The unwashed masses dare to think that we are the elites? Clearly a result of their inadequate education…
Because projection, misinformation, disinformation, and political agendas.
yup. Amoral leadership lying to gullible supporters who want conspiracies, it’s really that simple. A base who want simplistic explanations that reinforce their prejudices. Truth doesn’t even rate.
They aren’t. Republicans lie all the time and some people are stupid enough to believe them.
Putin is also one of the world’s richest man and funds Trump.
Now that you mentioned putin, I propose we go looking for the Mexican cartel people who do the political events such as head and shoulders separations and we give them a challenge. Maybe give them a small island as a reward? 😉 Could you please bring back putin’s happy face for a chance to win Mara Lago! Or Mara Island! 🏝️🏖️. With margaritas!
Because the Democrats abandoned working class voters in the 80s and 90s to court the professional-managerial class in a pivot towards the center, and the Republicans were able to win over these disaffected blue-collar voters with resentment politics.
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Most elected Democrats had abandoned a working class message by the 90s. Jimmy Carter seems like a socialist by today’s standards, but its important to remember that at the time, he was running on a pivot towards the center and an attempt to distance the party from the New Deal. Ted Kennedy’s primary challenge was a campaign to return to their New Deal principles. Mondale and Dukakis were both moving to center as well, as the party had convinced themselves that Regan’s success meant New Deal politics seemed fiscally irresponsible.
By the time Clinton was in power, the party was essentially a center-right party by their own historical standards. Clinton and the 1993 Congress passed legislation that actively hurt the middle class while helping the managerial and financial class. His deregulation of Wall Street was a gift to investors, while his work requirements for Welfare basically killed the program. Worst of all was NAFTA, which created the largest outsourcing of manufacturing jobs in American history.
Obama at least ran on a progressive platform (which should have proved to Democrats that centrism was not a winning strategy), but he governed like another moderate. He even attempted to pass another NAFTA like trade agreement, the TPP, and Trump successfully won over blue-collar workers by promising to kill that deal. Granted, he also won them over by blaming their economic woes on immigrants, and his opposition to the deal probably had more to do with his racist desire to undermine as many achievements of the first black President as he possibly could, but the TPP would have been another nail in the coffin of American manufacturing jobs.
Anyway, point is, aside from a few progressive hold-outs, the Democrats by-and-large pivoted away from their New Deal roots towards being technocratic centrists whose policies benefit investors and white-collar workers and often hurt the working class. Meanwhile, the Republicans, whose policies are even worse for the working class, are able to create the illusion of being on their side through scapegoating and dog whistles that appeal to blue-collar workers (particularly white blue-collar workers, although not exclusively).
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Well, A) I didn’t say the Democrats had lost the working class. I said that their policies were not targeting the working class. Even this election, Kamala Harris’ stump speeches repeatedly focus on the middle class but make no mention of the working class.
And B) those overall numbers don’t factor in race or geography. The Democrats still do very strongly amongst black Americans because of the legacy of Civil Rights Act and the Republicans’ Southern Strategy, and they are much more likely to live below the poverty line, but the black population is also unevenly distributed throughout the south and in northern urban population centers. Because of the Senate’s structure and the Electoral College, winning white working class voters can be a successful path to power in the Midwest and most of the South, where blue-collar whites can deliver GOP victories. In fact, the Republicans have won white working class voters in 8 of the last 11 elections, and that support handed them the presidency in 6 of them.
That’s why the Republicans have the reputation of being for the working class, and the Democrats don’t. The Republicans are actively working to win working-class whites (and there’s some evidence that Trump is gaining ground with working class black and Latino men), while the Democrats are actively trying to win moderate white-collar voters and assuming their base of working class minority voters will turn out
In some categories, but overall Dem voters get more income. I think most wealthy donors skew Republican, which is rational. Why shouldn’t they vote for self-preservation? No one justifies to these wealthy donors that no one wants a handout.
People, regardless of their socioeconomic status, should be taxed appropriately for the resources they use. If your business is generating billions in revenue, and your net worth is multi mill+, you got a lot of benefit from the civilized order of society. That’s basically what your taxes are for. Well, that and human potential is worth investing in as that’s how we got so far here. It would be great to go further instead of boiling to death in some war torn, poverty stricken wasteland, but I digress.
Here’s some data on income by party, I can’t speak to the quality of the source: https://www.thehivelaw.com/blog/average-income-republican-vs-democrat-by-political-party/
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Democrats believe they alone should be the alternative to the Republican party. Their refusal to replace First past the post voting in the states they control is them telling us they know better then everyone else.
Aren’t you telling everyone you know better than them right now?
That being said, we have preferential voting here in Australia, and it’s Awesome. We can vote for who we want, and they still get paid if they get a minimum amount of votes.
But eventually, your votes keep filtering down until one prference is selected
The state of Maine disagrees. Dems got ranked choice to pass.
projection and propeganda, full stop.
Probably for the same kind of reason that “everyone knows” that the corporate media is a “liberal media”.
“The media is liberal!”
“Who told you that?”
“The media.”
Because it’s convenient to have bad faith actors sowing discord before any election.
Tankies (sleeper conservatives that they are) can’t rely on logic, merit or hope for a better tomorrow, so they cause as much chaos as possible to their perceived ‘enemies’. This chaos includes the encouragement of unrealistic statements and general cognitive dissonance.
My true thoughts are that they went too far and started to believe their own drivel as generations of hexbears rose and fell and shit themselves into .ml
What does this post or article have to do with “Tankies?” Did you just hop in here to badmouth them without any context? The idea that anyone who opposes Democrats is a conservative is so out of touch. You must live in a world of ghosts, probably ones wearing ushankas and singing the Internationalé. What a strange comment.
Not strange at all. Mostly the people shitting on the libs around here are “tankies” or whatever flavor gets the fascists more points. It’s simple math.
there is not and never has been any historical evidence of a red-brown alliance. Communists, even at the height and horror of Stalinist purges, were never fascist. Fascism is something different, and the urge to conflate the two just makes you seem dangerously uneducated on the subject. No, worse than that, because misunderstanding and miscommunicating the nature of fascism is actually a boon to the fascists! It is in essence no different than when Stalin intentionally mischaracterized social democracy as being “the moderate wing of fascism” and worse than actual Nazism in order to give himself political cover in the lead up to Molotov-Ribbentrop.
So when you deceive yourself and others about the nature of fascism, you are aiding the fascists. So like don’t do that.
But this still has nothing to do with the article or post, talk about living rent-free
there is not and never has been any historical evidence of a red-brown alliance.
He’s not saying there’s a red-brown alliance. He’s saying all these supposed reds are actually browns, or useful idiots.
Apologies for the long post that largely agrees with what you had to say :p To give some background to the uniniated, the theory of ‘Social Facism’ as described gives a historical perspective into so-called ‘red-brown unity’ leading up until WW2.
(anti communist parties described Stalinists as fascist) […] led to mutual hostility between social democrats and communists, which were additionally intensified in 1929 when Berlin’s police, then under control of the SPD (socdem) government, shot down communist workers demonstrating on May Day in what became called Blutmai (Bloody May). That and the repressive legislation against the communists that followed served as further evidence to communists that social democrats were indeed “social fascists”.
The idea of social fascism, that social democrats are “objectively the moderate wing of fascism” as Stalin put it, intensified by SocDem authoritarian anti-left policies, lead to even greater hostility from the Communists against the Liberals than the Nazi’s themselves at the time.
In 1929, the KPD’s paramilitary organisation, the Roter Frontkämpferbund (“Alliance of Red Front-Fighters”), was banned as extremist by the governing social democrats. A KPD resolution described the “social fascists” [social democrats] as the “main pillar of the dictatorship of Capital”. In 1930, Kurt Schumacher of the SPD accused Communists of being “red-lacquered doppelgangers of the Nazis”. In Prussia, the largest state of Germany, the KPD united with the Nazis in unsuccessful attempt to bring down the state government of SPD by means of a Landtag referendum.
So technically, there was a red-brown (Communist-Nazi) alliance within Prussia in order to take down the SocDems, the Comms were obviously more ideologically aligned with socdems but felt they were the main thing preventing progress and thus wanted to speed up their demise.
We all know how collaborating with the Nazi’s turned out:
After Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party came to power in Germany, the KPD was outlawed and thousands of its members were arrested, including Thälmann. Those events made the Comintern do a complete turn on the question of alliance with social democrats and the theory of social fascism was abandoned. At the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935, Georgi Dimitrov outlined the new policy of the popular front in his address “For the Unity of the Working Class Against Fascism”. This popular front […] The American historian Theodore Draper argued that “the so-called theory of social fascism and the practice based on it constituted one of the chief factors contributing to the victory of German fascism in January 1933”.
It turns out that by the communists temporarily aligning against liberals with the fascists in what today would probably be known as ‘accelerationism’, we headed from social democracy to concentration camps in 10 years.
And as you say, fascism is typically more obvious:
Leon Trotsky argued against the accusations of “social fascism”. In the March 1932 Bulletin of the Opposition, he declared: “Should fascism come to power, it will ride over your skulls and spines like a terrific tank. […] And only a fighting unity with the Social Democratic workers can bring victory”.
And while there are elements of logic to such a conclusion of ‘social fascism’ especially when today you have every ‘social democrat’ or ‘liberal’ capitaluting heavily rightwards and forming alliances with the far-right (France etc.) BUT As you say, and as history has shown, muddying the waters about the true nature of fascism pulls wool over the eyes of those with potential to affect change and prevent the rise true fascism. Which is growing every day.
Karl Popper argued that some radical parties of the era welcomed or turned a blind eye to the weakening of democracy, or saw a dictatorship as a temporary stepping stone to a revolution. quote from Popper “[Communists] even hoped that a totalitarian dictatorship in Central Europe would speed up matters […] Accordingly, the Communists did not fight when the fascists seized power. (Nobody expected the Social Democrats to fight). For the Communists were sure that the proletarian revolution was overdue and that the fascist interlude, necessary for its speeding up, could not last longer than a few months.”
And finally, it reeks of the unfortunate leftist ‘purity test’ behaviour which weakens unity and divides potential allies.
In 1969, the ex-communist historian Theodore Draper argued that the Communists who proposed the theory of social fascism, “were chiefly concerned with drawing a line of blood between themselves and all others to the ‘right’ of them, including the most ‘left-wing’ of the Social-Democrats.”
Anyway, when I read this theory it opened my eyes a tonne to the folly of refusing to collaborate with liberals. While I still believe liberal and center right policy, along with intense anti-left propaganda, are the reason for the rise of fascism today (overton window, ratcheting effect, disillusionment with electoral politics due to ineffective and oppressive governance that only benefits the wealthy).
Despite this by ostracising and refusing to collaborate with liberals we shoot ourselves in the foot by being so obsessed with purity that we reject reality. Perfect is the enemy of good. All progress is good provided it takes us along the right path and does not cut off the path to something greater.
I love this so much.
I didn’t really have the time or energy to go into the supporting logic, for as you’ve just demonstrated its a very involved argument that involves a lot of oft ignored history of the period after the crushing defeat of the German working class uprising (1923, '24) but before the Nazis took power in the wake of the Reichstag fire ('33, '34). Which honestly I’m not great on anyway, I appreciate your insight, slight factual correction that just makes the point even more urgently, and any book recommendations!
So while we are providing clarification and context to the uninitiated, I dug out Trotsky’s definition of fascism from 1932 since we are being so adamant about properly defining it:
At the moment that the “normal” police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium – the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie [the small business owners basically MAGAs], and bands of the declassed and demoralized lumpenproletariat [working poor who are so exploited and disillusioned they defy their own class interests]; all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy. […] And the fascist agency, by utilizing the petty bourgeoisie as a battering ram, by overwhelming all obstacles in its path, does a thorough job. […] When a state turns fascist, it doesn’t only mean that the forms and methods of government are changed […] but it means, primarily and above all, that the workers’ organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat.
In my opinion, wrt building coalition between liberals and communists, there tends to be a real failure by all parties, Marxist communists and liberals alike, to orient the alienated individual within the class or ideological milieu. Liberals can really only see the alienated individual; whereas commies, who claim to be materialists, can view the class/ideological superstructure, or sometimes reluctantly the individual, but almost never both at the same time. Mfs never read/don’t understand Theses on Feuerbach and it shows.
Which is to say liberalism and communism can’t really be allies, but individual liberals, who we might call progressives, more concerned with rights and human emancipation than preserving private property, can be won over to the demands of class struggle, especially as the conditions of struggle introduce sharp contradictions into their lives and the lives of the people around them. At this point the demands of their class outweigh the explanations furnished by their ideology and alliances can be forged between members of the fractured liberal or social democratic workers, and the communist/socialists who (hopefully) have prepared the field of struggle for the intensifying conflict.
Tldr: noone has a monopoly on being insufferable and maybe we could try not demonizing each other for like 15 seconds and see each other as rational people doing our best, reacting to rapidly changing conditions, that will result in pretty serious lose/lose final consequences for libs and commies alike if we can’t resist the actual fascists together.
But now I’ve been led away from the topic of the post article, proving that we are doomed to become what we most strongly condemn.
It’s really not that complicated
Excuse me? Can you give me more details about what you are trying to say?
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This would be a good example of the sort of elitist sentiment I was referencing in my other post.
One big thing Democrats do that marks them as elites is they consistently prioritize the climate over the needs of people.
People come second in their rhetoric.
Do you know what a changing climate does to the needs of the people?
I mean, obviously, natural disasters like severe weather impact the needs of the people. Look at the last two hurricanes in the US south or the wildfires out west. Death, injuries, lives disrupted, houses and businesses destroy or damaged, links in supply chains shattered.
Imagine what happens to populated areas that, hypothetically, get hit repeatedly by this for a few years. Many in Florida can’t find home insurance already. Eventually they’ll have to leave and go… where? If this happens repeatedly in poorer neighboring countries? What if sea levels actually rise and wipe out coastal cities? Massive migration, climate refugees, regional instability. It gets too hot for a good crop yield or rainfall patterns change and we get less fresh water? Food and water scarcity, death and starvation… the needs of people can’t be met.
Thr planet? It’ll likely be fine in a few million years. We won’t be.
Brain dead take
I don’t know about you, but I live in the climate.
Don’t worry, they said they will move us out of the environment.
I get what you’re trying to say, but not being killed by a tornado tends to count among the needs of the people.
But if I get taken out by a tornado I don’t have to worry about medical debt.
Well the problem really comes when instead of a tornado surprising you in the nearest Walmart parking lot late evening, it instead decides to stop by where ever you happen to be and generally just fuck everything you own. In bad cases it’ll break a bone or two just to teach you a lesson.
Good luck with recovery after that beating.
Elitism and wealth, though often linked, are not the same. The term nouveaux riche highlights this difference: it refers to those who have gained wealth but lack the cultural status of the traditional elite. One can be rich without being part of the elite, as elitism is more about attitudes of superiority tied to education or social influence than money alone.
In American politics, Democrats are often branded as elitist due to their perceived condescension towards certain demographics, such as rural communities or southern voters. Critics argue that some Democrats dismiss these regions as culturally or intellectually inferior, suggesting that rural areas offer little value or substance. This perception of elitism stems from more than just economic disparity; it reflects a cultural and ideological divide. The urban-rural schism is not simply about money, but about who holds the power to shape discourse, values, and the future of society. Such perceptions fuel populist resentment, where rural or working-class voters feel alienated or belittled by what they view as a metropolitan, highly educated, and culturally insulated elite.
You can see some of this elitism right here in the comments in fact.
Trump is the urban elitist you are referencing. Why does he get a pass from the voters from rural places?
Trump has been snubbed and the laughing stock of elite NYC society for decades.
Because democrats value egalitarianism and education. Good education is expensive. The businesspersons that have expended the most effort to offshore our jobs to the serious detriment of working-class America have had some of the most expensive and exclusive educations of all, and they are some of the wealthiest people on the planet… (conservatives fullstop here and ignore the rest: …who are also likely voting conservative). Couple that with the fact that expert (educated) advice and direction is often in direct conflict with the myopic goals and views of the uneducated. Don’t dump shit everywhere (but it’s cheap, easy, and fun to roll coal and pour used motor oil on the ground!), don’t cut down all the trees (but mah lumber is more expensive!), and maybe wear a mask (grandma was gonna die eventually anyways, at least I can bring her Covid from the Applebees take out!)
So it’s really easy for the conservatives to paint education = evil, and then of course they couple that with feel-good bullshit like “common sense” and small-town American wisdom that is completely meaningless but makes the uneducated feel smart or like they have control of their situation.
Accuse your enemies of that which you are guilty.
Because Republican voters never, ever seek evidence or utilize basic critical thinking when their hatred steeped biases are confirmed.
A sufficiently hatemongering, and therefore trusted conservative talking head could say “Kamala Harris is a secret Aids Virus in a skin suit made of harvested fetuses made human size by George Soros’ double secret reverse shrink ray!”
And you’d cue thunderous Republican voter applause with shrieks of “I FUCKING KNEW IT!”
