• sexywheat [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    8 days ago

    In fact, many would argue that they have used far more resources trying to stop this man’s political rise than they ever did trying to stop Donald Trump.

    There it is. That’s all you need to know.

  • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    9 days ago

    I mean fuck Bernie, with that out of the way the dude was pulling crowds like ten times the size of Biden’s during the primary, on top of that he still gets people coming out to hear his message. But no, we need pragmatic dipshits who’s policies are kill the poor and give more money to the police.

      • Carl [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        8 days ago

        He definitely would have won in both 2016 and 2020 in the general. Most voters wanted something different in both elections, which was Trump in 16 and Biden in 20.

        Of course we’d all be complaining about all the sucdem things he’d do, but like… I don’t think he would have tore up the Iran deal, did the Abraham accords, moved the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem, and so on.

      • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        8 days ago

        Bernie was and forever will be a compromise candidate. He wasn’t actually radical. At all. He was offering a previous era’s Keynesian treats for the imperial core and, most crucially, a more marked divergence from the standard foreign policy line than either party is comfortable acknowledging.

        The fact they had a meltdown over that really should get printed out on business cards and any liberal who bleats about “radical marxism” should be forced to read and eat one of those cards before continuing.

    • HamManBad [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      8 days ago

      fuck Bernie

      Obligatory for reasons of theory, but let’s not pretend we all wouldn’t have felt warm and fuzzy inside the day he won

      • for sure. it would have indicated a future of possibilities, including gentler transitions, and a signal that elite control over our electoral system wasn’t absolute or at least not controlled by people who are committed to full imperialist barbarism.

        I’m getting older. my lower back isn’t what it was. I’d prefer to spend my sunset years gardening, painting, reading, and attending community theater and if they let me have a believable pathway to that which wasn’t soaked in blood or achieved by ignoring and stepping over the bones of friends and kind strangers being tortured, I would be so relieved.

        but it seems this barrier to the all encompassing motives of capital cannot be allowed.

    • BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      8 days ago

      I think the outcome makes it clear that crowd sizes don’t mean anything. Biden’s supporters may not have come out to hear him speak, but his message of “nothing will fundamentally change” resonated with enough of them to win him the primary.

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    8 days ago

    Socialists in america need to reject the term progressive. It’s used in order to claim socialists as their own, as “progressive liberals” instead of as what they really are, opposition to liberals. The whole “progressive” thing is used to erase socialists and keep it buried enough that people do not become politically educated about the differences.

      • HexaSnoot [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        5 days ago

        Yeah I’m barely reading the comment without snoring. I bet its well written, but I could care less to learn about what a “progressive” is and I have no context to understand when people talk about them. Also, after I stopped being liberal it took me like 2 years to learn what a SocDem is. Both are a dumb mincing of words, and they’re both highly effective ways of confusing people who desperately need to learn to abandon liberalism altogether.

        • GalaxyBrain [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          5 days ago

          Just say youre a communist. Even if you’re an anarchist tell people you’re a communist. When I was younger and an anarchist I still called myself a communist when speaking to strangers or co workers or whatever when politics came up because i had found that if you call yourself an anarchist you get immediate dismissal, if you call yourself a socialist you get treated like a liberal. If you call yourself a communist you get curiosity and a conversation. People want to know why you’re a communist.

              • HexaSnoot [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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                4 days ago

                I get what you mean. For me it’s a fairly private soul searching and an aid in my spirituality. Understanding more about what an all loving world needs to exist. It helps me think about how people should be treated more kindly in certain ways. I’d always felt people are completely worthy in general, and now I think I’m also worthy in ways I hadn’t known. I’m more perceptive to self worth.

      • GalaxyBrain [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        5 days ago

        Agree on socialist. Disagree on communist. I have gotten the most mileage out of normies calling myself a communist even when I was an anarchist. If I told them that id be dismissed, if I said I was a communist they’d be curious as to why and id get a conversation curiosity beats outright dismissal and has led to a decent amount of totally random interactions leading to people I’ve met on the bus or streets thinking differently. When you call yourself a communist you will need yo justify it,.which should be easy but it gives you at least the chance to state your point. If you call yourself a socialist people will just think radlib

    • CommunistCuddlefish [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      8 days ago

      I like this. Do you have any suggestion for alternative terms? I think I’ve struggled with finding a different word because I don’t feel comfortable calling anyone in the Democratic Party “leftist” so I fall back on “progressive” as a default

      • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        8 days ago

        One that isn’t insulting to the liberals that exist under the “progressive” tent? I don’t know. The word is essentially a tent of social-democrats and socialists, and that tent is useful as an alliance but damaging in that it erases socialists from discourse as they get consumed into “progressive liberals”. This erasure results in fewer people learning the difference between socialists and liberals, in fact it makes people think socialists are liberals.

        Socialists should call themselves socialists and any big-tent collaboration should be clearly labelled as a Socialist-LeftLiberal collaboration/alliance.

        The benefit of calling someone like Bernie or AOC LeftLiberal instead of Progressive is it educates less political people that LeftLiberal and RightLiberal exists. This pushes the vast majority of the Democrats to the right in people’s minds and it will open up space for a “left” to exist. While doing this it also clearly educates people that Socialists and LeftLiberals are not the same thing.

        You get me? If LeftLiberal becomes a thing in people’s minds then everything that is not LeftLiberal becomes right wing in people’s minds, pushing the entirety of the democrat party into the right and opening up control of what “left” exists to Socialists and Social Democrats. The benefit of this is that everyone who currently associates “left” with being good will fall into this camp over time, they will reject RightLiberals when they become associated with being right wing in their minds. So much american thinking can be boiled down to “left good, right bad” or “right good, left bad”. This can be weaponised linguistically.

        It is possible to convince LeftLiberals to start doing this because they will realise how much it benefits them to make the distinction. And it is possible to convince Socialists to start doing this because it stops erasing Socialists.

        • GalaxyBrain [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          5 days ago

          Call yourself and communist. Radlibs have really weakens the term socialist, they’ll assume Bernie Sanders at best. Call yourself a communist cause as I’ve been stating in this thread already, that leads to follow up questions. If you say youre a socialist to a co-worker or other normal person they’ll say ‘oh, okay’. If you say youre a communist you’ll have to answer the quiz everyone gives someone who says theyre a communist so learn to dispel that nonsense and then you hage a productive conversation where you get yonrxplain why you’re a communist. Being a cool and reasonable person while people around you know you’re a commie is a wee bit of praxis

          • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            5 days ago

            Yeah I agree with you there but I don’t think any communists really ever say they’re progressives outside of electoralism. What I want to do is get the liberal-left to stop using progressive too, or at least to label themselves as liberal-left in order to put it into people’s minds that the existing shit bags are the right and open up the field to the left of them more.

            • GalaxyBrain [they/them]@hexbear.net
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              5 days ago

              There is no way of stopping that from happening and those terms will therefore feel more and more meaningless as time goes by. We don’t need to reclaim these terms. We can just let them be taken by the libs to die in the dust of history. If liberals are claiming a radical term that means its a great to claim the more radical term. If ‘progressive’ becomes a meaningless liberal buzzword, let it be one. Take advantage of it.

        • Yeah that makes sense! I generally tell people “Liberals are right wing because they still support capitalism and empire” but some of the edge cases make that harder to sell. Left-liberal is a term that can fill that niche.

          • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            8 days ago

            Exactly, and if they start to build their understanding of the world as these people being “Left-Liberal” then they will automatically start to interpret everyone outside of that as being right wing.

            I know the whole political window shit is hated here but this genuinely pushes the window leftwards by doing it.