Anecdotally, I’m seeing a lot of normie liberals get radicalized by watching Democrats approve Trump’s nominees, pass his legislation, and cave on their own government shutdowns. Turns out, if you pitch yourselves as the only opposition to fascism, people expect you to actually oppose fascism.
“We DO opposite fascism. We sent a letter about it and everything!”
- Jeffries, probably
A-fucking-men!
Only a third so far have realized that what is now being called “democratic socialism” is what they have always supported. Mainly: using the tax dollars (we already pay) for programs and services that benefit society. As opposed to the Republican plan of using that money to line the pockets of the Trump-Epstein class.
That percentage will only grow.
Exactly. When people find out what being a Democratic Socialist/ Progressive really means, most support it.
We have a choice between Democratic Socialism that helps the Citizens, or MAGA Socialism that helps only the Wealthy. Frame it that way, and the choice becomes easy, for most people.
I would bet that has always been the case but those feelings were suppressed.
The neo-Renaissance awakening is almost upon us. America’s last chance power drive for grift and glory is almost over.
Dont forget to remind everyone that the trump government decision to buy equity stakes in the private sector is literal socialism by definition. The government owns the means of production instead of private.
So when Republicans start moaning about socialism, feel free to educate them on their president who is implementing socialist policy
Government owning the means of production is only socialism if the working class controls the government, which is demonstrably not true in the slightest. Instead we have capitalists controlling the government, and when the capitalist class exerts its power over the government to directly seize more ownership of the means of production, that is fascism (or at least often a hallmark of fascism).
That’s why I used the term Socialist Policy.
But he’s not implementing socialist policy, he’s implementing fascist policy.
The government buying private equity is a socialist policy
No it isn’t. Not unless the government is controlled by the working class, which it isn’t.
That’s good news.
I do have one “BUT,” though: Let’s hope the Democrats don’t follow in the footsteps of many (at least in name) left-wing political groups and split apart. Nothing could be better for the Republicans than to face two parties whose voter bases are each too small to defeat them in the election.
What needs to happen is for people to vote in primaries so democratic socialist candidates have a shot at winning the nomination (for whatever office they’re running for).
I think something interesting about DSA is that it has an internal constellation of caucuses, which are largely ideologically based. There’s a reformist caucus, and anarchist caucus, a Marxist Leninist Caucus, multiple Trotskyist Caucuses, a Maoist Caucus, etc.
So the various mergers and splits that leftist orgs have been doing for decades now essentially get to do them in the sandbox of DSA.
Many movements have tried this before. The moment power and money are at stake, the representative system—in which self-interested individuals tend to work their way into leadership positions—leads to divisions.
Furthermore, it won’t help much if the DSA is united when a schism occurs with the old Democrats: On its own, the DSA certainly doesn’t have enough supporters to win the election.
Even if Trump is as unpopular as can be (though 40% still remain loyal to him—but that’s just an aside), there will still be enough Democratic voters who were politically shaped during the Cold War and would never vote for anything with “socialism” in its name.
Well, let’s just hope for the best.
Furthermore, it won’t help much if the DSA is united when a schism occurs with the old Democrats: On its own, the DSA certainly doesn’t have enough supporters to win the election.
This is something DSA has long thought about, and the dominant position in the org is what’s called the “Dirty Break” strategy. Essentially, DSA parasitizes the Democratic ballot line, such that DSA supercedes the Democratic party itself.
Even if Trump is as unpopular as can be (though 40% still remain loyal to him—but that’s just an aside), there will still be enough Democratic voters who were politically shaped during the Cold War and would never vote for anything with “socialism” in its name.
Plenty of Trump voters also voted for Mamdani. The fact of the matter is that, of you give people things that benefit them, and can demonstrate good governance, then you can override that cold war programming without a ton of friction. Especially when the institutions of American liberal democracy are decaying before our eyes
there will still be enough Democratic voters who were politically shaped during the Cold War and would never vote for anything with “socialism” in its name.
Then they deserve the fascism that the Neoliberal ghouls they’ve been supporting for decades have enabled. Too bad the rest of us will have to suffer because the fucking ShitLib wastrels are too Lead-addled to get out of the way.
Nothing is tastier to a leftist than other leftists. Eat the rich, sure, but have you TRIED eating another leftist with slightly different political views??
99% of leftist stop infighting right before the movement becomes pure enough!
Listen we can’t have any 1%ers. We gotta deal with that last percent or this is for nothing. TO THE GALLOWS BOYS
I think a lot of people didn’t even think this was an option.
This is an excellent outcome.
Democialist Party
Here’s the poll: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28524353-cnn-july-poll-conducted-by-ssrs-midterms-parties/
How are they drawing the conclusion that “A third of Democrats now identify as democratic socialists” from that?
They must have more data than was presented there. For example, 18% of ALL respondants viewed the DSA positively. I would assume that what we didn’t see there was the number that 30% of those who viewed Democrats positively also viewed DSA positively.
We really shouldn’t have to assume…
Also how are we going from “has a favorable opinion of” to “identifies as”?
Now?
If the DSA did more than attack liberals I might be inclined to think this is a good thing, but so far they can’t win in any district that isn’t overwhelmingly blue. Not sure how they’re going to beat back conservatives.
Idk, I think the DSA is only going to succeed in fracturing the Dems. We’ll see.
People thought the Tea Party would split the Republican Party, but they just morphed into MAGA, and entirely took over the Republican Party.
That’s what the DemSocs should do. Just take over the Democratic party, whether they like it or not.
The Tea Party did split votes away from the conservatives, they were literally spurred on by Ron Paul’s presidential campaign. They flipped conservative house seats, sure, but I’m pretty fucking sure Obama won that year and in 2012. Do you want to see JD Vance win? Do you like the way things have gone with the extremism from MAGA?
Hasan Piker has been proudly wearing a fucking Chairman Mao suit. He was literally fucking glazing the man just the other day on stream. How far gone are you that you’ve forgotten how he killed tens of millions of people in order to industrialize? Last time I checked the United States didn’t need to kill millions of it’s own citizens in order to pull itself out of poverty - oh by the way the Great Depression happened.
Fuck - all this revisionist history from tankies on this platform really has cooked your brains, hasn’t it?
Hasan Piker doesn’t lead the DCCC or the DNC. He’s an influencer on the internet. I am not a socialist or a communist but the oligarchy has aligned themselves with the MAGA cult. They should stop supporting the MAGA movement. The oligarchs have supported MAGA and we will support the DSA.
The oligarchy has aligned themselves with anyone that further their goals. The oligarchy owns every major social media platform and have been fomenting extremism for decades but your political movement isn’t extremist because you’re different (you aren’t, you just color yourselves differently).
You are a sheep, and you all speak the same way ‘we don’t this, we don’t that, we support this etc.’ Any movement filled with so many people who seem to think that they can be the mouthpiece for everyone grouped with them is filled with idiots and charlatans.
Edit: two week old user lmao, you’re a fucking DSA shill - thank you for outing yourself I’ll be sure to remember you.
I am not a socialist or a communist. The oligarchy should stop supporting MAGA or we’ll keep supporting DSA.
If the oligarchy didn’t support the DSA there would be no coverage of them outside of fringe, independent media outlets. I don’t think you understand how truly captured the media environment is in the U.S., or you’re acting as if you don’t which is certainly worse.
DSA = blue MAGA.
Of course I haven’t liked the extremism from MAGA, but I definitely like what I’m hearing from the Progressives and the Democratic Socialists, so I will support them, and their policies.
I have no fear of that leading to Mao-style Red Chinese Communism, that’s just ludicrous. We can’t even get Dems and Republicans to agree on rasing the minimum wage, we’ll never change our system of government to a failed Chinese political system from 50 years ago through elections. And if we do, then that’s what we’ll get because we VOTED for it. But it won’t happen.
I don’t understand how retreating from the clearly Fascist/ Nazi policies to policies that actually serve the American people will somehow lead to millions of dead Americans. I’m much more confident that MAGA policies will lead to that outcome long before Democratic policies will.
I’m not afraid of the word Socialism, and won’t be scared off of positive, constructive government policy just because corrupt treasonous MAGA pedophiles labelled it Socialist.
Bottom line: I’d MUCH rather live with Democratic Socialism, than MAGA Socialism.
What makes you think the DSA is advocating for anything other than authoritarianism when their loudest voices are complimenting fucking Mao? This is a genuine question, what makes you think that electing the opposite side of the extremist/authoritarian coin will result in anything other than living in a falling dictatorship?
Edit: By the way, according to those loud voices - being against the DSA means I must be paid off. That sure does seem fucking weird, doesn’t it? ‘If you aren’t with us, you’re against us.’ Who does that sound like I wonder?
Edit 2: crazy, the DSA strategy of never discussing anything with anyone criticizing you has filtered down to the plebs. Fucking MAGAts all over again.
Because they’re going to be in CONGRESS, where whatever they want has to be approved by a whole bunch of other people before anything happens, and only about .0001% of anyone’s wish list ever gets through. Just because one candidate says something wacky, doesn’t mean they represent the entire party, no matter how loudly you want to scream it. After all, look how much insane shit MAGAs spew.
This is just them pivoting because they know they need to rejuvenate the party
The “centrist”/right-leaning/neo-liberal democrats would rather rip the party in half than to use this swell of popular support for leftist ideals to win elections and make real change. The old Dems will flail and writhe and hurt themselves in confusion as the old guard dies and change happens whether they like it or not. They’ll try to kick leftists out, jump ship themselves (going independent, forming a new third party, merging with libertarians, or maybe going all the way to going Republican), and bomb the entire party with infighting, fixing nominations with anti-democratic party tricks, and intentionally letting republicans win rather than supporting a socialist candidate. Can’t wait for this cluster fuck.
They’ve been doing half of what you listed, for decades.
I’m holding on to the hope that DSA candidates winning more elections in the face of centrist nonsense will make moderates realize they’re being self defeating by doing this kind of crap. A real working coalition of socialists and liberals could be a political juggernaut that could also create some good policies together.
I think what people forget is that moderates are just fighting for what they believe in, just like progressives do. The problem is they do not want the same thing. Moderates and progressives have fundamentally different motivations. Democratic moderates are not simply progressives that have pragmatically decided to pursue centrism to win the most gains they can. They’re not progressives willing to settle for a moderate option. Moderation is their actual desired goal. They themselves are mostly wealthy coastal elites. They’re quite comfortable in their lives, and their main goal is to protect the status quo. They fundamentally do not have the same goal of crafting meaningful legislation that progressives do.
For Democratic centrists, eeking out a single seat majority in the Senate is mission accomplished. Progressives need to push for greater gains, as they want 60 votes to pass major reforms. Conservatives need 60 votes, as they want to implement Christian Nationalism. But Centrists? Neither party ever getting more than 55 votes in the Senate is their ideal outcome. Such a government will be able to pass modest bipartisan bills that don’t rock the boat, but no real change to either the right or the left will be possible.
Liberals ultimately have little desire to create a “political juggernaut,” as a juggernaut is only useful if you want to force through real change.
Al-sayed is the key. If he beats Stevens AND the establishment falls in line, there is hope. If they don’t, there isn’t.
He’s just so…reasonable.
IDK, my wife and I are both Democrats in MI and we’re both voting for him Tuesday.
Because that’s what they’re paid to do, obviously.
Like David "iPAC"man?
My analogy for this attitude is 90s MTV executives and producers not understanding the appeal of Primus, giving up on music, and becoming surveillance as entertainment with reality TV because we wouldn’t sit and listen to Train, gin blossoms, modest mouse, etc.
The corporate centrist wing would sooner switch to the republican party than do anything helpful for their constituents.
The corporate centrist wing is largely made up of ex-Republicans anyway.
Corporate Democrats are just Republicans who happen to inhabit social circles where homophobia is considered distasteful.
Cnn trying to stoke fear
Well as per usual they are giant failures because they are only managing to stoke hope.
I don’t know, I will give them some credit for awarding the journalists for reporting on Donald Trump’s Epstein files right in front of him at the correspondants dinner. Ultimately meaningless and toothless like much of the reporting but delightfully petty.
If this is their attempt at stoking fear, they should do it more
Stoke fear among the ruling class*
They want a cultural divide here so that they can send as many people who will try to stop them to the camps as possible. They know what the next steps are. Question is, do you?
Oh sorry. America is a democracy. Democrats should just listen to their base, obviously, so we can avoid further calamity. Surely that’s what will happen next. Surely.
I wish there was an option for Social Democrat, because that’s what fits me. Bernie made Democratic Socialism famous but I don’t think most people who define themselves this way understand the difference.
I mean, Americans can just look at Europe. It’s basically entirely social democracy. I don’t understand why entire America is pretending social democracy is some sort of socialist boogeyman…
It prevents money from being taken by the people who want to take your money. They pay a lot to keep the working class from thinking that’s bad. Thus the boogeyman-ing.
Because they are uninformed. And Democratic socialism is closer to communism than social democracy.
Democratic Socialism is closer to socialism than communism. It literally means using democracy to transform the economic system to be socialist.
I’d consider myself a democratic socialist myself, as I believe that workers should own the businesses they work for instead of consolidating the power to a small amount of executives and shareholders who only care about making more profit than they did the previous quarter. I also believe this would limit the possibility of corruption by preventing extreme wealth from existing in the first place.
I do not consider myself a communist because I don’t believe that centralized control is a good idea in most cases. An exception to that for me would be a single payer healthcare system, where the government guarantees healthcare to all of its citizens and visitors free at the point of service.
Workers can own businesses today, so there’s nothing stopping that from happening. There are lots of worker owned collectives out there. The major difference between Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism is that Democratic Socialism wants to nationalise many categories of business, ie. to have the government run them.
This tends to not go well where it’s been tried because once business and government meld it becomes an unstoppable force that eats everything and has no accountability to anyone or oversight by anyone, and rapidly becomes inefficient and ineffective. I much prefer the Scandinavian way of mass deployment of labor unions, so that labor is a powerful force in it’s own right rather than one that’s ruled by a powerful merged political/business elite.
The difference between it being an option and it being mandated is that when the level of greed we see today is allowed to exist, then it will exist, and power will slowly and inevitably be taken away from the worker class.
There are also multiple types of socialism, and socialism doesn’t necessarilly mean government ownership specifically. Check out Professor Richard Wolff’s excellent lectures on the topic.
There are also multiple types of socialism, and socialism doesn’t necessarilly mean government ownership specifically.
That’s why I wish there was better understanding of social democracy.
I understand social democracy very well and I don’t think it’s a good system because the capitalist class ultimately stays in charge, which will inevitably lead to corruption and the slow reverting of social services. I used to be a social democrat myself around when Bernie started to run for president the first time, so I understand why the premise is popular.
My idea of socialism includes:
- Workers owning the businesses they work for with no exceptions, which eliminates worker exploitation and enshittification
- Having a hard wealth cap (both realized and unrealized) of between $10-50 million tied to inflation
- A universal basic income that is enough to thrive, which will allow people to persue hobbies and become entrepeneurs without fear of failure
- Having all basic necessities be guaranteed and universally available without means testing (healthcare, housing, utilities, food, etc.)
- A universal right to dignity and privacy (eliminate mass surveillance both from governments and from companies, police and prisons must treat people with respect, similar to the Norweigan system)
- Create a government organization that publicly audits code to ensure that neither malicious foreign or domestic actors have the ability to hack into computers to the best of their ability, and have a state bug bounty program for all open source code
- Have the government own essential infrastructure as voted on by the people (public infrastructure, prisons, the military, schools, etc.)
- Have a more direct form of democracy, eliminating representatives in favor of direct voting on legislation wherever possible to aid in abolishing corruption
- Eliminate the Supreme Court’s ability to unilaterally enact laws
- Public funding of elections where representatives are needed, along with a new voting system (RCV, STAR, etc. depending on what mathmeticians agree represents the people best for each individual scenario)
- Ban all advertising, especially political. If any individual is getting paid to speak in any form that is not directly advertising, who pays must be disclosed or else face prosecution
- Ban all for-profit news organizations, excluding independent outlets who receive their funding from small-dollar donations
- Ensure that nobody is above the law by allowing the public as a whole to sue individuals and organizations, even if they were not directly affected by whatever crime has been committed
And that’s just what I came up with and is by no means comprehensive.
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Who is uninformed, Americans or Europeans?
Americans. And I can say that as someone who’s lived half his life on each continent. But Europeans probably don’t know what Democratic Socialism is either.
This sounds like the same kind of splitting hairs that results in fighting between “leftists” and “liberals”. As long as we continue to bicker and come up with all of these ridiculous purity tests then we’re never going to defeat the right.
There are pretty substantial differences.I voted for Bernie so I don’t think they are so substantial as to cause a fight, but I just wish there was better education out there in the US on Social Democracy. It works in Europe and most Americans are blind to it or think Democratic Socialism is the same thing.
The function of the DSA, although they may seem extremist to you, is to pull the Overton window back to the left, where it was before virulent McCarthyism. Watch and learn.
Doesn’t seem extremist to me at all, it’s just not exactly what I’d prefer in the end. I vote for the candidates in it that I can anyway.
Vote for progressives in democratic primaries and there would be. It’s pretty much too late now, but the path to a legitimate leftist party has always been there, but leftists don’t vote in primaries.
I do. And we came very close with Bernie. I would even say that we won, but the party elite simply blocked his nomination. But there’s always next time. I consider the primaries to be far more important than the general election where my state and county has gone blue for decades without much risk otherwise.
We didn’t come close with Bernie, DNC favoritism aside Bernie overwhelmingly lost because enough progressives didn’t register to vote in the primaries. That conspiracy bullshit needs to die. Yes the DNC backed the Democrat because why would they back an independent and not a member of their party? But they didn’t cheat, it was simply that not enough Bernie supporters voted for him in the primaries, because progressives mostly don’t vote.
Well let’s put it this way, if 400-450 superdelegates had pledged for Sanders before any votes were cast as they did for Clinton, he would have won too. No one can really say the outcome without the ballot box being stuffed prior to the election. It was close enough that these kind of things are enough to sway it.
At any rate, my hopes lie with AOC. No one will be able to accuse her followers of being only “bros” and try to divide the vote by sex. She will probably lose the general election but getting her through the primaries will be a win.
No he wouldn’t have, and we can generally assume that’s true because, again, historically progressives don’t vote, especially not in primaries. Democrats vote. Democrats voted for the Democrat, surprising absolutely nobody that wasn’t terminally online. He never stood a chance because he was never that popular with democrats in the first place.
The Bernie bros thing was entirely propaganda though, very nearly every Bernie primary voter voted for Clinton in the general. More Russian republican disinformation.
I have zero doubt he would have had there been a level playing field.
It wasn’t even close man. Clinton got nearly 4 million more votes, like 30 percent more votes than Bernie. It wasn’t close and Bernie never had a chance. Also why would it be a level playing field? Bernie wasn’t a Democratic party member, obviously the party is going to support the Democratic candidate. There was no cheating, there was no conspiracy, it was simply that too few progressives voted in the primary.
Completely relate to this. The reality too is that Bernie Sanders much more closely represent Social Democratic principles.
Not sure what combination it is that people don’t understand the difference or have a tendency to gravitate to more absolutist ideologies, but I feel this.
You’re absolutely right- Bernie and I’m guessing most of his followers are social democrats. I seem to recall an interview where this came up and he basically shrugged the question off and said it didn’t matter to him what ppl called it. As for these political terms, I think Americans are broadly illiterate.
Is a Social Democrat someone who only democrats at parties or with a group of friends? Okay have fun, don’t democrat and drive 'cause it’s gonna take every decent person to bring down the fascist authoritarian theo/pedo/oligarchy
The fascist authoritarian theo pedo oligarchy consists of the entire system, so unless you’re talking about bringing down Democrats as well as Republicans, all you’re doing is propping up the system as it is. Our current conditions did not form in a vacuum they had the assistance of the DNC and their ratchet effect
“Every decent person” includes a significant percentage of Democrats, a tiny smattering of people who still call themselves Republicans but don’t vote that way, and not a single damned soul of the MAGA base.
BotHSiDEs
There are no 2 sides to US politics, there is one right wing fascist oligarchy
From what I’ve read, DSA is in practice a Social Democrat org, I suppose out of necessity. Bernie is the same.
I think if the real goal was social democracy they’d just call it that. I do think Bernie (as the primary torch bearer of the term), does want to nationalise much of private business in the end, but is starting with standard social democracy to get the ball rolling. Many of the others may actually just be social democrats who are on the Bernie bus because that’s the one going somewhere.
True, but DSA is a large, national organization that’s been around for decades, so that implies both institutional inertia and factionalism. It may be a group of both social democrats who don’t feel welcomed in the democrat party and actual socialists who may not see any other viable alternative available to them.
Yes there is definitely something to creating a unified front between both camps, and I have no problem uniting under this banner, at least up until the point we take over the Democratic party in a stable enough way to start splitting hairs on policy.
That makes sense. Although we can dream about left unity, the differences between some of the folks in the party may be to great to reconcile (i.e., a lot of people in the party are not left at all).
