Welcome to antifa. I'll get HR to process your file right away.

lol Sol you gonna take up arms to preserve the bounty of riches that the elected Democratic majorities have brought us?

Gee, Crackersmack! You know who's worse than neo-fascists? Democrats!

Once you get tired of waiting for that grassroots leftist revolution, you'll probably switch sides and march with the something-or-other-shirts. So many fachos are disappointed leftists, including old Benito himself. The clock's probably ticking on you.

Hitler wrote that some of the most promising SA recruits came from former communist party street thugs, much moreso than "farther right" moderates. He recognized they were empty headed dolts who just wanted an excuse to wreck shit, and could eventually be extremely easy to flip.

Another classic fascist coup tactic? Cheering on far left fringe groups to siphon off votes from the most threatening opposition party.

Mussolini marched on Rome with explicit support of the American ambassador. The National Alliance that Mussolini used to secure parliamentary power was an alliance between the fascist and the liberal parties.

Hitler only came to power by forming a cabinet with right-centrist Von Papen, and a refusal of social democrats to make common cause with communists.

The Liberal powers refused to take action to stop fascism in Spain, and supported Franco for years after. America routinely supported right wing death squads and genocide throughout the cold war, and we're doing it right now in Palestine.

80% of the Nazis killed in WWII were killed by the Soviets.

But tell us more about how communists are the real fascists, Dinesh D'Souza.

*****

Seems like neither of you are getting the point of the historical examples you're bringing up. If lefties and right-wing Democrats can't figure out how to cooperate, the fascists are going to win. That seems like the likely outcome, frankly. I can't see people like Nom and Crackersmack finding common cause any time soon.

Also, just as a side note, it's real nice that Stalin beat Hitler, but to a Polak like me, he wasn't an improvement. I have a lot of sympathy for the German liberals who didn't want to pick a side between the guys advocating for pogroms and the guys doing pogroms.

Also ashtar, you know who else collaborated with Hitler? The fucking Soviets. You know who collaborated with the Holocaust? The fucking communist Soviets. Yeah, scoreboard and all, they did eventually start killing Nazis, but that was not Stalin's decision. Stalin and Hitler were such good bros Stalin literally did not believe his own people when they told him Russia was being invaded.

Got some neutral academic articles on that? All I’m finding are think pieces about how the red army could have thrown more slavs at the Nazi machine guns to end the war sooner.

Mister Yuck you shouldn't be worrying about the lefties, the Democrats have proven that they don't need us and that they actually can win while rejecting our politics in every possible way.

When your party gets electorally massacred in 2022 and 2024 it won't be because the left stayed home, it will be because the normies did. You can interpret why however you want but imho it's because Democrats failed to address the material needs of voters.

Crackersmack is gonna go out and fight against fascists once they're done convincing the left that voting Democratic is bad, pinky swear.

SolRo, just Google the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact or Katyn Forest, and the deliberate delay in liberating the Warsaw ghetto for collaboration with the Nazis and in the Holocaust. My main source for Stalin's general incompetence is the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast series on the winter war. Hardly neutral or academic, but it cites its sources.

Crackersmack, I agree with you wholeheartedly. I'm not worried about Lefties sinking the party, I am a Lefty. This midterm is likely going to be a massacre and the general election as well. That's not because the Democrats are rejecting Lefties, if you're paying attention you'll notice that we're finally gaining some influence in the party. It's because two senators are on the take and Democrats can't do anything without them. I get that you reject electoral politics or whatever, but the only alternatives I know to them seem really unlikely to bring any positive outcome. Anyway, I hope you're doing more than just owning libs on the internet to organize politically, cause owning libs is gonna do less than nothing to prevent the coup we all know is coming.

I haven’t seen anything that says soviets directly or knowingly assisted in the holocaust.

I have seen some polish nationalist screeds inventing history though.

Polish fascists suck, too

I would agree with Crackersmack that the Dems may lose big precisely because they've failed to address the needs of the voters, but it always amazes me in these conversations that lefties like Ashtar and Crackersmack talk as if there's a choice between the Dems and the Left and not a big, big country out there that has moved markedly to the left since Reagan and wants nothing to do with either.

Every single Democratic administration since Clinton has had the mission of holding back a right-wing wave, and well, it hasn't been going all that well lately. But there are worse outcomes, and there's zero guarantee that the progressive platform you dream of would end up less like the New Deal and more like George McGovern. You can argue that the progressive Left can give, say, Trump voters what they really want in terms of working class-focused policies that might improve their lives, but that's counting on a rationality and open-mindedness I'm not sure the average Republican voter possesses anymore, if they ever did.

Or maybe the Dems really have no choice but to go big on a new vision of government or go home, considering that Trump is probably going to run again in 2024. But there's still the tricky question of 50 Republican senators that haven't been swept away yet. Maybe it is more prudent to simply count votes, pass what you can, and hope for the best. But you guys seem to assume that rural poor Republican Trump voters would jump at the chance to vote for progressives if only they really understood you. This strikes me as overly optimistic, verging on naive. Don't bet the rent on that.

It’s become obvious to me that the core problem of American politics is that Fox News is allowed to be a propaganda operation and big tech treats them as legitimate news sources…so the front page of google news right now is 1/2 Fox sources all screeching agitprop or political attack ads.

The real news networks are also critical of democratic failures (as they should be) but the political news cycle ends up being mostly negative news when dems are in charge, because Fox will be negative to dems 100% of the time. Conversely the political news cycle will be mostly positive when cons are in power because Fox will never report negative stories about republicans and the real news networks won’t do 24/7 political propaganda like Fox does.

The country is headed for fascism, and there’s not much that can be done about it.

Miss Henson, the Democrats wouldn't have any problem holding back the right wing if only they would do what they promised. The Democrats are killing themselves by making very specific promises when out of office and then getting elected and falling over themselves to make excuses why they can't do what they said they would. You can be relatively young and still have lived through two really high profile examples of Democrats pulling this stunt: 2009 and 2021.

This isn't about "going big" or about some unrealistic wishlist of lefty priorities. This is about Democrats promising "hope" and "change", voters doing their part and electing huge majorities of Democrats, and then Democrats doing absolutely fucking nothing in the most smug and infuriating way possible.

This is about Democrats promising a $2000 stimulus and then not delivering it, for no reason. This is about Democrats promising student loan relief and then not delivering it, for no reason. This is about Democrats promising to expand Medicare, and then not doing it for no reason. Etc etc etc. We could go on all day like this. Democrats think that they can get the media to manufacture consent for this inaction, and it just does not work anymore. Nobody buys the excuses. We've heard them all before, just a few years ago.

Fascism isn't inevitable, but at this point it may happen by default because there is just no opposition to it, organized or otherwise. Fox News pushes an actual cohesive agenda that has no equivalent on the center or left. There is no centrist ideology other than to stop the left and privatize/insurance-ify everything. Pretty much everybody at this point has given up on the idea that electing Democrats results in any specific set of policies being enacted. So you tell me where we go from here. Seems like we are headed for a single-party state, and honestly I don't know what would really be different.

Here's a great article by David Sirota called "Democrats’ Betrayals Are Jeopardizing American Democracy" and he is able to make the case much more eloquently than I am.

https://tinyurl.com/2p23mdp7

Bernie Sander's speechwriter thinks it's all the Democrats' fault? Colour me shocked!

You have to resort to ad hominems because you can't engage with the content of the article.

The fascists are united, the anti fascists are fighting each other over who has the best ideas.

That’s how the fascists won in Germany and that’s how they’ll win in America.

The fascists are united, and more than half the anti-fascists aren't really anti-fascists at all, their objection to the fascism is purely aesthetic. Those people are 100% completely fine with polite fascism that follows societal norms. That's how we got here. That's why so many Democrats spit on the ground when they hear Trump's name but fondly remember George W Bush as "one of the good ones" despite W having a far higher body count.

Why do you give that low credibility troll the time of day still? Anyone who studied fascism in Spain is not at all fooled by the thinly veiled rhetoric coming out of the only guy on poetv that deserved blocking

Gmork if you have me blocked why don't you just go be fat somewhere else?

Mister Yuck: the point I take from those historical examples is that liberalism is an ineffective bulwark against fascism. This is also born out by American history since Reagan.

I agree that left-liberal unity is needed, but that's not going to come from PMC centrists leading the way. The PMC can be dragged along with a working class agenda, but no one else can be brought along with a PMC focused agenda.

I think there's a kind of a reversed is-ought problem in politics, where people will change their analysis of what is true based on what sorts of action they think are likely to happen. That is, if the only action one can think of to address a problem is voting for a corporate centrist, they seem likely to change their estimation of the problems we face so that they're the sort of problems that a Joe Biden might solve.

Or maybe politics is the art of the possible and what decides what, exactly, will unify the left isn't who has the best, most wonderful socialist vision for a glorious future but what people will actually fucking vote for. Politics is not, primarily, about oughts.

If you want to know what's true, you can sign up for a philosophy class. If you want to win an election, you pound the pavement and count votes in Congress. Granted, the Dems haven't been able to do that yet, but it's still early, at least for some of their bills. But while it might be true that you need to give voters some sort of vision of the America they might someday want to live in -- that sort of work has to be done by someone, someplace -- the idea that you can govern an increasingly conservative country from a forthrightly leftist perspective has its risks, to say the least. Maybe I'm wrong and America's electorate will simply bloom and overflow with brotherly feeling when presented with inclusive, well-crafted socialist ideas, but you're placing a big bet on your fellow American there, and something like seventy million of them voted for Donny Two-Scoops.

God nobody here is trying to realize Marx's wildest dreams, I think most of us just believe that it is possible to actually do stuff like child care without it becoming a giveaway to insurance companies or that maybe, just maybe, we can actually allow the government to negotiate drug prices for medicaid. Nothing that the American left wants will turn this country into 1985 USSR. Nothing that we are asking for enjoys less that majority support. Stop pretending that we are wild-eyed Che clones or whatever.

Okay, okay, but maybe your delivery is the problem. From absolutely everything I've read of yours here, you reserve more fury for "smug" Democrats than for actual Trumpers and seem to believe there's a livin'-the-dream socialist America out there just waiting to happen if the Dems would just stick their neck out for it. A true believer in an America I'm not sure exists, in other words.

Sadly, I think that most Americans are capitalists to their very bones, and while I'd be all about striking a deal for drug prices, you've got to remember that an enormous amount of Americans would reject this out of hand. That may not be an optimal situation, but that's the setting that you've got to push your policies through in. Maybe we should demand more from the Democratic party. But the other way to look at it is that we're surviving by the skin of our teeth right now, and red-baiting the left is the oldest move in the R playbook. There are some traps we shouldn't fall into. The S-word is one of them.

Americans are generally too dumb and too gullible to fascist propaganda to accept socialist policies when branded as such.

But if you sneak in some socialist policies here and there they will also vehemently oppose republican attempts to remove them.

They wanted to end social security under bush and had to quickly backtrack. ACA has survived over a decade of republicans wanting to repeal it.

Like CS said, just focus on the policies. People actually like medicare for all, and the case for it is overwhelming. It's also much better messaging than "expanded insurance exchange vouchers for those in the 3 quintile or below of family income" or whatever the fuck the current plan is.

I also don't think the American people are particularly reactionary (though some classes are); it's just that every institution (media, higher ed, big tech, insurance, finance, pharma, etc.) is controlled by people with a lot of money who don't want to give it to poor people.

Regardless, if it's true that the American public is inherently fascist, and sneaky rearguard incrementalism is all we can hope for... well, we're fucked, because we've been doing that for 40 years and things have just gotten steadily worse–to the point of near collapse. I honestly don't see what we have to lose by trying something else.

I think part of the problem is that too many people, including people in this thread, are still falling for the Democrat's gimmick. Those of us that were deeply invested in the 2006 and 2008 Democratic majorities know how this game is played. No matter how many of them you elect, the Democrats will always be just one vote shy of doing what they promised, so you just have to give that extra money and put in that extra effort, and maybe they'll do it next time! And if they don't it's the fault of the voters for just not working hard enough, for not having strong enough faith. And as long as you never look an inch below the surface you can maintain hope that something is just about to change, any day now, just make sure that you keep donating when they send those apocalyptical-sounding emails.

It's really weird how people don't seem to remember pretty recent history.

Like, history where we were all commenting on this same website. You can look up what a dumb lib I was!

The democratic party is a machine for getting money from donors into the hands of professional consultants who went to Ivies and worked on the campaign of that pilot woman who spent 90 million dollars and lost to Mitch McConnell by 20 points. Nothing will get better until this changes.

Same, I was really invested in Obama's 2008 campaign even to the point of contributing considerable volunteer hours. The lies and excuses of 2009 felt like a personal betrayal to me.

And here we are a decade + later, and we are experiencing a level of labor agitation that I have not seen in my lifetime, and Democrats are still missing in action. If they even faked a little populism it would pay off massively for them, but they just won't.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and assume whatever response he gave included a high school level insult and no substance

Kids with assault rifles.

And we're running out of adults in charge telling them that they can't just shoot anyone they want.

the adults are busy watching klan judges use kyle rittenhouse's spoof as skin cream and crying

no wait, that's just me, not sure where the adults went