The Bernie military vote point is stronger than I gave it credit for too. Voting to expand military budgets isn't just operating under constraint, it's a specific action with specific consequences. And he had no obligation to endorse who he endorsed. Real compromises that caused real harm. I'll own that.

The Good Cop/Bad Cop framing is the clearest thing you've written. Pelosi needing a strong Republican party. Bipartisan deportation records. Bipartisan surveillance. Bipartisan mass incarceration. Documented and not argued. We don't have to rehash how the establishment dems are ushering in fascism just as much as the pedophilic republicans. We're aligned there, and the establishment Dem party is obviously a captured party that's supposed to be used to depressurize revolutionary fervor.

On Platner: the profile is worth scrutinizing. Where I'd push back is that you're presenting a chain of interpretations as a settled verdict. The specific conditions of this race still matter as variables even if the profile is concerning.

On the consciousness raising vs accelerationism distinction: that's the most important clarification you've made. You're not saying make things worse to force radicalization. You're saying break the delusion that working within the system can save us. I understand that, but I fear that simply abstaining from voting does more of that harm. I think of MLK and Malcolm X. 2 sides of the same coin, but what was essentially put forth was "you can deal with MLK or you can deal with Malcolm. Who do you want to deal with?" I would rather deal with a democrat who says they're going to do better and hold them to the fire than a republican who gets off on shamelessness in addition to children.

And I recognize we're worried about the same long term outcome. That pushing back fascism incrementally lets people get comfortable, energy dissipates, and the underlying conditions never get addressed. That's a real contention.

But here's where I can't follow you.

On Weimar: I pushed back too broadly earlier. The National Socialists never received a majority. Their support was concentrated in a specific profile, economically displaced petit bourgeois, disaffected young men, veterans with unprocessed trauma, people whose identity organized around status hierarchies that had collapsed. That's not everyone looking for something to believe in, as there were those who still pushed back against it, that's a specific psychological and material condition being activated and channeled.

And that's exactly the problem with the grief cycle bet. Increased suffering and violence doesn't just radicalize people against the system. It radicalizes them for it too. And one side of that equation currently has vastly more power, infrastructure, and resources to perform that radicalization and twist it to their own ends than we do. The National Socialists were mostly imagery and bluster, as fascism always is, aesthetics of strength and belonging and someone to blame. That's enough. That's all it takes to capture disaffected young men full of rage who are looking for a target for a destructive tendency they don't know what to do with. Fascism doesn't need majority support. It needs an organized minority with that profile and the infrastructure to channel them before we can get to them first. And violence breaks down organizing, just as much as it breaks down hierarchy (for example, forcing those with property to recognize the tenuous relationship between "ownership" and the rules society has built and how they can easily be circumvented.)

The grief cycle theory assumes that if we stop offering false hope, people will complete the grief and radicalize toward us. But the conditions producing the grief also produce people who look like, to pull from fiction, Tetsuo from Akira, like Simon from Infinity Train, like Azulin from Unicorn Wars. (Video breaking down these characters I'm thinking of that was decent if you're interested) Broken, traumatized, conditioned toward dominance, full of rage with no healthy outlet. I know because I once felt the same when I was younger, but thankfully I found people who were able to pull me out of that rage. And the system is very good at getting to those people before we are. It gives them imagery, belonging, an enemy, and it allows them to use their power to pull themselves up by harming those around them. We're offering them a process of grief and consciousness raising that requires sitting with profound discomfort and uncertainty. That's a harder sell and it operates on a longer timeline against an opponent that's actively recruiting from the same pool right now.

If we had the organizational capacity to get enough people to not vote on a scale that would actually delegitimize the system, we'd have the capacity to run a nationwide general strike. We're nowhere near either. We've been struggling to sustain a single day of action.

And my own radicalization didn't come from the failure of a single candidate. It came from watching the cruelty and imperialist nature of the US play out over years. If that's more commonly how radicalization happens, the grief cycle theory is betting on a mechanism that may not even be the primary driver.

The people being deported under the infrastructure Obama built and Trump expanded didn't get a vote on which timeline the left chose to operate on. I'm not defending the system, I'm arguing that the people paying the cost of being wrong about the timeline deserve to be named in it.