Don’t forget the material basis for these shifts! While The Discourse of “practical” truangulating centrists tends to show this rightward path, it is because (1) they were already fundamentally reactionary, they tend to just use this logic as an excuse for why they tolerate far-right positions, and (2) the right is supported by the ruling class to address some of the “problems” it creates, like a marginalized underclass that wants enough income to feed their children, housing, and safety from violence.
The shift right is not driven simply by debate or ideology, but by the arenas where degradation in material conditions due to capitalism meet the ruling class’ need to deflect blame to the marginalized (who they can reap larger profits from) to placate the less marginalized. Racism, nationalism, and extermination campaigns are created and maintained for the interests of capital, with the common people being pushed and prodded to fall in line with repeating the (usually ad hoc) new or recycled scapegoats and underclassrs. Wouldn’t want you to point blame in the right direction!
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Yep, this is a huge fucking problem.
Top bad the often proposed suggestion of “let’s just skip right to the end” isn’t actually a solution.
Thank you.
Real sick of this argument right now. Just letting the right win because the left-most party is too willing to compromise isn’t a moral victory.
The criticisms of the dem party don’t amount to “let the right win”, they amount to “the DNC prevents any political resistance to the right, they either need to be coup’d or destroyed if we want to stop the right from winning”
This is not how I have understood the criticisms being thrown around Lemmy lately, but I appreciate the perspective. Even so, I’m not sure I can agree that the best solution to dealing with the right is to fight the centrists first, but I can at least appreciate your point in the specific context of the current two-party system.
Even so, I’m not sure I can agree that the best solution to dealing with the right is to fight the centrists first
We aren’t able to use electoralism to fight the right as long as the political platform and messaging of the democratic party is 95% the same as the republican’s.
fight the centrists
Centrists are literally the people that often have the majority of backing from the very people and institutions that allow these problems to fester and grow. Their solutions are often the most unworkable in the real world and their outcomes are often right leaning simply because of how politics works in capitalist societies. Centrists have power in our political system not because of brokering any good compromise, it’s because Centrists are often the best fundraisers because they can appeal to a wide array of rich donors.
It’s a silly take if you think Centrists can be allies to any semblance of Left. The Kamala Harris campaign is literal proof of it. Raise $1.1B, spend $1.120B on literal Centrist trash positions and political strategy like paying celebrities and sending Richie Torres to Michigan, while telling everyone how you’re the smartest people in the room.
The most celebrated Centrist policy of the 20th century is the ACA (note all the other ones that were celebrated before it are not so much celebrated now because of what they actually did see NAFTA, TANF, etc). The only “left” positions in the ACA is 100% coverage of preventative medicine, mandatory contraception coverage, and making preexisting conditions an illegal qualification. In reality the real mark of the ACA is that instead of going bankrupt for hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in medical debt, Americans are going broke for tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical debt. It’s literally a debt regulation that keeps private healthcare a viable and profitable system because the game of musical chairs that is our healthcare debt system was running out of chairs. 10% of Americans owe medical debt, thanks to the ACA it’s thousands to hundreds of thousands, if it wasn’t for the ACA it would be 10x larger.
Who had the most benefit from that policy? It certainly wasn’t people, who still struggle to pay for healthcare, still carry medical debt, and still are going bankrupt. It was the corporations who could continue this extractive grift because the government essentially brokered a deal between the entire market to reset the scale of the economy and no one corporation felt like it was losing out compared to the others.
You can even look at the majority of legal opposition to the ACA isn’t based in it’s left positions. For contraception you have Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania. That’s it for opposition to the left positions, the rest is about how the market is regulated under ACA:
- National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius and other lawsuits were about the individual mandate, which was effectively ruled a tax.
- King v. Burwell was about using federal subsidies in states without exchanges
- House v. Price was about cost sharing and transfer payments between insurers
- United States House of Representatives v. Azar was about cost sharing reducation payments and how they were allocated in the budget
- California v. Texas was again about the individual mandate as a tax
- Maine Community Health Options v. United States was about risk corridor payments and appropriation.
Where is the opposition to the left here? It’s not really there, because there’s not a lot of “left” policy. This is centrist infighting about who has to hold the bag (and how much bag they have to hold) for this fucked up system that extracts money from people’s health.
That’s what centrism is, market brokerage.
No, that’s not what Leftists have been advocating for. Leftists have been advocating for revolution and ceasing support for genocidal parties.
We need ranked choice voting so people can vote for who they actually want without throwing away they vote. The problem is opposing ranked choice voting is one of very few issues both parties agree on, since it hurts both of them.
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The sad thing is that it works both ways. If a left party in government is improving things but had to do a compromise and therefore couldn’t go all the way the far left is also complaining about that.
Compromise with far right positions should never happen, but compromise in itself is not something bad, and imho it’s one of the main problems in today’s democracy that too many people see it that way.
As with almost all things: it’s good to have principles to stand by, but the world is rarely as black and white as it seems to be.
The Dems are just going along with the slide, that isn’t improving things. They aren’t compromising with the people, but with Capitalists. As a result, they are going forward with what is in no uncertain terms a genocide, and are actively supplying it.
Not everything is about the US
This meme is US-centric.
The only people who say that leftists see the world in black and white are people who do not understand leftists.
I hate the term “normalization” because it doesn’t mean anything to most people. The closest approximation of it’s meaning to most people is “stuff (usually negative) is happening”.
Please point me to the time in American history where it was normal to:
- pay taxes for everyone’s health care
- follow international law
- not do extrajudicial killings/imprisonment
- not be personally or institutionally racist
Spoiler you cannot. These times literally do not exist in any meaningful way, they only exist as ephemeral pockets of modernity that you personally have experienced. Many of the arguments that you can make in favor of these points of time, suffer greatly from the just world fallacy. When you look a little too hard at those pockets of time, you’ll find that your feeling was just a feeling and it wasn’t even true.
This meme may be good at convincing libs their world view is fucked, but it’s not an accurate depiction.
I kind of look at normalization in terms of the Overton window, as in what topics are up for debate politically. I completely agree that there is always a gap between how a society sees itself and how it actually behaves, but I would argue that the stage where a society starts to openly embrace its crimes is the one to be really worried about.
This still doesn’t make any sense:
pay taxes for everyone’s health care
This was never up for debate until let’s say 2003 when Conyers introduced medicare for all. Then it was up for debate in pockets of years, and it really matters specifically what you mean by who’s debating in that window. Politicians or news media.
So roughly these are the open Overton windows for universal healthcare
follow international law
This was never really up for debate until 2001. The US simply just broke international law when it saw fit prior, and after.
not do extrajudicial killings/imprisonment
This is essentially the same as above. See our various policing actions in the modern era. MOVE, Japanese Internment, Mexican “Repatriation”. Lynchings. Pinkertons. No real debate to be had here, America just does it and then does paperwork to justify it.
not be personally or institutionally racist
This has essentially been debated since the start of the US. So it’s been “in the window”. But in practice the position has always been right wing even to this day.
I would argue that the stage where a society starts to openly embrace its crimes is the one to be really worried about.
Open embrace of crimes is worrying sure, but in practice it’s not practically better than doing crimes, denying you do them, and pretending you’re good. Because in reality, what you can see on the left as “open embrace of criminality” on the right is seen as “being the good guys”. So the open embrace may qualify as an increase in magnitude but not a change in direction. I’d love to see this actually proved out, rather than just said.
This also pretends that the causes of these shifts are not a change in material realities, but rather a change in attitudes ex nihilio. When every empire thinks its fading it does this kinda shit, because this is the kind of shit that builds and maintains empires. It’s not because the “bad guys” are in charge.
A large portion of the reason that these things never came into debate until the 21st century is because the US was cruising off of the compromises made as part of reconstructing the rest of the modern world post WW2. Those compromises started being untenable in the 70’s and have created these debates in the 2000’s, 2010’s, and 2020’s solely because they are crumbling.
The most important of these debates happened behind closed doors before most of us were even born. The Overton Window shifts rightward not because it’s a nerdy window function, but because it’s a marble on a table long enough so that it takes the marble a century to traverse, and that table was set up a century ago to be tilted to the right. The ratchet effect is because Democrats defend the core compromises made in 1945.
I think what matters is what public finds acceptable. At the end of the day, society is a social contract with people at the top deriving their legitimacy from having the consent of the public. The less debate there is on these issues the easier it becomes for a tyrannical regime to act with impunity. This lecture from Parenti is relevant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlFuxIzD240
The less debate there is on these issues the easier it becomes for a tyrannical regime to act with impunity.
This is a position you can no longer seriously hold in America in 2024. Public debate on these issues does nothing. You can look at the public attitudes towards plenty of policy positions that when polled have an overwhelming majority of support across the country but have been politically nonviable at the federal level:
- legalized marijuana
- medicare for all
- access to abortion
- over policing
- a fair economy
We can have open debate till we’re blue in the face. We can march until we wear out our shoes. The liberal tools have failed us completely in actually moving the political dial. These tools have been defeated in the modern era by experiments at the imperial periphery. I suggest you read If We Burn by Vincent Bevins.
Legitimacy is not a real discussion point in this country, it is assumed. If it were we’d constantly ask why is our democracy legitimate when the government is not actually picked by a majority of our population. Democrats in their racism are blaming Latino men. The percentage of Latino men that voted for Trump is a minuscule percentage of Latinos that can vote in this country. The overwhelming majority of Latinos didn’t vote in the previous election. The president is picked by 1/5th to 1/3rd of the population eligible to vote. If you were to boil that down to a friend group you’d have a social intrigue movie in the style of Bodies Bodies Bodies.
If we liken this to the problem of consent with sexual relations, the US rules on tacit consent at best, and generally coerced sexual assault and when those don’t work outright violent sexual assault. If legitimacy was a real issue the US would rule on enthusiastic consent. But it doesn’t.
Parenti’s lecture is meant to disabuse tankies of advocating for censorious democratic centralism of the USSR. It does not work in the context of the US because the system of control is completely different. If a country is a boiler that you need to keep from exploding, the USSR worked by creating the most armored boiler possible. The US works by having a minority or impoverished person or some other type of scapegoat put their face in front of a pressure relief valve and open it. The end result in the context of ruling a country is the same, the architects of the boiler are well insulated from its negative effects.
I think you misunderstand me here. I’m not saying the system can be changed by liberal means like voting every four years. The change comes from people organizing and building a worker movement that can take tangible action like doing general strikes, mass protests, and so on. However, political education is a prerequisite for such a movement. People need to agree on what the problems are and what the necessary action to solve these problems is. That’s where ability to discuss things is important.
Also, if you bothered to watch the lecture then you’ll see that it’s discussing how workers in US struggled for rights. It doesn’t talk about USSR at all.
This
I’m not saying the system can be changed by liberal means like voting every four years. The change comes from people organizing and building a worker movement that can take tangible action like doing general strikes, mass protests, and so on.
Is a completely different argument than this:
At the end of the day, society is a social contract with people at the top deriving their legitimacy from having the consent of the public. The less debate there is on these issues the easier it becomes for a tyrannical regime to act with impunity
Especially to a liberal.
This
I’m not saying the system can be changed by liberal means like voting every four years. The change comes from people organizing and building a worker movement that can take tangible action like doing general strikes, mass protests, and so on.
Says that political power comes from material leverage and its logical ends are the Mao quote “Political power comes from the barrel of a gun”.
This
At the end of the day, society is a social contract with people at the top deriving their legitimacy from having the consent of the public. The less debate there is on these issues the easier it becomes for a tyrannical regime to act with impunity.
Says that political power comes from the public simply voicing their agreement / disagreement and the ruling class enacting that opinion.
At the end of the day if your way to fight back against the ruling class is through material leverage, public debate simply doesn’t matter, worker organization sublimates that.
It’s not a completely different statement though. A society is fundamentally a social construct based around common ideology. That’s what the government derives its legitimacy from. An organized labor movement is a path towards revising the social contract.
At the end of the day if your way to fight back against the ruling class is through material leverage, public debate simply doesn’t matter, worker organization sublimates that.
As I pointed out above, worker organization doesn’t come out of thin air. It requires education of the masses, which involves public debate. If you study any effective social movement throughout history then you’ll see that it always starts with public debate.
The less debate there is on these issues the easier it becomes for a tyrannical regime to act with impunity. This lecture from Parenti is relevant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlFuxIzD240
Also just some off topic dunking, Parenti literally contradicts this in the speech
12:10 Speech fights percolated and shook the nation for a while and that’s what percolated up to the Supreme Court and it was then that Oliver Wendell Holmes and those guys sitting up there in the black robes started saying that uh time uh overthrows many a fighting faith and there must be change and we must tolerate these uh these kinds of things and the right to dissent blah blah blah it was when they got and felt the impact the power of people mobilized and organized and directed against their establishment that they knew they had to give a little it’s when people develop that power that they gain some modicum of freedom
It’s not debate it’s organized material opposition.
Also, if you bothered to watch the lecture then you’ll see that it’s discussing how workers in US struggled for rights. It doesn’t talk about USSR at all.
It’s not debate it’s organized material opposition.
Nice cherry picking there. What Parenti says in the speech is that it’s actually both. He gives examples, such as how Wagner Act was leveraged by the workers to start doing mass organizing, showing how the system can indeed be leveraged along side organization outside the system. His whole point is to use all the tools available and to dismiss simplistic analysis that you’re advocating for here.
this meme is true, but in a different way than intended: it says, that you always should vote the lesser evil, since else the lesser evil will become more and more evil
Not what it says at all, but not surprised that’s how libs who have been doing this would interpret it. How’s that been working out for you by the way?
not a lib, just think that we should always vote the lesser evil, even if it isn’t good. also the time isn’t ripe for a revolution yet, and, no offense, even if it was, what have you been doing to change society?
also how has what been working out for me?
Nobody was talking about time being ripe for any revolution. The point of the meme is that voting is a very limited form of political participation that can’t solve underlying problems on its own. How has the strategy of voting for lesser evil been working out for you.
compared to voting more extreme parties not bad actually, the last time I voted the communist party it didn’t even get into parliment and I don’t think it will next time
or are we talking about voting in generall?
We’re talking about voting being seen as a primary way for the working masses to engage politically.
No, the “lesser evil” won many times and still went far right.
winning isn’t just winning an election, also, do you think the dems would have gotten more right wing, if the polls said something like 60% for them?
The Dems won many elections and still moved right. And yes, the Dems would get more right wing if they could get away with it.
I think they moved right, because they couldn’t compete against trump, obama for example was a pretty good start if you ask me
They competed against Trump in 2020 and ran a more progressive campaign, and won. They competed against Trump in 2024 and ran a genocidal campaign that paraded around warmongers like Liz Cheney, and lost even the popular vote.
Obama is the premier example of a warmongering neoliberal that could perfectly orate for progressive voters despite his actual policy, both domestic and foreign.
Stop voting for people, FFS. Vote for policies, then hire people to implement those and nothing else.
This is a bad faith meme that represents anyone making any form of compromise as a rude, close-minded, genocide supporter, posted by an account that frequently posts pro-China, sometimes pro-Russia propaganda, and hops between Western country-focused lemmy’s pending election cycles.
Just making sure the context for this post is visible.
This is a bad faith meme that represents anyone making any form of compromise as a rude
They’re not depicted as rude, they’re depicted as an know-it-all eager compromiser that ends up working for the forces of reaction because they have no real principles or red lines.
close-minded
That is generally the attitude of “centrists” and people that go out of the way to congratulate themselves on “being practical” by triamgulating. If they were open to actual principles they eould no longer be triangulating on them, and triangulating is their primary commitment.
genocide supporter
Like virtually every Democratic member of Congress and both of their presidential candidates? Anyone tolerating that is indeed complicit. It does not require any mental gymnastics to acknowledge this.
posted by an account that frequently posts pro-China
No!!! I almost passed out when I read that. You’re telling me there are good aspects of a designated enemy of empire!? Impossible.
Open-minded btw.
sometimes pro-Russia propaganda
Not another designated enemy!!! I almost died when I read this.
and hops between Western country-focused lemmy’s pending election cycles.
Is this supposed to imply something bad about them?
The only moral stance is to post about the US election in lemmydotEthiopia, the Australian election in lemmydotSuriname, the Bolivian election in LemmydotAlbania, and so on, but only if it’s months out of sync. Anything else is suspicious.
And here I thought statements of lemmy.ml being overrun with tankies were exaggurated. Boy your deconstruction of my post sure showed me!
Tell me about it. When I first learned that the website developed and run by Communists had Communists on it, I couldn’t believe what was happening.
Seeing you seething and coping publicly really makes my day little buddy.
Don’t conflate my concern in speaking out against discourse like as “seething and coping.” My goal is to call out attempts to divide and other people for what it is.
stay mad
Very surprising that the main instance admin’d by leftists has leftists on it.
Authoritarian manipulation is not a leftist value.
What do you mean “authoritarian manipulation?” What on Earth are you talking about?
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support acts of repression by such regimes or their allies.
From Wikipedia.
The comment I am responding to never denied that there is an influx of tankies here. Instead you said I shouldn’t be surprised to find leftists here, inferring that leftists are tankies. Being authoritarian and manipulating information to manipulate people is not a leftist value.
You can disagree with me all you want. I’ll respect that. I would appreciate if you had better respect than to treat me like I am insane and my statements make no sense just because you disagree.
It’s more that anyone that uses the word “tankie” as an unironic pejorative is extremely likely to have never read Marxist theory and are just trying to attack Marxists that go against the standard western narrative. You just pulling the Wikipedia article when both of us are obviously familiar with the term is just condescending.
Nobody is intentionally “authoritarian.” The people trying to separate “authoritarian” Communists from “true” Communists are the same people that say there has never been “true” attempts at building Communism. Moreover, the separation point between “authoritarian” and “democratic” is never outlined, it’s purely vibes-based and meaningless. Marx and Engels were often called “authoritarian” as well, to the point that Engels wrote On Authority to debunk the entire vibes-based notion of it.
I am not treating you like you are “insane,” but that you are out of your depth when it comes to Leftist theory if you’re going to be throwing the term “tankie” around like it has actual meaning.
Sounds like you just can’t defend your own comment. You’re all talk when it’s time to call people names but this is your entire response to me? lmao
I hope you can someday have the courage of your convictions, “anti-authoritarian”.
People elect representatives to represent them, not to compromise and pass the opposition’s agenda.
It’s forgivable if the representative failed to obtain enough power, but if they have literally any means at their disposal and don’t use it, an unwillingness to use all the power the people gave them to do what they elected them to do is a betrayal of those people.
The meme is 100% good-faith, and it’s made by a Leftist that is sick of the constant far-right slide the Dems go through. The account making this comment frequently attacks leftists as “tankies” as well.
Just making sure the context for this comment is visible.
That is not my experience. I hope I am the one who is wrong.
Which part is not your experience? That you call leftists “tankies?” Or that @yogthos@lemmy.ml is a leftist?
That this post was made in good faith. The way conversation between the left, the right, and the centrist voters is either dishonest, or shows a horrible misunderstanding of common opinion. If it is the latter, I am wrong about the good faith bit, hence the “I hope I am wrong,” though I am not happy about either outcome.
How is it “dishonest?” As a Leftist voter, it absolutely depicts what I agree with, liberals have been moving further and further right to the point of rationalizing genocide. How is it a “horrible misunderstanding?”
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Lol, stfu CCP Russian bot, we know you aren’t a real human who actually engages with history and political discourse.
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The same shit is happening in Canada. Not every meme is solely about America you narcissist.
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