If all you want is to have the “good” cop to come back, and to be subject to the carrot instead of the stick - fine. You do you.

But is it too much to ask for you to simply be honest about it?

I don’t think I care enough

You don’t care to find out if the thing you have been calling “democracy” your entire life even qualifies as democratic?

Fair enough, I guess - maybe the people calling themselves “democrats” not lifting a finger to stop fascism hasn’t convinced you to question the lies these very same people have been selling you since birth… but that could never be me.

Why are you mad at me?

Ummm… I’m not mad at you.

I’m trying to show you that you aren’t asking to get democracy back (because that’s something you never had).

What you are asking for is to have the “good cop” back - the very “good cop” that is right now busy handing you over to the bad one.

If I were (as a thought exercise) to consider your metrics for democracy valid, I’d have to enquire as to what the point of democracy even is if it comes with fascism as a built-in feature - which, of course, is perfectly acceptable if we were to use your metrics.

And that’s before we even get into the nitty gritty of how your metrics of democracy solves the fundamentally violent and fundamentally irreconcilable incompatibility between democratic values and the capitalist mode of production.

Depends on you threshold but we have had it for a while

Getting to “choose” which pack of political racketeers gets to be the public face of capitalist looting and pillaging falls outside my threshold… which means that we’ve never had anything that can be called “democracy” with a straight face.

If we accept the liberals’ definition of democracy we might just as well accept the tankie’s definition of socialism, too - both are equally warped and vile.

I’d be happy to just get democracy back.

When did we have democracy?

See how absurd this statement is?

Liberalism is literally the ideology of the status quo now.

Is it absurd to point that out, too?

Prefiguration is a theory of praxis

Soooo… the failure of anarchism to actually preconfigure anything since the end of WW2 in the face of massive liberal counter-insurgency is perhaps tied to anarchist’s theories about preconfiguration not being remotely good enough - if they even exist at all?

Bringing about things like the 40-hour week.

Can you show me anywhere in the world where anarchism is as strongly represented in labor movements as it was in Spain during the 1930s?

Looking at the past does not make the present any better.

Anarchism doesn’t have to become the sociopolitical system to be beneficial.

So what should it be then? A vanguard in everything but name?

Look into prefiguration

I’d love to… but where is it? Every time I ask anarchists this, they point me to social projects such as that happening in northern Syria and Chiappas in Mexico - social projects that reject the anarchist label. And I don’t exactly blame them for rejecting it, either - trying to “preconfigure” something when your theory is too damn orthodox to even allow you to understand what “preconfiguring” should actually look like is a pretty obvious sociopolitical dead-end.

They rescue(d) and support(ed) refugees, fed people all over the world, setup bail funds and so much more.

This is all great - but lots of organizations and movements are doing direct action of all kinds. Can you seriously tell me that this represents a functional political movement that would be capable of surviving and thriving if a convulsive revolution were to kick off tomorrow?

Perfectly true.

But anarchism hasn’t exactly been very productive over the last century when it comes to providing alternatives, has it?

Shouting down fascists is child’s play in comparison to their liberal cousins.

You need to make those eye-holes bigger.

Graeber is dead wrong on this. It wasn’t the antiwar movement in the US that caused “Vietnam Syndrome” - being militarily defeated by a nation the US viewed as “inferior” did.

And it also wasn’t 9/11 that overcame “Vietnam Syndrome” - the invasion of Panama and the first Gulf War did that.

If the antiwar movement in the US achieved anything, it was to provide the US military with a pretext - ie, somebody to blame - for extracting themselves from a war they had decisively lost.

Only man?

Gross.

A personal philosophy is a fine and dandy thing to have - but it’s not much of a security measure to protect against the very thing OP says they are concerned about, is it now?

Imagine encouraging members of activist groups to unilaterally POLICE the behavior of their fellow members - in an anarchist community.

Imagine being unable to bring up very real security concerns within an activist group so that the group can solve the problem in an appropriately DEMOCRATIC manner - again, in an anarchist community.

Are you TRYING to cultivate a culture of suspicion in your orgs?

Imagine turning “here, read this book”

Oh, look, it’s the standard “read my fave Beardy McDeadguy’s book” answer edgelords that are completely out of touch with the people they (purportedly) wish to liberate offers to those they assume to be too ideologically “impure” for their glorified counter-culture club they mistake for a political movement.

Do you seriously think the CNT-FAI was built this way? Or the movements in Chiappas, or Rojava?

bell hooks wrote her books to inform - not to be used as a way to purity test people because you don’t know how to democratically normalize common-sense security measures in organizations.

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?

Ask them to read some bell hooks

I don’t think putting people through a “re-education” process is going to have the results you think it will.

However, this is an important point - having certain people monopolize the security function IS a pretty dangerous security risk in itself, and it would be a far better strategy to make this a perfectly understood and non-negotiable paradigm within the group than trying to subtly psyop certain individuals who may simply be too enthusiastic for their own good.

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.