ToastedPlanet @ ToastedPlanet @lemmy.blahaj.zone

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2 yr. ago

It wasn’t fair or free. What part of that can’t you see?

This is a baseless assertion. Our elections have been self-evidently fair and free so far, including the recent Wisconsin and Florida special elections. Musk tried to buy the Wisconsin election and failed to get the candidates he wanted. We'll see what happens with the North Carolina 2024 Supreme Court election, but even that is an attempt to overturn the election results publicly not a secret rigging of the election. If they succeed that makes future fair and free elections even less likely than they are now.

If we fix the democracy,

We also need to people to reject neoliberalism and fascism and accept socialism. Or else we will eventually have to deal with a fascist movement that is so large it is a majority of the population.

We had like 8 parties running, and only 2 very similar parties got the majority of the votes.

We live in a two-party system which is what our first-past-the-post systems trend towards, so that it isn't surprising.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

but because progressives are legally denied access

Bernie wasn't legally denied access. He was allowed to run when he wanted to run. The courts regrettably ruled that political parties are private organizations and can run their elections however they want despite the inherent public interest in there being a formal standardized process that political parties should be legally mandated to honor. Especially since the Republicans and Democrats are the only serious vehicles for political platforms in the US.

and violence was used against them when they tried to attend the debates.

This is conspiracism.

That’s neither fair nor free. Its an illusion of choice where the only options support the status quo of oligarchy

The choice between neoliberalism and fascism was a real choice. With neoliberalism we prolong our democracy with the hopes of co-opting the Democratic party with socialist and progressive candidates. With fascism we get progressively efficient death camps until society collapses or everyone is dead. It's worth going into a bit more detail with the fascism choice since that's what we have gone with. In addition to showing the consequences that further establish this was a meaningful choice, it's important to drive home how terrible this choice was.

Now that we are a christo-fascist techno-feudalist dictatorship our ability to change society depends on the failure of that fascist dictatorship. This is not accelerationism, but anti-fascism. The first step to making things better is getting rid of the fascist dictatorship. The fascist dictatorship is both actively making things worse while also blocking attempts to making things better. So if we want to make things better then the fascist dictatorship needs to go.

When it comes to getting rid of the fascist dictatorship, societal collapse, or at least political collapse, is more likely but who knows how long that will take. It's also not clear if it will be caused by internal or external factors. External factors being a foreign military or economic policies aimed at the US. It will probably be more likely be internal factors given the size and capabilities of our military and our leading and foundational role in the modern world economy we created after WWII.

Internal factors could include a whole host of causes. Like disease or famine. Fascist incompetence will probably be what drives whatever the ultimate cause is. We might get infighting when Trump dies of old age or is too debilitated to do anything more than be a figure head. It could also be a revolution that is either peaceful or violent. The peaceful revolution being the statistically more likely to succeed of the two.

It seems like any political violence will result in a civil war at this point. Most of the users on lemmy never spare any thought for the backlash political violence would cause if the MAGA movement had a martyr to justify atrocities. Considering that, it seems unlikely that those advocating for political violence are prepared or even care to fight a protracted and bloody civil war.

None of these possibilities would even be on the table for discussion let alone likely in the immediate term if we had gone with neoliberaism for four more years. We are at the point where we need some kind of a revolution to stop death camps here at home. Our failure to stop a fascist movement that wants to kill the most vulnerable groups of people was a choice. And a clear choice at that.

…what you call neoliberalism is nothing more than deepening inequality

This is demonstrably false. Here's a video to learn more about neoliberalism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zswexNXorOE

Neoliberal ideas were thought up and implemented by people deliberately to create a state of inequality to benefit a few wealthy individuals. So it is not another label for inequality, but a political ideology with a set of policies designed to create inequality.

empowered the corporate interests and weakened democratic accountability …in other words, empowering the neo-nobles.

This was by design, not an accident of spontaneous inequality. Neoliberalism is a political invention. We did not trip over it.

Your country is an oligarchy with a temporary king every 4 years, coated with a thin veneer of democratic rituals.

We are now a a christo-fascist techno-feudalist dictatorship. We have a christian theocratic dictator who is supported by an oligarchy of tech billionaire feudal overlords that together rule over us like we're serfs.

It is obvious how meek the Americans are. Based on recents polls more than 40% still supports the antics of the current king

Fox News has brainwashed millions of people over the last thirty years, so that's not particularly surprising.

and the other 60% doesn’t do anything significant to oppose the idiotic decrees.

I'm genuinely curious what you consider to be meaningful action at this point. People are doing all kinds of non-violent action. The fascists took control of this country largely non-violently, Jan 6 being an exception. And even Jan 6 didn't succeed in any kind of violence against its purported targets, but seems to have helped Trump more than it hurt him due to the lack of consequences.

We're unlikely to get a fair and free election at this point if we even hold elections at all. So short of fascist incompetence getting us 2026 and 2028 elections, there's not a lot of peaceful levers in a fascist dictatorship besides building a movement that is oppositional to the administration. Such a movement will be essential for toppling this fascist dictatorship whether we hold elections or not. Even the CCP had to roll back its Covid-19 restrictions because of protests in China.

Also, I would like to point out that while it is true that those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable, violence is still our least useful tool. The current administration is shockingly incompetent. Trump, his cabinet, and Musk are perhaps the best people to have as political opponents in this moment as they truly seem to have no real clue what they are doing or how to do anything properly. Peaceful change is still our more likely avenue of success so it's what we should pursue for the time being.

No it was a democracy, but it wasn't inclusive of everyone. What your argument is describing is a comprise that had to be made so that a new nation would not be divided almost immediately. Women weren't able to vote either. Only land owning men.

But our democracy had a virtuous circle that expanded who was included in the political process. This expanded who could participate in our economic institutions as well, eventually. This is process also took place in England. And despite such an unequal start in America, it was working for most of our history.

It was with our adoption of neoliberalism in 1980 with Reagan's election that the virtuous circle became a vicious circle. People were increasing excluded from our economic and political institutions. And our democracy has now fully transformed into a extractive fascist dictatorship.

Our capitalist system was always an extractive economic institution but our democracy had kept it in check. Things like trust busting, monopoly laws, and the New Deal prolonged the growth we were experiencing under the extractive economic institution of capitalism.

Now that our political and economic institutions are fully working in tandem as extractive institutions that growth will soon end. We can already see how Trump's attacks on universities and scientific research are stifling innovation. Without any innovation fueling creative destruction, growth in our economy will stagnate. The extractive institutions run by the owner class will eventually run out of things to extract.

At this point it becomes a race between the collapse of America and it's ability to consume neighboring countries in order to keep extracting. Much like Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Unlike Russia, even with fascist incompetence, America has the most powerful military in the world going off budget alone. It's likely we will conquer quite a few countries before our extractive institutions cannibalize everything.

So no, not oligarchy. Not the same thing as neoliberism either. Your argument is a critique of people from over two hundred years ago from a modern moral perspective. Whether or not that's fair, it isn't a useful means of analysis. Even though it was not as inclusive as we would like it to have been American democracy was functionally a democracy from the beginning. And it became more inclusive as it went on. There was nothing stopping us from making different choices at critical junctures along the way that would have resulted in us reaching the kind of democracy that includes all people.

It is important to understand that this outcome was not inevitable. It's not worth staying in the judging pit arguing who to assign blame to so we can sling mud at them. But we need to acknowledge that we failed so we can learn from this and move on. There's no shortcut around it. The sooner we learn our lessons the sooner we can build a better world.

I do not consider the vicious cycle of a neoliberal democracy to be the pinnacle of democracy. Only I acknowledge that American democracy was a democracy. It was never perfect, but it didn't have to turn out this way. We didn't have to embrace neoliberalism in 1980 and American democracy didn't have to die in 2024 with fascism.

This is important to state because there are misconceptions about what might happen next. We aren't any closer to the pinnacle of democracy now. In fact, we are even further from it. This fascist dictatorship will be even harder to change than the last neoliberal democracy was.

Building inclusive institutions is hard. The further you get from them the harder it becomes. Even revolutions that seem on the surface to be a complete overthrow of the previous regime can in fact turn out to be a changing of the guard. If the institutions of a society, both political and economic, are not fundamentally and radically changed to include as many people as possible the vicious cycle is more than likely to continue. There is no such thing as a clean slate or rock bottom when it comes to how bad things can get. Things can always get worse and they will unless people learn from our mistakes and apply what we've learned to make things better. edit: typos

It was the Mont Pelerin Society who came up with the neoliberal ideas that Reagan implemented.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zswexNXorOE

I effectively answered this in the comment to M0oP0o, but I'll go into more detail here. We needed one or two more election cycles for a candidate with a populist narrative about progressive and socialist change to co-opt the Democratic party. By co-opt I mean totally control it, the way Trump has taken over the Republican party. This would be hard, since the owner class has a class interest in stopping progressives and socialists and supporting neoliberals and fascists, but it wasn't impossible. As far as policy, the short answer is a serious of constitutional amendments to ensure majority rule in all branches of government and mandate worker own corporations while also completely redistributing wealth.

Considering the death toll and the long term destruction to the Earth's environment a four year Trump term would cause, it seems like it would be worth it to go for a political Hail Mary. Especially when a christo-fascist regime starting with Trump will undoubtedly last much longer than four years. The damage will not be constrained to America, but will be global.

Not mention people seem to forget that before Nazi Germany was defeated it conquered most of continental Europe. Even if it doesn't happen in the next four years, this fascist Trump administration is laying the ground work for conquering North America. People on lemmy tend to use the word imperialism a lot when describing America. So they jump ahead to assuming that American empire is dying when it is American democracy that has died. American empire is getting started now. In the sense that America, as a fascist nation, is going to exert itself on everyone it deems to be in its regional sphere of influence. I don't know how long it will last, but it's going to take a lot to stop North America from becoming a one to one match with America.

It is theoretically possible to get out of this in the next elections, but it was highly unlikely before Trump's inauguration. Now that he's trying to tip the scales in his favor in future elections this becomes even more increasingly unlikely. The nature of fascist regimes is that the dictator prioritizes loyalty over everything. Which means competent individuals are completely overlooked for consideration in hiring and appointments. Hence fascist incompetence. We cannot rule fascist incompetence out, but we cannot predict where it will strike. Incompetence could cause the fascists to lose at the ballot box, but it could also strike when they try to invade a neighbor. Since we don't know when or how an opportunity will arise we have to keep an open mind so we can exploit it when it does.

The 2024 election was our last scheduled opportunity to defeat fascists. So we really should have given it everything we had while we had a chance even if it was a long shot. We don't know when we will get another now. It might be in 2026 and 2028 with elections. Or it might be in 2029, in a completely hypothetical scenario, where after winning a third term Trump dies of old age and infighting creates an opportunity for rebellion. We've gone from having a regularly scheduled opportunity to try to make things better to who knows when we get another. And we still have to do all the same work we had to do before, but it will be harder because now we have to defeat a fascist regime first.

Neoliberalism isn't fascist lite, but it does lead to fascism. I doubt I'm alone, at the time anyway, in thinking Obama was at least a progressive candidate. Hindsight is 20/20. Obama was yet another neoliberal. But considering American history, electing a Black president whose slogan was hope seemed like we were bucking trends, when in fact we were doing more of the same.

It has become more obvious now with two Bernie runs and three full Trump runs that neoliberalism is a sales pitch for the scam that is late-stage capitalism. But it's not for a lack of trying people have been picking the long fuse party. This country rejected Hillary Clinton twice, probably not for the right reasons in all cases, but at least some people were looking for alternatives to what they saw as Bill Clinton's version of the Democrats.

We need socialism. And I can't guarantee we would have gotten there in one or even two more general elections. But if Trump showed us anything, it is possible to co-opt a modern political party with a populist narrative. What Trump did to the Republicans is what Bernie tried to do to the Democrats. Someone else younger, I don't know who, needed to be given a chance to do that and we did not create an opportunity for them to even try.

It's not wishful thinking. It was possible, but hard, to make a course correction, but we failed to even give ourselves the time to do it.

Many people think fascism came out of no where recently. It is a direct result of 45 years of neoliberalism. We need socialism.

The only way to have time to stop the bomb from going off is to choose the longer fuse. We didn't even give ourselves a chance to replace neoliberalism with socialism, people let fascism win in 2024.

The US was a democracy. Having a civil religion has no bearing on whether or not a country is a democracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_fallacy

2024 when fascists won a fair and free election. Our democracy was never perfect, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a democracy.

Insisting America wasn't a democracy isn't clever analysis. It's factually wrong and it's not even an effective narrative to fight fascists.

No, that was when we got Super Pacs which is how billionaires have a control over a majority of US Senators needed to break a filibuster.

No, it wasn't, but it's been dying since Reagan.

That's why I said highly improbable. But if they became states it would be the end of Canadian politics. It would be all American politics at that point. edit: typo

Currently it seems like there is a highly improbable but mathematically possible outcome where the Conservatives and Bloc Québécois form a government. Canada gets to be the 51st state and Quebec gets to be the 52nd state. 💀

Let's get that last seat! edit: typos

How long ago was that? If you did that to someone younger now, who hasn't heard of it, they would probably believe you without asking if it was real. The fact Iran-Contra is real is neither here nor there. What's changed is how people engage with conspiracy theories. We should want people to think critically and ask for evidence.

People already dismissed conspiracy theories in general. I'm old enough to remember a time when conspiracism was a fringe belief system back in the 90's and 2000's when I was a kid.

The right-wing infosphere has normalized conspiracism. Fox News got people to believe there was a conspiracy where there was none so the Republicans could enact the equivalent of a conspiracy in broad daylight. TDS, Trump derangement syndrome, is the go to accusation for the MAGA movement against their opposition. Calling people conspiracy theorists would probably cause a bit of cognitive dissonance for Republican voters.

Some conspiracies do exist, and those who are part of them ALWAYS deny them.

All kinds of people deny conspiracy theories usually because of the lack of evidence and attempts at grifting. Trump never denies involvement in Jan 6th, he mostly lies about the nature of the attack on the capital. He intentionally mischaracterizes the attack as peaceful despite the deaths.

Based on a google search it is. It looked kind of familiar. I need to watch that movie again. Thank you!

We still need to do the more substantive arguments for our positions, such as progressive and socialist positions, and refutations of neoliberal and fascist positions. But once the sound-bite reaches saturation in the population it will, in theory anyway, have done the desired damage.

To some conservative people, a man not wearing a black suit to a funeral is effectively taboo. It effectively is to some of the users, without respect to their political positions, in this comment section apparently. It's something some of his voters will have to rationalize to defend him. If we do enough of these trivial ad hominem attacks eventually some people will be less motivated to vote Republican.

People who do not care about suit color will considered this topic to be a trivial non-issue and move on with their day. They aren't the target audience. And the people who do care will be really bothered by it. What bothers a person is different for everyone. People probably should be bothered by the more serious life or death stuff, but not everyone is. To some people climate change is a trivial non-issue and by talking about that we're grasping at straws according to them.