Form a new party!!! Don’t call it Labor or Labour. Don’t call it Green. Don’t call it progressive. Don’t call it socialist or liberal.
Just give it a name that people understand and don’t have preexisting bias against. “For The People”
Take on BOTH the democrats and GOP. Become popular overnight. Keep hammering home it is not about skin colour, race or country of origin, but about the billionaires that aren’t happy with paying no tax and having billions. Make it about the 99%.
It is the only way you’ll get your country back without excessive violence. The two status quo parties are hollowed out from the inside. And both are infiltrated by foreign interests.
That’s what Bernie is saying. He’s calling all progressives to run as Independent, aka No Party Preference, down ballot so we can shove the Corporate DNC into the GOP where they so desperately want to be anyway.
The “Do Something” party
New Democrat(ic) Party!
The Common Sense party.
Please can we just ban the phrase “Common Sense” from politics already
Not very practical while the US voting system is still first-post-the-post. Y’all need to fix that first.
there’s also a good chance that fixing it will simply fuck us even harder.
How’s that?
FPTP ensures that every vote in the winning party goes to the electoral college.
So if you vote 51% dem, and 49% republican, in a FPTP state 100% of all electoral votes are dem.
If you have a system like IRV where you split it between the electoral as fairly as possible, you lose literally half of your votes. And given that EVERY red state uses FPTP, aside from nebraska you’re running a wildly uphill battle. You should be targeting red states first. And blue states last, otherwise we will almost certainly end up in a worse position, losing TONS of our voting potential.
Yeah, right. So almost like a prisoner’s dilemma bind. And I guess a national change is fairly unlikely any time soon…
yeah, literally, you’re fucked if you do, and you’re fucked if you don’t. The only situation in which you win here is starting in red states.
also, a federal change to the law is illegal afaik, so it would have to be something that either, states individually agree on unanimously, or something the federal government can’t even control.
The thing is, you can “not call it socialism” all you like. The fact is that it is socialism, you have to respect people’s intelligence enough to know that they will figure that out (or be easily convinced of it, if you really need an argument that doesn’t respect their intelligence). When this happens, and even moreso when you inevitably reveal yourself to be socialist, it will make you look deeply insincere and subversive, because you yourself will have fed into this taboo and not done the work of separating the term from its negative stigma or generating positive media for it.
Socialism is simply the fact of the matter and being socialist means caring about material reality enough to not just lie and gaslight as a means of convincing people. When you get attacked for being socialist, you will not be able to backpedal without sabotaging your own movement, because there will be a litany of evidence that you are socialist. As there should be, or you would not have the support of actual ideological socialists (remember that whole material reality thing I just mentioned).
The material reason why socialism is a “no-no” word is because when the right attacks it, the liberal establishment does what they always do; they backpedal. Not only does this make the right’s criticism look reasonable, because it confirms there is real reason to fear being associated with socialism; but it ensures that the people only ever hear the arguments against socialism, never the arguments for it. All of the arguments which are intrinsically associated with socialism; which you have done all this work to propagate; are never connected to it optically, and the people never learn what it actually is, leaving all of your policy open to attack.
What you are suggesting here is not the solution but exactly the issue that has brought us to this point.
The only way that you will ever launder the term “socialism” is by openly advocating for socialism and calling it what it is when you do. You just aren’t going to beat the establishment at their own game; rather, we must show the people what it is to be respected and hear policy based in material reality that will actually address their needs, and you will win support from across the spectrum.
Buddy half of American voters voted for trump. We are well past “insulting their intelligence”. The reality is that the majority of American voters are stupid, lazy, or both.
Separately I don’t think you know what socialism is if you think progressive policies are socialist. Just because “social programs” and socialism share a common word doesn’t mean they are the same thing.
I disagree. And I don’t mean to preach, but there is a power in words and using them (or not using them). The fight over the word and meaning of socialism is not what “the people” need right now, that can come later. This has been happening in the US closing in on a century. It’s not those tolerant of material reality (as you say) you need to convince, it’s those that would benefit from “the peoples” agenda that don’t acknowledge material reality. Ride the wave of making billionaires pay.
Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.
Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security.
Socialism is what they called farm price supports.
Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance.
Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.
Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.
When the Republican candidate inscribes the slogan “Down With Socialism” on the banner of his “great crusade,” that is really not what he means at all.
What he really means is “Down with Progress–down with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal,” and “down with Harry Truman’s fair Deal.” That’s all he means.
- Harry Truman
Don’t swim against this right now. These programs from the new deal and fair deal are not even called socialist by American standards anymore.
Socialism? Americans would be happy to have health care, better workers‘ rights, affordable education. Just like most other advanced economies in Europe, Australia, South Korea, Japan, and so on. That’s not socialism, that’s capitalism with regulations and social programs. Nobody really wants socialism, which was as utter failure everywhere it was tried.
Anywhere socialism has existed, it has done so under the threat of global capitalism which is led by the United States. The countries you listed are only able to maintain their wealth and relative comfort by taking advantage of the global south. They benefit from obscuring that relationship so that the people who see that benefit, don’t have to reckon with the extent of it and how it enables the oppression of all of us and holds us back as a whole.
Today, the global North drains from the South commodities worth $2.2 trillion per year, in Northern prices. For perspective, that amount of money would be enough to end extreme poverty, globally, fifteen times over.
Over the whole period from 1960 to today, the drain totalled $62 trillion in real terms. If this value had been retained by the South and contributed to Southern growth, tracking with the South’s growth rates over this period, it would be worth $152 trillion today.
These are extraordinary sums. For the global North (and here we mean the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Japan, Korea, and the rich economies of Europe), the gains are so large that, for the past couple of decades, they have outstripped the rate of economic growth. In other words, net growth in the North relies on appropriation from the rest of the world.
Let me give you the quick and dirty, oversimplified rundown of how that relationship plays out:
Power, under capitalism, resides in capital, which isn’t just money but also resources and property. In order to maintain power, capitalism requires infinite and continuous growth, which of course requires more and more resources to sustain.
Say a given country decides it would like to own its resources nationally and use the wealth generated by those resources to support the growth and welfare of their own people. Capitalist nations are able to wield state power against those countries whenever they encounter this sort of difficulty. This includes leveraging state and capitalist media to run propaganda campaigns, which sour public perception of that country’s national leadership; funding coups and covert operations against them; giving money and training to militant minority resistance groups; and when all else fails, all out war, while messy, is a very lucrative means to the end of converting the resources of global south nations into private capital for the global north.
This capital is then wielded within the capitalist world to manipulate political outcomes in favor of the private owners of capital and to prevent the working class from gaining the consciousness that would enable them to struggle for the things you mentioned; health care, worker’s rights, affordable education; as they slowly strip away what was won from past struggles.
I believe this lovely quote by Ella Baker, a major activist and leader behind the civil rights movement, is relevant to the conversation;
A nice gathering like today is not enough. You have to go back and reach out to your neighbors who don’t speak to you. And you have to reach out to your friends who think they are making it good. And get them to understand that they–as well as you and I–cannot be free in America or anywhere else where there is capitalism and imperialism. Until we can get people to recognize that they themselves have to make the struggle and have to make the fight for freedom every day in the year, every year until they win it.
Your wall of text is ahistorical. Yugoslavia is a counter example. They received American aid after WW2 to rebuild.
Half of Europe lived under real socialism and it was a fucking terrible time for many reasons.
During the Cold War the Soviet led block and the non aligned movement together had sufficient resources, knowledge, and people to get their shit together independently of the US.
Don’t worry about getting it right 100% perfect in the planning phase, the important thing is to just get fucking moving. If either trying to shake up the democrats or forming a third party end up being wrong, then learn from it and keep moving. We can’t afford to miss the launch window because we couldn’t agree that the plan was perfect.
The “We can’t do this because it doesn’t solve 100% of our problems” excuse.
The worst part is that Republicans unironically believe that these are all paid actors.
I’m educated enough in American politics to understand elusive news about Musk ans Trump but about not that Bernie guy. Is that a first or last name and what was the point of the rally? Also is a rally like a démonstration?
Bernie Sanders is a Senator for the state of Vermont. Be has run for president and went pretty far on a socialist platform. Far enough that when you refer to him by his first name while discussing politics, just about every American knows who you are talking about. If there is a truly left wing politician in American government, it’s Bernie. And while it doesn’t say a lot about the state of things, it does say quite a bit that so many people showed up to hear him speak.
LOL socialist
I can really see AOC as president. She’s already at the minimum age, but I would like to see her take another 5-10 years to learn how to broaden her appeal.
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It’s also pretty funny to say that she needs to “broaden her appeal” when she’s already drawing tens of thousands of people without even running a presidential campaign.
I want her to start running right now. Fascism is here, we can’t afford to wait.
So do I, but I wouldn’t expect her to win right now. Americans are too lazy to want change but they’ll want to be rescued from collapse. Things have to get a lot worse before enough fence-sitters will listen to her.
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AOC should try pandering to neo-conservatives. I’m sure that will work this time!
so when does the revolution start?
say the literal acts you want Americans to do or you’re even more cowardly than we are. ICE can’t disappear you if you’re in europe, you don’t need to mince words
here you go:
America doesn’t need a revolution, a simple general strike will remind the capitalist bastards that they rely on us, not the other way around.
then what are you waiting for?
I’m Australian. We have mandatory voting, which makes it almost impossible for a nutjob like Trump to take control here.
when things actually start happening.
Until then, nobody cares.
If you’ve ever wondered why hitler got so far, this is why.
when things actually start happening.
gestures broadly
Things like American citizens being deported to foreign prisons when they have not committed a crime?
Travellers with legal visas at the border being imprisoned and tortured instead of just turned away?
Private citizen data being stolen from government facilities while federal employees are illegally terminated from their jobs?
States being threatened with loss of funding until the King gets a personal apology up to his standards?What things are you waiting for?
is there actually evidence of them being tortured?
Illegally detained sure. The worst thing that’s happening right now is the deportation stuff, but we’ve done this before, multiple times. Notably with the japanese.
It’s not good, don’t get me wrong, but we’ve done it before, and came back from it once. All of this shit is also being challenged by the judicial branch, whenever it gets off of its ass that is.
most of these things haven’t gone through fully, or are being immediately responded to with lawsuits. USAID for example. Immediately overturned in court.
Eagles said the detainees at the San Luis facility have no sleeping mats or blankets or windows, and the lights are on all day and night.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/canadian-detained-us-border-1.7483021
Now we could quibble about the degree of torture, but then we would be arguing about how much torture is acceptable for someone who had a visa, a job in the US, and was apprehended at the border instead of just denied entry.
And again I ask, what specific things need to happen before people will start doing something about it?
i’m not sure that’s necessarily torture, inhumane conditions for sure.
The worst one in that case is lights being on 24/7 and no sleeping arrangements. But it’s also not clear how long people are being held either.
Speaking to CBC News earlier Thursday, Jasmine’s mother, Alexis Eagles, said her daughter — who grew up in Yukon and had been living in B.C. until last year — was being detained at the San Luis Regional Detention Center after she recently tried to enter the U.S. from Mexico.
she’s canadian, visiting canada, and entered the US through mexico? Ok, so it looks like she tried to enter at the canadian border, her visa was revoked, she tried to then enter through the mexican border for some reason, after having her visa already revoked. Seems questionable and like a stupid decision to me, and even her mother seems to agree with that.
and was apprehended at the border instead of just denied entry.
i would assume that revoking a visa, is a denial of entry, especially since this literally happened at the canadian border, so maybe you want to read up a little bit on that one again.
And again I ask, what specific things need to happen before people will start doing something about it?
i don’t know, good question, it’s the hard question to answer here. The judicial branch has already done something about it. It’s definitionally illegal, it’s just a matter of it being escalated to the scotus, and hoping they side with the law.
i’m not sure that’s necessarily torture, inhumane conditions for sure.
As I said, your quibbling over the definition of torture, ignoring the actual issue here: is this “inhumane treatment” appropriate for someone who hasn’t been charged with a crime?
But it’s also not clear how long people are being held either
She was held for 11 days, it’s in the first paragraph.
i would assume that revoking a visa, is a denial of entry,
"She attempted to return to the States with the new visa
I would assume being granted a new visa is a statement that "it’s okay to come back now’.
The judicial branch has already done something about it. It’s definitionally illegal
And no one is listening to them.
the scotus, and hoping they side with the law.
The same SCOTUS that already ruled that Trump can not be charged with a crime? If they side with these illegal actions will that be reason to act? Or will the response be “The Court says this is legal so I guess it’s fine.”
They are boiling the frog slowly. If you were asked a year ago if everything that’s happening now would be cause to do something and start protesting most people would have said “of course!” But somehow by the time the US got here people are still saying “we’ll protest when things actually start happening”.
People who have committed no crimes are being detained with no charges in inhumane conditions for weeks, and everyone in a position of power is fine with this. So I continue to ask you name something that if it were to happen it would definately be time for Americans to do something. It doesn’t have to be the exact line in the sand, it can be something that “we should be protesting before this happens, but if it has gotten to this point we definately should be opposing it.”
Holding people in inhumane conditions isn’t enough.
Denying reporters access to the country because they have been critical of Trump in the past isn’t enough.
Deporting American citizens to foreign prisons isn’t enough.
The fact that a judge said they can’t deport American citizens to foreign prisons and they still did it anyway isn’t enough.So what is enough?
As I said, your quibbling over the definition of torture, ignoring the actual issue here: is this “inhumane treatment” appropriate for someone who hasn’t been charged with a crime?
it’s the capital punishment system, it’s highly inhumane from bottom to top, idk what you want me to tell you, or why this is even surprising to you. This was a bad idea, and her mother evidently must’ve told her it was, and she didn’t listen.
She was held for 11 days, it’s in the first paragraph.
that doesn’t specify whether it was in that specific facility or not. She could’ve been moved a few times by that point.
In a Facebook post, Eagles said Jasmine was held at the San Ysidro border crossing for three days after she tried to enter the U.S. on March 3, and was then moved to San Diego before she and others were “forcibly removed from their cells at 3 a.m.” and sent to the Arizona facility around March 9.
oops, she was moved, multiple times.
Eagles is less clear on what happened next, but said that Mooney then got “some sort of consulting visa application.”
“She attempted to return to the States with the new visa, and she had already been flagged so they just detained her,” Eagles said.
it’s not clear how she obtained this visa, and the fact that she went all the way to the southern border? Is patently suspicious, why wouldn’t you just go back to the northern border if it was a basic clerical issue? Especially knowing that the politics around the southern border are bad right now. It really seems like she was trying to be held in captivity at this point.
I would assume being granted a new visa is a statement that "it’s okay to come back now’.
and presumably also through the same border as last time, preferably even the same processing point. I mean this just seems like an objectively bad judgement call to me.
And no one is listening to them.
yeah that’s the problem, the executive is just doing their own thing, illegally. We either have to wait for them to listen to the judicial, or for it to make it’s way to scotus, where it should get interesting. Scotus doesn’t have a defined right leaning ruling just yet, so it’s hard to say how they would lean here. But a lot of what the trump admin is doing is explicitly unconstitutional and a huge misreading of the power granted to them.
The same SCOTUS that already ruled that Trump can not be charged with a crime? If they side with these illegal actions will that be reason to act? Or will the response be “The Court says this is legal so I guess it’s fine.”
and that was an objectively bad and corrupt ruling by scotus, the problem is that we have no means to act upon it, other than complaining about it. If they rule in favor, then i guess we have to figure out what to do from there. And it doesn’t look like we have many options unfortunately. But i’m at least semi hopeful they will rule against it, because it’s patently unconstitutional.
They are boiling the frog slowly. If you were asked a year ago if everything that’s happening now would be cause to do something and start protesting most people would have said “of course!” But somehow by the time the US got here people are still saying “we’ll protest when things actually start happening”.
were people protesting the same time last year? I know there were some big protests over some of the big problems. But fundamentally, people don’t care unless their way of life is directly affected materially. That’s just the truth of it. There’s no way around that, no amount of yelling at people angrily on lemmy or twitter is going to make people care. It’s when they and their family starts starving that drastic things happen. This is a well understood phenomenon.
People who have committed no crimes are being detained with no charges in inhumane conditions for weeks, and everyone in a position of power is fine with this. So I continue to ask you name something that if it were to happen it would definately be time for Americans to do something. It doesn’t have to be the exact line in the sand, it can be something that “we should be protesting before this happens, but if it has gotten to this point we definately should be opposing it.”
to be clear, the biggest illegal parts of this aren’t what’s mentioned here. Detaining people without explicit cause isn’t necessarily illegal, though you can’t hold them indefinitely either, so it’s more complicated there. But the two biggest problems are the deportations to places like el salvador, without any due process over it, as defined by previous precedent, and the fact that people aren’t even being fairly tried for these crimes they’re committing, before being handed over. Whether or not they did it is irrelevant, this is a blatant miscarriage of justice.
Anybody should be able to agree with this. I’m fairly sure there are several protests happening over this already, and if there aren’t idk why. Oh and btw, not everybody in power is ok with this, a lot of congress is against this, evidently, and the judicial branch in particular seems to be pretty against it. The legislative i don’t think exists anymore. SCOTUS is probably the most problematic of all of these.
Holding people in inhumane conditions isn’t enough. Denying reporters access to the country because they have been critical of Trump in the past isn’t enough. Deporting American citizens to foreign prisons isn’t enough. The fact that a judge said they can’t deport American citizens to foreign prisons and they still did it anyway isn’t enough.
all of these things are bad. I don’t disagree, but i also don’t know what you want me to do about this, i voted for kamala, evidently not a lot of people did for some reason. So it doesn’t seem like it’s my problem. Seems to be everyone elses problem, since they have no idea what’s happening.
So what is enough?
idk it depends on what you’re doing. If you’re talking completely overthrowing government, that’s clearly outlined to be when it hits the bottom line of everyday people. That’s just how it is. If you’re talking protesting, that’s a lot easier, and a lot of people are doing it, but a lot of people also aren’t really in a position to protest either.
fwiw this is what I’ve been saying since November. Just have Bernie and AOC tell us which way to jump. Then - we do that.
No Joe Biden is the incumbent he is clearly the best candidate.
Trump and gang is trying to have AOC charged for terrorism, so it seems to be working. She should either get DNC leadership now or finally form her own party.
Please don’t let her form a new party. As much as people say they hate the 2-party system, fragmenting the Democratic Party would be a yuge mistake at this point. We need to let the Trumpublican Party eat itself when he keels over from dementia or his final Big Mac Attack. The MAGA opportunists who rode in on his coattails will tear each other to pieces as they claw for position like rats.
The maga problem isn’t just Trump. This is the culmination of decades of work by christo-fascist conservatives. They’re not resting on their laurels and lining their pockets like a normal regressive administration. Every effort is being taken to solidify their power and deconstruct any threat that might rise up post-trump. Even if they did eat themselves there won’t be a government to rebuild.
We’re passing an inflection point in American politics. People want change and polls indicate they don’t care what side it comes from. The Democratic party has never polled lower. Being the milquetoast neoliberal corporate party is objectively the worst anchor to tie around your neck.
AOC and Bernie’s message isn’t wildly popular on accident. That energy needs to be captured and amplified, Democratic party or not. What’s the worst that happens from a split ticket? More people stay home?
Edit: you don’t even have to run against them to capture the Democratic party. Just have headliner progressives threaten it with a broad show of support and you force them to open up the primaries. Their policies have no support, they have no chips to call the bluff.
A Trump presidency, let alone TWO, wouldn’t have been possible without the gradual dumbing down of Americans over the last century, which IMO is an unintended side effect of progressive addiction to entertainment and convenience. Nobody conspired to make people more stupid by getting them to watch too much TV. That happened as business people strove to sell more products and get richer, like always.
Conspiring to make and keep people stupid is a conservative top 10 hit. For them the ideal populace is homogenous, fertile, docile, fearful and uneducated.
Anti-intellectual attacks have been the go-to for centuries, they’ve just gotten more modern and efficient. Look into groups like the heritage foundation, prager u, the heartland institute and (most importantly) the people bankrolling them.
Its a long legacy of chipping away at the foundations of democracy and critical thinking. Blaming technology and the free market is buying their propaganda. It’s the same lie they use to frame climate collapse as an unavoidable natural cycle.
I know there are individuals who hate the world and want everybody else to be suffer, or to be dumb and gullible because then they’re easier to con. But IMO the main driver is the basic conservative attitude that everybody should stand on their own two feet - either because in their minds it makes the nation stronger, or they just resent having to pay for anybody else’s anything - even things that benefit other conservatives. Individually motivated group behavior often looks like a conspiracy but it’s not. Most people don’t eat meat to spite vegans, or floss to put dentists out of business. Etc.
Cool. So what policy changes did they enact? None? Then who gives a fuck?
Action, not words, AOC. Action, not words, Bernie. Fucking stfu and DO something.
Getting their base energized and angry about the current situation is doing a lot more than introducing a bill that has a 0.00% chance of getting passed. The chances of them talking to the high ranking party officials and getting them to reverse course probably has the same chance of success.
It helps to use your brain to actually think about the outcomes of actions. On the off chance that I’m just being an asshole, please let me know what is a better use of their time.
“introducing a bill that has a 0.00% chance of getting passed” is Bernie’s function.
So he can look like the real leftist who is really trying.In this environment … bipartisan politics haven’t played a meaningful role in national US government since … Oh. George W Bush, maybe.
