this post was submitted on 03 May 2026
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MeanwhileOnGrad
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Sure, but he's not "one of the most right-wing politicians in US History"
He's not even the most right-wing Democrat president in the past 30 years.
Controlled opposition is very different than kind of fuckery we see from the Dems. The Dems are a mixture of ideological neoliberals, shithead opportunists, and sane people. The thing is, even most (though not all) of the shithead opportunists are in it for the power; the money is just a nice bonus. They'll sell out our lives for money, but not their own power, generally. Very few of them, even the shithead opportunists and most of the neolibs, would take the tack they did if they thought there was a serious chance of them losing an election because of it.
The reason they continue as they do is not because they're being puppeteered by corporations, but because not enough fucking people give enough of a shit to bother voting them out. And you can argue that that's because the US electorate is puppeteered by corporations, but then we're dealing with a very different issue than a few thousand party apparatchiks. They're complacent and complicit, but not wedded to this state of affairs - the reason this shitshow continues is because there is no available alternative CONSENSUS amongst the non-Republican ELECTORATE.
That's a much more daunting task than dealing with a metaphorical handful of fuckwits, so most people prefer the fiction of a Dem party controlled in smoky rooms by cigar-puffing oligarchs in suits. Those oligarchs have outsized power compared to their actual numbers, but the core of the issue is that sanity doesn't even have a majority inside the party electorate, much less a majority in the general electorate.
Hell, man, I don't even know that I disagree with them that revolution is needed to break at least the US out of this rut - though I certainly fucking hope it isn't, as I am terrified of both the bloodshed that could entail, and the uncertainty of outcome that involves (anyone who thinks "It can't get worse than this" lacks imagination - or awareness of current events outside of their comfortable suburban basement). But I do know three things that put me in opposition to tankie anti-electoralism:
Making things worse helps no one. In addition to that moral concern, giving more power to fascists makes educating and organizing harder, thus making the eventual goal of revolution harder. In that vein, harm reduction, when sufficiently strong differences are presented (ie Republicans-as-a-fascist-party and Dems-as-a-spineless-neolib-party) is not optional, on both moral and practical grounds.
Most people in the USA are not as far left as tankies, and even many non-tankie leftists, think. Which means our options are extremely limited for "Push through a socialist utopia platform", even if we had an institutionally-clean-slate and no Citizens United to deal with in making a brand new "Near-50% Of The Electorate Party".
Electoral politics affects national political discourse and the Overton Window. You (generic you, I figure you aren't a tankie, I'm just talking in the abstract here in general) think the Dems are never gonna move the Overton Window left? Fine. But I promise that the GOP continually moving it right is not going to make people more receptive to ideas that they find abnormal. And, of course, that such lovely paradises as "North Korea" and "Thousands of years of brutal feudal-and-oligarchic-and-despotic regimes all across the world, unchallenged until modernity" show us that suffering is not what causes revolutions. Political consciousness is what causes revolutions.
Man, fuck accelerationists, and I still carry the belief that if dems had power for longer than one president at a time the overton window shift would be possible and perhaps someone like Mamdani could've eventually gotten into office that way. But on the other hand, we had a pandemic where it seems like there was a point that even the normies started to figure out that money was just made up and pretty much the entire system is rigged... and then it all just immediately went back to status quo.
I'm hoping that there's a revolutionary shift after all this fuckery (I have to hope because I think if there isn't the alternative is boots goosestepping through the streets of DC), and when that comes I'll have to ask myself if the shakeup would've been possible with another likeable Obama type barely moving the needle and continuing the normal kowtowing and funneling our money to the tech bros and corporate oligarchy.
I understand the frustration, but I also think you really overestimate how much of a change the expressions of discontent were during the pandemic, compared to the baseline understanding of Americans just turned up in volume. And skepticism of the system does not necessarily include a willingness to see it overturned. See: the Soviet Union and Russia.
Shit, man, the biggest expressions of public discontent during COVID weren't against the basic functioning of the economic system, but against inconveniences like masking or limited functioning of recreational institutions.
I think you kinda touched on this earlier when you said "the US electorate is puppeteered by corporations," and I understood you were making a contrast between "electorate" and "politicians" there. But I think following up with "the biggest expressions of public discontent during COVID [were] against inconveniences like masking," really proves how fucked up the American voter is. I remember it being said once that voters have the attention span of months not years, but I think it's really gone down to weeks at best, and the selfishness has multiplied 10 fold since 2020. DOGE already seems like a bygone era to most people.
I think the defining topics of the 2026 midterm election aren't going to be discovered until September at the earliest. DOGE, Greenland, Venezuela, Iran, Ballroom, Minneapolis, sorry to say it, are all hardly going to appear as footnotes.