the ‘least bad is best by comparison’ logic is a race to the bottom with no floor. it justifies supporting any system that’s marginally less repressive than the worst possible alternative
the ‘influence their policies’ approach has a +50 year track record of the left getting played. what policy influence did the left actually extract from liberals in exchange for votes?
my approach is building organizations in my community to feed people abandoned by liberal capitalism. that’s what i see as actively undermining the system. i don’t care about the election sideshow and all the rationalizations people come up with to get people to vote for their preferred hitler.
it justifies supporting any system that’s marginally less repressive than the worst possible alternative
I suppose that depends on your definition of “supporting”. Whether the system persists doesn’t depend on my vote, if there is no realistic option to abolish it by voting, nor does not voting seem to have much of an effect. But for some people, that margin makes a world of a difference, sometimes even between life and death. Whether trans people get to piss in peace (and generally exist) or whether the ICE gets to ramp up its operations does depend on votes.
That doesn’t mean I support the system, just that I acknowledge its nuances and that I’m not throwing marginalised people under the bus just because it doesn’t fix the root cause.
what policy influence did the left actually extract from liberals in exchange for votes?
Dunno, all the labour protections and antitrust measures the fascists are rolling back? They wouldn’t need to gut them if they didn’t work anyway; they could just keep up pretenses and work on other things.
The civil rights that, by your own description, the liberals only supported to once they realised it was more popular? Again, they’re not great, but you’ll have to admit that they’re loads better than the alternative we’re seeing now.
my approach is building organizations in my community to feed people abandoned by liberal capitalism. that’s what i see as actively undermining the system.
Agreed. Building structures that show how things could be done better challenges the value of performative social measures. But that doesn’t mean you can’t also vote; these things aren’t exclusive.
i don’t care about the election sideshow and all the rationalizations people come up with to get people to vote for their preferred hitler.
The simple fact is that liberals have also enacted a lot of progressive measures over the last two centuries, whether due to their own ideals or due to leftist pressure. It’s not enough, but for many people, it’s a significant improvement anyway. To call that “their preferred hitler” is an incredibly reductive and arrogant take that reeks of privilege. It’s easy to call the election a “sideshow” if your life isn’t impacted, but that overlooks the people whose lives are.
Those people are the common ground I’m talking about. Dismissing them and anyone who cares about them as “libs” doesn’t make you a better leftist, it just makes you a worse ally.
i’m a trans woman, i have plenty of skin in this, and from where i’m standing the democrats have been actively complying with anti-trans legislation rather than fighting it. Pretty much every day there’s a new democrat ad about how they’re going to protect women’s sports.
those labour protections were concessions extracted by organized pressure, not liberal goodwill. they’re being rolled back precisely because that pressure dissipated when the left got absorbed into electoralism.
ice is what it is today because of liberals like obama and his enablers, do you really think the same people that built these structures up will dismantle them?
i do vote, just not for genocidal centrist parties and from where im standing the priviliged one is you
Maybe there’s a regional difference then? I’m passing on the synthesis of lectures I’ve been given by other transgender communists and people of color, but I don’t know where they’re based. In any case, there clearly are dems that do defend trans rights; I’m sorry that the rest are failing you.
that pressure dissipated when the left got absorbed into electoralism.
Yeah, the idea that elections alone can fix anything is bullshit and I’ll admit I took long to understand that lesson. It only really sank in after 2021, I think.
Change needs to be cemented with popular support to stick, but the pressure to change things in the first place will need to come from outside.
do you really think the same people that built these structures up will dismantle them?
No. That’s why their traditionalist leadership is so incensed at the “insurgency” of progressive candidates gaining visibility and influence in primaries: they don’t want those structures challenged, but the fact that people are electing reformers at all is a threat to their democratic legitimacy for preserving the structures. Their efforts might fail, but for now, they’re a problem to the leadership.
By contrast, the Republicans have made an explicit point of suppressing all dissent. There are no (visible) challengers, because no freedom of expression is allowed in the first place. Whatever charge of building and maintaining such structures we may bring against the Democrats, the Republicans have made things much worse. Any semi-progressive measures the Obama administration might have undertaken were rolled back, while any restrictive ones were accelerated.
The notion that both sides are equal just smudges over a lot of these distinctions. Obama wasn’t great, but this is significantly worse.
i do vote, just not for genocidal centrist parties
The idea to vote left in primaries, but vote anti-right in general elections where actual leftist chances are slim for all the reasons you’ve brought up. When one option is objectively worse in some aspects and better in none, standing on the moral high ground does nothing for the people in the valley being overrun. All they hear from the right is the propaganda “They want to take away all your shit” and all they see from us is hostility and condescension.
Don’t get me wrong, voting left is better than not voting at all, and if it’s a deeply one-sided election, it may even be more prudent. But the message “I won’t vote for the people that’ll hurt you less” sounds a lot like “I won’t protect you”. I don’t think that’s your intention, but from the conversations I’ve head, that’s the impression many get.
That’s really the core of my argument: many liberal voters don’t really want this, but don’t (yet) see the restrictions of the system and how it preserves this shit. We don’t yet have the leverage to topple the system, and with each step the fascists get to take, it’ll become harder to build that leverage.
Hence, I believe that we should adapt our messaging (not our ideals, just the way we present them) to be less hostile to the closest thing we get in terms of like-minded people. It’s not a problem of ideology, but of PR. We’re not gonna radicalise voters that perceive us as arrogant pricks, just feed into the “left and right are both bad” centrist narrative of complacency.
If we can emphasise that we (mostly) want the same goals - life, liberty, happiness - it will be easier to talk about the reasons that’s impossible right now and the measures we suggest to make it possible.
(As an aside, that’s the problem at the heart of leftist infighting: we tend to forget that we ultimately want the same thing and get hung up on fights about how to achieve it until we accuse each other of being the enemy.)
from where im standing the priviliged one is you
Point taken. Your talking points sounded a lot like the ones I’ve heard others complain about; chalking that up to privilege instead of a different perspective is my mistake. Diminishing your struggles wasn’t my intention.
Maybe there’s a regional difference then? I’m passing on the synthesis of lectures I’ve been given by other transgender communists and people of color, but I don’t know where they’re based. In any case, there clearly are dems that do defend trans rights; I’m sorry that the rest are failing you.
to give you some context, in the US there is no popular vote for presidency. my vote for president in the general has essentially zero impact. the democrats win by such a large margin that voting no confidence or for communists running 3rd party is more ‘useful’ under the reform-electoral framework than voting for the democrats. getting a party that challenges capital to a non-negligible percentage is what communists should do if the option is available.
if anything it’s the ‘blue no matter who’ browbeating which is serving to suppress left-wing dissent in the party. there are a lot of states in the country where that’s the wrong position. if democrats had anti-capitalist 3rd party challengers in safe blue states, they might actually have to be something other than diet republicans.
i would like to return to your original question:
I never understood why “libs” are so broadly hated within the leftist spheres. Pro-capitalist stances in some strains of liberalism, sure, but at least in terms of human rights, equality, rule of law and such, it feels like we should have more common ground with them than this animosity implies.
i vote for whatever progressive challengers there are in the primaries, however this year there has been a widespread pattern of democrats winning their primaries and then abandoning trans people. every day there’s a new campaign ad from democrats across the country talking about ‘protecting girls sports’. some of my comrades did a protest demanding our (progressive liberal) attorney general (top law enforcer in the state) enforce our states equal protection law against hospitals complying in advance with trump on trans healthcare. they were arrested.
the reason ‘libs’ are so broadly hated is because they serve capital and protect institutions over people. those hospitals which complied in advance with trump wield outsized political influence (spend lots of money) in liberal spaces as well as political campaigns. They already did the political calculus on abandoning us, they know can afford to lose our votes. me expressing my disgust with them is not going to move a bunch of mainstream liberals to change their blue no matter who votes.
to paraphrase malcolm X:
The white conservatives aren’t your friends either, but they at least don’t try to hide it. They are like wolves; they show their teeth in a snarl that keeps you always aware of where you stand with them. But the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to you but pretend that they are smiling. The white liberals are more dangerous than the conservatives; they lure you, and as you run from the growling wolf, you flee into the open jaws of the “smiling” fox.
re:
It’s not a problem of ideology, but of PR. We’re not gonna radicalise voters that perceive us as arrogant pricks, just feed into the “left and right are both bad” centrist narrative of complacency.
i am not going to self-censor in the name of optics and catering to people who don’t see me as human. you can call that arrogant, but i think that people with disgusting beliefs deserve scorn. i have zero faith that appearing unthreatening and compliant will ever placate them.
the ‘least bad is best by comparison’ logic is a race to the bottom with no floor. it justifies supporting any system that’s marginally less repressive than the worst possible alternative
the ‘influence their policies’ approach has a +50 year track record of the left getting played. what policy influence did the left actually extract from liberals in exchange for votes?
my approach is building organizations in my community to feed people abandoned by liberal capitalism. that’s what i see as actively undermining the system. i don’t care about the election sideshow and all the rationalizations people come up with to get people to vote for their preferred hitler.
I suppose that depends on your definition of “supporting”. Whether the system persists doesn’t depend on my vote, if there is no realistic option to abolish it by voting, nor does not voting seem to have much of an effect. But for some people, that margin makes a world of a difference, sometimes even between life and death. Whether trans people get to piss in peace (and generally exist) or whether the ICE gets to ramp up its operations does depend on votes.
That doesn’t mean I support the system, just that I acknowledge its nuances and that I’m not throwing marginalised people under the bus just because it doesn’t fix the root cause.
Dunno, all the labour protections and antitrust measures the fascists are rolling back? They wouldn’t need to gut them if they didn’t work anyway; they could just keep up pretenses and work on other things.
The civil rights that, by your own description, the liberals only supported to once they realised it was more popular? Again, they’re not great, but you’ll have to admit that they’re loads better than the alternative we’re seeing now.
Agreed. Building structures that show how things could be done better challenges the value of performative social measures. But that doesn’t mean you can’t also vote; these things aren’t exclusive.
The simple fact is that liberals have also enacted a lot of progressive measures over the last two centuries, whether due to their own ideals or due to leftist pressure. It’s not enough, but for many people, it’s a significant improvement anyway. To call that “their preferred hitler” is an incredibly reductive and arrogant take that reeks of privilege. It’s easy to call the election a “sideshow” if your life isn’t impacted, but that overlooks the people whose lives are.
Those people are the common ground I’m talking about. Dismissing them and anyone who cares about them as “libs” doesn’t make you a better leftist, it just makes you a worse ally.
i’m a trans woman, i have plenty of skin in this, and from where i’m standing the democrats have been actively complying with anti-trans legislation rather than fighting it. Pretty much every day there’s a new democrat ad about how they’re going to protect women’s sports.
those labour protections were concessions extracted by organized pressure, not liberal goodwill. they’re being rolled back precisely because that pressure dissipated when the left got absorbed into electoralism.
ice is what it is today because of liberals like obama and his enablers, do you really think the same people that built these structures up will dismantle them?
i do vote, just not for genocidal centrist parties and from where im standing the priviliged one is you
Maybe there’s a regional difference then? I’m passing on the synthesis of lectures I’ve been given by other transgender communists and people of color, but I don’t know where they’re based. In any case, there clearly are dems that do defend trans rights; I’m sorry that the rest are failing you.
Yeah, the idea that elections alone can fix anything is bullshit and I’ll admit I took long to understand that lesson. It only really sank in after 2021, I think.
Change needs to be cemented with popular support to stick, but the pressure to change things in the first place will need to come from outside.
No. That’s why their traditionalist leadership is so incensed at the “insurgency” of progressive candidates gaining visibility and influence in primaries: they don’t want those structures challenged, but the fact that people are electing reformers at all is a threat to their democratic legitimacy for preserving the structures. Their efforts might fail, but for now, they’re a problem to the leadership.
By contrast, the Republicans have made an explicit point of suppressing all dissent. There are no (visible) challengers, because no freedom of expression is allowed in the first place. Whatever charge of building and maintaining such structures we may bring against the Democrats, the Republicans have made things much worse. Any semi-progressive measures the Obama administration might have undertaken were rolled back, while any restrictive ones were accelerated.
The notion that both sides are equal just smudges over a lot of these distinctions. Obama wasn’t great, but this is significantly worse.
The idea to vote left in primaries, but vote anti-right in general elections where actual leftist chances are slim for all the reasons you’ve brought up. When one option is objectively worse in some aspects and better in none, standing on the moral high ground does nothing for the people in the valley being overrun. All they hear from the right is the propaganda “They want to take away all your shit” and all they see from us is hostility and condescension.
Don’t get me wrong, voting left is better than not voting at all, and if it’s a deeply one-sided election, it may even be more prudent. But the message “I won’t vote for the people that’ll hurt you less” sounds a lot like “I won’t protect you”. I don’t think that’s your intention, but from the conversations I’ve head, that’s the impression many get.
That’s really the core of my argument: many liberal voters don’t really want this, but don’t (yet) see the restrictions of the system and how it preserves this shit. We don’t yet have the leverage to topple the system, and with each step the fascists get to take, it’ll become harder to build that leverage.
Hence, I believe that we should adapt our messaging (not our ideals, just the way we present them) to be less hostile to the closest thing we get in terms of like-minded people. It’s not a problem of ideology, but of PR. We’re not gonna radicalise voters that perceive us as arrogant pricks, just feed into the “left and right are both bad” centrist narrative of complacency.
If we can emphasise that we (mostly) want the same goals - life, liberty, happiness - it will be easier to talk about the reasons that’s impossible right now and the measures we suggest to make it possible.
(As an aside, that’s the problem at the heart of leftist infighting: we tend to forget that we ultimately want the same thing and get hung up on fights about how to achieve it until we accuse each other of being the enemy.)
Point taken. Your talking points sounded a lot like the ones I’ve heard others complain about; chalking that up to privilege instead of a different perspective is my mistake. Diminishing your struggles wasn’t my intention.
to give you some context, in the US there is no popular vote for presidency. my vote for president in the general has essentially zero impact. the democrats win by such a large margin that voting no confidence or for communists running 3rd party is more ‘useful’ under the reform-electoral framework than voting for the democrats. getting a party that challenges capital to a non-negligible percentage is what communists should do if the option is available.
if anything it’s the ‘blue no matter who’ browbeating which is serving to suppress left-wing dissent in the party. there are a lot of states in the country where that’s the wrong position. if democrats had anti-capitalist 3rd party challengers in safe blue states, they might actually have to be something other than diet republicans.
i would like to return to your original question:
i vote for whatever progressive challengers there are in the primaries, however this year there has been a widespread pattern of democrats winning their primaries and then abandoning trans people. every day there’s a new campaign ad from democrats across the country talking about ‘protecting girls sports’. some of my comrades did a protest demanding our (progressive liberal) attorney general (top law enforcer in the state) enforce our states equal protection law against hospitals complying in advance with trump on trans healthcare. they were arrested.
the reason ‘libs’ are so broadly hated is because they serve capital and protect institutions over people. those hospitals which complied in advance with trump wield outsized political influence (spend lots of money) in liberal spaces as well as political campaigns. They already did the political calculus on abandoning us, they know can afford to lose our votes. me expressing my disgust with them is not going to move a bunch of mainstream liberals to change their blue no matter who votes.
to paraphrase malcolm X:
re:
i am not going to self-censor in the name of optics and catering to people who don’t see me as human. you can call that arrogant, but i think that people with disgusting beliefs deserve scorn. i have zero faith that appearing unthreatening and compliant will ever placate them.