ToastedPlanet

There’s no way to get ranked choice voting without overthrowing the two-party system first.

There has been some progress in this regard. So it is possible to change systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_United_States

Are we a democracy or are we flawed?

These aren't mutually exclusive. Humans are imperfect. The systems we build are imperfect as a result. People have been measuring democracies on a scale from 0 to 10.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu?time=2023

The choices available are selected by capitalists and it has been that way since this country was founded.

The US was made by wealthy land and slave owners. The compromises in the document reflect that. After WWII, McCarthyism did a lot to undermine communism, socialism, and the left in general in the US. It laid the ground work for the neoliberals who would come later to fill the minds of Americans with their ideology. The right in this country has been working to undermine the left for a long time. Blaming everything on democracy really misappropriates blame here. Especially when it's Republicans who have been working to undermine democracy.

Things will have to get worse before they can get better.

Things only get better by making them better. What accelerationism misunderstands is that things haven't got better in the past because bad things happened to people. It's that things have gotten better because people learned from the bad things that happened to them and then used that knowledge to make things better. If we let things get bad and no one learns anything, it won't do any good. We have to educate people. And we can do that without things getting worse.

As it is now we might learn a lot of lessons from the rise of christo-fascism. But we may not be able to act on them. These election results have truly fucked us. Fascists might end up killing us all with fossil fuel emissions. But of course billionaires will survive in their apocalypse bunkers.

What your argument is describing isn't populism in general. Trump's populism is christian nationalism which seems to be what your argument is referring to. Bernie's platform in 2016 and 2020 was a populist platform that was intended to forward a progressive agenda.

https://www.wordnik.com/words/populism

A political philosophy supporting the rights and power of the people in their struggle against the privileged elite.

Why would we discard it later? Populism isn't inherently radical or reactionary as Bernie and Trump have demonstrated. It provides a narrative to contextualize what the campaign is for to the people. Which Democrats definitely needed in this election. It's highly unlikely Democrats will make their own populist campaign. We need to hijack the Democratic Party the way Bernie tried to do and Trump did to the Republican Party.

The strategy is to use the Democratic Party so we don't have to build our own party from scratch. It's not because we like or think highly of Democrats. Because of our first-past-the-post voting system we end up in a two-party system. The Democrats are the tool we have to use when the Republicans are fascists that want to kill us.

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

That sucks. We need systemic change to our police departments.

Sup. I'm trans too.

I've seen the five comments you wrote. Be a bit easier if we do this in one comment chain yeah? I assume you meant neoliberalism is the left wing of fascism. Anyway, if you talk to people with neoliberal ideas in their head, you'll find they are perfectly capable of empathy.

Neoliberalism leads us to fascism because it elevates markets and corporations over people. Which means the rich are free to extract as much wealth from everyone else as they want. Neoliberalism also leads us to fascism because the only change it permits to a system is the people in that system. It's a lot easier for fascists to convince neoliberals to change the people in society than in it is for socialists or progressives to convince them to redistribute wealth or enact systemic change respectively.

This isn't a moral failing of neoliberals. It's a failure of education. We can teach people to identify flawed neoliberal ideas and rationalize how they got us to where we are now.

As far as Democrats are concerned criticizing them isn't the issue. The problem is trying to sink their campaign in the months leading up to the election when they were the only viable option to delay fascism. We need a populist narrative to push a socialist and progressive agenda to really turn the US around. But it takes time to get a campaign like that off the ground. It's going to be a lot harder to do now.

The Democrats were always going to run an incumbent this election, it's standard in US politics. Not a good standard as it turned out, but the incumbent advantage was a political fundamental for decades.

I would say an important take away from this election is that the Democratic Party is a tool. We can criticize and critique it as much as we want. But we aren't doing ourselves any favors if we snap our tool over our knee and throw it away because it isn't perfect.

In the context of a 2-d, Euclidean geometry, x and y axis political compass putting neoliberals slightly right of center makes sense. In different models a different position could make sense. People don't need to move through neoliberalism. The issue is that many if not most people in our society have neoliberal ideas in their heads.

Regan, Bush Sr, Clinton, W, Obama were all some variation on neoliberal. Neoliberal rhetoric laid the ground work for Trump. Biden also being a neoliberal hasn't moved the needle on this while in office. We can't wait for someone to do it for us. We have to help people fully internalize neoliberalism as a scam. Then teach them about socialism.

I can read what you wrote.

it makes me a decent fucking person.

Being a decent person is not the goal. Helping people is the goal.

How about a seminar on tariffs though.

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

Our first-past-the-post voting system mathematically leaves us with two parties. Bernie tried to hijack the Democratic Party which is what Trump did to the Republican Party. If the Democratic Party's leadership goes to prison during the next four years there might not be much of a party left to hijack. We might end up having to build our own party with its own populist narrative and then get it to be the one party that competes with the Republican Party, which is the harder of those two options.

The meta is populism. If the corpse of the Democratic Party has enough juice in it, then it can be used to forward a populist narrative. If it doesn't we'll have to make our own from scratch. edit: typos

I'm talking about Democrat voters or low information Republican voters who somehow aren't in a right-wing information silo. Trump voters, who have been watching Fox News and similar programs, have been brained washed for decades. They need mandated cult deprogramming at this point with help from specialists.

What we need to overcome is so widespread and ubiquitous that even people who aren't particularly politically engaged have the idea in their head. Bring up socialism to people, and they reflexively say 'socialism doesn't work'. Maybe they give a passing reference to the Soviet Union. If a person believes their society's institutions are infallible and that they are at the end of history it's hard for them to understand we need systemic change and wealth redistribution.

Neoliberalism needs to be fully internalized as a scam so people can look for other answers to their problems like socialism. The only changes that neoliberals are able to accept are changing the people who are in charge of institutions. It's why fascists are able to appeal to them where socialists and even progressives struggle. The fascists only have to make the leap from changing the people in our institutions to changing the people in our society, primarily by getting rid of them. edit: typos

All of that is true too. But we can't control Biden or Harris or DNC consultants. And I doubt they will listen to us. We can choose to make a case to voters and delay fascism for four more years. We can use that time to create a populist campaign.

It's going to be a lot harder to do that now. Criticism isn't the issue. It's the inability to detach a person's ego, their self-image, from what needs to be done in the moment. The people we are arguing with cannot seem to do that. It didn't help them during the election. It's not helping them now.

I'm not perfect at this. And there's a limit to how good at minimize our egos, anyone can be. We can't get out of our egos, it's a part of the human condition. But we can focus on being useful over being moral.

Rather than scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds a more useful statement would be today's neoliberals can be tomorrow's socialists. But to do that we have to do the work of convincing people to be socialists. Teaching people neoliberalism is a scam is the first step in that.

If any neoliberal can't get on board that neoliberalism is dead, then obviously they are no use to us. But they are an easier pool of people to convince than the fascists who want to kill us. And if the Democratic Party still exists in future elections and there somehow are future elections, both seem unlikely, it's still worth voting for them because it gives us time to get a populist campaign off the ground assuming there isn't already one that's ready to go. edit: typo