Quasit4d ago

Here's the problem: To even turn things back to the way they were 20 years ago would take a President as ruthless and unchallenged as Trump himself. Or a President, House, Senate, SCOTUS and Federal judiciary that would be completely behind that level of reform. Plus a ruthless purging of all the apparatchiks that Trump and his team have ensconced throughout the federal bureaucracy.

Tell me truthfully, do you believe that that will ever happen? Is there any doubt in your mind that if a Democratic Presidential nominee manages to win they will do ANYTHING to roll back the huge surges we've made toward fascism under Presidents from both parties over the last 40 years?

Is there any question that a Democratic president and Congress would just insist that it was time to look forward, not back, and to make sure that we have a nice diverse group of people running ICE, DHS and the border patrol? Maybe a little more diversity among the staff and inmates of the death camps that Trump has built?

If anything, aren't the Democrats likely to pass MORE funding for the military and ICE and DHS? Will they do a single goddamned thing to rein in Israel and it's genocide of Arabs in the Middle East?

If that's all we can expect under the best circumstances from the Democratic Party, why should we settle for that instead of the complete overthrow of the system that the world desperately needs? Under the status quo our extinction due to climate change and the effects of war will just be a little slower. Which hardly seems a kindness.

I await replies.

#Politics #Extinction #Democrats #Fascism

Show threadLightfighter3d ago
@Quasit Even if all changes for the last 20 years were rolled back it wouldn't solve the problem. Trump has shown many of the weaknesses of the Constitution and laws of the US. Without significant structural changes, fascism is only an election away.
Show threadTiota Sram3d ago

@Lightfighter @Quasit indeed one can pseudo-empirically ask the question "do Democratic institutions protect counties against dictatorship" and look around at countries like Italy, Hungary, Britain, and Israel to see that they do not.

Liberals love to ask anarchists "but how would your society of free association ever prevent a dictator from rising to power? It's an excellent question that every person should be able to try to answer about their favorite political system, but it seems the liberals have forgotten to ask it about theirs. We can see right now in very fine detail exactly how the "checks and balances" can be systematically dismantled, sidestepped, or just ignored. Even if the system eventually reins Trump in, its failure to stop any of his worst impulses before they happened makes it feel like a very hollow sort of success. Alex Pretti doesn't benefit from a (very hypothetical at this point) swing back towards a less corrupt and fascist system.

Show threadAnarchist Trans Ace Pirate3d ago

@tiotasram @Lightfighter @Quasit

when "checks and balances" are taught no one bothers to ask how that works when all parties involved do nothing

Show threadLightfighter
@coolcalmcollected @tiotasram @Quasit There are no mechanisms to enforce most of the checks and balances. SCOTUS rulings are just opinions written on paper. Congressional subpoenas the same. While the Executive has an army of LEO's and the Army.
Apr 2 at 6:10pmWeb
Show threadQuasit3d ago

@Lightfighter @coolcalmcollected @tiotasram

The only real check or balance is the people themselves. We should have risen up and overthrown the rich bastards DECADES ago.

Show threadLightfighter3d ago
@Quasit @coolcalmcollected @tiotasram They have done a great job of propaganda on us. The anti-communist/socialist, pro evangelical christiian positions have been drilled into us from childhood since the 40's has had its desired effect. Our "liberal" party is closer to Reagan republicans than anything, and if we gathered every leftist in the country I think we'd have trouble filling two professional football stadiums.
Show threadTiota Sram3d ago
@Lightfighter @Quasit @coolcalmcollected they are currently providing plenty of opportunities to start changing that though.
Show threadAnarchist Trans Ace Pirate3d ago

@Lightfighter @Quasit @tiotasram

whenever I see a post about "the left" it's 99% about American democrats which isn't remotely "the left" since (bare minimum) clinton

Show threadQuasit3d ago
@coolcalmcollected @Lightfighter @tiotasram
The Democrats are fascists, and have been for a long time. Their job is to play leftists on TV, and thereby discredit the whole concept of a left in America. They are the primary shock troops of the oligarchs against true leftism. And they really love their work, because they hate our guts.
Show threadLightfighter3d ago
@Quasit @coolcalmcollected @tiotasram The only people they will instantly attack is someone slightly to their left.
Show threadQuasit3d ago

@Lightfighter @coolcalmcollected @tiotasram
And whenever they are dealing with Republicans, they can't fling themselves on their backs and spread their legs fast enough!

It's amazing that Democratic voters don't realize that that's not a bug or a weakness. It's their whole reason for being: to lubricate the entry of fascism in America, and normalize it.

Show threadMissConstrue3d ago

@coolcalmcollected @Lightfighter @Quasit @tiotasram

I tend, semantically, to use left, lowercase to describe anything left of William F. Buckley, whereas I use Left, uppercase to describe people/ideas with egalitarian or working class focus.

Granted, state control of assets also falls under Left, but at some point on both ends of the spectrum, you circle around and end up espousing the ideas of the other side, which...I dunno man, I can't explain tankies.

Show threadTiota Sram3d ago
@MissConstrue @coolcalmcollected @Lightfighter @Quasit it turns out that politics is not even remotely 1-dimensional, and while I don't have better language sitting around ready to go, we desperately need some.
Show threadTiota Sram3d ago

@Lightfighter @coolcalmcollected @Quasit also worth noting that the founders made choices like giving suffrage only to wealthy white landowners in order to create a system that helped a wealthy industrialist class take power from the old nobility, but from the start all the talk of "freedom" was just window dressing to get the commoners to go along. They explicitly choose mechanisms like the electoral college to prevent the common people from having too much power, meaning that the entire system of checks and balances was never designed to prevent the concentration of power entirely.

Obviously it was supposed to prevent the exact situation we find ourselves in now, but it didn't work (and no similar system can work in the long run) because power corrupts, and any system that tries to prevent the corruption of laws using laws is doomed to failure.

What the present moment also shows is that power is not as simple to wield as the fascists would like, and that centralized power inevitably crumbles. Minnesota was able to break ICE not through military prowess but through pressure of norms, Iran is able to resist Trump's overwhelming military power through persistence and economic revenge, Assad's regime couldn't endure as popular support finally eroded and international allies were distracted, etc. None of these offers a simple or painless path to defeating fascist power, but they show things aren't as hopeless as the fascists would like us to believe. Masses of people organized autonomously into formations of resistance can absolutely stand up to opponents that seem to have overwhelming forces because those forces also boil down to a lot of individual enforcers and deploying them is contingent on the backing of an even wider public that can be swayed by a lot of things.

The point is that the ultimate defense against corruption and fascism, with or without official checks and balances, is a politically active mass of common people.