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TwoQuestions posted:What we need to do is operate as if we're already in a totalitarian hard right dictatorship. What did the Spaniards do under Franco? What do Leftists do in Saudi Arabia? Keep their heads down and their mouths shut so they don't get killed. Not exactly a winning strategy. Regimes like that collapse because they rot from the inside, not because of long-term opposition movements.
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Dec 13, 2019 17:41
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Violent revolution is pure fantasy. It has never happened in any system where existing democratic mechanisms are perceived as legitimate. Sure, yes, a lot of people know and moan about the various ways the game is rigged, but in the end you can trust that nothing overrides the actual number of votes in the ballot box. As long as that's true, you can a) keep believing that you'll be able to beat the odds and convince more people next time, and b) look at the empirical proof that you're clearly outnumbered and can't really go "we represent the masses against tyranny". The one time a western parliamentary democracy got close to a leftist revolution was France in '68, and it's very illustrative that De Gaulle was able to defuse it by calling an election - and then win that election. In the end, capital controlling the media doesn't just mean they successfully attack socialist parties, first and foremost they successfully attack socialist ideas, and it works regardless of whether we contest elections or not. Anti-electoralism just allows you the comfort of a like-minded bubble in which you never confront the fact that right-wing values - hierarchy, nationalism and greed - are simply more popular than cooperation and equality.
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Dec 14, 2019 18:30
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Infinite Karma posted:We don't even need leaders who lie. We need Sean Hannitys and Roger Aileses and Bill O'Reillys, media personalities who lie. One Mitch McConnell or two in government, not a whole party full of them. The reason these people are successful isn't really their messaging, at least not primarily (they do have a knack for pandering to people's pre-existing prejudices while also creating new ones), it's having a powerful platform. The left doesn't need to lie, getting the truth out would be enough. The problem is that the corporations can operate the whole right-wing sewage factory at a loss, because it ultimately means more profits for their owners from getting kleptocrats into power. Roger Ailes certainly was a clever propagandist, but you can't replicate his success if you don't have access to the same giant piles of blood money. Plus, the same media establishment will fastidiously pick apart every half-truth and misleading statistic by a left-wing leader while completely ignoring outright made up bullshit from rightists. They can do this even if their preferred leader is an uncontrollable jelly-brained moron - when Trump lies believably, Fox will relate his words as true, and when he really shits his pants in a way that's obvious to anyone, they just cover for him by not mentioning it. That said, there is something to be said for cynicism as an image, in that we live in an age where people apparently don't trust idealists. All politicians are lying scum, popular belief goes, so you should treat them purely transactionally. And if one appears to be idealistic, they're either a) unpredictable lying scum, or b) a weak personality who may be nice but won't be able to get anything done in a cutthroat environment. Speaking from experience, I was part of a nascent left-wing party here in Poland and the criticism I heard most often while canvassing (from potential voters, discounting people who just called me a dirty communist) was "you're too idealistic and politics is brutal, I just don't believe you can succeed". We got thrashed hard in elections, then the party allied with the awful corrupt faux-socdems we would call lying thieving scumbags just weeks before - aaand support went up, because cynical powermongering is apparently seen as statesmanlike. I left because frankly I don't have the stomach for it, but it was a pretty big lesson in how people actually think. Sure, they value integrity in their friends and family, but politicians are judged by a different standard.
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Dec 16, 2019 12:47
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IMO it's largely impossible for the Left to reclaim flags and nations and gain anything from it, because it's not the actual symbolic identity crap that attracts people to the Right. Neonationalism is appealing because it's exclusionary. Maybe it's different in the US, but in any European country, you can communicate entirely by singing the national anthem and you won't reclaim a single voter from anti-immigrant parties if you don't want to close the borders. You can if you just straight up abandon genuine internationalism in favor of valuing the comfort of "your" people above the lives of others. Case in point: Denmark. The Danish social democrats were able to win elections by combining a defense and expansion of the welfare state with closed borders and essentially racist policies against non-ethnic Danes. They didn't shift their rhetoric and aesthetic to be more rah-rah patriotic, they couched the racist policies in boring socdem technocracy. And they won, because people mainly wanted the making GBS threads on immigrants part and could live without the harping on about national traditions part, not the other way around.
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Dec 23, 2019 12:57
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