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Fuck The Right, Left Unite
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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All of these were fought for with literal blood well before any liberals decided it was in their interest to push legislation. Don't delude yourselves by thinking the libs did these things out of the kindness of their heart.
I don’t disagree, but I think it’s pretty clear Lawrence is using the American colloquial definition of liberal rather than the academic definition.
Even if you use the academic version it makes sense. Liberalism is the default ideology in the USA. The majority of the population at any point will be Liberals.
"the American colloquial definition" is the American colloquial term for propaganda
Left leaning liberalism = liberals in the USA. It ignores the right leaning liberals and is flawed.
No, "liberals" "in the USA" = everyone on the left in America, which is wrong and bad because it ignores all of the anti-capitalist people and silences them by labeling them with an explicitly pro-capitalist Ideology. The left is (at the very least) liberals and socialists and some kinds of anarchists, there is a lot they have in common they can work on but calling them all "liberals" distorts reality in a consequential way.
e; Scpelling is hard sometimes
“The left is (at the very least) liberals and socialists and some kinds of anarchists,”
This is a VERY Eurocentric perspective. What constitutes progressive/left views changes culture to culture.
Oh bullshit, there are and have been American anarchists and socialists who have worked with and sometimes worked against American liberals going back to at least the early 20th century. Like, just to grab the most obvious example, Frances Perkins was a member of the freakin Socialist Party of America for years before she joined FDRs cabinet as labor secretary and did a bunch of the New Deal stuff liberals pat themselves on the back for now.
No it is because there are more nations than what comprises the West. Your definition would not make any sense in one of the dozens of authoritarian nations that are still trying to determine IF human rights exist.
The POV you are advocating suggests every society faces the same struggles and questions and that isn’t true.
Given how much historical evil can be tied to Eurocentrism it us important to stomp it out when you see it.
Nah the instant I saw this post I just fucking knew the comments would be full of these fucking clowns. Just block the divisive trolls as soon as you see them and things will get much better
“Well ACKSHUALLY the party that literally passed these key pieces of progressive legislation deserve 0% of the credit! In fact liberals are worse than the conservatives, who we will never even bother to criticize! The libs are our true enemy!”
Not really. Civil rights absolutely, social security, kind of, the activists didn't create the idea but they gave muscle to the labor movement to the point that FDR got elected in the first place and had the momentum so sure, clean air act and clean water act, you must be joking, those were just liberal government things. The things from that end of the spectrum are actually really good examples of why having a functioning government is a good thing even if it means "electoralism," meaning it can't all just be people in the streets fighting. You need both sides of the equation: The vigor and blood to push things forward, and then the paper and system to lock it in. Without either side of that, it doesn't work.
More to the point, stop shitting on people who did good things. If you live in America, you benefit from all of the things on that list. Look for enemies elsewhere. This is the left's favorite thing, to turn its guns exclusively on its own side, and it's super good at it.
Yes, eco activists died for a lot of those movements too.
The point isnt to "turn guns on [our] own side," it is to remind people that these movements and legistlations rest on the shoulders of giants, just like most everything else in our society
I really don't think that Nixon was strongly motivated by eco activists. I mean, I get what you're saying... like I said, the overall climate does make an impact on the "establishment" policies absolutely and the activism has to lead by about a hundred miles before the government starts catching up to it. I think on that front we're saying more or less the same thing.
The right did a lot of that specifically to prevent indigenous people from using their traditional lands
I think this type of thinking ends up being quite self defeating.
We should evaluate all politicians as vessels to carry out the will of the people.
When you consider them as such, not as people or entities to assign blame, as your goal is to be pragmatic, you look at their incentives and track records instead.
I think leftists often have this self defeating problem of being unable to stomach the fact that they will not get their ideal politician, and there will be no sudden uprising.
As a result, they often will criticize the politicians closest too them too loudly, ending up supporting "both sides" notions that cause voter apathy and let quite literally fascists win instead.
What I am saying is that we have to be pragmatic.
Particularly for the US, people have to realize that yes, while the DNC sucks, the democrats are the only practical, realistic way for people to actually end up winning.
Its long, slow, and no fun at all, but people have to support them publicly, and acknowledge their faults in ways that don't dissuade voters from voting for them. They then must also vote in increasingly progressive candidates in primaries and local politics.
Anything else is simply grabbing a foot gun, because this imperfect system is very slow, and won't change over night.
Or we could actually work to build up our own communities and set a real workers party up. Otherwise we are at the whims of fascists and fascist lite
This is not realistic and only results in the fascist coming to power.
A system that is all or nothing or first past the post mathematically results in a 2 party system as any time one side fractures, the other side wins disincentivising people from fracturing and creating only 2 groups. You can't escape this reality, so truly, the only option forward is long slow and unfun as described, because what you've described is essentially what Russian backed Jill Stein is, and exactly why Russia want her to steal votes from democrats.
The system you want can only come about after years of the boring, long, unfun stuff I described resulting in proportional representation. Anything other than proportional representation pushes any political system back down to 2 major sides and any other parties being largely irrelevant. Parliamentary systems make them slightly more relevant with coalitions and such, but still, you just can't win the way you've described.
Not with that attitude.
These are the realities of the american political system.
To ignore those realities is to support many many people being discriminated against and potential dying.
You can't fix a system by ignoring it.
It is impossible, as in unlikely to the point that discussing it is counter productive, to start a new party, and win in the USA with its current system.
The presidency position is too powerful, gerrymandering, billionaire controlled media and voter suppression would make it too difficult to actually secure even one ounce of useful power in the house or congress, and you'd need to hit a critical mass quickly enough that fascism hadn't already taken over (you're already past this point).
Your only play, and I mean only, is somehow keeping democracy limping into 2026, campaigning your asses off for the democrats even though we all think they are mid, and somehow getting enough seats in the senate to impeach and remove trump.
There aren't really any other viable win conditions.
We can't just gleefully stick our heads in the sand and hope that wishful thinking cloud 9 dream idealistic goals will happen.
If you really think im advocating for ignoring the system, then you have completely misinterpretted my comments lmfao
How do you figure? I have explained why creating your own party cannot possibly work, so how would that be anything other than ignoring the system to chase an impossible goal?
Is ignoring the abandonment of the actual mechanisms of reform not ignoring the system? I think I am pretty justified in interpreting it that way, but you didn't really expand and just game me a "Not with that attitude." with your last comment.
Well you cant do anything close to what im proposing with that point of view so i just didnt see a point to continuing the conversation.
If you require someone to simply immediately believe your lofty premise to continue a conversation, I question how genuine that conversation is.
I explained in detail the problems I saw with your, I believe, completely idealistic and unrealistic approach, and you kinda just went "nuh huh". that doesnt seem in good faith at all.
I pretty clearly said that i dont think youre worth conversing with lmfao. Take your "good faith" and shove it. Ill continue organizing and radicalizing the homies and you can continue licking boots, and we'll see who has the prettier smile in the end lmao
You are simply hurting the cause you pretend to support by ignoring the only system you have in place to solve it.
It is simply impossible to get the amount of people needed for what you are talking about organized.
You'd need more than the third of maga voters.
It is crazy you aggressively eschew pragmatism/liken it to boot licking. Absurd, naive, and counterproductive behaviour.
Like i said, not worth conversing with. Not with that attitude lmfao
You've been the only one bring incivility to this conversation.
you refused to acknowledge any of my points when you disagreed.
Meh meh meh meh mehmehmeh
Yeah. This whole thing where voting for someone is "falling in line behind" them is very weird to me.
Politicians are not your friends. Even ones I like, I don't really look at as that I am "allied" with them. I'm just inputting that I want them in charge more than I like the other person; it's sort of the last stage of the process of trying to control what my government might be in a position to do to me or do to other people in the world (for good or bad, often for bad).
Do these people go driving and decide whether the transmission "deserves" to be in third gear or second gear or whatever? Do they set "red lines" about when they will and won't touch the steering wheel? Dude, the government is often terrible. Refusing to give any input to it until it gets better on its own seems guaranteed to be self defeating.
It's literally terrifying how many people in this country don't grasp this concept.
You cannot get hung up on punishing a political party over a single issue while holding the door open for fascists. You cannot bank on a 3rd party candidate that CANNOT under ANY circumstance win. You have to elect the best option that most closely aligns with your ideals, then reform that party electorally. It's been done numerous times throughout American history and conservatives just did it in the worst way possible to the Republican party.
That's it. That is the way within the system we live in.
The only other option is flat out revolution and not only is that unlikely to happen, but history has shown us that without a clear plan for what happens after a revolution things can easily be worse as the void gets filled by other grifters and criminals.
I'm really not sure what's going to happen in this nation going forward with so many people that simply don't get this.
I mean, I think it is part and parcel of them thinking it's safe for someone else to do their thinking for them. I definitely won't say all of this "well we can't be VOTING or anything, what the fuck is that supposed to accomplish?" mindset is maliciously engineered and injected into the discourse, but some of it is.
I would add to your prescription for what we have to do instead, vocal activism and direct action for what an actually good solution would be, supporting candidates like AOC or Mamdani, and then if the only choice that emerges at the end of that on the ballot is between "everyone dies" or "policies that are really not ideal," we vote for that second thing and keep fighting otherwise.
One of the reason I am suspicious of all the "anti-electoralists" on Lemmy is that they spend very little energy on all that stuff, as far as I can tell. Some of them actively are complaining about AOC and Mamdani, and saying that good leftists can't support THEM, either, because (insert various bullshit). That is a lot more of a red flag than just the sort-of-plausibly-confused idea that voting for establishment Democrats is a bad thing.
Yeah, I mean on Reddit I would assume the people even against AOC/Mamdani are conservatives/Russians/bots trying to divide and conquer. But on Lemmy it almost seems like it really is just fabulously ignorant people. I say that not only because there's a lot less bot/conservative activity on Lemmy, but also because I see a lot of comments from clearly real people that seem to think that in reality we can just magically skip to a situation where an ultra left government can materialize out of thin air if they personally want it badly enough.
I have to assume some of these people are literally underage and we all have pretty wild concepts about what's possible in reality, especially the complex parts, when we're that young. But some are clearly grown ass adults. It's alarming.
I think it is (at least) two populations.
There are clearly people who are just walking typing Dunning-Kruger effects with bad political opinions, but don't show any kind of signs of being employed to spread disinformation and honestly seem self-consistent and high-effort about it in a way that makes it seem a little unlikely that they're being fake about it.
But then, also, there are people who constantly spread the same little handful of talking points, don't really seem to be putting much effort into making it believable and don't seem self-consistent about it or even to be reading stuff that people reply to them with, sometimes make weird little errors which clearly indicate that they're not from the US even though they care deeply about US politics, and so on and so on. That second population, I think it's safe to say are deliberate mass-scale propaganda. It's different on Reddit (and a lot more transparent, and they have populations of them like the pro-Israel propagandists who are not present on Lemmy), and to be honest I am also a little surprised that they have elected to spend effort on a tiny platform like Lemmy. But it seems obvious to me that they have done. And some of the nature of what they like to push makes it particularly interesting (as does the concordance that a lot of them seem not to be US-based which is very interesting to me.)
They are vessels that must be driven toward change under the threat of force, sure
Thats in an ideal world, but its not practical for the US in particular because their system only allows for 2 parties.
In fact, many systems boil down to that due to first past the post forcing people to vote strategically instead of for the party that best represents them.
In reality, people have to vote strategically and then use internal party politics such as primaries to shift the party to a more progressive place.
Threatening to make them lose only means the worse party comes into power and rachets everything backwards far more than leaving them in place.
I dont mean electoral force, I mean popular resistance.
Even 'working within internal party politics' involves the use of force, because capital is constantly doing the same.
"In reality", democrats are beholden to the same forces of capitalism as the Republicans are - pushing them 'to the left' will always involve a threat of force greater than the threat posed by capital.
BINGO. This is the way.
Lemmy is full of people who blew their vote on a 3rd party or didn't vote out of apathy or anger over a single issue that simply refuse to grasp this concept. 3rd party voters actually thought they could make a random unknown candidate the president, despite being a member of a practically non-existent party with ZERO representatives in Congress. Then their most popular 3rd party candidate got a whopping half of a single percent of the total votes cast, confirming that no 3rd party is going to win anytime soon. Probably in their lifetimes. They refuse to grasp that the real way to work within this shit system is to elect the Democrats then reform the party by voting out the members that won't get onboard with more progressive policies. Political party reforms have happened multiple times in American history and conservatives just did it in the worst way possible to the Republican party.
I love that Lemmy is almost devoid of conservatives, because I don't need to listen to shitstains argue in bad faith in favor of fascism. But honestly, there's so many of these people that I just described on here that refuse to work realistically within the established system that it makes me lose a lot of hope for the future. I guess they're just banking on a revolution without realizing that not only is that probably not going to happen, but there are many examples in history of things being worse afterward because there was no plan for afterward and the void gets filled by something worse.
Long story short, you're right. Elect the party that isn't literally fucking fascists. Then reform it by voting out the non-progressives. That's the only realistic way we get this nation back on track.
No, they did it because their lib constituents wanted it in large enough numbers that they had to represent the will of their constituents. Because liberalism builds and conservatism destroys.
So instead of posting useless, divisive bullshit to demonize lib legislators, let's get together and work against the fucking fascists.
I suggest learning about the ratchet effect and how it influences modern politics in america. Liberalism and leftism are two different things. Liberalism, in america especially, is a right wing ideology that seeks to act at the "rational" party. They will not act unless, as you said, their constituents make it clear they will lose their seat without said action.
Democrats fight progressives more than they fight Republicans. The ratchet effect was coined for a reason. I've seen it for over 10 years as a voter.
Whose blood do you think was being shed? Liberalism is the default in this culture. Those people dying were likely Liberals. There has never been a substantial enough number of leftists in the USA to be the drivers of most major policies.