ID: ally @missmayn posted: “the democrats were more energized and organized against campus protests than the current authoritarian takeover.”
Can’t escape the braindead c/Politics users even in this comments thread bruh.
People out here still blaming voters as if it isn’t the literal textbook definition of a politician to meet consituent demands for their vote.
Not only was the DNC content in allowing Trump to win, they were content in losing just to protect Israel. a
There’s a lot of unease about this, because some people believe everyone should just vote for the better of the two options; whereas other people believe the option needs to be good before they will vote for it.
Americans were given a choice between two options. One option was clearly better than the other, but the poorer option won, because the better option wasn’t good enough.
It reminds me a bit of the game-theory around the game ‘ultimatum’. Should we just accept whatever is offered, since it is still better than the alternative? Or should we sacrifice our meager reward to spite the person who offered an unfair split?
The way I look at it, it’s not about spite, it’s about not contributing to the problem. If this was a choice made entirely in a vacuum where the choices were dropped from the sky with no history and there were no future elections, and you could absolutely only choose between them and nothing else, then fine, choose the dems since I guess they will technically be “less bad.”
The problem is the choice isn’t made in a vacuum. There’s a reason we have the choices that are presented to us in elections because this is a repeated game where past results affect later games. We keep getting worse and worse options from either party because they know people don’t have a real choice. As long as the dems are anywhere before the line, even if they’re shockingly close, then people will have to pick them. So they move right up to that line because they won’t be punished for it. In turn, Republicans have the space to move further right now that the overton window has shifted.
The DNC feels free to rig primaries, which are supposedly where we’re allowed to have input without risking a Republican winning, because they know that the outcome won’t change people’s votes, or even if it does, they don’t seem to care THAT much about winning as long as actual leftists lose.
Repeat until we have Democrats who are anti-immigration, pro-war, pro-police, pro-surveillance, and pro-corporate and Republicans who have just taken their mask off. And this even trickles down to the base somewhat. How the hell does California vote to keep literal slavery around and still conceive of itself as liberal?
Also, this is less a strategic point and more of a moral one, but I take issue with the idea of the Dems being “better” as a given. Better for who? They’re not better for the people they’re helping to bomb. Why should their priorities not matter? How can you quantify their suffering against different kinds of suffering for other groups? “But the Republicans will do the same, so it’s a wash, you shouldn’t consider that.” Meaning we’ve taken their issue off the table. It’s no longer in the realm of politics because we’ve just accepted that it’s fated to happen. It shouldn’t matter to us.
“But you can apply pressure once they’re in office, the Dems will be more receptive.” How exactly will you pressure people who you’ve told you will unconditionally vote for and won’t act against outside the system? And are they more receptive? They didn’t stop supplying Israel. They never raised the minimum wage or got people healthcare. They never did anything to codify Roe V Wade or to sure up the courts against corruption. Plus once you spent all this political capital putting them in power, how many liberals or even progressives are going to meaningfully push back against them? Libs will go back to thinking everything is fine and a lot of progressives will just think they should try to “hold them accountable.” Whatever that means.
Of course, merely not voting isn’t sufficient to affect change, but I think putting all this emphasis on voting is doing harm to the effort to get people to get organized in other ways. It distracts them and it makes it seem like your principles don’t really matter. “If you are so adamant about supporting the people working against my interests, can you really be by ally? Do you really care about me?”
I think there is solid reasoning in most of what you said. But there is a key point that I don’t agree with…
As long as the dems are anywhere before the line, even if they’re shockingly close, then people will have to pick them. So they move right up to that line because they won’t be punished for it. In turn, Republicans have the space to move further right now that the overton window has shifted.
You say “people will have to pick them”; but that’s obviously not the case - otherwise they would have won.
One could choose to reverse your reasoning to say that the Republicans are free to become more and more progressive without being punished, because there is no other real option. … Clearly that doesn’t seem to be happening; but why not?
There’s are a lot of different reasons why the window might shift left or right… but one fairly simple force is that it will tend to shift towards the party that is winning. Right now, the Republicans are winning, and so the Democrat tries to be just a bit more like them in the hope of capturing enough for the ‘middle ground’ to win. It is pretty natural to think that the middle is somewhere between the two parties, rather than further to the left. I think if the Dems were actually winning elections then they would not be sliding towards the other party. It would be the other way around.
What’s missing from your analysis is the material backing of the parties. The Democrats and Republicans, with the backing of their corporate donors, both represent the interests of the capitalist class. They have their differences in some areas, but neither is interested in disrupting the fundamental relationship between classes and the means of production, which is what grants capitalists their power. So winning or losing elections is less important to them than winning while compromising on that core class interest.
One could choose to reverse your reasoning to say that the Republicans are free to become more and more progressive without being punished
Two things: Why would they? If they want to serve capitalists and they can get away with doing so, they’re gonna do it. Second, in a superficial rhetorical way, they have made appeals to progressives. They use some of the language of economic populism talking about elites controlling you, or the economy giving you a hard time, corporate censorship of media, failures of institutions, and the way we spend money on awful foreign adventurism instead of on helping people at home.
Of course this is all for show and for the things they don’t just straight up lie about, they subtly twist the messaging to play to the same feelings while turning the attention to things that aren’t the problem. Failings of institutions becomes anti-intellectualism. Economic worries get directed to competition with immigrants and foreigners instead of the capitalists exploiting all of them. Corporate censorship gets turned away from the influence corporations have over our communications to just being about crazy woke people who “don’t understand how things work” and can’t handle people “telling it like it is.” Isolationist isn’t about being anti-war or anti-multinational corporations, it’s about how wars don’t benefit Americans enough and how outside influences from scary foreigners is corrupting the country.
Post Clinton and Obama, the Democrats became the party of “everything is fine except for those dumb dumb bigots.” And after Bush, the Republicans pivoted to the counter-narrative of that while still maintaining their priority towards the interests of the capitalist class. So neither party is really addressing your concerns, but one seems to be at least acknowledging the problems you have and telling you you’re a super special person and the other party seems to be ignoring your pain and kicking you while you’re down.
And of course with Republicans in power, I’d expect these roles to flip again. Once Trump does enough of his bullshit he’s gonna say everything is great except for those whinny wokes and the Democrats are playing opposition to that, even against policies they supported while in power like deportation, but only go so far as saying that things were better before Trump ruined everything. If we could just go back to before that everything would be fine. Even more specifically, post Trump there has been an effort to pin things all on specific people rather than any structural critique or even going to far as to broaden it to the party as a whole. “There are good, honest Republicans I might disagree with, but respect, but Trump is pure evil and everything bad that’s happening is specifically because of him” or some other rotating cast of figureheads like Musk, Desantis, etc. even though all of these policies are things Republicans have been working towards for decades, sometimes with the help of Democrats.
So no, I don’t think the stances of the political parties ever really ebbs left based on who wins elections. We had 8 years of “Hope and Change” Obama and the party completely balked at Bernie for actually wanting to follow through on the empty rhetoric of Obama.
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Those textbooks didn’t have one option being a fascist takeover of the country.
What’s so hard to understand that both Biden and the voters are at fault
No, not Biden. First of all, he wasn’t running. It was the party more broadly. By just saying Biden, the party doesn’t have to change, but the voters are naturally expected to change and be more willing to vote for whatever genocidal shit demon the party demands unquestioning fealty to in 4 years.
You can’t absolve Biden’s part in this though, if his administration hadn’t hid how he was just not in a condition for another years of the presidency (I believe even Biden has admitted this now) then an actual primary could have happened. Instead it was swept under the rug until the last second, then they scrambled to get a non-geriatric candidate that was a good pick for the situation but wasn’t picked by voters.
You can’t absolve Biden’s part in this though
I’m not. I’m just not about to let party leadership off the hook by acting like Biden did this all by his lonesome.
George Carlin said it years ago but it bears repeating:
“But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got. Because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.
Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want.
Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that.
You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.
And by the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care.
Good honest hard-working people – white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on – good honest hard-working people continue – these are people of modest means – continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you at all – at all – at all. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on; the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes everyday.
Because the owners of this country know the truth: it’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
Unless America finds a way to get the money out of politics, I don’t think it’s problems will ever get fixed by politicians. The class divide will widen and ultra wealthy will grab more money and power, while those below will be busy with culture war distractions and not focused on the class war.
The french did a pretty good job cleaning up.
There was a lot of turmoil before they stablized on the respectable undomesticated society they have today.
Maybe it could happen again?
I guess it’s up to the American citizens. I wonder how much worse it’ll become before they start really fighting back.
Every society is 3 missed meals from a revolution.
Most of the country already lives paycheck to paycheck. If most people became unemployed and couldn’t find work they’d be homeless in less than a year.
They have plenty of circus, but bread (or eggs) is going to get more expensive.
Idk where the edge is but I think if our incompetent government doesn’t push Americans over the edge soon climate change probably will.
As soon as I started reading, I just had to look up the clip
I hadn’t considered this until this post, but where are those protesters now?
Protests have been ongoing. Just off camera, mostly. Some students got suspended from the schools, other schools have been banning groups from organizing over pro-palestinian issues.
I mean, the Israel lobby won.
Just off camera
This is the important part. Corporate propaganda outlets will not report on burgeoning political movements that threaten the status quo, unless they are absolutely forced to, and only then to deride and ridicule them in order to discourage their growth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revolution_Will_Not_Be_Televised
The revolution will not be right back after a message about a white tornado, white lightning, or white people
You will not have to worry about a dove in your bedroom, the tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl
The revolution will not go better with Coke
The revolution will not fight germs that may cause bad breath
The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat
The revolution will not be televised
Will not be televised
Will not be televised
Will not be televised
The revolution will be no re-run, brothers
The revolution will be live
I thought the USA was the Israel lobby 🤔
They are and they won.
Facing felony charges from a democrat.
Who’s the democrat? The person who arrested them, or the state attorney? I believe their state attorney is a Democrat, and that’s where it would normally come from, not a cop. Not sure who ordered it though
The states attourney filed the charges. She is also an adjunct law professor at the U of I as is Rabbi Dovid Tiechtel of Illini Chabad who claimed in the article below that he was heavily involved with descions being made during the protests. He has “Isreal” listed as a hobby on the Chibad website. I wouldn’t be surprised if he applied political pressure on behalf of Isreal. https://www.wcia.com/news/breaking-news/pro-palestinian-protestors-rally-again-at-uiuc/
The U of I chanselor announced his resignation back in November.
So those with ownership of the property or powers to speak in their stead called the police to perform an investigation into a protest on campus and issues statements against them and the investigation was brought to presumably the state attorney we mentioned. I know of no students who were prosecuted by the state for a long term, do you? I know the university’s themselves suspended students and professors, threw people from dorms and treated peope most unfairly.
For the most part the attorney sentenced them to a 4 hour holding and release. Note that is shorter than any holding time I have ever recieved, standardly 8-12 hrs before a bond is set.
All punishments seem to be from the schools not the Legislative/Judicial branch. Thus meaning unless you can show otherwise, this “Democrat” appears to have given the most lenient sentences possible
(Granted that is for most, anyone who got involved in violence I’m sure she referred to the courts, so they could depict what happened)
They were charged with a class 4 criminal felony by the county prosecuter, Julia Reitz. Being arrested and released isn’t a punishment. Illinois has cashless bond. They weren’t arrested at the protest, they were indighted by a grand jury. A conviction means that you are facing a 1-3 year prison sentence and you’ll never be able to vote, own guns, or get many types of jobs and nobody will hire you anyway. They’re trying to fuck up this girls whole life because she said Isreal is bad.
The voting thing is untrue I believe, you can vote with a felony once out of incarceration. Also if sounds like a jury decided that by your words. So it was again not a singular person.
So that person will be eligible to vote whether found guilty or innocent by a jury in the 2026 elections. Owning a gun on the other hand, if found guilty, no, I don’t believe they can in Illinois. I guess we’ll find out what the jury decides. Do you know when the case is happening?
(I agree it is all ridiculous)
An indightment just means that there is probable cause to charge the person, it’s not a descision on whether they are guilty or not. The process is done in secret, so there is no defence for the person being charged. It’s just a way to issue an arrest warrant. They do it that way in order to prevent people from asking for a “show cause” hearing which would allow them to personally defend against the whole thing. D It’s a dirty trick.
The media has no reason to cover the protests anymore
Being deported
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Oh you just copy paste this like a bot, okay. You know we should stop pressuring our party leaders to do anything we want because they don’t represent us afterall right?
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I’m so glad to hear from someone that did actual research about this! Would you mind sharing some of the sources that support your claim about protesters only caring about “feeling morally superior”? I can’t find anything about this, but it sounds like you can help. Was there a study?
You should take some of the energy you use for crying
I dont copy paste shit everywhere :p
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What was that? Lol
They never existed in a meaningful capacity
You know Democrat politicians are rich oligarchs too, So it’s in their interests just like the Republicans to protect their money bins. We need to stop worrying about Republicans and Democrats and start worrying about us working people. Free Luigi!
America is a one party state. But, in typical American extravagance, they have two of them.
If Democrats wanted Trump’s authortarian take over and were just pretending to oppose the Right
What would they be doing differently?
Ah yes. Fascists taking over the county? Time to blame their opposition. Help their opposition? Nah, I’d rather blame them.
Lol, what opposition?
It’s not enough, but I’ve seen more of it from the DNC than I have you.
I’ve seen more of it from [the elected officials delegated to head the country], than [the random poster on the internet].
the bar is in hell.
Y’know, you could just admit that you’re not paying attention. That’s allowed.
Paying attention to what? How the democrats stack up against the political actions of posters?
You and other poor people dummy
Nobody was blaming anyone in the post, just making an observation.
But yes the first step in growth is realizing your mistakes and they refuse to do that. Fascism depends entirely on lazy, uninvolved and conflict averse people. Nowhere in the world has fascism ever come to power without the support of “centrists”. The US democratic party is a party of centrists with no goals and no interest in actually doing anything. They have created the perfect breeding ground for a fascist takeover.
I have posted it before and i will post it again, the democratic party is not free of blame. They cant just lean back and blame everything on Trump or Musk or voters.
The Democrats will learn the wrong lesson from this: “We need to convince more Republicans to vote for us!”
The US democratic party is a party of centrists with no goals
That’s just not true. The democratic party is a coalition group with a great variety of goals that don’t form a coherent ideal. You have AOC who’s a either a social democrat saying she’s a democratic socialist or a democratic socialist who’s hiding her true ideals behind policies that advance her goals but are far easier to sell than what she really wants. Then you have obvious fascists who are clearly there only to enable the wealthy. Aside from them you have the people who believe that the democratic process is sacrosanct and above defiance even in the face of someone obviously attempting to subvert it.
Aside from that, on average the Democrats prefer action against climate change, that the rights of minorities be protected, and are less anti-worker than the GOP. These are real differences that matter. There’s no such thing as “centrism” and pretending otherwise is an amazing way to excuse not supporting the largest institution that will lock your worst enemies out of power, even if they don’t do anything.
Furthermore, even if the DNC literally never got anything done (which, to be clear, they have done good things that support workers like favorable rules for Unions)that would be great for us, because it’d mean their feckless ineffectual leadership would give us plenty of room to build parallel institutions, educate, and bring others around to our ways of thinking. When the GOP is in charge that becomes harder and it’s more dangerous for everyone involved.
Now do Worker Rights, Unions and Economic Equality instead of Liberalism.
The democrats still win but once again, lots of strike breaking and missed opportunities to enact drastic improvements.
And I bet that during all that time and unlike on Liberalism, when it comes to Economic Equality and Work vs Capital they kept moving to the Right almost as fast as the Republicans.
Illustrating the theory that the Democrats have not moved to the Right with a graphic about how they moved on Liberalism is like claiming improving harvests of oranges by showing the numbers for apples.
Those things only are allowed because without them, a worker revolt would have obliterated those favoring under regulated Capitalistism.
Curious how that graphic doesn’t say Left and Right on the horizontal scale but rather Liberal and Conservative, whilst the title describes it as showing that the Democrats have moved to the Left which is quite a different thing from Liberal.
It’s almost as if that’s a piece of propaganda meant to deceive readers…
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I dislike the democratic party as well, but that just flat-out isn’t true. There are focused efforts to stop most of Trump’s exec orders and many other actions (as they relate to him trying to act like he has control of governmental spending, etc.) as many are blatantly illegal or unenforceable and also to stop Musk. Now, senators and house members aren’t doing a ton, but there’s not much they can do - they are a bicameral minority. They actually are threatening a government shutdown, but that hasn’t occurred yet. Most of the resistance is rightly coming from the judicial branch.
Sounds like confusion stems from you believing words and actions to be of equal value. Which is typical for any defense of Democrats.
No, there are actual legal challenges. As for the government shutdown, that is absolutely just words as I said in my comment.
No, there are actual legal challenges.
Yeah, like I said, you believe words to be actions.
A challenge in court is, objectively, an action. As opposed to “words”. Already some of the executive orders have been blocked. I can give sources if you are actually interested, but you’re not being reasonable.
Farting is also objectively an action. That’s not the kind of action people are calling for.
I understand that you believe this to be some kind of proper action. You don’t have to keep reiterating it.
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It’s cuz college students are easier to kick but Republicans fight back. The Democrats are doing their usual bit of having a few committees to complain while the republic burns and alternatively hand-wringing “I wonder why we lost the election???”
What I don’t understand is that there aren’t any protests going on for the current administration. Like he’s calling to literally remove all Palestinians and no one cares now?
there aren’t any protests going on for the current administration
Are you fucking kidding me??
Take your apparatchik strawman back to !politics@lemmy.world 🙄
Let’s also remember that Trump is deporting international students who participated in pro-Palestine protests on US campuses
That’s literally the first article I’ve seen about it and the first time I’ve heard it called 50501.
Maybe things are just moving too fast?
I’m not against it, literally all for it, but I feel like there were larger protests after his first election and concerned about not seeing more.
I feel like there were larger protests after his first election and concerned about not seeing more
It’s been two weeks. People are still reeling and major protests take time to organize.
The 50501 movement alone has organized more protests than there was in the first two weeks of his first infestation. No matter what it “feels like” to you.
I was really just looking for people’s insights/perspectives on things here, cause I feel like it’s important.
But to demonstrate what I mean, the 2017 women’s march happened the day after Trumps first inauguration and had 470,000 people in DC alone, with somewhere between 3-5million participating across the country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Women’s_March
Idk why people are being so toxic to you but another thing to consider is the news cycle has been completely overtaken by Trump since
I think people are just frustrated, I know I am.
You’re certainly right about Tump just owning the news cycle. Whether it’s all been literally taken over, they’re too afraid to fight back, or whatever it’s clear that most news agencies aren’t willing to call a spade a spade (or a nazi salute a nazi salute).
Sounds like you’re not looking very hard for them.
That’s fair.
I guess part of me is worried that I have to look hard.
You do because the mainstream media is complicit.
The corporate interests that are backing this coup are the same ones in control of the social media platforms. They are actively suppressing efforts efforts to organize.
That would at least explain things, it definitely feels more muted than last time. I’m hoping it isn’t just apathy and am looking for more ways to make an impact.
Maybe things are just moving too fast?
Maybe you aren’t paying attention.
Saw people protesting Gaza just yesterday, not at the 50501 group either.
The media is in the pocket of the president. Why would they publish that story
Wasn’t there supposed to be a big one yesterday across all US state capitals?
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These garbage ratio posts that continue to blame the working class for a failing duopoly political system that has been taken hostage by a plutocracy, and has clearly divorced itself from the needs and desires of the governed populace do nothing more than confirm that Lemmy is now rife with bots and state actors.
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Millions failed, not the handful in positions of leadership who have actual power, and whose job it is to earn enough votes to win elections?
The hallowed Democrat Party leaders, whose positions in the Party are nothing less than the manifestation of Divine Will, are but the infallible vehicles of the word of Our Lord, and their decisions are not to be questioned by lowly plebes who need only know their place and get in line behind them.
Nobody has lost their grandparents or parents, I’m so sure of it.
-You
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Who to you think I voted for?
What a ghoulish thing to say
How do you know the didn’t vote for kamala
This is bait
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MLK and Malcolm X tried to warn us about liberalism a long, long time ago… and I don’t think the left, even now, has realized what liberalism truly is - the “political arm” of the capitalist order. The carrot to the fascist stick.
I don’t think the left, even now, has realized what liberalism truly is
Lmfao, new to leftist spaces are you? 😂
Lmfao, new to leftist spaces are you?
Unfortunately, no. I’m not.
It is not the fascists that have rendered the left so ineffective and weak in the Anglophone world, Clyde - it’s the liberals that did. And all your edginess doesn’t hide the fact that the left still virtually have no answer to liberal co-optation - unless you want to inform me of some brilliant plan that the left has managed to hide for the last seven decades?
