2178
34,000! Largest rally that Bernie or AOC have ever had
(lemmy.world)
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Form a new party!!! Don’t call it Labor or Labour. Don’t call it Green. Don’t call it progressive. Don’t call it socialist or liberal.
Just give it a name that people understand and don’t have preexisting bias against. “For The People”
Take on BOTH the democrats and GOP. Become popular overnight. Keep hammering home it is not about skin colour, race or country of origin, but about the billionaires that aren’t happy with paying no tax and having billions. Make it about the 99%.
It is the only way you’ll get your country back without excessive violence. The two status quo parties are hollowed out from the inside. And both are infiltrated by foreign interests.
The Bull Moose Party. It will call back to Teddy Roosevelt and the first time we used progressive policies to take back from the robber barons.
Don't don't don't split the vote. Not even Trump was that stupid.
It's already split. If Democratic party runs another centrist/neoliberal candidate it will continue to be split. There is no indication that they'll run anyone left of kamala.
Now's the time.
Dems are managing to split the vote all on their own it seems
In U.S. you would still have to participate in Democratic primaries so this would come down to creating a new wing inside democratic party. This was done before and didn't change much. The geriatric party leaders would still control everything.
Please explain
In democracies with multi-party systems you have two voting rounds. In first every party presents a candidate. If anyone gets over 50% of votes he wins and that's that. If no one gets more than 50% two candidates with most votes go to second round.
In U.S. you have only one round and usually it's super close. If 3rd party candidate enters the race and gets even 1% of Democrat votes the Republican will win for sure. That's why Bernie took part in Democratic primaries. His only chance was to win those and run as Democrat candidate. That's also why Tea Party and MAGA movements were integrated into Republican party even though they started outside of it. If you want 3rd party candidates to run in elections you would have to change the system completely.
That’s not how new parties work my friend
How do they work?
I’m not sure. Claude said
Forming a new political party in the United States is a complex process that involves navigating federal and state regulations. Here's a step-by-step guide:
Develop your platform: Define your party's core values, positions, and policy agenda to differentiate it from existing parties.
Create an organizational structure: Form a committee with leadership roles (chair, treasurer, secretary) and establish bylaws governing your party's operations.
Register at the federal level: File with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) by submitting Form 1, "Statement of Organization" if you plan to raise/spend more than $1,000.
Register in individual states: Requirements vary significantly by state, but typically include:
Build local chapters: Establish a grassroots presence by organizing at the local level in communities across your target states.
Field candidates: Run candidates in local and state elections to build visibility and credibility.
Work toward ballot access: Each state has different requirements for getting your party on the ballot, often requiring a minimum percentage of votes in previous elections or petition signatures.
Fundraise: Develop a funding strategy that complies with campaign finance laws and regulations.
Think of forming a political party like planting a tree - you need strong roots (grassroots support), a sturdy trunk (organizational structure), and many branches (local chapters) before you can bear fruit (electoral success). The process requires patience, as most successful third parties in American history took years or decades to establish themselves.
For more detailed information, you might want to consult your state's secretary of state office website or the FEC website (https://www.fec.gov/).
I wasn't taking about forming a new party. There are many parties out there already. People's Party, Green Party, Libertarian Party... I'm talking about why people don't vote for them. If Bernie and AOC formed a new party they would face the same issues as all the other parties. In the end they would have work with Democrats and most probably would be absorbed by them.
The "Do Something" party
EverForward Party
Onward Together Party
Inspired Collaboration Party
Positive Frontier Party
That's what Bernie is saying. He's calling all progressives to run as Independent, aka No Party Preference, down ballot so we can shove the Corporate DNC into the GOP where they so desperately want to be anyway.
IIRC, he also called for the corpocentrists to get primaried.
“People” = “Communist”
Agreed.
Gotta take a page out of idiocracy here folks.
The Cowboy Party (Named after the most popular/recognizable NFL team)
Or, how about:
The Murica Party
Then you put Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as your president. I’ve had debates about the feasibility of this approach and this is the modern Ronald Reagan play.
The cowboys are probably the more at divisive team in the country.
The 99% Party. It's a slick way of calling it a worker's party without sounding like a communist party.
The thing is, you can "not call it socialism" all you like. The fact is that it is socialism, you have to respect people's intelligence enough to know that they will figure that out (or be easily convinced of it, if you really need an argument that doesn't respect their intelligence). When this happens, and even moreso when you inevitably reveal yourself to be socialist, it will make you look deeply insincere and subversive, because you yourself will have fed into this taboo and not done the work of separating the term from its negative stigma or generating positive media for it.
Socialism is simply the fact of the matter and being socialist means caring about material reality enough to not just lie and gaslight as a means of convincing people. When you get attacked for being socialist, you will not be able to backpedal without sabotaging your own movement, because there will be a litany of evidence that you are socialist. As there should be, or you would not have the support of actual ideological socialists (remember that whole material reality thing I just mentioned).
The material reason why socialism is a "no-no" word is because when the right attacks it, the liberal establishment does what they always do; they backpedal. Not only does this make the right's criticism look reasonable, because it confirms there is real reason to fear being associated with socialism; but it ensures that the people only ever hear the arguments against socialism, never the arguments for it. All of the arguments which are intrinsically associated with socialism; which you have done all this work to propagate; are never connected to it optically, and the people never learn what it actually is, leaving all of your policy open to attack.
What you are suggesting here is not the solution but exactly the issue that has brought us to this point.
The only way that you will ever launder the term "socialism" is by openly advocating for socialism and calling it what it is when you do. You just aren't going to beat the establishment at their own game; rather, we must show the people what it is to be respected and hear policy based in material reality that will actually address their needs, and you will win support from across the spectrum.
Socialism? Americans would be happy to have health care, better workers‘ rights, affordable education. Just like most other advanced economies in Europe, Australia, South Korea, Japan, and so on. That’s not socialism, that’s capitalism with regulations and social programs. Nobody really wants socialism, which was as utter failure everywhere it was tried.
Anywhere socialism has existed, it has done so under the threat of global capitalism which is led by the United States. The countries you listed are only able to maintain their wealth and relative comfort by taking advantage of the global south. They benefit from obscuring that relationship so that the people who see that benefit, don't have to reckon with the extent of it and how it enables the oppression of all of us and holds us back as a whole.
Let me give you the quick and dirty, oversimplified rundown of how that relationship plays out:
Power, under capitalism, resides in capital, which isn't just money but also resources and property. In order to maintain power, capitalism requires infinite and continuous growth, which of course requires more and more resources to sustain.
Say a given country decides it would like to own its resources nationally and use the wealth generated by those resources to support the growth and welfare of their own people. Capitalist nations are able to wield state power against those countries whenever they encounter this sort of difficulty. This includes leveraging state and capitalist media to run propaganda campaigns, which sour public perception of that country's national leadership; funding coups and covert operations against them; giving money and training to militant minority resistance groups; and when all else fails, all out war, while messy, is a very lucrative means to the end of converting the resources of global south nations into private capital for the global north.
This capital is then wielded within the capitalist world to manipulate political outcomes in favor of the private owners of capital and to prevent the working class from gaining the consciousness that would enable them to struggle for the things you mentioned; health care, worker's rights, affordable education; as they slowly strip away what was won from past struggles.
I believe this lovely quote by Ella Baker, a major activist and leader behind the civil rights movement, is relevant to the conversation;
Your wall of text is ahistorical. Yugoslavia is a counter example. They received American aid after WW2 to rebuild.
Half of Europe lived under real socialism and it was a fucking terrible time for many reasons.
During the Cold War the Soviet led block and the non aligned movement together had sufficient resources, knowledge, and people to get their shit together independently of the US.
Forgive me for actually caring about the subject. Clearly you have other priorities.
You mean this aid to Yugoslavia?
The aid to Yugoslavia that is an example of the US being hostile towards socialist states and cynically providing support to anyone that would align with it against its enemies? The same US whose loans are notoriously difficult to pay back, leaving the recipients permanently indebted to the US? Surely we are talking about different aid Yugoslavia, that couldn't be your single counter example.
Yes, and for the most part they did. Let's not for get that in 1917 the Russian Empire was still a medieval state with similar technology. After the USSR was founded; their last famine would be in 1947, which happened as a result of WWII; and I'm not sure if you remember this but they would be the only other world power than the US at the time. In the 1970s, the average soviet had higher caloric intake than the average American. They beat the US to space, fought through several invasions and international boycotts, though with a much lower GDP than the US. They had to spend 15% of their GDP to the US's 5-7% to compete with the US militarily. This was of course reasonable to do as the US had set itself out to be a hostile threat to the very idea of socialism, but was a major sacrifice nonetheless.
Standards of living in across the Soviet bloc dropped substantially in the 90s after the fall of the USSR as corrupt governments and wealthy elite privatized the USSR's resources. Even today, Russians earn under $10,000 per capita, about the same as the Soviet Union in the 80s. There is a lot more depth and complexity to this history than you would like to make it seem.
I disagree. And I don't mean to preach, but there is a power in words and using them (or not using them). The fight over the word and meaning of socialism is not what "the people" need right now, that can come later. This has been happening in the US closing in on a century. It's not those tolerant of material reality (as you say) you need to convince, it's those that would benefit from "the peoples" agenda that don't acknowledge material reality. Ride the wave of making billionaires pay.
Don't swim against this right now. These programs from the new deal and fair deal are not even called socialist by American standards anymore.
This quote is an example of what I am talking about though. Roosevelt had to take great strides to ease the great depression, because of mass protest movements at the time openly led by socialist/communist parties, but he could not go so far as to address the economic system that created the great depression. Nor could the capitalist class allow these policies to be associated with the socialists that visibly fought for them. Doing so would threaten the power of capital; this is not long after the bolshevik revolution that created the USSR, so there was major fears of similar movements taking root in the US.
This is not Truman defending the new deal, this is him distancing the new deal from socialism.
The new deal was not socialist, which is by design, but it was made up of things that socialists would have certainly fought for and taken even further if their effort was sincerely meant to achieve socialism.
It's time to stop letting socialism be used as a scare word. Sure, the loudest ones will continue to bury their heads in the sand, but those people weren't going to be won over anyways. Furthermore, you aren't going to win people over by talking down to them, and you cannot address their needs in a sincere manner if your base assumption is that they aren't intelligent enough to understand their own lives.
Not very practical while the US voting system is still first-post-the-post. Y'all need to fix that first.
there's also a good chance that fixing it will simply fuck us even harder.
How's that?
FPTP ensures that every vote in the winning party goes to the electoral college.
So if you vote 51% dem, and 49% republican, in a FPTP state 100% of all electoral votes are dem.
If you have a system like IRV where you split it between the electoral as fairly as possible, you lose literally half of your votes. And given that EVERY red state uses FPTP, aside from nebraska you're running a wildly uphill battle. You should be targeting red states first. And blue states last, otherwise we will almost certainly end up in a worse position, losing TONS of our voting potential.
Yeah, right. So almost like a prisoner's dilemma bind. And I guess a national change is fairly unlikely any time soon..
yeah, literally, you're fucked if you do, and you're fucked if you don't. The only situation in which you win here is starting in red states.
also, a federal change to the law is illegal afaik, so it would have to be something that either, states individually agree on unanimously, or something the federal government can't even control.
I also don't believe that voting is the answer to meaningful social change (though maybe it can be part of it in some contexts). But I was responding to a question that seems to.
Now is the perfect time. Breaking with the Democrats mean they have to play ball now or get electorally buried.
They will chose that latter, for sure.
Unless it really works like it has the potential to. Then the repugs and dems would be totally cooked.
If the Dems don't want to win an election, they don't have to run a canidate.
Don't worry about getting it right 100% perfect in the planning phase, the important thing is to just get fucking moving. If either trying to shake up the democrats or forming a third party end up being wrong, then learn from it and keep moving. We can't afford to miss the launch window because we couldn't agree that the plan was perfect.
The "We can't do this because it doesn't solve 100% of our problems" excuse.
Yeah, I've noticed that about the left in general, that the perfect is always the enemy of the good. Meanwhile the right's out there like "yeah, a lot of you are going to die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make".
The halloween party
The Freedom party
The Justice Party
I like Freedom Party, take that word back.