Petrol posted:Frankly, much has changed since 2016. If you're going to engage with electoral politics at all you are already talking about some degree of strategic compromise. People are genuinely scared of the political milieu right now, not unreasonably. And they hold out some hope that Sanders could beat Trump and that, if he did, some of the most vulnerable people (domestically at least haha) could be afforded some relief in the immediate term. On the first point they are wrong so it's all academic, but on the second point they are right, and it's probably unfair to be mad at them for trying. PSL or whoever are never going to become the vanguard that leads a communist revolution in the united snake of amrika so who cares anyway. Give them a damn break
american politics is insane and unpredictable, and bernie's already made it further than i expected. for the quoted reason i will vote for him if he is nominated after all. yes.. dimitrov, and togliatti, and social democracy is the left wing of fascism, the dsa sucks, etc. i agree, i still think all of this. still.. its bernie time for me, personally
You would think this is a dumb strategy except for the fact that everyone in this stupid country is dumber than trump and come Super Tuesday every BeatTrump bluenomatterwho Democrat is going to vote for literally a guy who is in every way exactly like trump except for not saying covfefe on Twitter or whatever. I wish they would have nominated Biden instead because Amerika deserves whatever national embarrassment the general election debates would have been.
c_man posted:I propose that domestic US politics be relegated to the alchoholism subforum
elias posted:Do you guys remember 2016 when the Green Party ran a more communist ticket for the presidency than all the communist parties did
not sure i agree about e.g. Lamont Lilly being less Communist but Ajama Baraku is good.
cars posted:I've written plenty about this on this forum before, but the odds are nil of Sanders somehow overturning the complete domination of the United States federal government by private health insurers. Anything he proposed as President would be gutted by the industry's legislators before it passed, and anything that passed would be circumvented by their lawyers and accountants before it even began to be enforced. And if and when the government started to enforce whatever was left, the Supreme Court would overturn it. There will be no reform for health care in the United States, because there is not even a feigned recognition of the right to it, and nearly the entire force of the national legislature, courts and administrative bodies are arrayed against it, backed up by the heavily militarized U.S. police forces if it comes to that. Change will happen when Congress is marched out of their meeting house at gunpoint, or it won't happen at all.
He's said before his plan is to endorse progressive primary challengers and use his large base of support to put pressure on those who don't follow his policies. I don't know if he'll actually do that or if it'll be effective but I think it's a little premature to assume no change is possible under that scenario. We've had reforms without executing the entire congress before.
“My fellow Americans, there are 24 senators standing in our way to completing Medicare for All. I ask the public to 'convince' these senators by any means necessary. To ensure a expedited process, every 24 hours a billionaire will be removed from this world until all senators have agreed to support our agenda. To show how serious I am, the first has already been taken care of. *Screen changes to a live feed of Jeff Bezos slouched over a toilet* You have 23 hours. Good luck”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.commondreams.org/news/2019/11/11/ocasio-cortez-joins-chorus-critics-condemning-coup-bolivia-forced-out-socialist%3famp
Edited by burritostan ()
pogfan1996 posted:dsa = cia
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/02/14/ocasio-cortez-to-constituents-on-bolivian-coup-drop-dead/
a careful reading of this and a glance at how it's being promoted on twitter reveals it to be an unprincipled hit job. and i say that as someone who doesnt give a fuck about AOC. whatever nugget of truth might underpin this piece is indiscernible from the thinly veiled cancellation rhetoric
marlax78 posted:vimingok posted:Watched a youtube about why Bernie is awesome and concluded most of these folks mean well. Sure a lot of their stances on foreign policy and really existing communism are incomplete and half-baked but that might be due to wanting palpable solutions they can participate in without feeling weird, instead of going nazbol upon discovering imperialist socdem reality like Orwell did in Wigan Pier. So probably a bit unfair to reduce (all of) them to 1st world proles clinging to faded gentility.
https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/2nd-congress/ch07.htm
Lenin: Comrades, Serrati has said that we have not yet invented a sincérometre – that is a new French word that means an instrument for measuring sincerity. Such an instrument has not yet been invented. We do not need such an instrument, but we already have an instrument for judging trends.
...They are all sincere socialists, joking apart, but they are against the dictatorship of the proletariat!
... One does not need to look for a sincerometer and make jokes about it like Comrade Serrati in order to know the simple fact that there is and must be a struggle of tendencies. One tendency is the revolutionaries, the workers who have just come to us, the enemies of the labour aristocracy. The other tendency is the labour aristocracy, which in all the civilised countries is represented by the old leaders.
Speaking as a complete outsider to western politics and lay leftist, there seem to be unfolding conflicts *within* a 1st world labour aristocracy steadily crawling past the verge of crisis. Globalised capitalism is running at full tilt with nowhere to expand. If you agree with that, what will the stabilisation efforts of late stage empire look like? Trump is New Deal Christler for his fanatic base which so far has been stable enough. Bernie looks like an attempt to rebalance the Yankee/Cowboy detente with docile minorities but I don't see how that wouldn't be a contradiction-riddled disaster in practice. What are the channels of radicalisation, if any, for precariously underemployed urban white youth with no palpable direction for improvement?
pogfan1996 posted:dsa = cia
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/02/14/ocasio-cortez-to-constituents-on-bolivian-coup-drop-dead/
As a local staffer (who declined to introduce himself???) proudly informed us: “She refuses 99 percent of meeting requests from constituents.”
tears posted:fwiw that article is by @cordeliers who last time i gave a shit was phil greaves kahina krew. it is sad to me that i know this and now i feel depressed, thanks a fucking bunch you assholes,
i thought the name sounded familiar but couldn't place it, thank you!! cool my crazy detector is still properly calibrated, fucking nice
vimingok posted:marlax78 posted:vimingok posted:Watched a youtube about why Bernie is awesome and concluded most of these folks mean well. Sure a lot of their stances on foreign policy and really existing communism are incomplete and half-baked but that might be due to wanting palpable solutions they can participate in without feeling weird, instead of going nazbol upon discovering imperialist socdem reality like Orwell did in Wigan Pier. So probably a bit unfair to reduce (all of) them to 1st world proles clinging to faded gentility.
https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/2nd-congress/ch07.htm
Lenin: Comrades, Serrati has said that we have not yet invented a sincérometre – that is a new French word that means an instrument for measuring sincerity. Such an instrument has not yet been invented. We do not need such an instrument, but we already have an instrument for judging trends.
...They are all sincere socialists, joking apart, but they are against the dictatorship of the proletariat!
... One does not need to look for a sincerometer and make jokes about it like Comrade Serrati in order to know the simple fact that there is and must be a struggle of tendencies. One tendency is the revolutionaries, the workers who have just come to us, the enemies of the labour aristocracy. The other tendency is the labour aristocracy, which in all the civilised countries is represented by the old leaders.Speaking as a complete outsider to western politics and lay leftist, there seem to be unfolding conflicts *within* a 1st world labour aristocracy steadily crawling past the verge of crisis. Globalised capitalism is running at full tilt with nowhere to expand. If you agree with that, what will the stabilisation efforts of late stage empire look like? Trump is New Deal Christler for his fanatic base which so far has been stable enough. Bernie looks like an attempt to rebalance the Yankee/Cowboy detente with docile minorities but I don't see how that wouldn't be a contradiction-riddled disaster in practice. What are the channels of radicalisation, if any, for precariously underemployed urban white youth with no palpable direction for improvement?
imo, the Trump movement and the Sanders movement are two sides of the same reactionary coin within the labor aristocracy, where the former are Euro-Amerikan settler nationalists who are basically redundant in the era of globalized capital and transnational corporations. The good old days of the white nation dominating the north amerikan continent are over and the coastal Euro-American bourgeoisie know it. Making Euro-Amerika great again is in a liminal space, just wait. The latter still believe in "America" as some sort of great First World "nation" that can economically integrate regardless of nationality into one big multicultural empire with healthcare and those white nationalists are just "fly over states" who need to hurry up and die already. The Euro-American bourgeoisie know that dream is also over (thus the CIA seizing the democratic party and all the attempts to destroy the Sanders movement from the center). I don't think it matters whether Sanders wins or Trump wins, because the surplus value is gonna dry up for both sides of the labor aristocracy eventually and then the avenue for radicalization of urban white youth will be when your coastal city is being surrounded from the countryside by white nationalists.
vimingok posted:Speaking as a complete outsider to western politics and lay leftist, there seem to be unfolding conflicts *within* a 1st world labour aristocracy steadily crawling past the verge of crisis.
well i aint a westerner so i might be quite off but i am not sure about the extent or even existence of this crisis. i mean there are certain signs like trump getting elected, brexit, sanders' rising popularity, the clamor for healthcare, the gilets jaunes blah blah but trump served for like 4 years and he didnt go for any dramatic policy change or any large intensification of previous policies, brexit drama seems to have fizzled in confusion, sanders actually aint that popular compared to the internet hype, gilets jaunes keep protesting but contrary to how continuous their protests are the size or effects seem not that significant and healthcare isnt that much of a staple item. i mean there is no concern about rising food prices or shit that pertains to subsistence more directly like food or shelter or whatever. arab spring began with food riots and reactions to widespread unemployment for example. pre-wwii krauts were concerned with staple shit like food and clothing as well. i dont see any problem that dramatic in the west.
sovnarkoman posted:vimingok posted:Speaking as a complete outsider to western politics and lay leftist, there seem to be unfolding conflicts *within* a 1st world labour aristocracy steadily crawling past the verge of crisis.
well i aint a westerner so i might be quite off but i am not sure about the extent or even existence of this crisis. i mean there are certain signs like trump getting elected, brexit, sanders' rising popularity, the clamor for healthcare, the gilets jaunes blah blah but trump served for like 4 years and he didnt go for any dramatic policy change or any large intensification of previous policies, brexit drama seems to have fizzled in confusion, sanders actually aint that popular compared to the internet hype, gilets jaunes keep protesting but contrary to how continuous their protests are the size or effects seem not that significant and healthcare isnt that much of a staple item. i mean there is no concern about rising food prices or shit that pertains to subsistence more directly like food or shelter or whatever. arab spring began with food riots and reactions to widespread unemployment for example. pre-wwii krauts were concerned with staple shit like food and clothing as well. i dont see any problem that dramatic in the west.
Both the left and the right labor aristocracy are discussing imminent threats like climate change and/or financial meltdown which will introduce those factors pretty quickly. They're just trying to stop it with trump or sanders or brexit or endless shrimp at red lobster
sovnarkoman posted:vimingok posted:Speaking as a complete outsider to western politics and lay leftist, there seem to be unfolding conflicts *within* a 1st world labour aristocracy steadily crawling past the verge of crisis.
well i aint a westerner so i might be quite off but i am not sure about the extent or even existence of this crisis. i mean there are certain signs like trump getting elected, brexit, sanders' rising popularity, the clamor for healthcare, the gilets jaunes blah blah but trump served for like 4 years and he didnt go for any dramatic policy change or any large intensification of previous policies, brexit drama seems to have fizzled in confusion, sanders actually aint that popular compared to the internet hype, gilets jaunes keep protesting but contrary to how continuous their protests are the size or effects seem not that significant and healthcare isnt that much of a staple item. i mean there is no concern about rising food prices or shit that pertains to subsistence more directly like food or shelter or whatever. arab spring began with food riots and reactions to widespread unemployment for example. pre-wwii krauts were concerned with staple shit like food and clothing as well. i dont see any problem that dramatic in the west.
Trump is setting the stage for domestic repression though, e.g. the judge appointments and rollback of the fiduciary duty thing. At this point stocks are driving the economy; last week Tesla skyrocketed overnight for no reason whatsoever. It's not just business as usual and there is an intractable polarisation in US politics that indicates growing within-class conflict. Obviously real anti-imperialism is absent but the question is whether these conditions are better for education to that effect than say those of 2011.
cars posted:The best outcome of course is that there’s no post-election invasion of someplace by the U.S., but that’s only happening if it’s hit by a meteor or idk, many many nuclear bombs and missiles,
pretty much about to happen and United $naKKKe$ Congress, who are filthy lurkers, have targeted my posting clout by planning up to 1000 post-election invasions anyway
PressTV’s motto is to give “voice to the voiceless” and so we have given priority to non-mainstream political groups during our coverage of the US presidential election. We have spoken with socialists, Greens, Libertarians and more, but the Democratic Socialists of America - perhaps best exemplified by failed presidential candidate Bernie Sanders - has openly blacklisted Iranian media.
After repeated requests, the Chicago chapter of DSA wrote to Press TV that, “The officers of our organization have decided that it would not serve our interests to do an interview.”
This caused PressTV management to contact DSA’s headquarters in New York City to confirm if this allegedly-leftist political group was really enforcing a blacklist on the entire media of an internationally-recognized nation. As expected, no response was given, so - crucially - no denial either.
it is IMO notable, in a local and incremental way that extends beyond just bourgeois elections, that Mitt Romney is being roundly booed in Utah because he was nominally, and vocally, anti-Trump by the end of Trump's term in office. It's an odd thing to happen even with the Utah party joining the undead opposition to the 2020 election results, for a bunch of Mormon men to jeer at Romney over the issue in public. And, like, I know I can't qualify this enough, how this man should be booed for other reasons, and it is not like there are a lot of meaningful political differences between the two guys, but:
Trump did not even break 50% of the vote in Utah in 2016, and he got less of the vote in Utah than he did in New Hampshire, a state he literally lost to Clinton. ~20% of Utah's vote went to former-CIA & Mormon spoiler candidate Evan McMullin. That was not just because McMullin was a good Mormon boy and BYU grad. That would not have put him in the position to peel that much of the vote off from the Republican candidate by itself or even put him on the map really, and believe it or not I am not going to lean on the one thing I mentioned earlier in this paragraph that my paranoid self thinks probably had at least something to do with why he bothered to run as an independent at all.
What is even more notable is the 2016 Republican caucus in Utah: Ted Cruz won over 2/3 [of the vote]. Trump finished a distant third with less than 15% of the vote. This was the last GOP caucus of the season among the 50 states. It took place in late March, when the only real route to Cruz, or anyone but Trump, becoming the 2016 candidate, was to take the fight to the party convention and use some sort of old-school party big-timing on delegates to sink Trump there. (I honestly expected that scuffle to happen as at least a sort of soft strong-arm maneuver to get Trump's team to calm down a little on the public stage, making it clear that the GOP establishment still held the purse strings for financing his campaign... but in short order, that began to look like purposely throwing a close race to Clinton and it never materialized.)
Trump's failure to win majorities in Utah, even after anointing as the Republican candidate, was explicitly because Mormon voters in Utah, a heavily Republican state, had significant distaste for Trump relative to their counterparts in other states who fit the same demographic categories they did, including income & household wealth.
One big reason is that Trump presented a sort of public model of "manhood" that was at a certain fundamental level offensive to the mainstream Mormon idea of what it means to be a man. This was kind of a big deal that may be hard to explain to people if they have not spent a lot of time around LDS families. I did for many years in my teens and early 20s for reasons too boring to explain here.
The best way to try to explain it, I think, is counterexample: Trump's manhood WASN'T an issue for e.g. white-supremacist Protestant sects elsewhere in the country, groups that in a few key ways resemble the LDS church in most of its strongholds. I'm talking about Republican-wedded groups such as the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention. Those non-LDS Christian organizations have guided their membership through ideals for men and leaders fighting for "Christian values" that Trump's public image in 2016 did not contradict, and in many ways exemplified. The ideal leader was a man, and further, he was vicious, loud, slickly opportunist and, frankly, a whiner, endorsing himself as a superior bastion of morality despite his almost-certain personal and public immorality, standing up for his miniature mirror images, the people whose endorsement he sought, against a half-facetious, half-fantasized nefarious worldwide persecution.
Trump in 2016, a NYC property shark who probably didn't even know the Lord's Prayer by heart, was in a strange sense the very model of a New Evangelical sweat-hog preacher of the Baptist or Pentecostal or charismatic or "non-denominational" mega-church. He was a guy who easily invoked his own sordid and slimy past to prove he was a knowledgeable speaker on sin, then outright denied the same whenever it threatened to suggest anything else about him. This sort of rhetorical maneuver is well-understood among those groups, as well as among the tactically-weaponized Roman Catholic bishops and constituencies that had joined them in the 1980s, to be wise maneuvering in cultural warfare.
But the traditional idea of a Mormon man—at least outside of certain extreme reactionary circles—was not much like that. An ideal Mormon man—I stress "ideal"—was supposed to be a leader in his church to some degree at all times, but at the same time, to possess a pious stoicism. He should be family-oriented by sheer muscle memory, and a man of humble and carefully chosen words. The Mormon man is someone who should talk more, and more often, to his wife and children than he does to some real or imagined public forum of fellow faithful outside of the household. There is certainly a sense of manhood under siege from society in the LDS church, but it's distinct in certain ways, tied to struggle against the temptations of pride and participation in the corrupt & worldly-wise, rather than some conspiracy to sap an angry, tantrum-throwing paleogenetic fantasy-masculinity of its vital fluids.
The result is that Trump in 2016 was seen by a lot of Mormons, not just as a disaster as a man, but actually a FAILURE as one, in a way specifically coded as feminine. He clearly wasn't able to control his passions or mind his tongue. His family life was a decades-long public wreck. He was far more famous as a mouthy, spoiled TV star than he was even as a businessman, and well before he became the party's official candidate. Trump was a preening makeup-wearer who made playground faces at his opponents while they were speaking. Any religious convictions he'd suddenly espouse were nakedly tactical. You can see how all of this served him poorly in Utah at the time.
Even Mitt Romney, scion of the 20th century's great Mormon hope, was toeing the line of the acceptable back in 2012 with Mormons, though their leaders were not about to bring it up in public (see, we're circling back around to a point here.) Romney was viewed by many of them as someone who'd done wrong by his father's legacy, a silver-spoon Wall Streeter who was widely rumored to have skipped out on his church-required missionary work as a young man—a weighty charge even when just whispered about in private. By the time Trump came around, though, Romney's cohort would take what they could get. Romney launched into Trump, again more vocally than substantially, with what he no doubt considered reliable footing in Romney's "natural" base of support.
Now, by 2021, even with Trump himself defeated last year, Utah's joined the state-party Republican rebellion against the federal-level party's attempt to secure the reins again, diving deep into symbolic condemnation of the 2020 election results. And they are not only turning against Romney over it. They are making it an issue in public for him, loudly and disrespectfully. He now represents a different sort of problem to them in ways much more familiar to right-wingers in other places in the U.S. Romney's a city slicker because he's anti-Trump. Trump, a prissy moaner from NYC, isn't, because he isn't.
That means there's been a shift against Romney within his own cohort, but this time, it's in FAVOR of the parts of Romney's public persona that his fellow Mormons particularly and recently disliked—that is, in favor of Trump. And I'm not sure exactly what the nature of it is, what the material grounding for it is, but it's weird stuff. To see Romney booed by what must have been a largely Mormon crowd because he took some politically well-timed potshots at Trump is something that made me want to know a lot more about what's going on in Utah, what's happened to so quickly homogenize the LDS church in areas where they'd remained cultural holdouts. Loud and militant politics aren't unknown among Mormons as a crowd, just look at their bumpy ride into the U.S. mainstream if the public eye on their extremists isn't enough to convince... but this is an odd way to manifest that aspect in this day and age.
It's like what happens when one of those few remaining Democrat machines in the U.S. South finally succumbs to the Southern strategy decades later. Something happened here, and it probably involved conscious, planned, tactical activity that, again, extends beyond bourgeois politics, probably into the economics of the household. Interesting, to me.
Edited by cars ()
Because, and I'm not saying your read is superficial here, but all that stoic masculinity family values stuff is ultimately an aesthetic preference for the formulation of patriarchal power, what that power is meant to actually accomplish will always be more important. In the context of preferring a choice of candidate they could afford the luxury of turning up their noses at Trump, but in the context of him already sitting in the office of President, Romney compromised the supremacy of that power being enacted by breaking ranks. Romney's strategic error was the same as Clinton's: appealing to some higher (yet still completely rotten) ideal of what the USA is supposed to be, which is never going to actually win out over Trump's naked embodiment of what the USA really is.