this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
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We don't have to resign to fascism, resistance remains possible under much worse circumstances than ours (for example, invasion by Nazi Germany, pre-internet, etc.) If you want exacts, figure out how to support your community right now. Mutual aid groups, community gardens, food not bombs, IWW/union drives etc. If the plan is just tell people that Trump is bad... that's kind of just resignation to fascism isn't it? I mean, so long as that's the beginning and end of what you wanna do. Obviously doing that + actual resistance is totally different.
You can try to change the GOP from the inside but they have ideological guardrails just as strong as the dems do against socialism and against actual democracy. You just aren't aware of them necessarily cause presumably you were never brought up in that culture.
No it is not just telling people Trump is bad, it is things we haven't gone far enough to do such as actively campaign to devalue Trump's fist pumping image rather than circlejerk ourselves over it being iconic and for the textbooks already. What about outright incepting the idea into the non-MAGAs about how this shooting was Trump's fault, which 38 percent of voters already believe it is? What if what we do now to contextualize that "iconic" moment turns its caption in the history books to "The last gasp of life for the extinct MAGA movement?"
We love making fun of libs here for how they are too scared to do anything mask off that might actually be electorally effective. Well, leftists aren't restricted by that, and it's only us who have the power to make that more potent flavor of rhetoric that gives words to what the Dem base actually wants to say publicly and can win through. The chud Nazis are self-serious and when they are not in total executive power yet they lose soft power when made into subjects of piercing ridicule. When we undercut every post they make honoring the racist shooting victim by mentioning he was a bloodthirsty Zionist whose death was kinda funny, they actually become more demoralized than they are galvanized.
Only leftists can make the kind of propaganda that liberals crave viscerally but are too married to their self-perceptions as "the adults in the room" to make. The mutual aid groups we build will be a reaction to the fascist harms we can no longer avoid. What I am talking about is a pro-action to impactfully wound the Nazis as they attempt to rise that only leftists have the wherewithal to do.
Libs don’t crave that message. They believe violence is wrong no matter what and that being a victim is synonymous with being a hero. Dying to protect your family wipes away all sins in the liberal mind. Libs want to preach civility when someone acts rationally against the enemy they’ve said is an existential threat to their democracy. They joke that he can’t be trusted with the nuclear codes which if taken seriously means they’re suggesting he’d wipe cities off the face of the earth but they still think the future of millions of people in whatever cities he would target must only be decided by a vote in November. They will talk up January 6 and insist the enemy will take power by any underhanded means but then handicap themselves with high minded values. Let the whole world go down with the ship if it means they upheld their philosophical values.
We can give Dems more potent words, like all the left academia terms they absorbed and disarmed on the summer of 2020. This is what happens when we trying to win the spectacle on their terms; be it “the news” or social media. Those mediums are totalized by capital and cannot be won by an anti capitalist faction.
Not sure what the winning play is but I think it necessarily is some kind of sustained direct action that creates friction in a world of frictionless spectacle. Some sort of denial of treats and entertainment or easily digested narratives… it has to be totally divorced from the forces that determine success in the spectacle. Whatever it is, it will be incredibly unpopular due to the disruption, it will probably be illegal or be later made illegal by reactionaries… so it can’t be planned online.
(lol I got into a little bit of a rant mode. This is not intended to be overly confrontational, libs are just so damn disappointing.)
Based on polling the lib voters are actually a lot less addicted to that victim-as-hero image than their representatives are. The problem is that the message the Democrats sell to their voters from the top-down has consciously been chosen to be the "when they go low, we go high" message. But letting their voters cast themselves as the hall monitors of democracy and decency is just the form of appeal the top Dems consciously crafted to be most advantageous to them in their simultaneous pursuit of rewards from capital and everyday voters--who have the potential to become far more radicalized.
People will go toward whichever mainstream and widely publicized figure/party that agrees most with their views, just like how most people choose to go see studio movies over Indies because that's what has the ad spend. So Dem voters choose which leaders to follow and let themselves be guided by based on who they're putting on the TV, but what the popular Dem politicians and pundits espouse do not represent the fixed baseline average for what their voters already believe, just the fixed baseline for what their voters feel free to say at the current moment. Looking at an example from the other side, Republicans were terrified to call out Iraq for being a disaster until Trump called it out in a debate and opened the floodgates overnight.
The Dem voter-politician split on Gaza, Medicare 4 All, etc. is so stark, and while Biden is pulls his anti-Trump ads out of decorum the liberal voters online, especially on black Twitter are like "I don't give a fuck if he got popped." The message their voters crave has no mainstream figure to articulate for them yet.
I'm all for resisting fascism. The question is to what end, what exactly does delegitimizing the center right democratic party's opposition accomplish when they have a demonstrated willingness to target and sacrifice marginal groups in the pursuit of compromise with the fascists? Labour just won an astonishing victory in the UK. Unforced by opposition they are going after trans people, trans people who presumably helped give them that historic win.
By all means we should stop fascism where we can. But I'm not convinced doing it in this context, primarily as a messaging and PR win that will, let's be honest, only benefit Democrats, really moves the ball.
Or maybe I'm just in a bad mood. Feels ominous here lately.
While the Democrats deserve no help, this original post is about how we should resign ourselves to fascism because the Teamsters are at the RNC. Doesn't that imply that we at least prefer they not be there, even if it means being at the DNC? We should focus on moving the needle toward what we want. The Dems may stand to benefit and piggyback off us for power, but what other option is there really at the point. If we genuinely believed that Trump and fascism have won and the only option is mutual aid groups for when he is in power, Hexbear would be filled with posts on mutual aid groups building. But we clearly don't believe in that deep down yet or at least have some residual hope of something different, and we can work chasing that feeling.
You're talking yourself into opportunism. It's a bad sign that Teamsters are at the RNC, but that doesn't mean we should be trying to get them to go to the DNC (and they are anyway, I think). We should be pulling them, and everyone else, towards communism, not just a slightly less barbaric neoliberalism.
Yes but what do you believe pulling them entails
Agitating directly for the destruction of the imperialist, capitalist state.
K