Well, how about we just try it first instead of resorting to instant armed combat against our own government or a civil war?
you’re right. one more election and we fix climate change, ranpant exploitation and discrimination! We just have to vote properly.
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sorry.
Sure thing, would another hundred years suffice or would that still be too early to tell?
woah only a century? cool your jets extremist
Liberals have tried and failed to meaningfully improve their situations via voting for centuries. Without analyzing which class is in control of the state, voting will always be extremely weak.
We’ve been trying for a long time? How long should we wait? Do they need to officially declare fascism?
instant
Martin Luther King, Jr. 1963: https://letterfromjail.com/
Because they’re already drawing weapons and we’ve been “trying” so hard we elected him twice. You think this will change? You think the Dems will wave a wand and institute voting reform and healthcare or increase wages or improve the living conditions?
Actually my hope is that when this is over people in the MAGA movement will finally wake up and see how much of their own lives have been destroyed by what this ass clown did to them and we as a country can agree to NEVER allow it to happen again and that we can finally go back to letting the adults govern the country instead of a man who would have been a used car salesman had his daddy not given him everything he has.
after germany lost in ww2 only 300 people stood in front of nuremberg.
every fascist that survived just used their position of power and recognition and continued staying in politics. they didn’t change their minds, only the approach.
fascism wasn’t suddenly eradicated. the generations they put into this world were taught and raised by these fascists in hiding.
MAGA fucks won’t change their minds. They’ll just change the approach.
and honestly: as a non-american it doesn’t matter if trump or a dem are in power. they’ll continue murdering people in their interest.
As an American who’s lived in various countries and can’t stand his home country, I agree with you 100%.
Trump isn’t the problem, he’s a symptom of the problem. The US Empire has never served the working classes, no president has.
when this is over […] we can finally go back
(also the ‘clean energy’ he’s talking about is fracking 🥰 )
If we just keep changing the bandages and apply no antibiotics, surely the infection will just give up
Is Lemmy just full of hateful ass people or something? In what world does saying we shouldn’t start an armed rebellion worthy of all the downvotes? Y’all are fucking wild.
Lemmy is full of leftists, the vast majority of which understand that electoralism and reformism are losing strategies and that revolution is generally necessary.
your commitment to the bit is truly laudable 🤣
how about we just try it first
😭
lol, is this bait?
how many decades have you been trying for and failing?
Instant? My guy where do you draw the line?
Not sure if you have noticed, but your government has already started the armed combat against the people
Yes but my 12 gauge shotgun and my .22 riffle and my .45 handgun seem to be a tad lopsided against their tanks and drones and guided missiles so sorry if I’m not ready to pounce just yet.
Read up on the Viet Cong or Taliban and stop making excuses
Totally valid. You’re right. Under those conditions, voting will definitely work. But only if you shame people on the Internet to vote the correct way.
Poe’s law has got me good this time. Not sure if youre sarcastic or not lol.
Full on sarcastic
You can’t complain about the quality of your guns in the US. If I pissed in a circle I’d hit six gun stores. $300 and an hour later, I’d have a better weapon than any of the insurgent groups that beat the US military.
riffle
Gotta be a bit…
The .45 has me
. That’s specifically the cartridge that people buy when they want to say a 9mm is too weak for whatever combat scenario they have in mind. Some guy near me has a bumper sticker that says “.45 ACP: it’s like 9mm for men”. You can’t be both a .45 ACP chud and a smol bean.I’m a .45 ACP chud but I also recognize that it’s not gonna do much against any kind of armored target. There are dozens of us
The whole comment reads like someone whose Facebook picture is them in the driver seat of their truck wearing Oakley sunglasses and a baseball hat with an eagle on it.
Well, how about we just try it first
Nobody in the United States has ever tried to vote against a fascist dictator?
instant armed combat
Who do you think is actually organized an armed uprising against Trump? How do you think they’re doing it “instantly”?
Untrue I tried three times to vote against a fascist dictator but over half of my fellow Americans are morons who overrode my vote two out of the three times. But the key here is that voting worked one of those times and no matter how much kicking and screaming and bitching and moaning may have happened his butt was kicked off the WH lawn on Inauguration Day so clearly it does work.
You mean Biden who believes we would have to create Israel if it didn’t exist, who continued the war drive, who delivered weapons and training to genocidaires, who put infants in solitary confinement at the border, who was instrumental in ensuring that the prisons were full of black people who could be used as slave labor, who pardoned the judge who took bribes in exchange for sentencing 8 year old to juvenile detention for jaywalking, who failed to do anything meaningful to stop Trump, who failed to do anything meaningful to limit the power of the executive so it couldn’t be abused, who failed to do anything to stop fascism at all?
Those 4 years where voting a different guy in didn’t do literally anything to stop fascism in the least?
Sure. Do it again. I am sure continuing to not stop fascism is exactly how we stop fascism
And then we got another genocidal imperialist, worker protections continued to erode, and imperialism persisted.
I think the leftist point being made isn’t that any particular election has no effect. Of course elections have effects. At the very least they provide legitimacy. I think the point is that even though it worked to unseat Trump in 2020, the election did not halt the long term processes leading us towards fascism. It slowed them down a bit but didn’t reverse trend. Reason being that the owner class kept expanding their wealth and therefore control over the entire system. I think leftist memes about elections are often poorly communicated or understood, which isn’t ideal, but then it’s …memes.
I take this meme to also point out that a fascist could just not follow elections, or call them off entirely. Adolf Hitler, the man in the image, called of elections under guise of security. Yeah, you vote against 'em, but then they refuse to leave.
“BannedVoice” pointed out that this didn’t happen in 2020, but I’d point out that then Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, as well as a fair number of Republican politicians, were what you’d call “Tea Party” or neoconservative. Kevin McCarthy, as well as just about every one of these “moderate” Republicans, have been chased out of the party, largely because of their refusal to bow to MAGA orders. The Republican Party of 2020 is not the Republican Party we have now. It’s loyalists all the way through. Remember what happened with the Epstein files?
That’s important context for what happened in 2020.
Broadly, if one believes that elections are a tool that should be leveraged, it’s crucial to understand that elections are not enough, Never have been. Elections are but a small part of the democratic system. All the other cogs - campaigns, fundraising, at all levels of government, for this or that office, within parties, all of that matters immensely. The people you mention who acted as a bulwark against the fascists were a product of that system. Who the choices are come election time is the product of that. Whether it’s a Turd Sandwich v. Giant Douche. Or whether it’s Mamdani v. Cuomo.
over half of my fellow Americans are morons who overrode my vote
“How about we try voting”
“This doesn’t count, I voted but then other people voted the opposite way”
Maybe the problem is that people on Lemmy don’t understand what an election is.
But the key here is that voting worked one of those times
Oh yeah. Famously, all the fascism in America stopped existing on January 6th, 2021.
That’s why everyone was at the US Capital celebrating.
Dont forget the rigged machines in swing states thanks to Elon.
how white liberals think fascism works
Chad voting in a UN resolution condemning Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza
you’re finished
Official portrait of Benjamin Netanyahu
no, pls
Tfw when you vote for the lesser evil and they proceed to appoint Hitler as cancellor.
Okay analysis. Awful solutions. All that just to say what someone far smarter than him had already said: political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Fascists seize state power once they believe they have enough political power (ie the means of dispensing organized violence through a military or paramilitary formation). They are only stopped at the local level by antifascists willing to get their hands dirty, on the national level by the state military that refuses to go along, and on the global level by state actors.
Once they win elections, it’s already too late.
Hey what do you think stops them from winning that first election?
🤫
The upside-down corpse of Mussolini might disagree with that
Surely, having the largest military in human history is going to help us, right?
Thanks for sharing. It’s not bad, except for the lack of class analysis. Assuming the Democrats are principled and will always be opposed to fascism, is sadly wrong. They are exactly like those conservatives who always prefer fascism to socialism.
Yeah, a lot of the historical references and descriptions were good, but then when it got to the present day, essentially the “what is to be done” section, it just flopped hard. Paraphrasing: “a coalition of blue states can just ignore the federal government and do their own thing, boom, fascism defeated.” It’s not actually discussing anything about how fascism can actually be defeated even though the whole first half of it sounds like it’s supposed to be a set up to do just that.
Instead it descends into ridiculous cringe:
California could request Canadian peacekeepers for “election security.” New York could invite European observers for “financial transparency.” Make it embarrassing. Make America’s collapse visible to the world. Force the international community to pick sides.
This is your solution? That’s how fascism is defeated? Any respect I may have built up for the author when they were accurately talking about how fascists slither their way into power using the liberal* political apparatus was nullified by this point.
*(even though the author always insisted on calling the fascist appeasers “conservative” at every turn rather than using the more appropriate word “liberal”)Every solution is just another form of “blue states should just pretend there is no federal government,” even the last one which is titled “International Intervention” but that just means making all the other totally-not-fascist liberal “democracies” play ball with the new blue coalition instead of the liberal democracy that elected Trump.
No, the UN can’t invade America. But they can isolate it. Sanctions work. Ask Russia.
Ask Russia? The country whose economy improved after “the mother of all sanctions” were imposed on it? Russia, who is indisputably winning the conflict that those sanctions were supposed to stop, all while Russia’s economic ties with other enemies of the US have grown and blossomed? How about asking Cuba if sanctions work. Yeah, they work to starve the population and cause civilian immiseration and death, they don’t and never have worked to depose rulers. This doofus has no fucking clue what they’re talking about.
And even with the historical stuff, it left a big fucking gaping hole where the people and organizations that DID successfully fight fascism should have been. But nope, not even a mention. Clearly Christopher didn’t want to admit that communism IS the cure to fascism, theoretically and in practice, historically and right now. This essay is just more cringe liberal drivel.
Funny, posting said article on a nazi platform.
Write more non-Nazi stuff and it will stop being a Nazi platform.
The owner of the site is a fucking nazi so there no making it un nazi. Like keeping X cause you think you can change it from a white supremacist site.
Like keeping X cause you think you can change it from a white supremacist site.
I still lurk on Twitter. Calling it a “white supremacist site” is just… Silly. The whole point of social media is that it’s the users who create content.
I’m seeing a lot of right-wing fundamentalists being clapped by sane people. The only time I see any nazi/fascist/supremacist content is when it’s getting ratio’d or just ridiculed.
I’m not saying this content isn’t there, but I’m saying there’s still a lot of people fighting the good fight. Packing up your toys and going home is not really a method for anything other than getting completely marginalised, IMO.
Race baiting to distract from the class war?
what about classbaiting?
Why is this type of privileged exclusionary 1 dimension opinion even upvoted?
There are multiple problems that matter at any given time.
Saying that racism is a distraction ignores the very real people who are being harmed right now because they aren’t you, and thus you don’t care about them. “I got mine” but about other issues.
Some take for a socialist to have really…
Some take for a socialist to have really…
I wouldn’t assume they are one.
I mean their post history seems to match, as does their presence here and comment.
I just think some people only believe in ideas insofar as they are in the groups that benefit from said policies.
Adding white into this meme doesn’t acknowledge or address any problems, it just serves to divide people.
Moron
Lemmy libs next year: “VOTE FOR BLUEMAGA EVERYONE”
bro just one more vote bro, bro I swear just one more vote and it’ll fix democracy bro
Now’s not the time for that we can’t afford four years of Vance. We need to hold our noses and vote for Skeletor so we can stop the spread, then focus on progressive issues
Skeletor, we want to vote for you so Vance doesn’t win, but stop supporting Hordak destroying Eternia
Skeletor: Hordak has a right to defend himself
Can’t wait for the next biggest elections of our lifetime between JD Vance and Gavin newsome 😂 yikes
The total lack of show-up from the majority of the left to primaries and the general election is precisely why fascists are in power today.
You speak just like a privileged white psuedo-leftist who lives in relative peace while minorities have the largest crackdown on them since the start of the War on Drugs.
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That’s the least of bourgeois democracy’s problems, and such suffrage gatekeeping was banned for very good reasons.
Previously.Hmmm yes let’s give the bourgeois state further incentive to deprive the people it doesn’t like of education
IQ is pretty much a bullshit measure that largely correllates to education and economic standing than anything else. There isn’t some grand variance in intelligence, actually, what’s at play is competing class interests and socioeconomic factors determining diet and access to education.
So if everybody is well-fed and educated, we could use it to let only the most intelligent people vote?
“Most intelligent” is a moving target, but by feeding and educating everyone people will in general have better skills for making good decisions, yes.
In the current style of democracy elections can be bought by playing ads to people and by making empty promises until there is a majority.
If we need intelligence to make good decisions, but the majority is neither fed well nor educated well, people are trapped.
Do you have an idea how things can be changed?
Organizing in working class parties directly, filling in the gaps in food and education, and directly opposing the system. Marxism-Leninism.
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IQ is not a statistic.
IQ is generally bullshit. It tests how well people can take specific tests, it doesn’t correspond to actual intelligence, and people are far closer in that regard than they like to imagine.
the iq test is indeed BS, and was built on hatefulness and eugenics - is there an alternative to the iq test? i was thinking of the sat.
IQ isn’t a statistic.
Sure, it’s a tested metric, I misspoke. That doesn’t change that IQ is bullshit.
Never argued it isn’t bullshit…
Don’t see what the problem is, then.
Every dictator came to power through elections. Every dictator then manipulates or abolishes the next election so as not to lose power. No dictator has ever lost an election. There are “honest” exceptions but they were soft dictators. Fascism is just a special kind of dictatorship.
Mamdani just started manufacturing consent for the regime changes in Cuba and Venezuela. 😂
three weeks ago
I mean this isn’t a “white lib” thing. Most people don’t want political violence or related.
except for all the white conservatives that stormed the Capitol on Jan 6th, 2021; commit acts of violence against Democrat politicians; make reports and call “wellness checks” on others; commit or support police brutality; defend ICE abductions and trafficking…
There’s over 200,000,000 white citizens. A few hundred doing dumb shit isn’t the entire group. Would you apply this way of thinking to other groups of people?
Nope and I’m not applying it to “white citizens”; just “conservatives”. I’m saying to the "white lib"s and others that the violence is already here.
Congratulations
It’s only white lib thing, if you’re a racist
And yet political violence surrounds us. How do you propose voting will stop it? I’ve personally seen that fail for decades now.
“Surrounds us” maybe if you’re chronically online
Um actually you’re disconnected from the world by paying attention to outside
All those online ICE raids?
You ever fuckin’ seen a homeless person? How about the miles and miles of tents along stretches of highways just outside the cities? That’s one of many other forms of political violence. Remember how we stopped counting the death toll from Covid and were all told to get back to work? You know how many “incarcerated” “prisoners” we have doing slave labor? GTFO with your “have to be chronically online to see any political violence” bullshit. You’re fucking steeped in it but you’re too blind to see even what’s right in front of you, even if it’s a boot your tongue is apparently stuck to.
I can log out right now and go downtown to see tent cities full of starving, sick people. You only don’t perceive that as political violence because you’ve been trained to think poverty isn’t political.
Frequent airstrikes on civilians in Gaza even since the ‘ceasefire’, frequent attacks on likely fishermen/migrants in the Caribbean, strikes on Yemen and Iran within the last few months, Ukraine war, Cambodia-Thailand conflict, ISIS kidnapping in Nigeria less than two weeks ago, attempted arson on a train in Chicago last month, ongoing Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict, Bombing in Delhi last month, I can go on
Does ‘chronically online’ just mean not wilfully ignorant?
US foreign policy is a different topic than domestic. US foreign policy has always been vile.
The gulf between the wealthy class and the rest of the country has reached the critical point where those with power see all of us as “foreign”. The imperialism is turning inwards.
The wealthy don’t even live in the same world we do, nevermind nation.
“killing brown people isn’t violence”
Both here and on my HB main account, I notice you have a way of cutting to the core of liberal bullshit that I really appreciate
Ok? the topic of this thread is US policy in general
US foreign policy has always been vile.
Agreed and you think you’ll change it via voting?
Also ICE raids, violent union busting, enforcement of private property keeping hundreds of thousands homeless and millions more on the brink. But sure we’re just “chronically online” God I hate libs.
voting is actually the way to go, and would probably help get fascism out of the government
Cool song you linked to, but if you think its message is pro-voting, and if you actually think doing so “would probably help get fascism out of the government” then you are painfully naive. It won’t do that. It has never worked and it never will, not under capitalism (“liberal democracy”) and this fact is baked into it. At best, it’s a harmless waste of time. But there is valid argument to be made that the act of voting, useless as it may be to affect positive change let alone oust fascism, is still endorsing the bourgeois dictatorship, still a kind of tacit approval validating the very system that has allowed fascism to slide easily into power.
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the lyrics said “you might vote for someone else, and i might wanna change your mind, so vote and don’t today” and “vote and know it might NOT make a difference; you might see the contradiction, but they’re NOT talking to you”. thank frick for making linking stuff easier here.
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if voting CAN’T help, then a revolution would be the next method. oh and do you think indirect voting, and a one-party system (or multiple like-minded parties under a coalition like china or the dprk) is better?
- And… you think that is espousing a pro-voting message? k.
- Yes, revolution is necessary to defeat fascism.
and 3. (since your 2 contained multiple points) oh, and do you think what we have in the US (and other bourgeois dictatorships) isn’t a one-party system?
Yes, in genuine democracy where the means of production are not wholly owned by capitalists. You really need to learn what the difference between a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and a dictatorship of the proletariat is. China is far from perfect but the voice of the populace is vastly more powerful there and actually does steer the state. Considering the topic here was “voting out fascism” one obvious thing to note is that you won’t find China or the DPRK ever led by actual straight up fascists as is the case openly right now in the US.
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i think the message for that song is “you can vote, but you may NOT be sure about who you voted”
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i assume by “genuine democracy”, you mean like-minded political parties in a coalition (or lack thereof). oh and the us is a two-party system that silences most third parties
- The message of the song, confirmed by the lyrics you pasted, is the title itself. Vote… or don’t (because it doesn’t matter).
- It has nothing to do with “like-mindedness” it has everything to do with class interest. I thought you said you were a socialist. Do you know literally anything about Marxism? oh and no, the supposed “two” parties in the US both represent the same ruling class, you know, the fuckers that own the means of production under capitalism. You can call it “two” if you want, but you’re only displaying your ignorance to the fact that it’s just theater and both are two cogs in the same machine working in tandem to further the interests of the same class. Ever hear of the ratchet effect? Good cop/bad cop routine? Insert famous quote here:
“The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.”
- Julius Nyerere
-
- And… you think that is espousing a pro-voting message? k.
-
Fascism litteraly wins through democracy so…well we can stop it prematurely, but once it’s In power it won’t let itself to be voted out
maybe a revolution can work if NOT voting
Just you wait another few more years and I’m gonna vote so hard it’ll make your head spin
Some of the dumber white libs I’ve talked to honestly believe 51% of American voters voted for Trump 🤣
They don’t know what voting does or how it works but they’re sure it’s the only reasonable solution!
It’s funny how almost 20 million people less than in 2020 voted this time around (most of the missing voters being on the dem side too); people are beginning to realize we don’t really have a say
And it seems like a lot of Americans don’t understand FPTP or the Electoral College, or even the amount of voter suppression there is. Your vote only counts (and only maybe) if you live in a swing state. The votes in rural areas count for way more than in urban ones but those are already captured by R. Let’s not even get into the other branches of government:
Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability.
- James Madison
You should definitely vote but it shouldn’t be the only thing you do.
No
Yes. Voting is useful for showing solidarity with the movement and demonstrating how the current system doesn’t work. Just because it isn’t capable of causing any meaningful change doesn’t mean it’s useless.
Just because it isn’t capable of causing any meaningful change doesn’t mean it’s useless.
I see a lot of folks on .ml and .hexbear not understand this part. It’s like all change must be meaningful, and if it’s not then it’s not worth our time.
Lenin taught us that we need to build within the system of the masses in order to tip them over, not overturn it outright. There is a specific time and place for when change is the most impactful
Lenin’s position on integrating with the masses meant running working class parties in opposition to establishment parties, ie voting PSL over DNC. The vanguard’s task is to become a party that the working class puts their full support behind, so that when revolution does happen, the vanguard can serve as the spearpoint to direct the masses in one unified direction and crush the capitalist state, replacing it with a socialist one.
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I don’t know why you think you own the place when this is their Lemmy instance, while you’re a guest here.
I dont own the place. But neither does anyone in this comment thread, no one here is a mod on memes.ml, not that I should be expto know who owns what on a public forum
Badjacketing is bad. Don’t do that.
You’re right, I dont know that they are a psyop. I do, however, know that the position of ‘voting is not worthwhile if you are a leftist’ that they are taking above is the same position that many psyops would like to have in the minds of leftists. Put more simply, what might they have said differently if they were a psyop? Nothing, I presume.
It is better to root out psyop talking points that diminish our ability to form a collective voice, than it is to allow foolish notions like ‘dont vote’ to continue in our spaces.
Voting doesn’t do much, though. I support voting for working class orgs like PSL, but not for the DNC or GOP, and I know it’s very unlikley that PSL will win electorally. Leftists understand that the path to change is via organizing, not by supporting orgs that work against our interests, and we know we can’t magically turn a capitalist org into a proletarian one by wishcasting.
If you want to argue against that, then do so, don’t badjacket.
Im literally just telling folks to not engage in the same behavior that the fascists hope we engage in.
Fascists don’t care if we vote, what they care about is if we organize. Now that the spoils of imperialism are drying up, fascism is rising, and the super-exploitation we inflict on the global south is turning more inward. What fascists are scared of is working class organizing and building actual power.
- I don’t care what fascists hope.
- If fascists say the sky is blue, does that make it a “fascist talking point,” and therefore isn’t blue? That’s just not how it works.
