I have an out-of-state ID because it was a hassle to get it updated after I moved, and when I went to vote (in Illinois), they required me to provide proof of residence, I forget exactly but lika a copy of my lease or utility bills - pretty much the same documents you’d use to need to show to get an ID in the first place. You still have to prove you are who you say you are.

Vietnam. Decent enough government and standard of living, and they whooped America’s ass so bad that it’d be political suicide to go back there. I mean, what kind of timeline would we have to be on for someone to be stupid enough to… hmm.

Considering that fucking Greenland is caught up in it now, idk that anywhere is safe.

That’s just contradiction. An argument’s a collective series of statements to establish a definite proposition. Contradiction’s just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says.

Point me to anyone on Lemmy supporting Trump or denying his role in the genocide and I promise I’ll give them an earful. But otherwise it would be like randomly screaming, “MURDERING PUPPIES IS BAD!” like chill, pretty sure we’re all on the same page about that. The difference is that there’s a bunch of people on here who think murdering puppies is fine if the person doing it has a (D) next to their name.

The hyper-sexuality and the prudishness are two sides of the same coin. Repressing things doesn’t make them go away, it just means it’ll be expressed in weirder, less controlled ways. Additionally, there’s some people who embrace hyper-sexuality as a reaction against the prudishness imposed by Christianity - but at the same time, it’s possible to still have certain brainworms instilled by Christianity among those who consciously reject it.

Bad for artists, but for the environment, low quality, low effort, and the most annoying people in the world love it.

Carter started implementing the neoliberal economic policies that Reagan would take further, he was the one who started tearing up the New Deal and abandoning unions and the working class. I’d probably say JFK was the last defensible president, but hell, I’d take Nixon over Carter. There’s a reason he lost in a such a landslide.

traditionally disenfranchised people

This is the most important group. A third of the population doesn’t vote. You have to give them something worth voting for, and being “not Trump” or “the party of reason” doesn’t cut it.

It’s a myth that independent is the same as moderate. This group includes people who are fed up with the establishment and the status quo, and it also includes low-information voters who vote based on vibes. You wanna engage them, you gotta have energy, you gotta have people who are enthusiastic to vote for someone and willing to promote them organically. Giving them more of the same thing we’ve had for decades isn’t going to reach disengaged voters, by definition, if it did, they wouldn’t be disengaged. It’s also not going to do anything to peel off Republicans, if you actually talk with them, they hate generic Democrats more than just about anything, and Clinton/Biden/Kamala had extremely low crossover appeal, despite putting substantial effort into it because they all read as generic democrats.

I have die hard Republican family members who the only democrat they ever had a nice thing to say about was Bernie Sanders, and the worst criticism of him they had is that “he’s not actually as different from the rest of the democrats as he puts on.” These people regard Clinton/Biden/Kamala as virtually demons. Why? Because for a lot of people, it’s not just about right or left, it’s also about “establishment vs outsider” and “fighter vs compromiser” and things like that.

You put a far-left candidate out there making fire and brimstone speeches about how billionaires are fucking you and we’re going transform the economy to work for ordinary people, someone who’s unapologetic and not afraid to pick fights with both parties’ establishment, that’s going to excite people, it’s gonna offer something new, it’s gonna cut across established cultural battle lines and bring more people into the political process. It could’ve worked with Bernie, if he’d been given a real chance, and it could work with someone similar in the future.

The thing is that this commitment to keep putting out moderate establishment centrists may not be far-left, but it’s far-Democrat. It’s far-blue tribe. The people these people appeal to were probably always going to vote Democrat regardless. Allowing left-wing policy may be more “extreme” on the left-right axis but it’s more flexible and adaptable on the other axes I mentioned. And at the same time, it would allow them to appeal to people’s direct material interests, and many left wing policies are broadly popular for that reason, even among people who end up voting Republican.

Plenty of people including virtually the entire intelligence and diplomatic corps of the western world, along with virtually everyone in Washington DC, disagrees with you.

Imagine bootlicking so hard you think it’s a bad thing to be on the other side of the exact same ghouls who lied us into the Iraq War. How can any of us live with ourselves knowing that Dick Cheney thinks we’re bad people?

But we fundamentally have to reach at least some of them, I just don’t see a way to stop what’s happening otherwise.

Republicans have never taken that approach with Democrats, they’ve taken the exact opposite, and yet somehow they got into a commanding position. Weird how that works, huh?

The reality is that the “conventional wisdom” of the Democratic party of appealing to the median voter, reaching out to “moderate Republicans” by using people like Dick Cheney just doesn’t work. No matter how rational it may appear at first glance, it’s been tried over and over again and it just doesn’t work. The reality is that voters are more complex than that, and Trumpism cannot be defeated without understanding why it worked it the first place.

Bro’s out here talking about the sodomy demon, they’re all sodomy demons if you play your cards right 😉

In addition to valuing nerds as a way to win against the Soviets, there was also a latent fear of a revolution in America that would be supported by and follow the example of the USSR, which created an understanding that the masses had to be kept placated. And if there was anything too awful about society, it would be criticized by the USSR for the sake of gaining soft power, which provided an additional incentive to fix it. Regardless of all the problems that the USSR had, a world order with competing powers (multipolarity) seems to me to be the only way of keeping the worst abuses of any power in check.

This is very true. A lot of it comes down to chauvinism and, “we’re #1.” If an American sees a problem with the US government, then they’ll conclude that it is a problem inherent to all existing, or even all possible governments. When it does something bad, the worst thing people will say is, “This is like something you’d see in [rival country].” In this way, even while criticizing it, they still reaffirm their belief in their own superiority. And if you deviate from that and point out various ways in which the country is uniquely bad, it means you just knee-jerk hate everything about the country and want it to be bad. We are thoroughly cooked.

How did we go from something like 1940s era collectivism or 1960s era leftism to the current bizarro political machine that seems to have hypnotized a large portion (if not majority) of the country?

The prevailing economic wisdom after WWII was Keynesianism, which says that the government should increase government spending when unemployment is high and decrease it when inflation is high. What happened in the 70’s and 80’s was that the economy started experiencing both high unemployment and high inflation at the same time, “shrinkflation,” which wasn’t supposed to happen according to Keynesianism, and which it had no real response to. The reason it was happening (at least from a Marxist perspective) was that the US had already developed in the ways that saw the highest returns, and there simply wasn’t as much new ground to cover - this is what’s meant by “the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.” Regardless, the government was faced with a decision of which problem to focus on between unemployment and inflation - and it chose inflation.

The phenomenon of shrinkflation started under Nixon, who attempted to fight it with price controls and taking us off the gold standard, which was perhaps the most anyone ever did. Ford had no idea what he was doing and just asked people to spend less.

And then we got Carter, and Carter does not get nearly enough hate for his role in this. Carter chose to confront inflation rather than unemployment, the real beginning of “supply side economics” that Reagan would take further. Carter’s whole deal was “restoring the dignity of the office” after Watergate and his focus was on individual morality. His message was essentially, you’re going to have less purchasing power, but it’s ok because we can seek fulfillment in other ways, outside of the economic sphere. He marked the transformation of the Democratic party away from representing the interests of labor and towards the beast that it’s become today, with it’s obsession over norms and procedure and technocracy.

The result of Carter’s messaging and policy was one of the greatest blowout losses in history against Ronald Reagan. Reagan would do all the same things as Carter, but he at least had the decency to lie about it. He focused on how much more you’d be able to afford with cheaper goods, conveniently ignoring the fact that with lower wages, purchasing power would actually decrease. However, thanks to the Democratic party completely abandoning labor and the common people, there was no real pushback against this, there was no alternative explanation or solution or criticism of the broad direction of policy. In fact, economic policy was moved out of the sphere of democratic accountability altogether by leaving it to the Federal Reserve to set interest rates. Instead, the culture war kicked off and that’s what elections would be about from then on.

Why did the Democratic party abandon unions? Because the unions like the AFL/CIO stripped themselves of power and radicalism by purging communists during the Red Scare. The Carter administration didn’t view labor vs capital in terms of the fundamental struggle of society but as just another set of competing interest groups and lobbyists, which is honestly pretty much how the unions saw themselves and wanted to be seen anyway.

So what happens when more and more important questions are taken out of the hands of the voters, who then watch conditions gradually decline? Well, the voters get mad about declining conditions - and at the same time, get dumber from not being engaged in any important questions. There’s a sense that we can just fuck around and do whatever because our actions don’t have consequences, because most of the time what we say and believe seems to have no real effect on policy anyway. Nobody gets to vote on whether or not to keep arming Israel and bombing Yemen or on whether to raise or lower interest rates or anything like that - the only thing we get to vote on is stuff like whether trans women can play sports.

Trump’s popularity is very easy to understand in that context - he is a rebellion against that declining status quo and a desperate attempt to reassert the power of elected officials over technocratic institutions. Of course, since the left has been purged and is devoid of power, this rebellion can only come from the right. A similar thing happened in Iran (which Carter also fucked up btw but that’s not important right now), where after being installed by the CIA, the shah hunted down and exterminated everyone on the left, and then conditions declined and people wanted change, only that change had to come from the right because the left was powerless. And if the American left can’t materialize and offer an alternative vision, both to Trump and, more importantly, to the failed bipartisan status quo that existed before him, then we’re headed towards the same future.

That’s the narrative, but it’s centered around middle class white women.

Source

They also purged all the communists as a show of good faith to the government (which, uh, didn’t work). Those communists were likely more prone to class solidarity as an ideological commitment and also more willing to fight with radical actions like strikes, but instead we were left with opportunistic leadership that just wanted to secure the bag for themselves, and at best the other members of the union, but had no interest in any building any kind of broad coalition or promoting equality on a societal level - that would make them sound like a Red.

What are we supposed to do, not put golf courses all over the desert?

Poor guy was probably just born on 1/4/1988 and his real name is just Ayra N Soldier. People these days just call everybody a Nazi smh /s

It’s the same tactic as the “It’s OK to be white” or “White lives matter” slogans, but more clever because it leaves enough ambiguity such that just about anything can be justified under it. It mentions children to come across as more innocent and to implicitly accuse the opposition of endangering children (also playing into LGBT scaremongering, with the Nazis using the same tropes they use today). “Think of the children!” is a common and effective propaganda line.

Saying “future” instead of “glorious future” suggests that the children wouldn’t have a future at all otherwise. That the white race is under attack and is otherwise on track to be eliminated by Jews and communists and so forth. It’s harder to justify atrocities in the name of “a glorious future” vs “a regular future” as opposed to “a regular future” vs “we are completely exterminated ourselves.”

It is, of course, bullshit, because it’s literally Nazi propaganda trying to frame them as on the “defensive,” but it is carefully and intelligently crafted propaganda. It’s important to understand the enemy and their approaches in order to better counter their movements and defeat them, they should not be underestimated.

How is it even legal to have explicitly preferential pay for people not in a union? Is there a limit to that, or can companies just say, “Anyone who joins a union will be paid minimum wage.” Ofc with at-will employment they can always just fire you, but like, if you think about it it’s pretty fucked up right?