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this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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Then let's hold a primary.
The Democratic Party's primary already happened. As is typical for American politics the incumbent won their party's primary.
Well, at least in the states where they didn't succeed in keeping everyone else off the ballot.
There was no real primary. Even 2020 wasn't a real primary. The fix is in with mainstream media and the major outlets taking their queues from the establishment.
The idea that we have an actual democracy is laughable, and the Democratic party does everything in their power to keep it that way. Biden won in 2020 because the establishment picked him and the media did as they were told. There is no democracy without an independent press.
Biden is a better choice than Trump for a multitude of reasons, but not saving democracy.
We have a democracy. There is a real Democratic Party primary every four years. Incumbent presidents usually win their primary when they are up for reelection.
The press is independent, but for profit in most cases. There are of course non-profit exceptions. The fact capitalism exists doesn't mean democracy doesn't exist. It means the owner class has a profit motive to overthrow our democracy.
Electing Biden preserves our flawed democracy for four more years. This gives us time to build grassroots movements to put people with better ideas into political positions in the next two elections. It delays the christo-fascist movement for four more years, who have to win a presidential election to succeed.
Getting Biden in office is how we save our democracy, but not because of something he will do. In order to save our democracy, we first have to keep it. Then we have to fix it.
This year they literally canceled the presidential primary in several states so, no, we don't have a primary every four years.
Radical consolidation of the media industry has largely killed independent journalism. There is a long list of media personalities who were taken off the air for daring to speak the truth. Anchors are selected to represent the establishment perspective on everything. Media ownership and the establishment work together to dominate the narrative. For profit or non-profit is irrelevant. PBS is now as captured as the private networks.
New media caught the establishment by surprise and did manage to make inroads, but that has largely been brought under control. Democrats and Republicans cooperated long enough to pressure social media companies to tweak the algorithm to direct viewers to "trustworthy" news sources, a group that laughably includes FOX News and MS-NBC and excludes independent news providers.
Electing Biden can't preserve democracy where none exists. There was that study out of Stanford that showed zero statistical correlation between the policy desires of voters and what legislation gets passed. We have the facade of democracy, but no actual democracy.
What we do have is the fight for Democracy, and that fight has a much better chance under Biden than Trump. That's not a minor distinction. I will not get behind allowing the Democratic establishment to portray itself as the defender of Democracy. They are democracy's enemies, and they are my enemies. The entire fight for democracy in an age of media manipulation is a fight to pull back that curtain. That fight doesn't stop because of Trump.
Biden was a write in candidate in New Hampshire and won. Delware was cancelled because only Biden got enough signatures. Florida's cancellation is still being challenged in court. These exceptions are exceptions, they don't mean we didn't have a primary. The incumbent won the primary, like incumbents usually do.
The media isn't perfect. Fox News is a propaganda machine for the Republican Party. CNN was artificially shifted to the right by a rich donor. But the situation isn't as bad as your argument claims. We just had most of mainstream media attacking Biden over his debate performance. For profit media follows the profit motive to everyone's detriment. There isn't some kind of organized conspiracy to control the news.
We have a democracy. The policy people want and the policy that gets implemented has diverged since Regan. Neo-liberalism is the cause of this. Neo-liberalism suppresses socialist ideas, while allowing fascist ideas to take root. Neo-liberals cling to the status quo and believe that our institutions are fundamentally good. That we just need good people in charge of them. So they resist systemic change and fail to get to the root cause of our problems.
Our intuitions are fundamentally flawed and need to be fixed. We need majority rule in our democracy and wealth redistribution in our economy. We need to abolish the Electoral College, proportion Senate seats by population, have Supreme Court justices run for election to name a few. We need to remove the owner class by taking away their wealth and the source of their wealth. Workers need to own the corporations they work for. Every worker needs to be given an equal percentage of the company in stocks or bonds and be paid out regularly in dividends or interest. Billionaires need to be taxed until they are millionaires.
In addition to being difficult to implement neo-liberals are going to intuitively resit these changes. The fixes all involve systemic change to systems they believe are inherently good. There are people who would rather elect Trump than fix these problems. Not because they are fascists, but because neo-liberalism has led them to believe that a 'good man' needs to be allowed to do 'what needs to be done'. There are of course people who want their prejudices to be validated and overt fascists. But neo-liberalism leaves people susceptible the idea that systems don't need to be fixed and that only the people need be to changed.
Thanks to neo-liberalism it easier for a fascist to convince people to blame their problems on immigrants and minorities than for a socialist to convince people to solve their problems with systemic change and wealth redistribution. This is not to say that it is impossible to convince people socialism is the answer to their problems. Just that we actively have to educate people about the flaws of neo-liberalism and fascism in addition to convincing them about progressive and socialist ideas.
I am not arguing for this.
I am arguing for this.
I am not arguing Biden will save democracy. Biden is a neo-liberal. His political ideology prevents him from saving our democracy. The same goes for the Democratic Party who are predominately neo-liberals. I am arguing that we, as in the American people, need to save our democracy. The first step in the strategy I am arguing for is to elect Joe Biden. Out of the two viable candidates, he is the candidate who is not a fascist. Electing Biden will preserve our democracy, flawed as it is, for four more years.
Then we need to use the 2026 and 2028 elections to elect socialists and progressives. We ideally want a socialist president to win in 2028. We need to co-opt the Democratic party the way the christo-fascists co-opted the Republican Party.
The fascists will not be defeated until we defeat their ideas. Once Trump is out of the picture MAGA and the Republican Party will find a new guy. Fascists movements are springing up in Europe. Modi is the head of a hindu-fascist movement in India. Getting Biden elected is not the solution, just a way to delay the fascists in the US long enough to start implementing actual solutions. edit: typos