herself from it.
That's an example from like today of what I'm talking about. All it takes for the media to report on something is a high ranking politician saying it. There's so many and so desperate for ad revenue they will cover anything that comes out of someone's mouth if they're on the presidential ticket.
Stop blaming the Dem leadership and look at the facts.
The voters heard Donald Trump say that he liked grabbing the pussy and that he didn't like soldiers who got captured.
People are choosing garbage because they'd happily eat a ton of manure if it meant they could blow stink in a Libs face.
Death had to take him sleeping. For if Roosevelt had been awake, there would have been a fight.
Damn I miss Teddy. One of the last presidents to truly give a fuck and put the actions behind it.
He really wasn't one of the last tho...
Not by a longshot, hell, Ike was the last good Republican and he was long after Teddy.
Things were going pretty fucking great till the original "October surprise"
According to the allegation, on top of the Carter administration's agreement to unfreeze Iranian assets in U.S. banks in exchange for the release of the embassy hostages, the Reagan administration's practice of covertly supplying Iran with weapons via Israel likely originated as a further quid pro quo for having delayed the release until after Reagan's inauguration, setting a precedent for covert U.S.-Iran arms deals that would feature heavily in the subsequent Iran–Contra affair.
Which is why I'm so fucking nervous hearing right wingers start using that phrase lately.
They might not know where it comes from, but somewhere the person coming up with their talking points does. They just don't spontaneously come up with shit, they parrot the phrases they've heard.
But anyways, on the timeline of our country things have only been getting worse since we stopped running progressives and started Bill Clinton and the neoliberals.
We had a brief respite with Obama, but when you compare Obama and Carter and remember there was 27 years between them...
Obama wasn't anywhere near as progressive as we should have been.
"Moderate" democrats is not a successful strategy, we have all this freaking data and history to support it, but we just fucking ignore and keep letting the wealthy run shit cuz it's easy.
Sure.
But man no one taxed the rich and built stuff like Teddy did.
Plus, Teddy was the first presidential platform that used universal healthcare…
So part of it is that Republicans lie and propaganda
Ironic considering that Teddy was a Republican.
But also that the Dem party today is significantly more “conservative” economically than we used to be
But that's the contradiction. The GOP is even further along this scale, so how can the GOP be seen as the party of the people while the Dems are elitists?
Partly…
I think mainly.
We need to bring back the Bull Moose Party (at the local level, not the Russian-backed spoiler effect garbage like the Green Party is debasing itself at).
A better idea is to do to the Democratic Party what the Tea Party and MAGA did to the Republicans.
Primary out corporate candidates and push for progressive ones at every level. President, congressional rep, school board trustee, dog-catcher: it doesn't matter.
The problem progressive voters have is that they don't show up, and the especially don't show up during off years, in primaries and in down-ballot races. The polticial right, by comparison, has been getting people in place on small races for years.
Sanders did more for progressivism by enthusing Democratic members to vote in primaries and down-ballot races than Stein or any third party has ever done, and we're seeing results. It needs to continue.
That's a nice thought, but it won't happen because the ratcheting effect of primarying out moderates only works in one direction, rightward. This is because corporate donors are just as happy to fund fascists as they are moderates.
In contrast, progressive candidates often don't stand a chance because corporate donors fucking hate them and will spend effectively unlimited amounts of money to destroy their chances, especially if they make regulation and oversight of corporations a big part of their platform. Ditto for the police "union[sic]" and police reform, or AIPAC and opposing genocide, for that matter.
No thanks. Ranked Choice voting or bust. Yall choosing bust? Sall good with me, I had a vasectomy so I don't have kids. Rest well kids, you won't ever have to suffer these fools (me too, thanks).
I can see the reasoning that the presidency is the biggest office and gets people talking about third parties the most...
But the reason the Green Party is obviously a grift is they focus on battleground states for those presidential runs.
If they were doing what they said they're trying to do, they'd focus on states like Cali where they can get the media attention and votes while not handing the presidency to Republicans.
Like everything in American politics, it all depends on what state something is happening in
But conversely, the "spoiler" factor of even a fuly realized Green campaign is nil if the Democrats tack left. Pull the plug on Bibi and Jill Stein has very little to talk about.
It's like they know the party will never bother to win those voters, and assumes they'll capture them as good-enough/lesser-evil.
Yep, if the easiest votes to get were between the two parties, Republicans wouldnt pull the shit they do with far left parties while embracing the far right.
They'd move to the center to fight for those mythical "moderates" or at least have the Green party positioned slightly to the right of the Dem party.
But they're not. Because Dems just use those mythical moderates as an excuse to do what big money donors want. Moving to the right is effective at raising money from billionaires, but completely ineffective at increasing Dem votes.
The party and the voters don't have the same goals.
If she did this and raised taxes on corporate and individual wealthy, it would be a win of historical proportions.
Sounds like the democrats should do something about First Past The Post voting!
You wouldn't bring up the shortcomings of First Past The Post voting and then do nothing to change the voting system... would you?
So glad to hear of your public promise to work towards pass electoral reform in your state. Wishing you and your people the best of luck in this campaign you just signed up for.
Propaganda makes you believe that one of the two party is your fiend. Meanwhile for the past century both the red and blue party has served elites interests and fuck over everyone else (including the planet). The proof is that you are a peasants and it would take you a couple of minutes just to visualize how much a billion is.
The system is working as intended. A country created by the wealthy, for the wealthy, and controlled by the wealthy.
Having said that the two sides of the same coin is a bunch of bullshit when you see 60+ years of hate and fear propaganda conducted by conservatives.
Making every modern amenity a partisan issue and is also no mistake. It is very clear one side is keeping us from free education, free/cheap healthcare, equality, and a living wage. It is even clearer when they are pushing for more child labor, pollution, racism, and sexism.
You are contradicting yourself.
The system is working as intended. A country created by the wealthy, for the wealthy, and controlled by the wealthy.
It's not hard to understand, in such a system you don't make it to the top unless you belong to the wealthy
Not at all, I am just not falling for the two sides of the same coin bullshit invented by the conservatives to further denigrate our government.
There is a serious problem and it is not with the liberal/left/Democratic party. The reason we are in this situation is because the conservatives are garbage people dragging this country down.
There is a serious problem and it is not with the liberal/left/Democratic party. The reason we are in this situation is because the conservatives are garbage people dragging this country down.
The reason we are in this situation is because for centuries if not thousand of years rulers enslaved and beat up people to seize power.
There's a genocide going on right now where kids are being murdered daily, if you believe there's not a problem in the current system you are complicit.
This is not ancient history and the US is not unique in its genocidal actions. There is not a country that exists that has not engaged in this behavior.
I know there is a problem. In fact, I gather I know a lot more than you about it. Not disagreeing about that aspect at all.
Having said that we are also experiencing far less genocide than any other time in history. It is weird to say it but things have gotten a lot better although I am sure the Palestinians, for example, would disagree.
It is weird to say it but things have gotten a lot better
For billionares and rulers things keep getting better yes, for everyone else they don't. Look outside your window or at your bank account then remind yourself that there's someone chilling in one of their 500f yachts. For the average person in the past decade things have gone south.
Having said that we are also experiencing far less genocide than any other time in history.
Go ahead and compare the genocides perpetrated by parties without serious problems with these of their colleagues from history.
The world is objectively more peaceful and billions of people are better off than ever before.
The rural folk with the Trump signs in their yards say their way of life is dying, and you smirk and say what they really mean is that blacks and gays are finally getting equal rights and they hate it. But I'm telling you, they say their way of life is dying because their way of life is dying. It's not their imagination. No movie about the future portrays it as being full of traditional families, hunters, and coal mines. Well, except for Hunger Games, and that was depicted as an apocalypse.
To Democrats, "elites" mean your in some top percentile of wealth and income. To Republicans, "elites" means having a college degree.
This is the correct answer to the question the Guardian poses. I've lived among them and can 100% confirm this is how they think.
Elites is all about having a college degree and being "book smart" vs their "street smart" or "wise in the ways of man" sort of bullshit charlatans throughout history have used to make up for a lack of critical thinking skills.
It really is the right answer. But I think we can sharpen it if we look at how the media around Democrats elevates and highlights elitism as a quality to be pursued, for example, in a candidate.
A great example of this was the treatment of Pete Buttigieg, and specific media outlets elevation of him to a nationally relevant political actor. Harvard, then Oxford Rhodes scholar then a decade long McKinseyite (that alone should have disbarred him from running for president), then intelligence officer US Navy. He was the definition of "qualified" to the CNN and NPR editorial boards.
But how well had only political bonafides were a failed run for treasurer in Indiana, and a mayoral victory where he garnered all of 10k votes. So the guy has never actually won any significant state or federal elections. Yet in 2020, suddenly this guys is gets treated like a serious contender in the Democratic primary. Why?
Democratically aligned corporate press is obsessed with credentials, and specifically, the kind that comes from "elite" schools and organizations. Partially because they themselves also come from these elite schools and organizations.
We really have become addicted to certifications and tags and qualifiers for everyone because it's easier to "understand" them at a glance and that's decided as all you need.
On paper is good enough for far to many, it's just easier to categorize people and move on.
Being in your categories is the easiest way to automatically think of then as moral and good because they must be, you are. It's fucked up both parties. Look at Eric Adams and Marco Rubio.
Very true. The Dems could really stand for more blue collar qualifications. Especially if we treated “local union president” half as well as “McKinsey employee”
So they basically turned anti elitism to anti intellectualism so they can fool their audience.
I mean, I thought we all knew that.
I wonder what kind of people ran on anti-intellectualism in the past? Maybe around the time of UdSSR, or some German leader? Maybe some famous leader in Cambodia as well?
Yep, my comment was more about how this is kind of a tail as old as time thing.
It means the nerds you shoved in lockers who learned to read and now have successful lives while you scrape by trying to make alimony at a job that would pay a living wage if you didn't live in a right to work state.
See that’s the elitism. Plenty of bullies made it out and plenty of their victims didn’t. Ruthlessness is profitable and you don’t have to be a good person to go to college.
How exactly is that elitism? You're specifically arguing against the meritocracy that they consider elitism, all that fancy book-learnin.
Their mascot shits on a golden toilet in his own private country club ffs.
You’re assuming everyone stuck in rural America in a shit job with grievances is a shit person who did it to themselves. A lot of them are, especially the die hard republicans, but plenty had hard choices, or any number of other decent reasons beyond just not being smart or something.
And yeah their mascot is a filthy rich asshole, and a lot of them do suck ass. But also I spend enough time with those people to know plenty of them aren’t terrible but they are sick and tired of being treated like inherently morons for being rural
I get that, but I was that nerd shoved in lockers, and while the Midwest was decent, in the south it was far worse because I wasn't white.
The south tolerated those assholes a lot, and they were extremely ignorant, and their ignorance was a source of pride for them.
I don't want to demean the Midwestern red staters in any way, other than they clearly follow the wrong person, but the south is following moloch, their literal antichrist, out of hatred of others, and I'm fine holding them in contempt for that because it's no better than I would expect for them.
Also, they scream and scream about a Bible they've never read, and I say that as someone who went to catholic school, they thought I was lying like I said I memorized the phone book.
To Republicans, “elites” means having a college degree.
Also depending on the context can mean "lives in a city" or "pays a mechanic to fix their car instead of gets their hands dirty" or "doesn't go to church" or "makes fun of country folks / rural people" or "eats any food that isn't fried or served in a disposable bag and eaten between 2 buns."
...But they're never consistent, b/c they think that Trump, a literal billionaire who lives in a big city, definitely never has gone to church or gotten his hands dirty fixing cars... is somehow not elite.
...I mean... he probably doesn't eat anything that isn't fried / between buns, but that's about it.
It's incomprehensible / inconsistent.
It’s also how we talk, how we walk, and that we often come from elsewhere and think differently.
That's not what (((elites))) mean to Republicans.
A lot of times they amp up the dog whistle and say (((global elites))).
This is one of the greatest scams that conservatives get away with IMO, not just in the US but it happens in the UK and other places too. Conservatives get in, go hog wild cutting taxes, selling off public assets and throwing huge contracts to their friends, and then as soon as the other side gets back in they find that they have to now balance the books, the conservatives start complaining and saying they're the fiscally responsible ones.
It's literally happening right now in the UK - we just got rid of the Tories finally after about 15 years, and the new Labour government immediately found a £20 billion hole in the economy which they now have to make harsh cuts to sort out, and they're the ones getting criticized for it by the media.
We need a government report card.
At the end of every administration, we need to compare the national debt and all important factors.
It’s one thing people missed in coming up with democratic systems. If different people take turns to steer the ship then you need to define what their goal is so you can evaluate each.
I'd half agree; they could raise taxes instead of making cuts.
That generally also does not go over well in the media.
Conservatives make a mess to their advantage and win/win every time
Sure, because the media is generally profit oriented and therefore aligned with capitalist interests. We need more mutually supported and supportive media and journalism.
Don't say this around any conservative. They only believe in cutting taxes.
They always have these "household budget" analogies when it comes to the government, but even in a "household budget" situation one solution to overcoming debt is to find a way to raise your income so you can pay down the debt faster....
not just in the US but it happens in the UK and other places too
Damn. Can't believe New Labour is getting tarred with accepting soccer tickets, fancy clothes, and vacation packages from British Peer Lord Alli. Seems so unfair. Wish people would stop accusing the Labour government of being corrupt, when they are very obviously following the rules of accepting gifts and definitely not operating on any quid pro quo.
the new Labour government immediately found a £20 billion hole in the economy
New Labour has a set of accounting rules that count investment in capital as an expense and insists on running daily budget surpluses for their operating expenses.
Popping open your household account, making cartoonish bug-eyes, and announcing "We owe $200k on our 30 year mortgage but we only make $80k/year! We're bankrupt for the next three years until we pay this house off!" This is New Labour accounting. It's laughable and only ever used as an excuse not to spend any money.
On the flip side, this is the same party that insists on privatizing everything. From Thames Water to British Gas to UK Rail, every once-public service has to be turned over and rented back from the private sector. The Brits pass out these privatization contracts as sinecures, guaranteeing their financial friends huge piles of free no-risk revenues at the expense of the British taxpayer. And then they complain that the country has no money.
That New Labour slid directly into the driver's seat the Tories left and gunned it isn't something you can ignore, simply because the party leadership has changed.
To be fair, in this monopolized 2 party system, both parties are owned by pretty much the exact same corporate interests and mega rich. Everything is by design. There is nothing they leave to chance.
Because the media continually accepts and perpetuates the right wing framing of everything.
Because the media is owned and operated by rich men who benefit from putting the blame on others and calling it "news."
/thread
All threads starting with "Why" and ending in a question mark, can be answered: "Money corrupts people"
Because rich Republicans also own the media.
Because it was always about projection.
Because the Democrats abandoned working class voters in the 80s and 90s to court the professional-managerial class in a pivot towards the center, and the Republicans were able to win over these disaffected blue-collar voters with resentment politics.
Why haven’t Democrats embraced economic populism? Because for too long they’ve drunk from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans – big corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy.
US two-party sham needs replacing
Poor Republicans don't show up to push their representative or senators.
There could have been a public option to the ACA if a Republican Senator voted for it; none did. If Republicans can't get the full credit for being Santa, no one can.
Because it's convenient to have bad faith actors sowing discord before any election.
Tankies (sleeper conservatives that they are) can't rely on logic, merit or hope for a better tomorrow, so they cause as much chaos as possible to their perceived 'enemies'. This chaos includes the encouragement of unrealistic statements and general cognitive dissonance.
My true thoughts are that they went too far and started to believe their own drivel as generations of hexbears rose and fell and shit themselves into .ml
What does this post or article have to do with "Tankies?" Did you just hop in here to badmouth them without any context? The idea that anyone who opposes Democrats is a conservative is so out of touch. You must live in a world of ghosts, probably ones wearing ushankas and singing the Internationalé. What a strange comment.
Not strange at all. Mostly the people shitting on the libs around here are "tankies" or whatever flavor gets the fascists more points. It's simple math.
there is not and never has been any historical evidence of a red-brown alliance. Communists, even at the height and horror of Stalinist purges, were never fascist. Fascism is something different, and the urge to conflate the two just makes you seem dangerously uneducated on the subject. No, worse than that, because misunderstanding and miscommunicating the nature of fascism is actually a boon to the fascists! It is in essence no different than when Stalin intentionally mischaracterized social democracy as being "the moderate wing of fascism" and worse than actual Nazism in order to give himself political cover in the lead up to Molotov-Ribbentrop.
So when you deceive yourself and others about the nature of fascism, you are aiding the fascists. So like don't do that.
But this still has nothing to do with the article or post, talk about living rent-free
Apologies for the long post that largely agrees with what you had to say :p
To give some background to the uniniated, the theory of 'Social Facism' as described gives a historical perspective into so-called 'red-brown unity' leading up until WW2.
(anti communist parties described Stalinists as fascist)
[...] led to mutual hostility between social democrats and communists, which were additionally intensified in 1929 when Berlin's police, then under control of the SPD (socdem) government, shot down communist workers demonstrating on May Day in what became called Blutmai (Bloody May). That and the repressive legislation against the communists that followed served as further evidence to communists that social democrats were indeed "social fascists".
The idea of social fascism, that social democrats are "objectively the moderate wing of fascism" as Stalin put it, intensified by SocDem authoritarian anti-left policies, lead to even greater hostility from the Communists against the Liberals than the Nazi's themselves at the time.
In 1929, the KPD's paramilitary organisation, the Roter Frontkämpferbund ("Alliance of Red Front-Fighters"), was banned as extremist by the governing social democrats. A KPD resolution described the "social fascists" [social democrats] as the "main pillar of the dictatorship of Capital". In 1930, Kurt Schumacher of the SPD accused Communists of being "red-lacquered doppelgangers of the Nazis". In Prussia, the largest state of Germany, the KPD united with the Nazis in unsuccessful attempt to bring down the state government of SPD by means of a Landtag referendum.
So technically, there was a red-brown (Communist-Nazi) alliance within Prussia in order to take down the SocDems, the Comms were obviously more ideologically aligned with socdems but felt they were the main thing preventing progress and thus wanted to speed up their demise.
We all know how collaborating with the Nazi's turned out:
After Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party came to power in Germany, the KPD was outlawed and thousands of its members were arrested, including Thälmann. Those events made the Comintern do a complete turn on the question of alliance with social democrats and the theory of social fascism was abandoned.
At the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935, Georgi Dimitrov outlined the new policy of the popular front in his address "For the Unity of the Working Class Against Fascism". This popular front [...]
The American historian Theodore Draper argued that "the so-called theory of social fascism and the practice based on it constituted one of the chief factors contributing to the victory of German fascism in January 1933".
It turns out that by the communists temporarily aligning against liberals with the fascists in what today would probably be known as 'accelerationism', we headed from social democracy to concentration camps in 10 years.
And as you say, fascism is typically more obvious:
Leon Trotsky argued against the accusations of "social fascism". In the March 1932 Bulletin of the Opposition, he declared: "Should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank. [...] And only a fighting unity with the Social Democratic workers can bring victory".
And while there are elements of logic to such a conclusion of 'social fascism' especially when today you have every 'social democrat' or 'liberal' capitaluting heavily rightwards and forming alliances with the far-right (France etc.)
BUT
As you say, and as history has shown, muddying the waters about the true nature of fascism pulls wool over the eyes of those with potential to affect change and prevent the rise true fascism. Which is growing every day.
Karl Popper argued that some radical parties of the era welcomed or turned a blind eye to the weakening of democracy, or saw a dictatorship as a temporary stepping stone to a revolution.
quote from Popper "[Communists] even hoped that a totalitarian dictatorship in Central Europe would speed up matters [...] Accordingly, the Communists did not fight when the fascists seized power. (Nobody expected the Social Democrats to fight). For the Communists were sure that the proletarian revolution was overdue and that the fascist interlude, necessary for its speeding up, could not last longer than a few months."
And finally, it reeks of the unfortunate leftist 'purity test' behaviour which weakens unity and divides potential allies.
In 1969, the ex-communist historian Theodore Draper argued that the Communists who proposed the theory of social fascism, "were chiefly concerned with drawing a line of blood between themselves and all others to the 'right' of them, including the most 'left-wing' of the Social-Democrats."
Anyway, when I read this theory it opened my eyes a tonne to the folly of refusing to collaborate with liberals. While I still believe liberal and center right policy, along with intense anti-left propaganda, are the reason for the rise of fascism today (overton window, ratcheting effect, disillusionment with electoral politics due to ineffective and oppressive governance that only benefits the wealthy).
Despite this by ostracising and refusing to collaborate with liberals we shoot ourselves in the foot by being so obsessed with purity that we reject reality. Perfect is the enemy of good. All progress is good provided it takes us along the right path and does not cut off the path to something greater.
I love this so much.
I didn't really have the time or energy to go into the supporting logic, for as you've just demonstrated its a very involved argument that involves a lot of oft ignored history of the period after the crushing defeat of the German working class uprising (1923, '24) but before the Nazis took power in the wake of the Reichstag fire ('33, '34). Which honestly I'm not great on anyway, I appreciate your insight, slight factual correction that just makes the point even more urgently, and any book recommendations!
So while we are providing clarification and context to the uninitiated, I dug out Trotsky's definition of fascism from 1932 since we are being so adamant about properly defining it:
At the moment that the “normal” police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium – the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie [the small business owners basically MAGAs], and bands of the declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat [working poor who are so exploited and disillusioned they defy their own class interests]; all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy. […] And the fascist agency, by utilizing the petty bourgeoisie as a battering ram, by overwhelming all obstacles in its path, does a thorough job. […] When a state turns fascist, it doesn’t only mean that the forms and methods of government are changed […] but it means, primarily and above all, that the workers’ organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat.
In my opinion, wrt building coalition between liberals and communists, there tends to be a real failure by all parties, Marxist communists and liberals alike, to orient the alienated individual within the class or ideological milieu. Liberals can really only see the alienated individual; whereas commies, who claim to be materialists, can view the class/ideological superstructure, or sometimes reluctantly the individual, but almost never both at the same time. Mfs never read/don't understand Theses on Feuerbach and it shows.
Which is to say liberalism and communism can't really be allies, but individual liberals, who we might call progressives, more concerned with rights and human emancipation than preserving private property, can be won over to the demands of class struggle, especially as the conditions of struggle introduce sharp contradictions into their lives and the lives of the people around them. At this point the demands of their class outweigh the explanations furnished by their ideology and alliances can be forged between members of the fractured liberal or social democratic workers, and the communist/socialists who (hopefully) have prepared the field of struggle for the intensifying conflict.
Tldr: noone has a monopoly on being insufferable and maybe we could try not demonizing each other for like 15 seconds and see each other as rational people doing our best, reacting to rapidly changing conditions, that will result in pretty serious lose/lose final consequences for libs and commies alike if we can't resist the actual fascists together.
But now I've been led away from the topic of the post article, proving that we are doomed to become what we most strongly condemn.
It's really not that complicated
Excuse me? Can you give me more details about what you are trying to say?
there is not and never has been any historical evidence of a red-brown alliance.
He's not saying there's a red-brown alliance. He's saying all these supposed reds are actually browns, or useful idiots.
Probably for the same kind of reason that "everyone knows" that the corporate media is a "liberal media".
"The media is liberal!"
"Who told you that?"
"The media."
Putin is also one of the world's richest man and funds Trump.
Now that you mentioned putin, I propose we go looking for the Mexican cartel people who do the political events such as head and shoulders separations and we give them a challenge. Maybe give them a small island as a reward? 😉 Could you please bring back putin's happy face for a chance to win Mara Lago! Or Mara Island! 🏝️🏖️. With margaritas!
Projection.
Because projection, misinformation, disinformation, and political agendas.
yup. Amoral leadership lying to gullible supporters who want conspiracies, it's really that simple. A base who want simplistic explanations that reinforce their prejudices. Truth doesn't even rate.
Because democrats value egalitarianism and
education. Good education is expensive. The businesspersons that have expended the most effort to offshore our jobs to the serious detriment of working-class America have had some of the most expensive and exclusive educations of all, and they are some of the wealthiest people on the planet… (conservatives fullstop here and ignore the rest: …who are also likely voting conservative). Couple that with the fact that expert (educated) advice and direction is often in direct conflict with the myopic goals and views of the uneducated. Don’t dump shit everywhere (but it’s cheap, easy, and fun to roll coal and pour used motor oil on the ground!), don’t cut down all the trees (but mah lumber is more expensive!), and maybe wear a mask (grandma was gonna die eventually anyways, at least I can bring her Covid from the Applebees take out!)
So it’s really easy for the conservatives to paint education = evil, and then of course they couple that with feel-good bullshit like “common sense” and small-town American wisdom that is completely meaningless but makes the uneducated feel smart or like they have control of their situation.
Elitism and wealth, though often linked, are not the same. The term nouveaux riche highlights this difference: it refers to those who have gained wealth but lack the cultural status of the traditional elite. One can be rich without being part of the elite, as elitism is more about attitudes of superiority tied to education or social influence than money alone.
In American politics, Democrats are often branded as elitist due to their perceived condescension towards certain demographics, such as rural communities or southern voters. Critics argue that some Democrats dismiss these regions as culturally or intellectually inferior, suggesting that rural areas offer little value or substance. This perception of elitism stems from more than just economic disparity; it reflects a cultural and ideological divide. The urban-rural schism is not simply about money, but about who holds the power to shape discourse, values, and the future of society. Such perceptions fuel populist resentment, where rural or working-class voters feel alienated or belittled by what they view as a metropolitan, highly educated, and culturally insulated elite.
You can see some of this elitism right here in the comments in fact.
Trump is the urban elitist you are referencing. Why does he get a pass from the voters from rural places?
Trump has been snubbed and the laughing stock of elite NYC society for decades.
It's because Democrats are not willing to become anti-elite or anti-rich or anything like that, they'd piss off their donors. Only Trump was able to do this because everyone knows he's lying. His donors know it's all a show.
Hard agree. All we get from the Democrats is more of the same economically and military, but with some feel good identity politics (i.e. that don't in any way threaten corpos, just provide more markets) and socially progressive vibes. Still better than the alternative sure, but they are just sprinkling glitter on a turd to make it look appealing. There's zero interest towards actually addressing social/financial inequality, reigning in the power of corpos, separating money from politics, or basically changing the economic status quo in any meaningful way. It's a sad state of affairs, and absolutely no wonder leftists aren't enthused to vote for Harris. It's basically a vote for keeping things exactly as they are now, which is not what voters want at all. US politics is so corrupted by money now that a government of the people for the people is just a distant memory. And this talk of reforming the electoral college is just more window dressing, seems to me.
have you considered identifying as metamorphic rocks? Cause my newest donor has some lovely rock Polish for you and when you buy it you prove to all the haters that your post igneous lifestyle isn't just a phase! In fact I will specifically respect and enforce the sales of metamorphic rock Polish in all stores that would already sell it because of the corporate backing of this product!
what was that about a rent cap? Sorry no comment. And how dare you diminish the matamorphic-os who you tried to silence with this pointless off topic line of questioning. You are just Rockist.
They aren't. Republicans lie all the time and some people are stupid enough to believe them.
Because Republican voters never, ever seek evidence or utilize basic critical thinking when their hatred steeped biases are confirmed.
A sufficiently hatemongering, and therefore trusted conservative talking head could say "Kamala Harris is a secret Aids Virus in a skin suit made of harvested fetuses made human size by George Soros' double secret reverse shrink ray!"
And you'd cue thunderous Republican voter applause with shrieks of "I FUCKING KNEW IT!"
projection and propeganda, full stop.
Because it’s hard to think of a moron like Trump as elite at anything.
Corporate politicians are the same regardless of whether there is a D or an R in front of their name. They will vote in the interests of their donors every time, without question.
But there is such a thing as a non-corporate Democrat. Unfortunately, they are few and far between. There are also some wealthy Democratic donors that are less than 100% shitbags, resulting in some legitimate progressive policy.
Because they are? Let's not pretend several billionaires don't have Democrats on their payroll too. Are we just ignoring the existence of pelosi and her corporate democrat ilk to make this point? Dems and Republicans are in the pockets of corporate america and billionaires. It's not a secret that this country is a thinly veiled oligarchy
I think oligarchy is putting it extremely kindly. Can we please just acknowledge we are a naked kleptocracy now?
Nuh uh! Not my team!
..........and even if it was true, my team is better than yours, so they deserve to rule.
Democrats are elite in that they are smart
These billionaires are morons
Perhaps because they are the current ruling party of a government doing business with elites such as the world's richest man who funds trump.
It's true that the owners of large space technology companies are often rich, therefore all governments who contract to them are supporting elites.
Very insightful observation.
You don't go to school study and become the owner of a large space technology company, you need government backing for it.
Yes, therefore all governments that use private space companies are supporting elites. It's a brilliant point, no need to keep convincing me.
Name one single government in the world that isn't doing elites interests
True true. Government bad.
Go ahead and name one
All of them! You already said it best brother!
Propaganda.
Because 2 things can be true at the same time?
Why is this a question?
Its just each side has their own excuse of why their shit doesnt stink and what their idea of how this fake meritocracy will justify their elites.
The unwashed masses dare to think that we are the elites? Clearly a result of their inadequate education...
because the average american is dumber than the average human?
Kamala Harris’s campaign should strike a more populist note
I agree, if we could get Kamala to agree then I'd feel a lot more confident about her beating trump.
I don't understand why people want to blame everyone except Kamala and her campaign for her campaigns failings tho.
The media is always mad at Dem voters for not being excited for Dem candidates, probably because the wealthy owners of the media are the same ones donating so the left most option isn't really all that "left".
Because it's easier and then it becomes someone else's fault.
I don’t understand why people want to blame everyone except Kamala and her campaign for her campaigns failings tho.
There are a lot of things outside of Harris's control though - having two important voting blocs (the Jewish vote and the Islamic vote) that are on opposite sides of a big and important single issue, the need to draw in moderate Republicans, etc.
I agree, if we could get Kamala to agree then I’d feel a lot more confident about her beating trump.
Based on her 2019 platform I'd suspect that this is secretly the case. I'm expecting a massive turnaround - but this is conditional on Dems also gaining a majority in the House and retaining the majority in the Senate.
The media is always mad at Dem voters for not being excited for Dem candidates, probably because the wealthy owners of the media are the same ones donating so the left most option isn’t really all that “left”.
Actually it's a failing of FPTP, with a system like that folks need to aim for the centre.
::: spoiler The Guardian - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report)
Information for The Guardian:
Democrats believe they alone should be the alternative to the Republican party. Their refusal to replace First past the post voting in the states they control is them telling us they know better then everyone else.
The state of Maine disagrees. Dems got ranked choice to pass.
Aren't you telling everyone you know better than them right now?
That being said, we have preferential voting here in Australia, and it's Awesome. We can vote for who we want, and they still get paid if they get a minimum amount of votes.
But eventually, your votes keep filtering down until one prference is selected
One big thing Democrats do that marks them as elites is they consistently prioritize the climate over the needs of people.
People come second in their rhetoric.
I get what you're trying to say, but not being killed by a tornado tends to count among the needs of the people.
But if I get taken out by a tornado I don't have to worry about medical debt.
Well the problem really comes when instead of a tornado surprising you in the nearest Walmart parking lot late evening, it instead decides to stop by where ever you happen to be and generally just fuck everything you own. In bad cases it'll break a bone or two just to teach you a lesson.
Good luck with recovery after that beating.
Brain dead take
I don't know about you, but I live in the climate.
Don't worry, they said they will move us out of the environment.
Do you know what a changing climate does to the needs of the people?
I mean, obviously, natural disasters like severe weather impact the needs of the people. Look at the last two hurricanes in the US south or the wildfires out west. Death, injuries, lives disrupted, houses and businesses destroy or damaged, links in supply chains shattered.
Imagine what happens to populated areas that, hypothetically, get hit repeatedly by this for a few years. Many in Florida can't find home insurance already. Eventually they'll have to leave and go... where? If this happens repeatedly in poorer neighboring countries? What if sea levels actually rise and wipe out coastal cities? Massive migration, climate refugees, regional instability. It gets too hot for a good crop yield or rainfall patterns change and we get less fresh water? Food and water scarcity, death and starvation... the needs of people can't be met.
Thr planet? It'll likely be fine in a few million years. We won't be.
To be brief, it’s propaganda designed to keep rural voters red. Ie- "those big city folk don’t care about you."
Partly...
But also that the Dem party today is significantly more "conservative" economically than we used to be, as the article points out:
Plus, Teddy was the first presidential platform that used universal healthcare....
So part of it is that Republicans lie and propaganda
But if the modern Dem party didn't think the Dem party platform from a fucking century ago wasnt "too extreme" the modern Dem party would be as popular as it was with FDR.
I think that's more of a symptom than a root cause. republicans' goal since the 70's has been to pull the lower and middle classes to them with wedge identity issues like abortion. the whole "elitism" thing is a part of that too. So now the parties are competing on those wedge issues and identity more than economic progress, as they were in FDR's time.
Like, you understand that if the Dem party wanted to, they could still be that economically progressive, right?
And that in doing so it mitigate Republicans lying?
The Dem party becoming more economically conservative is solely the fault of the people choosing to do what donors want over what Dem voters want....
Both parties focusing on the "wedge issues" is by design, that way the wealthy who donate to both parties always win...
The only people who control the Dem.platform is Dem party leadership, them choosing wealthy donors over voters is literally no one's fault except the people running the party who keep repeatedly making that choice.
I get wanting to blame Republicans, but we can't on this one.
It's literally as easy as Kamala deciding to do so at this point, it's a month from election and she's the candidate. But she's not, instead she keeps moving to the right economically the closer we get to the election.
Do not make the mistake of thinking nerds on the Internet represent the Democratic Party rank and file. They like neoliberal economics.
Then why did 08 Obama carry the party and flip red states when all those neo liberals voted R due to the PUMA movement?
The neo liberals are not a majority of voters, they just still have a death grip on party leadership positions at the DNC
... because Obama was a moderate neoliberal.
Fortunately both Biden and Harris support an unrealized capital gains tax, which would be an absolutely huge move. If we can acquire both houses of Congress and thus the ability to pass laws, we may actually achieve it.
Also, have dems cut taxes or regulation on the wealthy at any point that you can remember?
the point is there would be more of a political mandate for economic change if our demographics looked more like this today. that map is never going to happen today no matter how progressive dems go on the economy, because of the work republicans have done to divide us over the last 50 years.
The point is there's been a political mandate for economic change for over a century...
The reason the Dems don't have the numbers to accomplish it, is them giving up on progressive economics.
Think of it like a restaurant. One that used to serve food people wanted and was always busy. Then the restaurant got kick backs from a differemt food supplier. One whose food was worse, and thus unpopular.
The restaurant loses business because the food gets worse, it takes a while because people only go out to eat every four years, and the only other restaurant serves shit sandwiches exclusively.
People won't still go out to eat and pick the shit sandwich, they'll just stop going out to eat. The patrons of the shit sandwich restaurant will eat anything, they'll keep showing up.
In this analogy, that explains the decrease in Dem voters while Republicans stay steady.
We can bitch and moan when the shit sandwich restaurant is the most popular, but bullying people to still patronize the restaurant that's a shadow of it's former self isn't going to work as well as that restaurant just serving the food customers want.
But they won't do that, because they make more serving cheap shitty food even if they get less customers
It's really as easy as running a Dem candidate that is as progressive as Dem voters.
Hell, Pennsylvania is an important battleground state where close to 60% of voters want to ban fracking...
If Kamala gave voters what they want on just that one single issue it would likely hand her the presidency. But she's not.
For some reason we only hear "this is what voters want" from the Dem.party when it's used to rationalize being more conservative. When the voters are more liberal than the party, the voters are told their views don't matter, and that depresses turnout which is why we don't have "the mandate" we used to.
I hope that makes sense.
continuing with your analogy, people have NOT stopped going out to eat. a significant portion have absolutely gone over to the shit sandwich shop.
a greater percentage of voting-age people voted in 2020 compared to 1932. In 1932 they were much more unified under FDR, today we are more evenly split between R and D.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States_presidential_elections
If the two restaurants both serve shitty food, there's not as much judgement for eating a shit sandwich. Because everyone eating at a restaurant is eating ahitry food. It becomes normalized.
The "good" restaurant becoming ahittier doesn't steal customers from Shit Sandwiches, it just makes people think that shit sandwiches isn't as crazy as it seems because both restaurants serv shit.
Which still fits.
Dems moving to the right year after year and adopting things like fracking and a border wall when a decade ago we said only a racist idiot would want those things... Makes the average American question if other "conservative" ideas are really as bad as Dems say they are, or if 5 years both parties would want them.
It only hurts the left and helps the right
I agree it absolutely hurts the left and helps the right, but we disagree on the cause. Remember in your analogy the food quality is not the only thing that diners care about. They are being lured to the shitty restaurant by stuff that has nothing to do with food at all.
Yep.
So making the "good" restaurants food shitty only hurts their business, and their the only ones with the power to set their menu.
We can protest, leave bad reviews, stop going to the restaurant, anything to communicate that we would eat there more if they had better food.
But at the end of the day it's up to the handful of people running the restaurant/party what they serve up.
not if the customers they're losing don't care about food. I think we're gonna have to agree to disagree here.
how did McDonald's get into this conversation? 🤔
It's not all "Move to the right." Just this week she suggested expanding Medicare for in-home care.
Which is like the most widely abused part of Medicare...
Not by people, by predatory providers who max out benefits while going months without even calling their "patients".
Jon Oliver just did an episode on it this season even, was just like a month ago I think.
As long as someone makes a profit on healthcare, it's going to be absurd by overcharging and undeserving.
We need a nationalized system lol kentge VA where there's no insurance middleman, Medicare gives us one middle man which just doesn't solve the root problem.
It's been 112 years since universal healthcare was part of a presidential platform, that being "too extreme" for today's candidat is making my point, not disputing it.
You need to look at the longer timeframe.
I also wish the Dems would promote more progressive policies. At the same time, the media does not celebrate the wins for Dems, such as the creation of the CFPB that Elizabeth Warren established. They don't celebrate the response to oligopoly through review of mergers and acquisitions by the FTC under Lina Kahn. They don't celebrate the reduced child poverty rate under the expanded child tax credit. Positive progress doesn't make it to mass media even when it does happen, which isn't often enough.
By the same token, they report everything trump says...
The report everything Vance says, but also Biden and Kamala too.
If Biden and Kamala talked about those things, then the media would too.
Kamala just went on an interview blitz, I watched some of it, didn't see her being up anything you mentioned. Did she in any of the recent interviews you e seen?
She was just on Colbert, he'd have let her say anything she wanted to...
Do you remember what she choose to discuss?
Edit:
Walz just talked about ending the Electoral college, and the media reported on it.
But they also reported on Kamala distancing herself from it.
That's an example from like today of what I'm talking about. All it takes for the media to report on something is a high ranking politician saying it. There's so many and so desperate for ad revenue they will cover anything that comes out of someone's mouth if they're on the presidential ticket.
Stop blaming the Dem leadership and look at the facts.
The voters heard Donald Trump say that he liked grabbing the pussy and that he didn't like soldiers who got captured.
People are choosing garbage because they'd happily eat a ton of manure if it meant they could blow stink in a Libs face.
Damn I miss Teddy. One of the last presidents to truly give a fuck and put the actions behind it.
He really wasn't one of the last tho...
Not by a longshot, hell, Ike was the last good Republican and he was long after Teddy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_United_States
Things were going pretty fucking great till the original "October surprise"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_October_Surprise_theory
Which is why I'm so fucking nervous hearing right wingers start using that phrase lately.
They might not know where it comes from, but somewhere the person coming up with their talking points does. They just don't spontaneously come up with shit, they parrot the phrases they've heard.
But anyways, on the timeline of our country things have only been getting worse since we stopped running progressives and started Bill Clinton and the neoliberals.
We had a brief respite with Obama, but when you compare Obama and Carter and remember there was 27 years between them...
Obama wasn't anywhere near as progressive as we should have been.
"Moderate" democrats is not a successful strategy, we have all this freaking data and history to support it, but we just fucking ignore and keep letting the wealthy run shit cuz it's easy.
Sure.
But man no one taxed the rich and built stuff like Teddy did.
Ironic considering that Teddy was a Republican.
But that's the contradiction. The GOP is even further along this scale, so how can the GOP be seen as the party of the people while the Dems are elitists?
I think mainly.
We need to bring back the Bull Moose Party (at the local level, not the Russian-backed spoiler effect garbage like the Green Party is debasing itself at).
A better idea is to do to the Democratic Party what the Tea Party and MAGA did to the Republicans.
Primary out corporate candidates and push for progressive ones at every level. President, congressional rep, school board trustee, dog-catcher: it doesn't matter.
The problem progressive voters have is that they don't show up, and the especially don't show up during off years, in primaries and in down-ballot races. The polticial right, by comparison, has been getting people in place on small races for years.
Sanders did more for progressivism by enthusing Democratic members to vote in primaries and down-ballot races than Stein or any third party has ever done, and we're seeing results. It needs to continue.
That's a nice thought, but it won't happen because the ratcheting effect of primarying out moderates only works in one direction, rightward. This is because corporate donors are just as happy to fund fascists as they are moderates.
In contrast, progressive candidates often don't stand a chance because corporate donors fucking hate them and will spend effectively unlimited amounts of money to destroy their chances, especially if they make regulation and oversight of corporations a big part of their platform. Ditto for the police "union[sic]" and police reform, or AIPAC and opposing genocide, for that matter.
No thanks. Ranked Choice voting or bust. Yall choosing bust? Sall good with me, I had a vasectomy so I don't have kids. Rest well kids, you won't ever have to suffer these fools (me too, thanks).
I can see the reasoning that the presidency is the biggest office and gets people talking about third parties the most...
But the reason the Green Party is obviously a grift is they focus on battleground states for those presidential runs.
If they were doing what they said they're trying to do, they'd focus on states like Cali where they can get the media attention and votes while not handing the presidency to Republicans.
Like everything in American politics, it all depends on what state something is happening in
But conversely, the "spoiler" factor of even a fuly realized Green campaign is nil if the Democrats tack left. Pull the plug on Bibi and Jill Stein has very little to talk about.
It's like they know the party will never bother to win those voters, and assumes they'll capture them as good-enough/lesser-evil.
Yep, if the easiest votes to get were between the two parties, Republicans wouldnt pull the shit they do with far left parties while embracing the far right.
They'd move to the center to fight for those mythical "moderates" or at least have the Green party positioned slightly to the right of the Dem party.
But they're not. Because Dems just use those mythical moderates as an excuse to do what big money donors want. Moving to the right is effective at raising money from billionaires, but completely ineffective at increasing Dem votes.
The party and the voters don't have the same goals.
If she did this and raised taxes on corporate and individual wealthy, it would be a win of historical proportions.
Sounds like the democrats should do something about First Past The Post voting!
You wouldn't bring up the shortcomings of First Past The Post voting and then do nothing to change the voting system... would you?
So glad to hear of your public promise to work towards pass electoral reform in your state. Wishing you and your people the best of luck in this campaign you just signed up for.
Propaganda makes you believe that one of the two party is your fiend. Meanwhile for the past century both the red and blue party has served elites interests and fuck over everyone else (including the planet). The proof is that you are a peasants and it would take you a couple of minutes just to visualize how much a billion is.
The system is working as intended. A country created by the wealthy, for the wealthy, and controlled by the wealthy.
Having said that the two sides of the same coin is a bunch of bullshit when you see 60+ years of hate and fear propaganda conducted by conservatives.
Making every modern amenity a partisan issue and is also no mistake. It is very clear one side is keeping us from free education, free/cheap healthcare, equality, and a living wage. It is even clearer when they are pushing for more child labor, pollution, racism, and sexism.
You are contradicting yourself.
It's not hard to understand, in such a system you don't make it to the top unless you belong to the wealthy
Not at all, I am just not falling for the two sides of the same coin bullshit invented by the conservatives to further denigrate our government.
There is a serious problem and it is not with the liberal/left/Democratic party. The reason we are in this situation is because the conservatives are garbage people dragging this country down.
The reason we are in this situation is because for centuries if not thousand of years rulers enslaved and beat up people to seize power.
There's a genocide going on right now where kids are being murdered daily, if you believe there's not a problem in the current system you are complicit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Israel_in_the_Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war
This is not ancient history and the US is not unique in its genocidal actions. There is not a country that exists that has not engaged in this behavior.
There are several genocides going on right now.
https://www.genocidewatch.com/countries-at-risk
I know there is a problem. In fact, I gather I know a lot more than you about it. Not disagreeing about that aspect at all.
Having said that we are also experiencing far less genocide than any other time in history. It is weird to say it but things have gotten a lot better although I am sure the Palestinians, for example, would disagree.
For billionares and rulers things keep getting better yes, for everyone else they don't. Look outside your window or at your bank account then remind yourself that there's someone chilling in one of their 500f yachts. For the average person in the past decade things have gone south.
Go ahead and compare the genocides perpetrated by parties without serious problems with these of their colleagues from history.
The world is objectively more peaceful and billions of people are better off than ever before.
https://oneearthfuture.org/en/one-earth-future/news/world-getting-more-peaceful
https://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7272929/global-poverty-health-crime-literacy-good-news
Downplaying genocides around the world makes you look pretty callous.
That's what you are doing
To be fair, there is a kernel of truth there.
https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about
To Democrats, "elites" mean your in some top percentile of wealth and income. To Republicans, "elites" means having a college degree.
This is the correct answer to the question the Guardian poses. I've lived among them and can 100% confirm this is how they think.
Elites is all about having a college degree and being "book smart" vs their "street smart" or "wise in the ways of man" sort of bullshit charlatans throughout history have used to make up for a lack of critical thinking skills.
It really is the right answer. But I think we can sharpen it if we look at how the media around Democrats elevates and highlights elitism as a quality to be pursued, for example, in a candidate.
A great example of this was the treatment of Pete Buttigieg, and specific media outlets elevation of him to a nationally relevant political actor. Harvard, then Oxford Rhodes scholar then a decade long McKinseyite (that alone should have disbarred him from running for president), then intelligence officer US Navy. He was the definition of "qualified" to the CNN and NPR editorial boards.
But how well had only political bonafides were a failed run for treasurer in Indiana, and a mayoral victory where he garnered all of 10k votes. So the guy has never actually won any significant state or federal elections. Yet in 2020, suddenly this guys is gets treated like a serious contender in the Democratic primary. Why?
Democratically aligned corporate press is obsessed with credentials, and specifically, the kind that comes from "elite" schools and organizations. Partially because they themselves also come from these elite schools and organizations.
We really have become addicted to certifications and tags and qualifiers for everyone because it's easier to "understand" them at a glance and that's decided as all you need.
On paper is good enough for far to many, it's just easier to categorize people and move on.
Being in your categories is the easiest way to automatically think of then as moral and good because they must be, you are. It's fucked up both parties. Look at Eric Adams and Marco Rubio.
Very true. The Dems could really stand for more blue collar qualifications. Especially if we treated “local union president” half as well as “McKinsey employee”
So they basically turned anti elitism to anti intellectualism so they can fool their audience.
I mean, I thought we all knew that.
I wonder what kind of people ran on anti-intellectualism in the past? Maybe around the time of UdSSR, or some German leader? Maybe some famous leader in Cambodia as well?
Yep, my comment was more about how this is kind of a tail as old as time thing.
Basically mob mentality.
It means the nerds you shoved in lockers who learned to read and now have successful lives while you scrape by trying to make alimony at a job that would pay a living wage if you didn't live in a right to work state.
See that’s the elitism. Plenty of bullies made it out and plenty of their victims didn’t. Ruthlessness is profitable and you don’t have to be a good person to go to college.
How exactly is that elitism? You're specifically arguing against the meritocracy that they consider elitism, all that fancy book-learnin.
Their mascot shits on a golden toilet in his own private country club ffs.
You’re assuming everyone stuck in rural America in a shit job with grievances is a shit person who did it to themselves. A lot of them are, especially the die hard republicans, but plenty had hard choices, or any number of other decent reasons beyond just not being smart or something.
And yeah their mascot is a filthy rich asshole, and a lot of them do suck ass. But also I spend enough time with those people to know plenty of them aren’t terrible but they are sick and tired of being treated like inherently morons for being rural
I get that, but I was that nerd shoved in lockers, and while the Midwest was decent, in the south it was far worse because I wasn't white.
The south tolerated those assholes a lot, and they were extremely ignorant, and their ignorance was a source of pride for them.
I don't want to demean the Midwestern red staters in any way, other than they clearly follow the wrong person, but the south is following moloch, their literal antichrist, out of hatred of others, and I'm fine holding them in contempt for that because it's no better than I would expect for them.
Also, they scream and scream about a Bible they've never read, and I say that as someone who went to catholic school, they thought I was lying like I said I memorized the phone book.
Also depending on the context can mean "lives in a city" or "pays a mechanic to fix their car instead of gets their hands dirty" or "doesn't go to church" or "makes fun of country folks / rural people" or "eats any food that isn't fried or served in a disposable bag and eaten between 2 buns."
...But they're never consistent, b/c they think that Trump, a literal billionaire who lives in a big city, definitely never has gone to church or gotten his hands dirty fixing cars... is somehow not elite.
...I mean... he probably doesn't eat anything that isn't fried / between buns, but that's about it.
It's incomprehensible / inconsistent.
It’s also how we talk, how we walk, and that we often come from elsewhere and think differently.
That's not what (((elites))) mean to Republicans.
A lot of times they amp up the dog whistle and say (((global elites))).
This is one of the greatest scams that conservatives get away with IMO, not just in the US but it happens in the UK and other places too. Conservatives get in, go hog wild cutting taxes, selling off public assets and throwing huge contracts to their friends, and then as soon as the other side gets back in they find that they have to now balance the books, the conservatives start complaining and saying they're the fiscally responsible ones.
It's literally happening right now in the UK - we just got rid of the Tories finally after about 15 years, and the new Labour government immediately found a £20 billion hole in the economy which they now have to make harsh cuts to sort out, and they're the ones getting criticized for it by the media.
We need a government report card.
At the end of every administration, we need to compare the national debt and all important factors.
It’s one thing people missed in coming up with democratic systems. If different people take turns to steer the ship then you need to define what their goal is so you can evaluate each.
I'd half agree; they could raise taxes instead of making cuts.
That generally also does not go over well in the media.
Conservatives make a mess to their advantage and win/win every time
Sure, because the media is generally profit oriented and therefore aligned with capitalist interests. We need more mutually supported and supportive media and journalism.
Don't say this around any conservative. They only believe in cutting taxes.
They always have these "household budget" analogies when it comes to the government, but even in a "household budget" situation one solution to overcoming debt is to find a way to raise your income so you can pay down the debt faster....
Damn. Can't believe New Labour is getting tarred with accepting soccer tickets, fancy clothes, and vacation packages from British Peer Lord Alli. Seems so unfair. Wish people would stop accusing the Labour government of being corrupt, when they are very obviously following the rules of accepting gifts and definitely not operating on any quid pro quo.
New Labour has a set of accounting rules that count investment in capital as an expense and insists on running daily budget surpluses for their operating expenses.
Popping open your household account, making cartoonish bug-eyes, and announcing "We owe $200k on our 30 year mortgage but we only make $80k/year! We're bankrupt for the next three years until we pay this house off!" This is New Labour accounting. It's laughable and only ever used as an excuse not to spend any money.
On the flip side, this is the same party that insists on privatizing everything. From Thames Water to British Gas to UK Rail, every once-public service has to be turned over and rented back from the private sector. The Brits pass out these privatization contracts as sinecures, guaranteeing their financial friends huge piles of free no-risk revenues at the expense of the British taxpayer. And then they complain that the country has no money.
That New Labour slid directly into the driver's seat the Tories left and gunned it isn't something you can ignore, simply because the party leadership has changed.
To be fair, in this monopolized 2 party system, both parties are owned by pretty much the exact same corporate interests and mega rich. Everything is by design. There is nothing they leave to chance.
Because the media continually accepts and perpetuates the right wing framing of everything.
Because the media is owned and operated by rich men who benefit from putting the blame on others and calling it "news."
/thread
All threads starting with "Why" and ending in a question mark, can be answered: "Money corrupts people"
Because rich Republicans also own the media.
Because it was always about projection.
Because the Democrats abandoned working class voters in the 80s and 90s to court the professional-managerial class in a pivot towards the center, and the Republicans were able to win over these disaffected blue-collar voters with resentment politics.
Accuse your enemies of that which you are guilty.
because US politics is center right vs far right
US two-party sham needs replacing
Poor Republicans don't show up to push their representative or senators.
There could have been a public option to the ACA if a Republican Senator voted for it; none did. If Republicans can't get the full credit for being Santa, no one can.
Because it's convenient to have bad faith actors sowing discord before any election.
Tankies (sleeper conservatives that they are) can't rely on logic, merit or hope for a better tomorrow, so they cause as much chaos as possible to their perceived 'enemies'. This chaos includes the encouragement of unrealistic statements and general cognitive dissonance.
My true thoughts are that they went too far and started to believe their own drivel as generations of hexbears rose and fell and shit themselves into .ml
What does this post or article have to do with "Tankies?" Did you just hop in here to badmouth them without any context? The idea that anyone who opposes Democrats is a conservative is so out of touch. You must live in a world of ghosts, probably ones wearing ushankas and singing the Internationalé. What a strange comment.
Not strange at all. Mostly the people shitting on the libs around here are "tankies" or whatever flavor gets the fascists more points. It's simple math.
there is not and never has been any historical evidence of a red-brown alliance. Communists, even at the height and horror of Stalinist purges, were never fascist. Fascism is something different, and the urge to conflate the two just makes you seem dangerously uneducated on the subject. No, worse than that, because misunderstanding and miscommunicating the nature of fascism is actually a boon to the fascists! It is in essence no different than when Stalin intentionally mischaracterized social democracy as being "the moderate wing of fascism" and worse than actual Nazism in order to give himself political cover in the lead up to Molotov-Ribbentrop.
So when you deceive yourself and others about the nature of fascism, you are aiding the fascists. So like don't do that.
But this still has nothing to do with the article or post, talk about living rent-free
Apologies for the long post that largely agrees with what you had to say :p To give some background to the uniniated, the theory of 'Social Facism' as described gives a historical perspective into so-called 'red-brown unity' leading up until WW2.
The idea of social fascism, that social democrats are "objectively the moderate wing of fascism" as Stalin put it, intensified by SocDem authoritarian anti-left policies, lead to even greater hostility from the Communists against the Liberals than the Nazi's themselves at the time.
So technically, there was a red-brown (Communist-Nazi) alliance within Prussia in order to take down the SocDems, the Comms were obviously more ideologically aligned with socdems but felt they were the main thing preventing progress and thus wanted to speed up their demise.
We all know how collaborating with the Nazi's turned out:
It turns out that by the communists temporarily aligning against liberals with the fascists in what today would probably be known as 'accelerationism', we headed from social democracy to concentration camps in 10 years.
And as you say, fascism is typically more obvious:
And while there are elements of logic to such a conclusion of 'social fascism' especially when today you have every 'social democrat' or 'liberal' capitaluting heavily rightwards and forming alliances with the far-right (France etc.) BUT As you say, and as history has shown, muddying the waters about the true nature of fascism pulls wool over the eyes of those with potential to affect change and prevent the rise true fascism. Which is growing every day.
And finally, it reeks of the unfortunate leftist 'purity test' behaviour which weakens unity and divides potential allies.
Anyway, when I read this theory it opened my eyes a tonne to the folly of refusing to collaborate with liberals. While I still believe liberal and center right policy, along with intense anti-left propaganda, are the reason for the rise of fascism today (overton window, ratcheting effect, disillusionment with electoral politics due to ineffective and oppressive governance that only benefits the wealthy).
Despite this by ostracising and refusing to collaborate with liberals we shoot ourselves in the foot by being so obsessed with purity that we reject reality. Perfect is the enemy of good. All progress is good provided it takes us along the right path and does not cut off the path to something greater.
I love this so much.
I didn't really have the time or energy to go into the supporting logic, for as you've just demonstrated its a very involved argument that involves a lot of oft ignored history of the period after the crushing defeat of the German working class uprising (1923, '24) but before the Nazis took power in the wake of the Reichstag fire ('33, '34). Which honestly I'm not great on anyway, I appreciate your insight, slight factual correction that just makes the point even more urgently, and any book recommendations!
So while we are providing clarification and context to the uninitiated, I dug out Trotsky's definition of fascism from 1932 since we are being so adamant about properly defining it:
In my opinion, wrt building coalition between liberals and communists, there tends to be a real failure by all parties, Marxist communists and liberals alike, to orient the alienated individual within the class or ideological milieu. Liberals can really only see the alienated individual; whereas commies, who claim to be materialists, can view the class/ideological superstructure, or sometimes reluctantly the individual, but almost never both at the same time. Mfs never read/don't understand Theses on Feuerbach and it shows.
Which is to say liberalism and communism can't really be allies, but individual liberals, who we might call progressives, more concerned with rights and human emancipation than preserving private property, can be won over to the demands of class struggle, especially as the conditions of struggle introduce sharp contradictions into their lives and the lives of the people around them. At this point the demands of their class outweigh the explanations furnished by their ideology and alliances can be forged between members of the fractured liberal or social democratic workers, and the communist/socialists who (hopefully) have prepared the field of struggle for the intensifying conflict.
Tldr: noone has a monopoly on being insufferable and maybe we could try not demonizing each other for like 15 seconds and see each other as rational people doing our best, reacting to rapidly changing conditions, that will result in pretty serious lose/lose final consequences for libs and commies alike if we can't resist the actual fascists together.
But now I've been led away from the topic of the post article, proving that we are doomed to become what we most strongly condemn.
It's really not that complicated
Excuse me? Can you give me more details about what you are trying to say?
He's not saying there's a red-brown alliance. He's saying all these supposed reds are actually browns, or useful idiots.
Probably for the same kind of reason that "everyone knows" that the corporate media is a "liberal media".
"The media is liberal!"
"Who told you that?"
"The media."
Putin is also one of the world's richest man and funds Trump.
Now that you mentioned putin, I propose we go looking for the Mexican cartel people who do the political events such as head and shoulders separations and we give them a challenge. Maybe give them a small island as a reward? 😉 Could you please bring back putin's happy face for a chance to win Mara Lago! Or Mara Island! 🏝️🏖️. With margaritas!
Projection.
Because projection, misinformation, disinformation, and political agendas.
yup. Amoral leadership lying to gullible supporters who want conspiracies, it's really that simple. A base who want simplistic explanations that reinforce their prejudices. Truth doesn't even rate.
Because democrats value egalitarianism and education. Good education is expensive. The businesspersons that have expended the most effort to offshore our jobs to the serious detriment of working-class America have had some of the most expensive and exclusive educations of all, and they are some of the wealthiest people on the planet… (conservatives fullstop here and ignore the rest: …who are also likely voting conservative). Couple that with the fact that expert (educated) advice and direction is often in direct conflict with the myopic goals and views of the uneducated. Don’t dump shit everywhere (but it’s cheap, easy, and fun to roll coal and pour used motor oil on the ground!), don’t cut down all the trees (but mah lumber is more expensive!), and maybe wear a mask (grandma was gonna die eventually anyways, at least I can bring her Covid from the Applebees take out!)
So it’s really easy for the conservatives to paint education = evil, and then of course they couple that with feel-good bullshit like “common sense” and small-town American wisdom that is completely meaningless but makes the uneducated feel smart or like they have control of their situation.
Elitism and wealth, though often linked, are not the same. The term nouveaux riche highlights this difference: it refers to those who have gained wealth but lack the cultural status of the traditional elite. One can be rich without being part of the elite, as elitism is more about attitudes of superiority tied to education or social influence than money alone.
In American politics, Democrats are often branded as elitist due to their perceived condescension towards certain demographics, such as rural communities or southern voters. Critics argue that some Democrats dismiss these regions as culturally or intellectually inferior, suggesting that rural areas offer little value or substance. This perception of elitism stems from more than just economic disparity; it reflects a cultural and ideological divide. The urban-rural schism is not simply about money, but about who holds the power to shape discourse, values, and the future of society. Such perceptions fuel populist resentment, where rural or working-class voters feel alienated or belittled by what they view as a metropolitan, highly educated, and culturally insulated elite.
You can see some of this elitism right here in the comments in fact.
Trump is the urban elitist you are referencing. Why does he get a pass from the voters from rural places?
Trump has been snubbed and the laughing stock of elite NYC society for decades.
It's because Democrats are not willing to become anti-elite or anti-rich or anything like that, they'd piss off their donors. Only Trump was able to do this because everyone knows he's lying. His donors know it's all a show.
Hard agree. All we get from the Democrats is more of the same economically and military, but with some feel good identity politics (i.e. that don't in any way threaten corpos, just provide more markets) and socially progressive vibes. Still better than the alternative sure, but they are just sprinkling glitter on a turd to make it look appealing. There's zero interest towards actually addressing social/financial inequality, reigning in the power of corpos, separating money from politics, or basically changing the economic status quo in any meaningful way. It's a sad state of affairs, and absolutely no wonder leftists aren't enthused to vote for Harris. It's basically a vote for keeping things exactly as they are now, which is not what voters want at all. US politics is so corrupted by money now that a government of the people for the people is just a distant memory. And this talk of reforming the electoral college is just more window dressing, seems to me.
They aren't. Republicans lie all the time and some people are stupid enough to believe them.
Because Republican voters never, ever seek evidence or utilize basic critical thinking when their hatred steeped biases are confirmed.
A sufficiently hatemongering, and therefore trusted conservative talking head could say "Kamala Harris is a secret Aids Virus in a skin suit made of harvested fetuses made human size by George Soros' double secret reverse shrink ray!"
And you'd cue thunderous Republican voter applause with shrieks of "I FUCKING KNEW IT!"
projection and propeganda, full stop.
Because it’s hard to think of a moron like Trump as elite at anything.
Corporate politicians are the same regardless of whether there is a D or an R in front of their name. They will vote in the interests of their donors every time, without question.
But there is such a thing as a non-corporate Democrat. Unfortunately, they are few and far between. There are also some wealthy Democratic donors that are less than 100% shitbags, resulting in some legitimate progressive policy.
Because they are? Let's not pretend several billionaires don't have Democrats on their payroll too. Are we just ignoring the existence of pelosi and her corporate democrat ilk to make this point? Dems and Republicans are in the pockets of corporate america and billionaires. It's not a secret that this country is a thinly veiled oligarchy
I think oligarchy is putting it extremely kindly. Can we please just acknowledge we are a naked kleptocracy now?
Nuh uh! Not my team!
..........and even if it was true, my team is better than yours, so they deserve to rule.
Democrats are elite in that they are smart
These billionaires are morons
Perhaps because they are the current ruling party of a government doing business with elites such as the world's richest man who funds trump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Starshield
It's true that the owners of large space technology companies are often rich, therefore all governments who contract to them are supporting elites.
Very insightful observation.
You don't go to school study and become the owner of a large space technology company, you need government backing for it.
Yes, therefore all governments that use private space companies are supporting elites. It's a brilliant point, no need to keep convincing me.
Name one single government in the world that isn't doing elites interests
True true. Government bad.
Go ahead and name one
All of them! You already said it best brother!
Propaganda.
Because 2 things can be true at the same time?
Why is this a question?
Its just each side has their own excuse of why their shit doesnt stink and what their idea of how this fake meritocracy will justify their elites.
The unwashed masses dare to think that we are the elites? Clearly a result of their inadequate education...
because the average american is dumber than the average human?
I agree, if we could get Kamala to agree then I'd feel a lot more confident about her beating trump.
I don't understand why people want to blame everyone except Kamala and her campaign for her campaigns failings tho.
The media is always mad at Dem voters for not being excited for Dem candidates, probably because the wealthy owners of the media are the same ones donating so the left most option isn't really all that "left".
Because it's easier and then it becomes someone else's fault.
There are a lot of things outside of Harris's control though - having two important voting blocs (the Jewish vote and the Islamic vote) that are on opposite sides of a big and important single issue, the need to draw in moderate Republicans, etc.
Based on her 2019 platform I'd suspect that this is secretly the case. I'm expecting a massive turnaround - but this is conditional on Dems also gaining a majority in the House and retaining the majority in the Senate.
Actually it's a failing of FPTP, with a system like that folks need to aim for the centre.
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Democrats believe they alone should be the alternative to the Republican party. Their refusal to replace First past the post voting in the states they control is them telling us they know better then everyone else.
The state of Maine disagrees. Dems got ranked choice to pass.
Aren't you telling everyone you know better than them right now?
That being said, we have preferential voting here in Australia, and it's Awesome. We can vote for who we want, and they still get paid if they get a minimum amount of votes.
But eventually, your votes keep filtering down until one prference is selected
One big thing Democrats do that marks them as elites is they consistently prioritize the climate over the needs of people.
People come second in their rhetoric.
I get what you're trying to say, but not being killed by a tornado tends to count among the needs of the people.
But if I get taken out by a tornado I don't have to worry about medical debt.
Well the problem really comes when instead of a tornado surprising you in the nearest Walmart parking lot late evening, it instead decides to stop by where ever you happen to be and generally just fuck everything you own. In bad cases it'll break a bone or two just to teach you a lesson.
Good luck with recovery after that beating.
Brain dead take
I don't know about you, but I live in the climate.
Don't worry, they said they will move us out of the environment.
Do you know what a changing climate does to the needs of the people?
I mean, obviously, natural disasters like severe weather impact the needs of the people. Look at the last two hurricanes in the US south or the wildfires out west. Death, injuries, lives disrupted, houses and businesses destroy or damaged, links in supply chains shattered.
Imagine what happens to populated areas that, hypothetically, get hit repeatedly by this for a few years. Many in Florida can't find home insurance already. Eventually they'll have to leave and go... where? If this happens repeatedly in poorer neighboring countries? What if sea levels actually rise and wipe out coastal cities? Massive migration, climate refugees, regional instability. It gets too hot for a good crop yield or rainfall patterns change and we get less fresh water? Food and water scarcity, death and starvation... the needs of people can't be met.
Thr planet? It'll likely be fine in a few million years. We won't be.