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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sup. I’m trans too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can read what you wrote.

it makes me a decent fucking person.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s all true. But her campaign is the tool that we had in that moment. We did it before with Biden. We could have done it again with Harris. In the months leading up to the election we’ve got to care less about the quality of our tool and more how we use it. We can push the Democrats all we want further to the left up until then.

But the campaign we get after the DNC convention is the campaign we have to use. Some people couldn’t put aside their moral self-image to do that. Now they’re beating a dead horse, when Trump has threatened to send those Democrats to prison. We could all be heading to death camps starting next year, and I’m hoping I can reach some people to get their heads in the game before that.

Neoliberal ideology leads to fascism. The actual neoliberals themselves are not fascists. We can work with neoliberals. The problem with scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds is that it’s a mindset that creates enemies out of people who are our allies.

Don’t get me wrong. Neoliberals need to abandon their ideology in favor of socialism. And a populist narrative wouldn’t hurt the Democrats either. But if we blind ourselves to the difference between neoliberals and fascists, we are making things harder for ourselves.

I think we actually agree on this, we just phrase it slightly differently.

I mean finding ways to attack the MAGA movement that convinces people to vote for Harris. There are people on lemmy who aren’t as politically engaged or as far left as we would hope. But more importantly, this is a space to spread ideas which can then be spread to the wider internet.

Biden is complicit, because he’s the president and it was his decision. She’s the vice president, who does not have that power, so she’s not.

We have a democracy for as long as we can keep it. There’s a good chance we just lost it. There’s no sense in giving up our agency because neoliberals are institutionalists. We knew what the Democrats were. Our options this cycle ended up being Harris or fascism. The goal was to get Harris elected to stop fascism for four more years. Instead of doing everything in their power to help get Harris elected, accelerationists did everything in their power to sink Harris’s campaign. We broke our only tool over our knee and threw it away because it wasn’t a better tool. Doing so wasn’t useful. edit: typo

Now people are beating a dead horse. Neoliberals are neoliberals. Fascists are fascists. Spend this energy attacking the MAGA movement.

I highly recommend you swap out subjective moral reasoning for utility. You’ve already convinced yourself that it is morally right that we all go to the death camps. But it’s not useful. There’s a chance we do something that’s useful between now and the death camps, but not if we care about being decent people more than we care about people.

Biden wasn’t running for president. Harris wanted to end the war. Trump wanted Israel to finish the job. Accelerationist rhetoric hurt the Democratic Party’s chances of winning at the expense of your goal to help the Palestinians. Now the genocide will be allowed to continue indefinitely.

You’re free to debilitate yourself as much as you want. Could you like, stop though. Please?

At best this is confusing cycling the fascist drain as a repeating pattern. At worst it is apathy masquerading as insight. Fascists kill people in death camps and don’t hold democratic elections. We’ve held on this long because we’ve been paddling against the current. Millions of people stopped paddling this election. Now we’re hoping fascist incompetence clogs the drain long enough for us to get away.

We’re going to be lucky to get another election. If we still have a democracy the effects of this next Trump term will outlive the next four years.

Trump got three justices onto the Supreme Court in his first term. These aren’t going to go in and out of power. They are going to sit there until they die. Trump could get another three Supreme Court nominations confirmed in this next term. Their influence is going to shape this country for thirty years or more.

He promised to jail his political opponents. The Democratic Party might not exist in four years and if does it will probably have shifted to the right. They won’t be a moderate challenger in any sense.

An oligarchy of billionaires has rallied around Trump as dictator. Project 2025 is going to give Trump an actionable agenda and an army of loyalists in government positions to execute it for him. Republicans control the Senate and are on track to take the House. The Republicans want to shape this country for decades to come.

All of this turns the discourse around climate change on it’s head. Our models of what could happen are typically based on climate admissions staying the same or with efforts to mitigate them. Now we have an incoming administration who are going to pollute as much as possible. That’s not a repeating pattern. It’s a self-destructive process that ends with billionaires living in their apocalypse bunkers and the rest of us dead.

Lashing out against neoliberals isn’t useful. The MAGA movement are the fascists.

It’s because the Overton window is shifted to the right in the US.

If the Democrats were a better tool, that would be great. They’re neoliberals, they don’t listen to anyone. Socialists have been able to get into their primaries. One day we might even get one of them elected as the nominee. But we need to keep our democracy long enough to do that. And there’s a good chance we just screwed that up.

Harris called for a ceasefire multiple times and promised to do everything in her power to end the war in Gaza. Trump said Israel needed to finish the job. Harris was the correct choice to help the Palestinians.

I saw you were stuck parroting propaganda and still are, so I decide to try to reach you. Me pointing this out to you has clearly been upsetting. Who ever got you hooked on this wanted to debilitate you so you would harm your own interests and the causes that you care about. Hopefully you’ve been able to tell that I don’t think particularly highly of the Democrats. I see how they are useful and point that out to people. You seem unable to stop trying to sink Harris’ campaign. She lost. It’s done. If we’re lucky we will still have a two party system. In the event Democrats still exist in some capacity, consider using them to advance your goals, as opposed to spread propaganda about the Democrats at the expense of your goals.

The Democrats aren’t going to become the party you think you deserve. But they are the party we can use to achieve our goals. If we fail to leverage them effectively that’s on us. Spreading this propaganda is self-defeating. It’s an exercise in shooting yourself in the foot. The Democratic Party is what we have to move the needle to the left. If we insist on casting them in the most unfavorable light possible to everyone, we shouldn’t be surprised when no one wants to vote for them and they lose. Your time would be better spent targeting the Republicans with this stuff considering they are the people who want to kill us.

Obviously the Democrats would do better if they adopted a populist message. We can’t control the Democratic Party. But we can influence the rhetoric around how people view their vote. If we make the Democrats look like fascists who must be protested out of a moral duty, then we’ve done the Republicans a favor. If we point out the Democratic Party are a useful way to advance progressive and socialist causes over time then we’ve done leftists a favor. Let’s do the latter.

Of course we’ll see what happens next year with this. Seems like the party could die if it’s leadership are all arrested. If it doesn’t, let’s use the Democrats to our advantage. edit: typo