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this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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I am so mad.
When are we intending to learn that "turning away" no longer works and "turning towards" is the only workable system that doesn't end right back in fascism?
Look, I get it, it sucks when you support a politician with a mandate and then they don't deliver. Or when you support someone as an alternative despite misalignment on the mandate and then it turns out they're not doing your agenda but the one you supported while holding your nose. It sucks.
But it's now a legit functional electoral strategy for extremists to be ousted, have the middle-of-the-road centrist frustrate their progressive one-time electors and result in a return to power of the far right everybody agrees is a worse alternative. That's objectively worse.
The real question is not why centre-right liberals keep frustrating progressives with broken promises and slow action. The question is why does that translate into disengagement instead of left-wing alternatives gaining support. It is a constant throughout for the far right to effectively capitalize on every single bit of discontent by either converting right-leaning people or disengaging left-leaning people from the system altogether. Where is the left-wing populism? Why are they absent from this conversation? How much do you need to suck at politics to fail to build any amount of momentum under these circumstances?
I am furious,
When will centrists learn that “blindly supporting” parties and rejecting legitimate criticism only loses them votes. “Having ethics” is the only workable solution that doesn’t end right back in fascism.
It’s like they want fash to win, they do everything but hold themselves accountable.
The right have devised and extremely effective strategy: spam the Internet with an absurd amount of hit pieces against the left (and liberal!) politicians. They monitor the reaction, and as soon as one takes hold, they push it - hard.
The left have a special talent for not showing up or wasting their vote on a no hope candidate. This strategy plays straight into that weakness.
Some examples: incubators for babies during the Brexit vote, being pro-Palestine during the 2019 UK election. Being anti-Palestine during the US election. Any reason to sit it out... and let facists win.
We need to wake up and realise that sitting it out is exactly what the nazis want. They don't expect you to vote for them. Just sitting it out is enough.
Yes, better left-wing candidates would be great - but that's on us. Getting rid of FPTP in the UK might help. Either way, we need to wake up to this strategy and start being smarter. Grass root campaigns to get better candidates, sure, but for fucks sake, turn out and vote!
Well, that's a problem for me, because any political system that relies on individual ethics (or in the ability to take specific actions politically that are seen as ethical by a wide range of ideological views) is doomed to failure.
The system can't depend on some centrist amalgamation of forces that somehow magically does all things for all members of the spectrum. There needs to be a solution. There needs to be a dragnet of leftist forces converting disaffection with centrists into political power.
If the path to fascism is depending on centrist grey men somehow fulfilling the expectations of leftists with no fallback option then we've failed already. How do you stop fascism when that hope does not materialize? Why is there no left wing answer to that question but there is a very successful right wing answer?
Leftist voices are suppressed in society because they challenge the ruling class.
Rightist voices are amplified because they only threaten minorities.
We are competing with a handicap, the solution is this. Systems where people can gather and share ideas without said ruling class involved.
Nope. Pure denialism there. The liberals with resources were as willing to suppress the extreme right as the extreme left. They're both outsiders. Why is the far right capable of mounting a populist response to that suppression but the left wing cannot?
This got weaponized by the far right, from 4chan to Reddit to Twitter, into a extremely effective PR machine to discourage political opponents and ingest potential supporters into a cult-like zeal. Even assuming that isn't the goal for the left (and isn't it?) why is it not capable of mounting a similar system with the same tools?
Billionaires are not suppressed by society, especially not by liberals.
Billionaires were quite shy about being right wing political activists in an environment where fascist activism was bad for business.
But when Thiel, Murdoch and their cronies went ahead and not only didn't get dinged for their crap but became more powerful because of it that became not just easier, but their default stance.
The neofascist movement didn't start with billionaires. It didn't even start with Steve Bannon rotting away at Breitbart. It started in 4chan and crappy websites and extremist online groups deploying relatively subtle examples of what we now recognize as culture wars and then the far-right media learning that lesson and leveraging it to take control of right wing politics.
Nobody in the left deployed those tools anywhere near that successfully at the time, and they still don't. And now there are fewer billionaires willing to bankroll them as a PR move, so it's harder.
because people aren't ready for the fully automated luxury gay space communism, and they want better things for themselves, and not for everyone else around them.
Nah.
Not even as a joke, and this is extremely not a joke, unfortunately.
And whatever, then the question becomes why that. Why is the left wing trapped in endless variations of a prisoner's dilemma but the right is able to weaponize modern social dynamics effortlessly. Either way it's a failure of the space.