- cross-posted to:
- latestagecapitalism@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- latestagecapitalism@lemmy.world
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I think the controlled opposition theory is certainly true in-part, but it doesn’t explain everything.
The other thing is that Republicans don’t campaign on policy. They campaign on random culture war bullshit - much of which, while incredibly stupid and a waste of time, is popular.
So, sure, allowing Tesla to dump toxic waste into their constituents’ groundwater is unpopular - but their constituents never hear about it until it’s already happened, and then the politicians blame someone else.
Instead, they campaign on your parental rights to infect everyone in your kid’s class with measels or to ensure your child isn’t turned into a trans catgirl by public schoolteachers and trained to use a litterbox, or the competitive sanctity of the women’s track and field team, or whatever other dumb bullshit they can come up with.
People can be made to care about that stuff easily. Then the politicians get elected, do some random bullshit culture war legislation to get re-elected, but focus on making their corporate donors happy by allowing them to more effectively fuck over the constituents.
I’m sorry did you just provide a nuanced argument that didn’t just equal “libs r bad”???
I swear… was this part of a conversation and not cheap tankie horseshit?
Why are you complaining about tankies on an explicitly socialist community?
ITT: Excuses from people who like that the only thing democrats are willing to accomplish is weapons sales for genocide.
It’s not weird at all. It’s completely normal. Both “parties” serve the same system designed by literal enslavers.
There was a referendum to tax the rich in Illinois and it fucking failed, by a lot. We don’t live in a liberal country. We live in a center-right country with strong far right tendencies.
You do understand that Liberalism (nowadays neoliberalism) is a center-right ideology, right?
Liberal as in?
The American meaning probably
Whatever that is.
It’s clearly too much for you to handle.
What?
Can we pump up the bullying just enough for the americans to finally start using words they way the don’t completely contradict their actual globally-acknowledged meaning?
Euros use it the same way, liberals have always obscured the specificity of liberalism.
Sounds more like you are obscured more than others.
I don’t think you know what you’re saying to be honest.
“Liberal” as in you’re in a different world that can’t see straight and words make you very slow…
Orioler as in???
Big L Liberal, if it has to be specified. I’m speaking from an amerocentric perspective. Not talking about liberalism the philosophical concept.
It should be specified, because your use here matches neither of those.
Well … most of the so called “Democrats” are also corrupt conservatives. They just don’t follow the Orange Fellon Rapist Turd
Cuz they all complicit. Democrats just argue about how fast and how much damage to do to get there. Rich ppl on both sides have rich ppl personality traits in common, they are just less or more psychopathic or narcissistic. They could all be like Dolly Parton and they choose, everyday, to be something else.
Because Republicans are paid by the elite to make people suffer
And Democrats are paid by the elite to make people suffer.
Ahh that’s the problem. We need to elect people who believe in suffering for its own sake. Remove all that corruption.
We need to elect people who believe in suffering for its own sake.
Libertarians
Why are there no populist socialists? I mean people like Milei or Trump, but unapologetically radical far-left, who bring a chain saw to slash landlords, or implement a myriad of taxes that hit the wealthy. They would be incredibly popular. I don’t want timid liberals who worry that capitalists emigrate to evade taxes. I want dyed-in-the-wool Marxists who confiscate their property and let them flee to whatever country wants them or put them in camps if they don’t behave.
There are, they just are gatekept from the electoral system, and censored or are too small without mass billionaire backing to spread their message that far yet. Parties like the Party for Socialism and Liberation do exist and do do work as Marxist-Leninists, but actually growing parties is extremely difficult, with or without state oppression.
Propaganda mostly.
Like look at hispanic trump voters. He campaigned on deporting their family. They voted for him anyway because they want to make it financially, and they have been told that voting Republican is how you do that.
Same with other conservative voters. They vote against their best interests because they are miseducated. They have been told their whole lives that government spending is irresponsible, taxation is theft, immigrants are stealing their jobs, that the Republican party is the party of fiscal responsibility, and that the Democrats are communists (spooky!) who want to make you poor and want to eliminate personal property.
So say Comrade Trump ran on a populist far-left platform. There is no way to really communicate the economic benefits in a way people would understand or believe. They are conditioned against it.
The DSA is attempting this now with folks like Mamdani and El-Sayed. Trying to frame generally left wing economic ideas in terms of “affordability” and making the policies directly applicable to their lived experience. But it is an uphill battle to cut through the conditioning.
Like look at hispanic trump voters.
Democrats lost Hispanic voters by running to the right on immigration and giving up on any sort of rhetoric about how “building the wall” is racist. The anti-immigrant people still voted Republican, while conservative Hispanics no longer saw a reason to look past culture war issues based on immigration, since there wasn’t that much difference between what the two parties were saying.
People love to go all “leopards ate their face” and just attribute it to stupidity but it’s really a failure on the part of the Democratic party’s messaging and tactics. They caved to the right’s rhetoric and it backfired, just like it always does.
Oh no, that is totally correct. I’m not even really blaming them entirely, because the Democrats really fucked up.
But the Republicans were obviously running to the right of the Dems. With trump and friends openly saying they wanted essentially more concentration camps and more deportations and to expand ICE to enact that policy. Democrats maintained the system of concentration camps and deportations, but Republicans were obviously still worse on that issue. And many voters, including hispanic voters, cited trump as being the better economic choice.
It’s only weird if you assume Democrats and Republicans aren’t both working for the same handful of billionaires and that all the culture war stuff they fight over is just window dressing to distract you from that simple fact.
Once you recognize that the purpose of the Democratic Party is not to govern, but to capture and neuter social movements dangerous to Wall St, and secondarily to give people enough faith in the system that they’ll keep voting and not revolting, then all the supposed contradictions make perfect sense.
Yep, that became the norm with the Obama betrayal. That’s when the democrats sold out the the same oligarchs that bought the bush era republicans.
Pretty sure it was the Clinton administration in the 90s when the Dems sold out to the same Oligarchs who bought the Reagan era Republicans, but the end result today is basically the same either way.
The long standing joke has been the Republicans are the party of bad ideas and Democrats are they party of no ideas.
If we could get the money out of the politics, then maybe things would be different. But both parties are just greedy cocksucking bootlickers.
Democrats are they party of no ideas.
Democrats are the party of promising a New Deal every election cycle and delivering Reaganomics every Congressional cycle
Still counts as no ideas, they’re just following the conservative playbook.
Getting money out of politics is a naive goal as it fails to account that economics are intrinsically linked to politics. They cannot be separated
Banning lobbying and implementing election spending caps would go a long way without even slightly affecting the economy.
Under capitalism, those are still not sufficient to change much, even if you could get those across. Politics and economics are, as Doc_Crankenstein said, intertwined, with the economic base having by far the largest impact.
Not sufficient to fix the problem, but it would be a step in the right direction.
A governments success largely tied to it’s economic performance, but that doesn’t mean the direct links to bribery can’t be severed.
What is the right direction? Is socialism necessary in your view?
Socialism is not necessary. I’m proposing reduced corporatism to remove the power of companies and their wealth generation capabilities to influence policy.
Politicians should respond to 1 person 1 vote. Not $1 per vote.
What you’re asking for is a capitalist state to work against the interests of the class that controls the state, though. That’s a practically impossible task, unless the ruling class fears revolt and allows minor concessions.
Banning lobbying
How would that work? Nobody is allowed to talk to a sitting Congress? They just go into seclusion every two years?
election spending caps
We don’t even have proper candidate run elections anymore. It’s all dark money running influence campaigns 24/7/365 from private think tanks and media companies.
Like, what are you going to do with FOX News or MSNBC during election season? What are you going to do with Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson? With Twitter and Facebook?
That’s before we even get into the paradox of asking politicians to regulate themselves.
How would that work? Nobody is allowed to talk to a sitting Congress? They just go into seclusion every two years?
Communication is fine. All voters have the equal opportunity to talk to their representative (lottery system if too much demand).
Companies don’t get the right to talk to representatives, except indirectly via voters.
Capped, controlled benefits are passed from voters to representative (mainly time Volunteered). No financial benefits from corporations. Election funding is centralised and limited.
We don’t even have proper candidate run elections anymore. It’s all dark money running influence campaigns 24/7/365 from private think tanks and media companies.
I’m saying we make this illegal.
Like, what are you going to do with FOX News or MSNBC during election season?
Ban election opinion pieces. Enforce only facts reported. Full speeches, not soundbites.
Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson? With Twitter and Facebook?
Anyone with over X followers has their political opinions censored unless they are registered as running for election.
asking politicians to regulate themselves.
Certainly not. Enforced by an independent judge.
Communication is fine. All voters have the equal opportunity to talk to their representative (lottery system if too much demand).
I’m reminded of the national media having a meltdown because Bill Clinton traded a few words with Loretta Lynch on the tarmac in Phoenix. Now I’m imagining this kind of scandal every time a Congressman trades words with a next-door neighbor.
Capped, controlled benefits are passed from voters to representative
You’re going to cap the number of hours a voter can volunteer for a political campaign? Even setting aside how that could possibly be policed, I can’t imagine how such a policy would be popular enough for anyone to endorse. Imagine a sitting AG ordering the state sheriffs to drag some little old lady out of a campaign office for overshooting her campaign volunteering hour cap and how that would play in the national news.
I’m saying we make this illegal.
We already have an abundance of illegality committed by these private institutions. Nobody is enforcing any of it, precisely because the judicial system is in the pocket of billionaire special interests.
Compare this to drug criminalization. Who gets busted more often? The corporate lawyer doing a line of coke in the Penthouse suite? Or the homeless vagrant melting spoons under the freeway?
Hell, compare it to the TikTok Ban that got advanced under Biden and implemented under Trump. Did TikTok become apolitical after it’s American assets were divorced from ByteDance? Or did it become even more political in the hands of a domestic set of oligarchs?
Ban election opinion pieces.
Blatant First Amendment Violation.
Enforce only facts reported. Full speeches, not soundbites.
As impractical as it is unconstitutional.
Anyone with over X followers has their political opinions censored
By whom? You’re going to tell the FCC to censor Elon Musk? You’re going to tell the FCC to censor Sitting President Donald Trump? Before or after the head of the agency is fired and the organization is gutted by angry partisans?
Enforced by an independent judge.
No such judge exists.
Now I’m imagining this kind of scandal every time a Congressman trades words with a next-door neighbor.
Talking to politicians is fine. Buying them coffee is not.
Capped, controlled benefits are passed from voters to representative
You’re going to cap the number of hours a voter can volunteer for a political campaign?
Yep. 24h.
I’m not worried about individual work. I’m trying to remove the effect of money.
We already have an abundance of illegality committed by these private institutions. Nobody is enforcing any of it, precisely because the judicial system is in the pocket of billionaire special interests.
Sort out paying off politicians and this will change.
Ban election opinion pieces. Blatant First Amendment Violation. Enforce only facts reported. Full speeches, not soundbites. As impractical as it is unconstitutional.
Ok, I’ll withdraw these. I can’t see how these rules wouldn’t be abused by fascist dictatorship. Maybe the media is less important with modern technologies.
Enforced by an independent judge. No such judge exists
Remove the money (except for high salary), enforce disbarment for violation. It will take a decade or two but they will be independent.
I agree with you with the fact that lobbying is protected by the first amendment.
You get money out of politics by repealing Citizens United and putting a severe cap on the amount of money that can be donated.
I mean, I’d point you to Steve Balmer and the scandal with the Clippers in the NBA right now if you want to talk about ways to evade spending limits.
The fundamental problem with “getting money out of politics” is that you’re dealing with a multi-trillion dollar annual budget running out of a country that prints the global reserve currency (for now). You cannot do politics in this country without moving around enormous volumes of money. It’s comically easy for that kind of money to spill into your back pocket, either directly (self-dealing) or through kickbacks and bribes or through insider trading or through second or third order machinations (Dick Cheney getting rich off a ballooning Halliburton stock price because he’d accrued millions in stock compensation during his time as CEO).
CU and private donations are the tiny little tip of the iceberg. Underneath that, you’ve got the sprawling network of public-private partnerships that administer our bureaucratic state. And then you’ve got the massive private real estate holdings and capital improvements that benefit from spending decisions. And then you’ve got the bones of the public sector economy - the public sector amenities and security spending - that any government needs to preserve its legitimacy. All of these operate at the scale of billions and trillions of dollars. It’s such that a seemingly banal decision - national standardized testing for public schools, shifts in regulation/subsidy for different kinds of energy infrastructure, where bureaucrats choose to build a highway exit or a train depot or an airport - can generate obscene fortunes downstream.
The problem isn’t “money in politics”, it’s “consolidation of wealth in a bourgeois class”.
Steve Balmer was busted. (But only because he broke the rules the other billionaires made.)
Money in politics and the billionaire class go hand in hand.
CU is not the tip of the iceberg, it was the opening of the floodgates.
The ability to form PACs is the vehicle that allows the uber wealthy to use their vast wealth to influence government/legislation.
Public/Private partnerships can be good, but I agree that they are heavily abused.
I had to look up bourgeois and now know that Marxists use it to reference the capitalist exploiters and not the middle class. I agree with you completely there.
Their very existence is proof that unfettered capitalism is not a functional or fair system. America’s system has been routinely exploited by those with money and it is so fucking heinous now.
We just need to start eating some billionaires. Or at least feeding them to the pigs. Feed the pigs to the pigs too.
Steve Ballmer was busted. (But only because he broke the rules the other billionaires made.)
It took eight years, during several of which the facts of the case were known but Ballmer was treated as a victim of slander rather than a man guilty of massive fraud.
We just need to start eating some billionaires.
Figuratively or literally. But a one year suspension from slapping cheeks in the Congressional locker room and a sternly worded letter from the FEC isn’t going to cut it.
The notion that you can just put up a sign that says “Tipping your elected representatives is against the rules” and leave it at that is a fantasy. And the notion that anyone from Kash Patel to James Comey is actually going after the rich and powerful is even more of a fantasy.
“Ah, but if the OWS movement had just People’s Mic’d the correct words, elections would work properly by now” is just magical thinking. It isn’t materialistic. You’re not looking at the networks of social influence or the feedback loops of wealth aggregation that have produced people like Trump, Thiel, Dimon, and Epstein.
My favorite Mamdani quote:
For far too long, our party has seen its job as managing decline instead of delivering material change for working people,” Mamdani said at a rally headlined by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. “It has seen its job as explaining why we cannot instead of showing how we can
And I don’t think it is accidental. I think Schmuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are Manchurian MAGAs who sold out the Democrats a long time ago. Even if they aren’t doing it purposefully, their cowardly and insipid behavior is 50% of the reason that MAGA regained power. They should be out of politics for that alone, they certainly haven’t done ANYTHING to prove they deserve a second chance at punishing MAGA. They didn’t do it when they had the chance, they aren’t going to do it in the future.
We should all be calling our Democratic representatives, and strongly demand that they vote AGAINST Schmuck & Jeffries for leadership. Start now, so everybody knows going into the Midterms that they can expect substantial change by the new Democratic Party.
No one needed to sell out the Democrats. When Nixon was president, the entire time the Democrats held strong majorities in both bodies of the legislature. You know what they did with it? They joined Nixon in developing the war on drugs to turn normal legal behavior into felonies that would disenfranchise Black people and those that associated with them.
The Ds have ALWAYS been this evil. No one needed to sell them out. They have always been a faction of the elite collaborating with the other factions of the elite.
When Nixon was around, conservative Dixiecrats were still a thing. You can’t really compare across different party systems.
Sure, that’s why Biden was different when he architected the crime bill and why Clinton was different when he went after Black “super predators” and spiked racialized incarceration and why Obama was different when he expanded DHS and ICE immensely and appointed Homan and deported 3M people and human rights organizations fought his policies and why Obama and Clinton devastated Libya. Very different
I mean, both Clintons are conservative dixiecrats, and they’re pretty involved in mainstream Democratic politics
Now the default Dem is a conservative further to the right of Nixon.
I think it’s like squares and rectangles. All republicans are absolute shitheads. Some Democrats are, too.
They’re all rotten.
Niggas talk about change and working within the system to achieve that The problem with always being a conformist is that when you try To change the system from within, it’s not you who changes the system It’s the system that will eventually change you There is usually nothing wrong with compromise in a situation But compromising yourself in a situation is another story completely And I have seen this happen long enough in the few years that I’ve been alive to know that it’s a serious problem
Yeah Chomsky spoke about it in the 70s as well, I think
Chomsky was personal friends with Epstein and defended him. Let’s stop caring what he said.
Plus he has said some pretty misguided things around 2016, I don’t like him. Even before I learned he fucked children with epstein and now is an israeli tool.
Chomsky who flew to pedo island and thought so highly of a Mossad asset.
I think Cuck Schumer is more fitting as he sits in his little cuck chair while the opposition fucks democracy.
Ha ha, Cuck Schumer, that’s a good one I’m using that. How did I not think of that?
Mamlapdoggy Edi quickly coward and apologized for talking about Israeli war crimes and threw his wife under the Israeli bus.
First glimmer of hope in a long time has been Mamdani. Every week I feel like I hear about something new and great and it’s weird actually seeing what someone can actually do.
The biggest thing he should be showing you is that someone motivated can make noticeable positive change in a relatively short period of time. When you see another politician failing to make such noticeable changes, it’s because they’re not trying.
Yes, Mamdani still has a lot of work ahead of him - what we’ve seen so far is just a good first few steps, but they’re obvious steps in the right direction. Whenever someone says “these things take time” and can’t show any obvious first steps to prove that we’re actually moving at all, then they’re not actually doing anything - they’re just saying they are and hoping you won’t notice.
It’s also important to understand his limitations. The capitalist system cannot be changed out piece by piece into a socialist one. Mamdani is powerless against the capitalist class, at most he can pass welfare and social reforms. The benefit of Mamdani is that he helps prove that these reforms are actually pretty easy to establish, but at the same time we must understand that socialism without revolution is impossible.
That’s why it’s critical to educate ourselves and communities, agitate amongst the working classes, and organize for socialist revolution.
If he keeps getting this good PR, Mandami won’t be around for long. Otherwise people might expect things to change.
Well Hakim Jeffries has been SECRETLY meeting with an UNELECTED SON OF THE DICTATOR to discuss the fate of OUR FUCKING republic.
ya don’t say…
It’s also weird how fascist policy like mass surveillance is going up at the same pace in blue states.
Nationwide rollouts, small pockets of local resistance.
Or with considerable support. Current WA governor for instance ran specifically on more cops and expanding the police state.
The resistance is about to get a whole lot bigger. No one likes these things. No one likes llm’s.
There is no way these llm’s pay for this either, this is going to be paid by federal government bailouts, because the rich can’t lose money now apparently that’s a thing. We should be ready for that to launch massive resistance.
During the 2008 crisis regular people lost everything and were financially devastated for generations. The wealthy got golden parachutes and the greatest transfer of wealth to their class in history. The working class got a homelessness crisis, expanding debt, a militarized police state, cia infiltration of occupy wall street and fascism. We need a revolution to fix this
I expect at best it’ll be business as usual when typical Democrats are elected. They won’t persecute and prosecute Trump, they won’t reverse most of his abhorrent policies and POs, won’t restuff the SCOTUS with people who think over follow entirely a rhetorical edict, etc. etc.
I’m convinced those people saying no to revolution, it could make things worse, don’t realize it’s about as bad as it can get right now. When you’re starting to pound at bedrock, going up is much easier.
