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May 9, 2024 23:51
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- Nov 10, 2008
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When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.
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So I've noticed a lot of people here have been saying "Well what if America is actually a conservative country and running on leftist policies won't win you elections even if you tried".
I understand this sentiment and it's probably true. A lot of Americans probably are conservative. They like their cars, they like the luxuries and "freedoms" of modern 20th century America and many people already have things like rising home equity or a decent enough life they don't want to compromise on. They don't want to be told that they're bad people or that you're going to take away something they already have and replacing it with something "risky" complicated and difficult to understand.
However I don't think that this is the time to lose faith in the system. It just means you're gonna have to pick and choose what you campaign on and focus narrowly on it while figuring out the pain points of common voters and running elections on the promise of addressing these problems.
This is not a new concept. The fact of the matter is we're a bunch of misfits of predominantly urban and white collar background.
In Tsarist Russia there were all kinds of proto-communist movements that fixated on replacing the Tsarist regime by any means necessary, including violence only to find they faced severe repercussions and a discrediting of their movement. Everyone thought "If we could just go to the people and plead our case they'd be sympathetic and activate as a revolutionary cause"
Then we had something called "Going to the people" as summed up in this wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_to_the_People
Yet almost 40 years later we had a revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union.
This guy gets it. We're never going to get anywhere by imposing leftism on America, the people hate that and will vote Republican to spite you just as Russian peasants turned in would be anarchists and revolutionaries to the police for political crimes during "Going to the people". Many of us are middle class computer touchers and educated urban "elites" in the eyes of the masses we all think we represent.
There is a massive pro labor movement that is taking place in spite of us rather than because of us. You want an alternative to current Democratic Party/GOP orthodoxy? It starts by you going out and figuring out what the pain points are of every day people. We already know most of them, healthcare, low pay, abusive management, lovely inflexible working conditions. It's nothing new. One of the biggest pain points for working class people in Imperial Russia was that their pay was garbage and often even worse than what was officially stated because management would dock their pay with fines for stupid procedural errors. Lenin was a lawyer and he wrote simple, easy to read leaflets that condensed this grievance into an understanding of what the worker's rights were and how they could work with socialists to agitate for and demand better rights. In some cases these rules violated existing labor laws. This was a time when peasants were deeply religious people with conservative values and a secret police often infiltrated every aspect of society and arrested people for political thought crime... If the Russians could change their country in this scenario, there's no reason Americans can't do so in the comparably freer and more permissive American system.
But you aren't gonna do it by declaring yourself a socialist mayoral candidate and then running scab labor in your election operation. You aren't gonna do it by telling people they can't have things that make their lives easier in a capitalist hellscape. You sure as hell aren't gonna do it by demonizing people's way of life.
You also are not going to sit on the peak and preach about leftist politics and hope that if people just understood where you're coming from they'd vote you..
None of that is going to work. I've said it once and I'll say it again. You have no responsibility or obligation to get into the weeds to explain HOW you are going to make things better for people. That's a white collar upper-middle class academia sort of audience and it lets your political enemies nitpick sound bytes out of your long winded academic explanations and come up with reasons to oppose you...
No it's much simpler. You bring out good old fashioned agitprop.
You're not getting paid enough- We'll fix it by making them pay you more
You can't afford your medical bills? We'll make healthcare free.
We'll use new technology to create jobs in the energy sector (Read: Green Energy)
We'll create new jobs and opportunities in X industries.
It really doesn't matter what you do to make this a reality, as long as you do it effectively and deliver on the promise to shore up your support with those constituencies.
The best part is we have modern technology and data science techniques that with some money would allow you to build a database of voters and cross reference data of the biggest pain points and political grievances people have right now. Then you just agitate and focus on those core issues.
Boris Johnson won the British Election by repeating "Get Brexit Done" almost constantly and I think that works a lot better than a complex explanation of why we're gonna do yet another referendum on Brexit to see if you really want it after everyone was sick and tired of hearing about it for 2-3 years.
No more talking about getting rid of coal and fossil fuels. You do that discretely with your political comrades at party HQ when you write up your policy and bills. You don't talk about taking away people's cars. You focus on simple statements that address people's problems. Most importantly you go out and you LISTEN. You don't impose your beliefs. You go around to red states and you ask what it is that makes people feel lovely about their lives or their jobs. You don't ask as a carpetbagger or some Yankee either. You find someone the community trusts who's also willing to talk to you and you get them to ask those questions. Then you take the bulk of those grievances compatible with socialism or social democracy and you condense them to simple, easy to read points of view that fit on a leaflet or a soundbyte you can repeat on TV.
These are things conservatives and the GOP innately understand while Democrats go all half cocked on TV like a Rhodes scholar and talk down on people with complicated "Scary" plans they later pare down for obscure procedural reasons nobody understands. That kind of poo poo pisses people off and it doesn't surprise me in the least that people vote Republican because of it. Republicans know how to tap into deep emotional fears and concepts that people can easily understand unless they're a well educated urban political junkies who can spend hours of their free time pouring over the information.
Most people don't care. We're in an information saturated world where ideas fight for oxygen with extreme attention grabbing statements. The winning political formula in my opinion will be when the left stops being so academic and starts doing research on popular bi-partisan policy planks and then finding out how to "go viral" with simple statements and catch phrases that drive turnout on those policy planks. The Russian Revolution seized opportunities provided by the times to enact political change in an analog era. We have unique times in the digital era that are offering us a similar opportunity.
Quoting this whole post because it was a good post.
I'd love to see a greater focus on winning local and state elections and infiltrating dem circles and making a long play to build institutional power as actual progressives. Drop the loving socialist moniker and just push your ideas without a poison pill ideology attached to it. Call yourself whatever you want in private, but pick a name, build a movement, and focus on optics to build your base with simple, understandable arguments for legislation that will help people.
I want to help progressives run at the local level on things they can affect without pushing voters away by talking about dialectical materialism and general strikes. Schools do not serve you, the roads are poo poo, the rent is too drat high, your boss is an rear end in a top hat, and the internet sucks because spectrum/att/whatever sucks. Here's how I, your new city council member, your schoolboard member, your mayor, your state congressperson can help. Build relationships, develop trust, then move to capture higher offices. You might need progressives in office *now* to fix all the world's problems, but you have no base, wanting it really bad is not a basis for winning. You can't fix climate change or usher in FALGSC as a county chair, but you sure as poo poo could get municipal internet installed, you could get union contracts for government business and green energy so they thrive, you could improve infrastructure and use that alone to propel candidates to the state or national level down the line once you build a network.
Basically, reject anyone who smells anything like Joshua Collins and people like him and focus on doing the dirty work, the honest work, the "sewer socialism" to use a left twitter meme.
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Nov 3, 2021 18:10
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Nov 1, 2021 16:22
