I can’t remember who said the Democratic Party is acting like a •minority party• when what we need is an •opposition party•. The piece below captures that feeling (and its venom is fully justified).
1/
https://www.everythingishorrible.net/p/fucking-fight-you-useless-fucks
A still-forming thought:
Perhaps we might usefully view this pathetic situation as a major political party realignment in the US that has been left half-finished. When Nixon adopted Goldwater’s Southern Strategy and won, the Republican Party effectively became a fascist party — but the Democrats never became an anti-fascist party.
2/
[disclaimer: not a political scientist, just riffing here]
Plurality voting forces a two-party system. There will always be two parties (or if a third forms, the system will rapidly collapse back to two; this happened twice in US history).
The role of the two parties can change, however. Parties are coalitions, and coalitions are heterogeneous. There are lots of ways to draw lines through the myriad political interests to form two coalitions of roughly equal size. And those lines can shift.
3/
When Nixon adopted Goldwater’s Southern Strategy and won, that was a party realignment. The new foundation of the Republican coalition was “throw anti-Black racism lots of ethnonationalist red meat so they support the concentration of wealth.”
I’d venture that ethnonationalism captured to concentrate power is (or inexorably becomes) fascism. Nixon’s realignment made the Republican Party the fascist party.
@AnarchoNinaWrites’s post below on this topic touched off my train of thought here:
4/
I mean just, tell me which one WASN'T a fascist? I'll even give you that Gerald Ford was probably a "normal Republican" as you understand it but it's not like that guy won a nomination - he's just the dude they put out there to make you forget what they'd done with Nixon. Goldwater? Fascist. Nixon? Fascist. Reagan? Fascist. Both Bushs and Cheney? Fascists and also creepy intelligence agency minions too. When, since Goldwater, haven't they been "just Nazis?"
[disclaimer: not a political scientist, talking out of my ass]
For the two parties are going to divide up the electorate, if one is the fascist party, maybe the other •has• to be the anti-fascist party — not just philosophically, but for practical reasons. Maybe you just can’t maintain a viable coalition to oppose a fascist party without bringing everyone who opposes fascism into your coalition. Sure feels that way now.
5/
But the Democratic party still at heart seeks to be a progressive party in the FDR/LBJ mold. The party’s gambit since Nixon has been that an FDR-shaped coalition would force the fascist-shape coalition to fracture. It looked like that might even be true for a few of the Obama years. Sadly, nope.
6/
The result is a two-party system where the parties are going at cross purposes: one going full naked stinking fascist, and the other not pushing back in the opposite direction but just…pushing sideways, wishing for the resurrection of a party split that’s gone.
This may explain in part the endless appeal of the centrist mush-meal pitch: “We just need a party that meets these poor benighted Trump voters with common-sense answers to kitchen table issues!” That sounds like the way you win the 1932 presidential election! Yay!
7/
I’m rambling, and struggling to figure out the heart of what I’m getting at.
It’s something about how maybe we should view the fecklessness of Democratic politicians the OP laments not as the •source• of the problem, but as the inevitable result of failing to form anti-fascist coalition, and to make that coalition into the other major political party in this country.
I feel like there’s something useful in there, something maybe strategically helpful that gives us a sense of agency. And man do I hate grand political cynicisms that rob us of our sense of agency.
/end
@lp0_on_fire @donaldball @inthehands
It's the same strategy, from the same neoliberal playbook.
Good cop / bad cop. Controlled opposition.
Neither party actually stands for anything but money. They tag-team us, pretending to fight each other to distract us from the fact that BOTH of them are always marching to the right.
@donaldball @inthehands "Too much in common." Is extremely true.
Even if they stood for all the right things, they still as effective as bringing a corkscrew to a gun fight.
@inthehands We need nationwide General Strikes Every Monday until the Democrats step up and join us in the fight. Then we can take the fight the next step. They won’t fight with us unless we force them to. And if they aren’t with us, they will just be busy appeasing the fascists.
if they aren't with us, they’ve chosen fascism and are the enemy. period.
and i can tell you right now, not even the whole Black or Latino caucus would join us. they’re mostly corruptocrats, ready to sell themselves to the highest bidder. Richie Torres is the perfect example of that.
at the end of the day, here they stand on Gaza, immigration, abortion & trans rights, will tell you everything about them.
yes, those are the 4 yardsticks. fail one, they fail all.
@inthehands I think there's some truth to that. As somebody who saw real bad shit coming down the pipelines ~23 years ago, part of the issue I've always had is being able to convince anybody that the problems were real. Or, if they would even acknowledge the actual problems, they'd steadfastly refuse to do anything about it.
That might be changing, somewhat, but I'm not terribly optimistic, at least not in the short run.
@inthehands you raise a lot of good points here, AND $$ interests have also contributed to the failure to rise to the moment.
The party players, not the voters so much.
Dem voters seem to want systems to work, so we can all live reasonably happy, peaceful, affordable, healthy and equitable lives, and if it's necessary (it is) : we'll be loudly anti fash
and yet politicians have increased their focus on what the big donors want: a bloated MIC, huge capitalist breaks/profits, loopholes
@inthehands this was an interesting interview with Michael Ansara on his memoir The Hard Work of Hope, they discuss the sorry state of the democratic party.
previously,
https://mastodon.social/@blogdiva/112080031261067311
https://mastodon.social/@blogdiva/113439662354931138
https://mastodon.social/@blogdiva/113484284891913413
when you give the other party all the chances to go full nazi, you have forfeited your privilege to harp about centrism.
just like you can’t be a little pregnant, you cannot be a little fascist.
and, no, not being not-fascist isn’t enough; just like not being not racist isn’t enough.
you have to be, actively, antifascist.
Democrats are a fascist-lite party with some antifascist politicians
@blogdiva
Right, all that. Democratic party leadership deserves all the berating for their failure to oppose effectively. But why the failure? The standard “they’re all corrupt and all politicians are the same and nothing matters” line that the doomer reply guys give me is not a recipe for action or agency. Sure, the Schumers of the world are a lamentable lot, but how did they even up in charge in the first place?
I’m mulling an answer to that I hadn’t thought through before. One metaphor for it would be that it’s a game of tug-of-war where one team is kind of pulling •sideways• instead of opposite the other team, and then wonders why they’re losing. And what that implies is lay of some of the “bring back FDR” stuff and focus on what you said: double down on being anti-fascist instead of just not-fascist.
That would mean a new kind of party alignment, and one that would leave all of us something to be unhappy about (as two-party systems always do, miserable stuff). But it’s a way to structure the part of our opposition that must fit in a two-party box (alas, but reality) in a way that might actually work.
@inthehands go look for any article on the evangelical breakfast club of capitol hill. that’s where this festering pustule of fascism vs fascism-lite started. HRC was part of it, esp whilst NY congresswoman.
that, and the money christo and islamofascists threw at zionists. Schumer has been taking money from the Saudis via the Murdochs for decades. remember that Fox/Newscorp was the new trojan to the old OPEC horse.
it’s not that they are corruptocrats. they believe it’s their godly right.
@inthehands I think one of the problems with the Democratic party (particularly the privatized campaign infrastructure) is that Clinton and potentially to a lesser extent Obama, the successful politicians from the Democratic side were not trying to build a coalition. they were trying to build an electoral majority
there's a lot of overlap between these concepts but I think it can explain part of whats going on. If all you need is to be the rational choice between you and your electoral opponent, you don't actually need to deliver anything to the people in your coalition you don't like. at least that's what the ideologically convenient thing would let you belive
@inthehands 100%. Center-right was always going to lose to fdr-shaped-centrist — once the right realized that, fash would always beat centrist.
Throw in a scoop of ‘dnc’s job is to keep the left down’ and there we are. Hopefully not for much longer.
@inthehands I think the problem is that in a 2 party, first-past-the-post system, the parties are defined by "X" and "not X", instead of by "X" and "anti-X".
For example abortion: GOP = Abortion should be banned. Dem = No it shouldn't. The Dem position isn't "Abortion should be free and available to anybody for any reason at any time".
Or: "Minimum wage should be raised". "No it shouldn't" vs. "Minimum wage should be completely abolished"
So, the opposition party to fascism is "not fascism" instead of "anti fascism". In this case it's fascism vs status quo. (Ante-fascism vs anti-fascism).
@alter_kaker I didn't see the antisemitism thing... I unfollowed her a while back, but I honestly don't remember why. Was just curious; thanks!
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