The way I like to put it is that voting is (one option for) the victory lap. It’s necessary, but will mostly take care of itself if you were successful in your other, vastly more important work. The desperate get out the vote efforts we see today are only like that because they’re the damage control leftists/progressives do after they fail in said vastly more important work (mostly by not showing up).

That’s true, but only because the German SDP relatively recently (in the 2000s if I understood the Wikipedia article right) adopted neoliberalism as opposed to its historical platform of Keynesian social democracy. For most of their history they were very much non-liberal social democrats.

It’s obvious what I mean so this sort of deflection is just weak.

I mean the problem with liberals is not that they focus on reforms, but that they don’t follow through on those reforms; if they did they’d be some variant of social democrats. The real problem is how they, like conservatives, are worshippers of capital who think society should be subservient to the whims of the ultra-rich—just, you know, with a few gentlemen’s agreements baked in.

No, the problem is that they coopted the word for their specific ideology in the same way conservatives are not in fact there to conserve anything and fascists don’t inspire unity in society.

Because farmers need goods and services that they can’t get without money, and because if they’re not compensated for that food they’ll just… not farm it except the amount necessary to feed themselves and their families. This also applies to shippers and everyone else who’s part of the farm to consumer supply chain so you end up having to compensate all those people and the way the current system (and most other systems) do that is money.

It is my dire belief that the entire world will have to invade America, like we did with Germany.

More likely, the rest of the world will look the other way while America cannibalizes itself.

I mean it worked for checks notes about 40 years from the New Deal to the Oil Crisis. Again we’d have to actually see socialism somewhere before we can make a judgement either way, but there’s no basis to claim that it’d do a better (or worse) job than Keynesian economics.

So, there is not a political solution here.

I’m not sure about the election fraud stuff, but there is no electoral solution here. The people of America will have to take to the streets and force Trump to back off before anything positive can happen. And by take to the streets I mean something like this, this or this.

What will happen is that the democrats will be allowed, again, to make majorities of both congressional chambers, and there may or may not be even a democratic president right after Trump. However, not enough damage will be rolled back, the wealth disparity will grow even more outrageous, and yet again there will be GOP majorities and presidents doing horrible stuff. Repeat this though the years and things will be horrible.

I doubt it. You might get majorities in the midterms if anything resembling democracy still remains by that point, but America is currently smackdab in the middle of a fascist takeover, and fascists never give up power when they have it. There’s talk of a third Trump term already, and there’s a nonzero chance that—if democracy even lasts that long, which isn’t at all guaranteed—Trump declares a state of emergency in 2027 because the Dem-controlled Congress is stopping him from saving America due to their Soros-funded DEI agenda. This is not the usual regression-stagnation cycle of US politics.

Need 1% of active participants from the population and the ‘game’ changes to the next phase.

What’s the next phase?

This is a multiple years effort

Uh… no? I mean maybe if you fail in your immediate goals but the scenario the American resistance should be aiming for is still a quick and decisive end to all this. By the time multiple years pass you’ll be operating under full blown fascism rather than backsliding democracy, and by full blown fascism I mean regime critics will be put in concentration camps.

I’m not trying to argue for the point or against it (it’s not even my comment), but the mod’s objection being “You can’t call a whole nation Nazi” when Nazi Germany was literally a Nazi nation was funny.

Huh? I don’t exactly have a PhD on this stuff but AFAIK you have to want to get rid of private property before you can claim to be socialist. Social security is just an addon to make capitalism more bearable.

If you stick with that system that enables and promotes greed, you can then regulate it (rather than make greed illegal and then be surprised that it’s not working). We’d need to actually see socialism somewhere before we can judge which approach is better (both will eventually be consumed by capital), but socialism does have serious persistence issues that need to be considered.

This logic checks out at a glance, but there are three problems:

1-Not all voters understand or care about this logic. “Biden must step down” and “The DNC must change its platform” were in part warnings that not enough voters would be on board with the lesser evil stuff to win the election, which is exactly what happened. There are multiple factions in the Democratic coalition, not just the antifascist coalition. Normal working class voters, for example, cared about their wallets more than all the democracy stuff (which not without reason seemed to them like an exaggeration), and to Gaza voters arguing for genocide support to prevent fascism was—for good reason—nothing short of a farce.

2-If not then, then when? As we’ve seen during Biden’s term, the same people who were supposed to fight those future battles (see: Bernie and AOC) mostly toed the party line rather than take advantage of the weakness of the DNC to advances their causes. This might’ve made sense in October, but people had been trying to rally voters against the party since February. The Uncommitted Movement in particular was a golden opportunity for Americans to demand a serious platform from the DNC, but cult mentality took over and the tit for that tat was Abandon Harris. This ties in to #1; this lost Democrats lost a good chunk of voters and activists that just didn’t care anymore. Maybe this would be different if America had a strong left that could utilize weak liberal rule, but it doesn’t. Conservative rule is actually better for actually building the basis of a strong left that can then thrive during liberal rule. Not saying letting Trump win was a good idea because of that, just that there are stages to this stuff.

3-Democrats, like all liberals, are only weak and feckless when dealing with the right. They can very much unite and fight back when dealing with the left, as seen in the 2016 and 2020 Bernie campaigns, and how they generally deal with progressives. It’s kind of obvious when you think about it; as fellow worshippers of capital to them the right is an inconvenience, while the left is an existential threat. If the Democrats were universally weak and feckless progressives would’ve taken over the party by now.

Again, not saying this meant Trump winning was actually good for America (I’ll reserve that judgement until I see what—if anything—comes out of the anti-Trump resistance, but I’m not optimistic), but there were significant flaws to this thinking that ultimately doomed this route of anti-fascism to failure. And either way, disagreeing with this position is one thing but calling dissenters Russian trolls or MAGAs in disguise was pure cult behavior.

It’s not a fair fight, but it’s gonna happen anyway. I mean a population of perfectly exploitable labor with no one to exploit them just sprung up; why would capitalists ever do anything except try to exploit it?

Most people here aren’t, but too many have a cult-like dedication to the party that makes them say “the Democrats are bad, but we can’t do anything except Believe™” at the eleventh hour. Remember how people here felt about the Uncommitted movement and calls for Biden to withdraw from the nomination? Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.

Socially progressive today means specifically civil rights and other similar platforms. Think gay marriage and trans healthcare.

Resilience to outside interference and internal perturbations is one of the criteria based on which a system has to be evaluated.

The idea behind leftist criticism of capitalism is that inevitably the greedy businesses will expand more and cannibalize the non-asshole businesses. Think of what Walmart and co did to local grocers. The heart attack (aka late stage capitalism) is the inevitable result of capitalists being allowed to accumulate wealth over generations and capture the system that was supposed to keep them in check, because fundamentally under a capitalist system money is power and the rich have more of it than you do. I honestly have no idea how to solve this, but the problem is a bit deeper than just a heart attack.

Edit: More Engrish.

It doesn’t even need to be bad people at first. For example under a socialist society can you pay a teenager to mow your lawn? What about if you promise to help someone find a teenager to mow their lawn and take a percentage of the money? What if you do it a hundred times?

Edit: Engrish.