The largest protest movement in American history happened under Trump because of rampant police violence under Republicans.
Then everyone went home when they elected Biden, even though police killings have only gone up every single year since then.
Liberals are fucking fascist cowards that would rather see a billion dead than be uncomfortable for one second.
Fuck you, PugJesus, and all your little MAGA cronies and alt accounts on here. I will never vote for a fucking Democrat.
Did those that downvote even read the article?
Shit is valid and you and your reactionary ear-plugging is this problem.
That's why we don't have down votes on hexbear. If you disagree you've got to post.
Yeah, the article basically calls both political parties a bunch of evil idiotic pricks. Which is pretty fucking accurate, but nobody seems to want to acknowledge this, even here on Lemmy
Depends on the instance.
Both political parties are a bunch of evil idiotic pricks. Each major party is the party of corporate influence. One is slightly more overt and explicit in their intention but it's not enough of a distinction to make identifying them worthwhile.
Okay, I acknowledged it. Now what?
Revolution
How do you have a successful revolution when roughly 95% of people support either Republicans or Democrats?
They don't, actually. The US government has a shockingly low approval rate to begin with, and it's only getting worse over the years.
I’m not talking about “approval rates.” I’m talking about how, in any given election, less than 5% of the vote goes to third parties.
If third party candidates can’t get enough support to even come close to getting elected, how would we be able to get enough people organized to support a revolution? Voting takes very little effort, so I would expect the number of supporters to go down, not up.
The US has First Past the Post.
This may surprise you, but revolution is illegal.
revolution is illegal
Does being illegal make it somehow easier to gain support?
No, but it means measuring support for revolution by the results of elections where only about 2/3rds of Americans even vote to begin with is silly.
To be replaced with what? You have a military backed group able to hold power and enforce true democracy or whatever that can’t be corrupted to the same ends sitting in the sidelines? If so I’m down.
Consider reading The State and Revolution. The people run the new government as an "administration of things," and not as career parliamentarianism. Units democratically decide things, and send delegates for higher units that decide things relating to multiple units, with instant recall elections.
Show me a political group worth backing and I will listen. Otherwise you are yelling at clouds. We acknowledge, we see no alternatives. Over throw the government, hell yeah sounds punk rock but what replaces it? A bunch of dungeon dweebs with zero understanding of global politics. Some Christo fascist extremist group that would start and lose a civil war with anyone non white. A far left progressive group that doesn’t understand how the American threat of violence is the only commodity keeping the US from being a third world country. There is a reason we spend the money we do on our military, its why Israel is our Middle East enforcers, it’s why we have to back Ukraine no matter what. It’s why the 2 parties are essentially the same.
Party for Socialism and Liberation.
Except you’re just being disingenuous. Leftists call out actual alternatives all the time during discourse.
And clowns like you just keep showing up, trying to derail the discussion, hemming and hawing about how leftists provide no real alternative.
Except it’s all lies. You are a fucking liar.
PSL. Even Greens would be better than either party if you're a liberal. But you would apparently rather ignore these "political groups worth backing" that both the left and large big-tent Muslim groups have been advocating, to plug your ears and make petty insults ("dungeon dweebs?" the hell are you talking about?) and make smarmy word-salad with a weird side of half-defending of the US subsidizing petty-bourgeois living conditions with violent imperial and neo-colonial exploitation, served on a plate of blatantly lying about the "far left," which are in reality the only ones who do understand and constantly talk about the evils and contradictions of empire and its absolute need to be dismantled, somehow "not understanding" one of the things they talk about and analyze more than anything and more than anyone; probably including you.
Which, also, go to any lumpenized ghetto or homeless tent city encampments in the US and tell me it's not "third-world country" for huge portions of the population. You imprison more than anyone ever has in history and still can't cover up this ever-expanding underbelly caused by both parties. How much of the "Real America" have you spent time in? Everything you said is petty-bourgeois distraction and railroading conversation into a jam-up of complacency and status quo-reinforcing. Vote for the PSL, join them or another socialist organization to help, and stop with this bad-faith talk; or otherwise admit to being a nationalist and that you like things this way because you are one of the shrinking portions that still benefit from it
but don't pretend to be on the side of progress while standing in the way and throwing shit at those advocating and pushing to make the world a better place.
A bunch of dungeon dweebs with zero understanding of global politics. Some Christo fascist extremist group that would start and lose a civil war with anyone non white.
Lmao your like I love fascists just please keep the Jesus out and don't lose the coups we start
I was thinking maybe we should just replace all the old cunts with younger and more competent people that actually care about what's going to happen in twenty years. The parties aren't really beneficial, it's time to let them go
huh, this is the first time I've ran across this idea on here. I mean, it would be fucking crazy and to pull it off would take a miracle of a life time.... but I think this has merit.
You could file this under Anti-trust/monopoly competition law.
Competition law is the field of law that promotes or seeks to maintain market competition by regulating anti-competitive conduct by companies. In economics, competition is a scenario where different economic firms[Note 1] are in contention to obtain goods that are limited by varying the elements of the marketing mix: price, product, promotion and place. In classical economic thought, competition causes commercial firms to develop new products, services and technologies, which would give consumers greater selection and better products.
This is largely how both the DNC and RNC are defined
According to Boris Heersink, "political scientists have traditionally described the parties’ national committees as inconsequential but impartial service providers."
So if you look at both the RNC and DNC as an organization or company that provides a service (which they've argued themselves in court, that they're not a true democratic function), you could consider them a national monopoly on a service provided to political prospects (think ticketmaster-livenation). If you break up the national level to only have individual organizations in states that aren't allowed to unlawfully co-operate with eachother, you would have better chances of people getting their state representatives to actuallly listen to their constituents.
National elections would become like an All-Star Jam or the Olympics basketball team. It would be much the same players but having to form their own services eliminating the "political pipeline" that the DNC/RNC currently has a market on, on a national level. Which, the overwhelming power they have, trickles down into state elections with vast resources and political sway disrupting a democratic process.
You could do all of this in a courtroom, no legislation required to be passed for enforcement. I have faith in each side having enough disgruntled members and judges tired of playing politics that you might get some headway.
The blue MAGA mass downvoters on here are a real problem for the platform. I don't even get the point of it. I think they think that any disagreement from the party line leads to the DNC failing because it's like Tinkerbell, and only kept alive by belief and clapping, not just a deeply corrupt neoliberal party in need of reform, that is terribly underperforming in only managing 50-50 while the GOP self-destructs.
More evidence of Dem voters getting radicalized by their "unbiased" media. these cats are the ones trudging blindly behind their party's frog-march rightward
Call it sheep herding, call it controlled opposition, or call it an accident if you're really gullible, but the outcome is the same. America ratchets rightwards and no one does anything. Rinse repeate until the lesser of two evils tturned into the lesser of two genocides.
Democrats should be the right wing party, and the other party should be Progressives. Republicans have proven themselves incapable of governing.
the other party should be Progressives
I'm curious who you consider to be a progressive in US politics.
And i do mean curious genuinely. I'm a communist so I don't have a very high opinion of what counts as "progressive" in the US. I do think there wouod be a voter base for what could be called a Progressive Party in the US but i don't see any leadership. Most espousing "progressive" positions would turn their backs on them the minute they could actually come true, or whenever they have to put their money where thier mouth is. Kamala Harris and the entire progressives caucus cime to mind.
I'd like to hear your opinion on possible leadership though. And i won't attack it as we both know I'll disagree before hand lol - I'm just genuinely curious how a non-communist views it
Frankly I'm not sure what the leadership would look like. It would start as the progressive caucus, but it would naturally evolve from there based on the voters.
I think the reason many current 'progressive' leaders abandon progressive policies has more to do with our current political paradigm than personal flaws of the leaders.
If there were a progressive party with a progressive base it would make progressive policies key to getting votes.
Okay, i can see the logic there. I also agree that its not about individual leaders having personal faults so much as the current political paradigm. I also agree that there would be a voter base for a progressive party. There's cerainly popular support for every proposed progressive policy in the US. Just M4A we know was widely popular across the country. Theres also been demonstrated that there's a grassroots donor base for a progressive party as we saw in Bernie's campaigns.
The real question that i think you should try to answer is given that there's broad support for these policies, and there's both a voter and donor base - Why does it not exist?
Liberals look at this question and blame the people. They blames voters. They blame the voting system and the two party stranglehold. Then they advocate for ranked choice and third parties.
Marxists consider the material basis of the system first and surmise that it doesn't exist because it wouldn't serve the interest ruling class. That liberal democracy is not democracy for the majority of people- the working class - but a democracy for the ruling class and both parties exist to serve their interests. This is why we can't get M4A - the most broadly supported policy proposal in the country. It doesn't matter that most people want it because it does not serve the interests of the ruling class.
It seems to me like the two versions aren't mutually exclusive. A better voting system that allows for more parties would undoubtedly lead to more parties winning votes, but such a reform would also run against the interests of the ruling class.
I mean, there's many nations with more than two parties, including progressive parties, but I don't see a reason why that's more in line with the ruling class there than here.
It's not so much about blame to my mind than it is about the way systems feed into each other.
However you slice it, whatever prior conditions you see as most important, replacing the republican party with one left of democrats would be a huge improvement.
I understand why you see things that way because you're a liberal and not a Marxist. Reform makes sense if you come at these problems from the perspective of liberalism. The problem is that the it really isn't an issue of systems feeding into each other - it is the system- liberal democracy and who controls and why it exists in the first place that's the issue.
You bring up good questions about why liberal democracy looks different in Europe than the US. There are a lot of reasons for that, but what matters is that liberal democracy performs exactly the same function in Europe as it does in the US. It doesn't matter if theres one party or twelve, ranked choice or first past the post. I'm not argueing that one or the other isn't better, i just don't think it matters whether the system of bourgeois rule is slightly better or not.
It does matter, even if you don't view it as significant in the broader context. Even from the perspective of starting a communist revolution, the more fascist and conservative the government, the more brutal the suppression.
My personal position is not for one system of government over the other as much as it is for better outcomes for society. I have enough trans friends and relatives that I want as few conservative reactionaries in power as possible.
Since it seems unlikely for capitalism to be toppled before the republican party crumbles, I still think it's worth working towards, especially when it just takes a single piece of paperwork every couple years to help.