We protest with pink hats; they protest with AK47s.
Harris ran an excellent campaign, but she was running a campaign and they were fighting a war.
They are willing to go scorched earth; we are not.
They are unbound by the law; we are hobbled by it.
For them, winning is everything, even if they can’t govern. For us, governing is everything even if we can’t win. (Failing to realize that if you don’t win you can’t govern.)
Bernie is awesome, but we need someone young, someone who comes from outside politics who isn’t shackled to the “inside game.” Someone like, dare I say, you know who. And yes we need to build systems that ensure we hold power. We need our own project 2025.
What about practical solution or actions. You clearly identified the problem, but didn't propose any real world solutions except in very general terms. We've had enough of that. Time to propose actions that can make a difference. Raise money from wealthy Independents and Democrats like Buffet to make a difference.
I'm getting there. I want to lay the foundations first where we are, why the Democratic Party as it stands isn't going to deliver us. I will be getting to proposed political and economic solutions, but I want to make sure as much of the audience is on the same page as possible beforehand. I won't drag it out like Lost or Yellowjackets, so don't sweat.
I’m so glad you have some ideas toward building a solid foundation! I’m hoping you start laying out your ideas so we can begin to take actions. We the people want to break through and make a difference. Please, start the process‼️
I agree with your premises, but I don't see where the resources are. I don't see where the money is. Bernie raised $250 million from small donors? Musk dropped that much on Trump in one donation when he sneezed. Now he's dropped another hundred million on his PAC for appearing in a Tesla commercial in the White House driveway.
Where are our billionaires? It was right-wing billionaires who built and continue to support the vast right-wing propaganda cabal. We all know their names. The Kochs, Mercers, Waltons, McMahons, etc. Half of them are in the current administration.
We have left-wing podcasters, radio shows and even a TV network (FreeSpeechTV), but where are the billionaires supporting this messaging? MSNBC has a couple of progressive voices on in the evening, but even they seem hobbled by stodgy, conservative management that ejects their arguably strongest progressive voices while continuing to stand behind their center-right morning show that had a huge hand in Trump's 2016 win.
How do we get people to understand that this struggle is not Democrats against Republicans, but working people against the billionaire class? We don't seem to have any billionaires stepping up. George Soros is blamed by the right for financing every bit of our grassroots efforts, but as we all know, he doesn't.
MSNBC is currently for sale. Where is our Rupert Murdoch that has the means to buy it and dump a half billion dollars in it to develop a truly progressive, unified voice to counter FOX, Newsmax, OAN and all of the other well-funded right-wing propaganda outlets? Where are the well-heeled, well-connected millionaires that have the means and the connections to pull together an investment group to build some of this infrastructure you speak of?
Anyone in the working or middle classes looking for a billionaire to save them is like a medieval peasant looking for a lord who will take a little bit less from him.
The building of the right-wing political infrastructure began with the famous Powell memo of 1971 urging powerful, wealthy businessmen to invest in building such an infrastructure, e.g., investing in scholarships for right wing students, funding "research" institutions in universities, investing in communication media, etc. They had the money and the organization (Chambers of Commerce) to make it happen. I think you are absolutely right that this is what we lack but I question where is the BIG money and organizational structure to make it happen on the left? Or, how can we use mass movement politics to do so?
To the person that implied that Kamala lost because she just "ran an excellent campaign", but was up against people fighting a war, I don't mean to be rude about it, but that's completely wrong.
She didn't lose, the Republicans stole the election, but it is a travesty that she didn't win by a landslide, because even if they hadn't stolen it, she would have barely squeaked out a win, against the convicted fraudster and rapist who attacked our country, and is deep in dementia, and holds about 90% ideas that most Americans find abhorrent. Not slaughtering a fool like Trump metaphorically on the campaign trail is forever to the shame of present-day Democrats.
She ran a campaign that tried to be all things to all people, but with most of the energy going to appealing to Republicans, and very little effort to appeal to the progressive vast majority of their own voters, which is typically the boneheaded democratic mistake they never seem to learn from; it's hubris that usually brings everybody down and this is no different, but in addition to the hubris I think it's the loser instinct to want to suck up to power even when that power is opposing you.
They assume that they can appeal to Republicans and turn them into Democrats, but Bernie has done that a lot more than they have by taking the opposite strategy, actually going out and making his case for why the maggots should change their minds to embrace things like Medicare for all that would improve their lives, rather than trying to be Republican lite, which never works, but hope springs eternal for the corporate Democrats.
She did some things right which really helped, and was even six points up shortly after picking Tim Walz which was absolutely by far the best decision she ever made in her life, and she did some super obvious boneheaded mistakes that a person of below average intelligence but with progressive values simply would never make, whereas she is a highly intelligent person who made boneheaded mistakes because of her establishment corporatist perspective, which causes a lot of establishment insiders to do stupid things even though they're smart people; we all have blind spots.
The establishment has made sure that the Democratic blind spots favor oligarchs and a corporate agenda, mostly by bribing them .
After picking Tim Walz, and Tim was proving to be the awesome secret weapon and by far the obvious best asset to the Kamala campaign, which all progressives knew he would be as soon as we learned about what he did for Minnesota, the Biden professional Democratic strategists who specialize in losing, got to her, and using their perfectly honed instincts for sniffing out the very best way to lose, they incredibly made her put Tim under wraps, and made him tone down his rhetoric, telling him to stop using the viral most popular slogans any Democrat ever came up with, they snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory; sniffing out the hard-hitting rhetoric that was so successful, basically punching the bullies in the nose, in an emergency effort to avoid the threat of winning.
The Biden advisors found his obviously superior talent for campaigning way beyond the pale and told them to go back to worrying about decorum and avoiding offending Republicans at all costs including alienating Democratic voters and losing elections.
They said let us spit in Bernie's eye after he offered to be a surrogate for her; still the most popular politician in America, but they knew better than to go with somebody like that.
Their superior loser instincts said "no she should campaign with billionaires and oligarchs instead; the working class always responds positively when lectured from above by the robber barons that are killing us all, plus Trump has billionaire oligarchs so why can't we?"
The same team still sometimes like to humiliate themselves by suggesting after the election that Biden would have won, because remember they were the ones who are sticking to their guns and insisting we have to run him after he lost the power of speech, and had to be removed from the public eye during The sundowner hours, and they had to come up with excuses for why his brain was failing every minute that he was in the public eye, even before 4:30 p.m..
They had hundreds of thousands of voters desperately begging them to stop their disgusting record setting genocide in Gaza, or they wouldn't be able to bring themselves to vote for a party willing to keep bombing, torturing and raping more children to death.
Kamala's excellent establishment loser instincts told her to lie to them and say that she was working day and night for a ceasefire, even took one of our best Congress members down multiple pegs, by convincing her to lie about that on the national stage; obviously the people that felt so strongly about the genocide which I include myself among although I did vote for Kamala, weren't fooled for a nanosecond by the lies and it just pissed us off more.
Progressives were obviously wildly underestimated by the liars, and the Democratic establishment always does that. We all know she wasn't working on peace, and she even insisted on silencing the one Palestinian voice that might have been heard from the campaign; not because that person was going to criticize her; she promised to endorse Kamala from the stage and submitted her very pro-Kamala speech ahead of time.
Kamala's establishment instincts also told her that when asked to differentiate herself from the historically unpopular Biden, her best answer was she could think of nothing she would have done differently. That one comment likely cost her hundreds of thousands of votes.
All the intelligent people in the country (and the entire world) are worried about the sabre rattling the US does with Iran, and progressives know that by far Obama's best accomplishment was the Iran nuclear deal, that face painted cobweb headed Hitler 2.0 took us out of, following his instincts to attempt the destruction of all life.
So kamala's establishment instincts told her that when asked who the biggest threat to the United States is, she would say" me too", not to amplify the outrage of women who are abused by men, but to amplify the dangerous world war risking fake outrage of trump against Iran.
Israel the country that's been trying to force us to do a proxy war with Iran on their behalf, like they did with our worst foreign policy blunder, the Iraqi genocide where we slaughtered about a million of them, under powerful arm twisting by the corrupt Israel lobby, is obviously the most destabilizing country in the Middle East by a country mile, and about the most dangerous country in the world for the United States outside of Russia.
So, Democratic establishment instincts like Kamala has vis-a-vis foreign policy, are a lot more like Trump's than they are like a progressive, which isn't surprising given the bipartisan history of warmongering in this country. After all it was Hillary who whipped up the votes needed to abdicate Congressional responsibility and allow bush to decide to attack Iraq at any time without consulting them; she contributed to the murder of a million people by playing politics.
Go check out Greg Palast. We need to get the left to stop going along with the establishment lie that Trump won the election fair and square. He stole the election even if you ignore the fact that no election with 13 billionaires funding one side, can truly be called democratic. They removed 4.7 million voters targeted by race mostly black, from the voter rolls in this era of Jim Crow 2.0. that was more than enough to change the election outcome even with the billionaires throwing their monet at it.
There are no heroes here except for the people that the establishment Democrats try to suppress. Establishment Democrats and establishment Republicans are far more aligned than they let on; agreed on almost every aspect of foreign policy, unchanged for decades, and the terrible setup for giving away the power of Congress, transferring it to the president, giving that branch (no accident that it's the most removed from citizen control) the power to destroy our country, defeating what we've always touted as the brilliant system of checks and balances with co-equal branches of government.
Without a hostile takeover and complete restructuring of the democratic party to get rid of the corruption, there's no hope of the Democrats being an effective foil for the Republican war machine.
As long as both parties are taking the Supreme Court's invitation to heart, and trying to win elections by simply out spending the other side, which of course three lies on sucking up to the richest people in the world, and that requires abandoning all Democratic and progressive principles in favor of taking the path of oligarchs towards a kleptocracy; it's quite clear at this point that the fascists are only interested in the presidency in order to treat the United States like a corporation by hostile raiders; they're taking it over breaking it and selling off the parts to make themselves fabulously rich by destroying their own country.
Another of the right wing's efforts that has paid off over decades has been their big-money backed efforts to install conservative university presidents.
Excellent piece. One of the most important points you made was not doing the same thing over and over but reinventing ourselves. The Repubs do it all the time… Tea Party, MAGA. Trump is entirely not suited to government, but he was different, so people had interest. Let’s reimagine new and better government programs: a better SS program, a better Medicare, but my god let’s name it something else. Because if we build back better, it is then something else. So let’s all get really creative, and with joy, love, and compassion, reinvent America. MAGA can’t destroy that.
Just subscribed, and you're preaching to the choir, but (as a profoundly unreligious person) I need something pragmatic: not uplifting fantasy, not more doomscrolling. I'm willing to work towards something, and I suspect there are more of us: suggestions?
One of the critical elements I will discuss over the next few weeks is the lack of capacity we have as a nation. We've become atrophied. I am getting to solutions soon.
The problem is the majority of the "Left" isn't progressive. They are also supported by the Oligarchs and AIPAC. They don't want the change Bernie speaks of, that's why they made sure his run for president failed. And, as noted in this article, rather than taking his momentum and building something, he flipped to supporting Biden and the same parry he spent his campaign railing against. So, until we can even identify what means to be "progressive" the Left will continue to flounder
If you don’t think that all the Trump voters wouldn’t be on board with liberal policies like a strong safety net, universal preK, universal health care and school lunches, if they could keep those they feel are undesirable, like they initially did to all of the non-white soldiers that weren’t allowed to participate in the GI Bill, you’d be naive.
In answer to where do we start? bluesky has become a place where we can meet and discuss things - albeit in short form format. In answer to who are OUR billionaires, in addition to poor old overworked Soros, there is Reid Hoffman and Mark Cuban, to greater or lesser degrees, and maybe also MacKenzie Scott and Melinda Gates.
AOC and Bernie are our real leaders, carrying empathy and fairness with their messages for the America people. Where is our constitution? Why wasn't Trump tried for treason when his thugs attacked the capital. And now that he wants to be Putin's best friend. This is treason. America I thought was suppose to be by the people for the people. Look at the meeting of the great minds that created the constitution during the Philadelphia Convention in 1787.
It seems to me that we need a vision. Everything else should flow from that. Companies that don't have a vision don't succeed. Political parties won't either. (Or movements. It should be a movement, not a party.)
Yes, let's build an alternative to the bankrupt and discredited Democratic Party. Let's build a political party of the working class: An anti-imperialist, anti-war, anti-racist party that will fight for the interests of the multi-national US working class, including immigrants and the poor and unemployed. All the progressives, independent socialists, DSA members, and anyone who believes in a society based on justice, equality, and peace should join together to build this alternative.
I agree completely on the inefficacy of town-halls as a strategy for winning. High school Pep Rallies never helped a lousy football team to win, it just made everybody feel worse after the lousy team lost. So much hope!
The problem between the Left and Right is there an absence of sufficiently moral billionaires who believe in the Left’s agenda, who are willing to fund all of these organizations, institutions, and think-tanks.
Democrats may earn a lot of money for individual small donors, but Americans are weary of that following loss after loss, especially after the Schumer debacle on the CR. I’m pretty much done contributing to Democrats because they’ve proven over and over that they can’t win even the easiest of fights.
If we are to take back our democracy it will be left to individual Americans coming together to make it happen. And that depends entirely on how much we all want it. I’m convinced the Democratic Party is both unable and unwilling to restore democracy at this point, no matter how many $5 contributions we make because they keep failing us… again and again.
The ultimate question each of us will have to answer is “how much are we willing to risk for our Democracy and Freedom”? $5 donations aren’t going to cut it. Neither are pep rallies. Neither is a Democratic Party that folds at every opportunity to give the Republicans more power.
Corbin. You describe the symptoms, not the problem. The reality is this - the 'right' has no inspiration, no vision, no beauty. They are retarded, as in they live far in the past, and live inside a historical propaganda bubble of self-deception and hubris. Their entire MO relies upon 'taking,' as has always been the case with empty vessels. Their ornamentation is self-righteous piety to a religious myth that puts god-like humans of white skin in charge of some god's Earth. This myth is biochemically addictive and malignantly terminal.
What fuels this taking is capitalism, the economic formula that engineers the artifacts of hyper-consumption via hyper-destructive extraction and ensuing pollution. What fuels capitalism? Oil, gas, technology, nukes and hydro-power, and their latest handmaiden - AI computing. There is nothing NEW about any of this - it is the well-paved road to Perdition, which all capitalists believe they will escape with the religious get-out-of-jail-free card or self-defined repentance. In order to infuse Stockholm Syndrome on the rest of us, they employ pernicious dominance and many forms of violence.
Rallies actually threaten them. Why else do they desire so savagely to eliminate them and hold those leaders hostage? Rallies are much more effective than tired and useless Party Politics, especially the Fascism-Lite of the modern neo-liberal Democratic party. I have never been in any party other the SWP decades ago. The reason people like Bernie, AOC, Crockett, Omar and others have agency is because they are ecological socialists who comprehend that capitalism is a parasitic dead end of ignominious death for much of the planet,
Stress within the populace will evince its own new path forward. As Harris often said, 'we are not going back.' The quantum field is massive when compared to the cancerous nihilism of Putin, TFG, Muck, Leo, Orban, et. al. But you must understand that no omelet will be made without a lot of broken eggs. The tragedy is that material and psychological addictions must fail before a desperate realization emerges that there are no off ramps to courage, strength, honor and reverence for life and Earth.
It appears to me that you are one important person among many to continue to create, via healthy stressors, ideas, strategies, observations, inventories, analyses, and energies so that many others will eschew depression and choose the power of humble cooperation. As e pluribus unum states quite clearly - from many, ONE.
Great article.
We protest with pink hats; they protest with AK47s.
Harris ran an excellent campaign, but she was running a campaign and they were fighting a war.
They are willing to go scorched earth; we are not.
They are unbound by the law; we are hobbled by it.
For them, winning is everything, even if they can’t govern. For us, governing is everything even if we can’t win. (Failing to realize that if you don’t win you can’t govern.)
Bernie is awesome, but we need someone young, someone who comes from outside politics who isn’t shackled to the “inside game.” Someone like, dare I say, you know who. And yes we need to build systems that ensure we hold power. We need our own project 2025.
WE do! Its called the Port Huron Statement
What about practical solution or actions. You clearly identified the problem, but didn't propose any real world solutions except in very general terms. We've had enough of that. Time to propose actions that can make a difference. Raise money from wealthy Independents and Democrats like Buffet to make a difference.
I'm getting there. I want to lay the foundations first where we are, why the Democratic Party as it stands isn't going to deliver us. I will be getting to proposed political and economic solutions, but I want to make sure as much of the audience is on the same page as possible beforehand. I won't drag it out like Lost or Yellowjackets, so don't sweat.
I’m so glad you have some ideas toward building a solid foundation! I’m hoping you start laying out your ideas so we can begin to take actions. We the people want to break through and make a difference. Please, start the process‼️
I agree with your premises, but I don't see where the resources are. I don't see where the money is. Bernie raised $250 million from small donors? Musk dropped that much on Trump in one donation when he sneezed. Now he's dropped another hundred million on his PAC for appearing in a Tesla commercial in the White House driveway.
Where are our billionaires? It was right-wing billionaires who built and continue to support the vast right-wing propaganda cabal. We all know their names. The Kochs, Mercers, Waltons, McMahons, etc. Half of them are in the current administration.
We have left-wing podcasters, radio shows and even a TV network (FreeSpeechTV), but where are the billionaires supporting this messaging? MSNBC has a couple of progressive voices on in the evening, but even they seem hobbled by stodgy, conservative management that ejects their arguably strongest progressive voices while continuing to stand behind their center-right morning show that had a huge hand in Trump's 2016 win.
How do we get people to understand that this struggle is not Democrats against Republicans, but working people against the billionaire class? We don't seem to have any billionaires stepping up. George Soros is blamed by the right for financing every bit of our grassroots efforts, but as we all know, he doesn't.
MSNBC is currently for sale. Where is our Rupert Murdoch that has the means to buy it and dump a half billion dollars in it to develop a truly progressive, unified voice to counter FOX, Newsmax, OAN and all of the other well-funded right-wing propaganda outlets? Where are the well-heeled, well-connected millionaires that have the means and the connections to pull together an investment group to build some of this infrastructure you speak of?
Anyone in the working or middle classes looking for a billionaire to save them is like a medieval peasant looking for a lord who will take a little bit less from him.
The building of the right-wing political infrastructure began with the famous Powell memo of 1971 urging powerful, wealthy businessmen to invest in building such an infrastructure, e.g., investing in scholarships for right wing students, funding "research" institutions in universities, investing in communication media, etc. They had the money and the organization (Chambers of Commerce) to make it happen. I think you are absolutely right that this is what we lack but I question where is the BIG money and organizational structure to make it happen on the left? Or, how can we use mass movement politics to do so?
To the person that implied that Kamala lost because she just "ran an excellent campaign", but was up against people fighting a war, I don't mean to be rude about it, but that's completely wrong.
She didn't lose, the Republicans stole the election, but it is a travesty that she didn't win by a landslide, because even if they hadn't stolen it, she would have barely squeaked out a win, against the convicted fraudster and rapist who attacked our country, and is deep in dementia, and holds about 90% ideas that most Americans find abhorrent. Not slaughtering a fool like Trump metaphorically on the campaign trail is forever to the shame of present-day Democrats.
She ran a campaign that tried to be all things to all people, but with most of the energy going to appealing to Republicans, and very little effort to appeal to the progressive vast majority of their own voters, which is typically the boneheaded democratic mistake they never seem to learn from; it's hubris that usually brings everybody down and this is no different, but in addition to the hubris I think it's the loser instinct to want to suck up to power even when that power is opposing you.
They assume that they can appeal to Republicans and turn them into Democrats, but Bernie has done that a lot more than they have by taking the opposite strategy, actually going out and making his case for why the maggots should change their minds to embrace things like Medicare for all that would improve their lives, rather than trying to be Republican lite, which never works, but hope springs eternal for the corporate Democrats.
She did some things right which really helped, and was even six points up shortly after picking Tim Walz which was absolutely by far the best decision she ever made in her life, and she did some super obvious boneheaded mistakes that a person of below average intelligence but with progressive values simply would never make, whereas she is a highly intelligent person who made boneheaded mistakes because of her establishment corporatist perspective, which causes a lot of establishment insiders to do stupid things even though they're smart people; we all have blind spots.
The establishment has made sure that the Democratic blind spots favor oligarchs and a corporate agenda, mostly by bribing them .
After picking Tim Walz, and Tim was proving to be the awesome secret weapon and by far the obvious best asset to the Kamala campaign, which all progressives knew he would be as soon as we learned about what he did for Minnesota, the Biden professional Democratic strategists who specialize in losing, got to her, and using their perfectly honed instincts for sniffing out the very best way to lose, they incredibly made her put Tim under wraps, and made him tone down his rhetoric, telling him to stop using the viral most popular slogans any Democrat ever came up with, they snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory; sniffing out the hard-hitting rhetoric that was so successful, basically punching the bullies in the nose, in an emergency effort to avoid the threat of winning.
The Biden advisors found his obviously superior talent for campaigning way beyond the pale and told them to go back to worrying about decorum and avoiding offending Republicans at all costs including alienating Democratic voters and losing elections.
They said let us spit in Bernie's eye after he offered to be a surrogate for her; still the most popular politician in America, but they knew better than to go with somebody like that.
Their superior loser instincts said "no she should campaign with billionaires and oligarchs instead; the working class always responds positively when lectured from above by the robber barons that are killing us all, plus Trump has billionaire oligarchs so why can't we?"
The same team still sometimes like to humiliate themselves by suggesting after the election that Biden would have won, because remember they were the ones who are sticking to their guns and insisting we have to run him after he lost the power of speech, and had to be removed from the public eye during The sundowner hours, and they had to come up with excuses for why his brain was failing every minute that he was in the public eye, even before 4:30 p.m..
They had hundreds of thousands of voters desperately begging them to stop their disgusting record setting genocide in Gaza, or they wouldn't be able to bring themselves to vote for a party willing to keep bombing, torturing and raping more children to death.
Kamala's excellent establishment loser instincts told her to lie to them and say that she was working day and night for a ceasefire, even took one of our best Congress members down multiple pegs, by convincing her to lie about that on the national stage; obviously the people that felt so strongly about the genocide which I include myself among although I did vote for Kamala, weren't fooled for a nanosecond by the lies and it just pissed us off more.
Progressives were obviously wildly underestimated by the liars, and the Democratic establishment always does that. We all know she wasn't working on peace, and she even insisted on silencing the one Palestinian voice that might have been heard from the campaign; not because that person was going to criticize her; she promised to endorse Kamala from the stage and submitted her very pro-Kamala speech ahead of time.
Kamala's establishment instincts also told her that when asked to differentiate herself from the historically unpopular Biden, her best answer was she could think of nothing she would have done differently. That one comment likely cost her hundreds of thousands of votes.
All the intelligent people in the country (and the entire world) are worried about the sabre rattling the US does with Iran, and progressives know that by far Obama's best accomplishment was the Iran nuclear deal, that face painted cobweb headed Hitler 2.0 took us out of, following his instincts to attempt the destruction of all life.
So kamala's establishment instincts told her that when asked who the biggest threat to the United States is, she would say" me too", not to amplify the outrage of women who are abused by men, but to amplify the dangerous world war risking fake outrage of trump against Iran.
Israel the country that's been trying to force us to do a proxy war with Iran on their behalf, like they did with our worst foreign policy blunder, the Iraqi genocide where we slaughtered about a million of them, under powerful arm twisting by the corrupt Israel lobby, is obviously the most destabilizing country in the Middle East by a country mile, and about the most dangerous country in the world for the United States outside of Russia.
So, Democratic establishment instincts like Kamala has vis-a-vis foreign policy, are a lot more like Trump's than they are like a progressive, which isn't surprising given the bipartisan history of warmongering in this country. After all it was Hillary who whipped up the votes needed to abdicate Congressional responsibility and allow bush to decide to attack Iraq at any time without consulting them; she contributed to the murder of a million people by playing politics.
Go check out Greg Palast. We need to get the left to stop going along with the establishment lie that Trump won the election fair and square. He stole the election even if you ignore the fact that no election with 13 billionaires funding one side, can truly be called democratic. They removed 4.7 million voters targeted by race mostly black, from the voter rolls in this era of Jim Crow 2.0. that was more than enough to change the election outcome even with the billionaires throwing their monet at it.
There are no heroes here except for the people that the establishment Democrats try to suppress. Establishment Democrats and establishment Republicans are far more aligned than they let on; agreed on almost every aspect of foreign policy, unchanged for decades, and the terrible setup for giving away the power of Congress, transferring it to the president, giving that branch (no accident that it's the most removed from citizen control) the power to destroy our country, defeating what we've always touted as the brilliant system of checks and balances with co-equal branches of government.
Without a hostile takeover and complete restructuring of the democratic party to get rid of the corruption, there's no hope of the Democrats being an effective foil for the Republican war machine.
As long as both parties are taking the Supreme Court's invitation to heart, and trying to win elections by simply out spending the other side, which of course three lies on sucking up to the richest people in the world, and that requires abandoning all Democratic and progressive principles in favor of taking the path of oligarchs towards a kleptocracy; it's quite clear at this point that the fascists are only interested in the presidency in order to treat the United States like a corporation by hostile raiders; they're taking it over breaking it and selling off the parts to make themselves fabulously rich by destroying their own country.
ALL OF THIS!
Woo hoo! Yeah!
Pretty much, yeah.
Another of the right wing's efforts that has paid off over decades has been their big-money backed efforts to install conservative university presidents.
Excellent piece. One of the most important points you made was not doing the same thing over and over but reinventing ourselves. The Repubs do it all the time… Tea Party, MAGA. Trump is entirely not suited to government, but he was different, so people had interest. Let’s reimagine new and better government programs: a better SS program, a better Medicare, but my god let’s name it something else. Because if we build back better, it is then something else. So let’s all get really creative, and with joy, love, and compassion, reinvent America. MAGA can’t destroy that.
wanna bet?
I agree with the premise. I also agree with - “If you build it, they will come.” So, let’s lay out the strategy and name it.
Just subscribed, and you're preaching to the choir, but (as a profoundly unreligious person) I need something pragmatic: not uplifting fantasy, not more doomscrolling. I'm willing to work towards something, and I suspect there are more of us: suggestions?
One of the critical elements I will discuss over the next few weeks is the lack of capacity we have as a nation. We've become atrophied. I am getting to solutions soon.
Dems need bloodthirsty ideologues
Goin Hi when they Go Low aint gonna get it
The problem is the majority of the "Left" isn't progressive. They are also supported by the Oligarchs and AIPAC. They don't want the change Bernie speaks of, that's why they made sure his run for president failed. And, as noted in this article, rather than taking his momentum and building something, he flipped to supporting Biden and the same parry he spent his campaign railing against. So, until we can even identify what means to be "progressive" the Left will continue to flounder
Yes. We need a vision.
Where do we start?
Discussing the roots of the symptoms I think.
The “roots” are simple and obvious, RACISM!
If you don’t think that all the Trump voters wouldn’t be on board with liberal policies like a strong safety net, universal preK, universal health care and school lunches, if they could keep those they feel are undesirable, like they initially did to all of the non-white soldiers that weren’t allowed to participate in the GI Bill, you’d be naive.
In answer to where do we start? bluesky has become a place where we can meet and discuss things - albeit in short form format. In answer to who are OUR billionaires, in addition to poor old overworked Soros, there is Reid Hoffman and Mark Cuban, to greater or lesser degrees, and maybe also MacKenzie Scott and Melinda Gates.
AOC and Bernie are our real leaders, carrying empathy and fairness with their messages for the America people. Where is our constitution? Why wasn't Trump tried for treason when his thugs attacked the capital. And now that he wants to be Putin's best friend. This is treason. America I thought was suppose to be by the people for the people. Look at the meeting of the great minds that created the constitution during the Philadelphia Convention in 1787.
So who is the democratic billionaire ‘Koch’ that’s going to bankroll it to kickstart this new machine? That’s how the right did it.
they also did it with The Chicago School, PBS specials, and ideas that seemed logical and like common sense. That's the other element.
It seems to me that we need a vision. Everything else should flow from that. Companies that don't have a vision don't succeed. Political parties won't either. (Or movements. It should be a movement, not a party.)
Yes, let's build an alternative to the bankrupt and discredited Democratic Party. Let's build a political party of the working class: An anti-imperialist, anti-war, anti-racist party that will fight for the interests of the multi-national US working class, including immigrants and the poor and unemployed. All the progressives, independent socialists, DSA members, and anyone who believes in a society based on justice, equality, and peace should join together to build this alternative.
I agree completely on the inefficacy of town-halls as a strategy for winning. High school Pep Rallies never helped a lousy football team to win, it just made everybody feel worse after the lousy team lost. So much hope!
The problem between the Left and Right is there an absence of sufficiently moral billionaires who believe in the Left’s agenda, who are willing to fund all of these organizations, institutions, and think-tanks.
Democrats may earn a lot of money for individual small donors, but Americans are weary of that following loss after loss, especially after the Schumer debacle on the CR. I’m pretty much done contributing to Democrats because they’ve proven over and over that they can’t win even the easiest of fights.
If we are to take back our democracy it will be left to individual Americans coming together to make it happen. And that depends entirely on how much we all want it. I’m convinced the Democratic Party is both unable and unwilling to restore democracy at this point, no matter how many $5 contributions we make because they keep failing us… again and again.
The ultimate question each of us will have to answer is “how much are we willing to risk for our Democracy and Freedom”? $5 donations aren’t going to cut it. Neither are pep rallies. Neither is a Democratic Party that folds at every opportunity to give the Republicans more power.
We should model ourselves on the civil rights movement. (At least I think so.)
"Bernie and AOC's call to action is for people to get involved.
But involved in what?"
Indivisible?
Corbin. You describe the symptoms, not the problem. The reality is this - the 'right' has no inspiration, no vision, no beauty. They are retarded, as in they live far in the past, and live inside a historical propaganda bubble of self-deception and hubris. Their entire MO relies upon 'taking,' as has always been the case with empty vessels. Their ornamentation is self-righteous piety to a religious myth that puts god-like humans of white skin in charge of some god's Earth. This myth is biochemically addictive and malignantly terminal.
What fuels this taking is capitalism, the economic formula that engineers the artifacts of hyper-consumption via hyper-destructive extraction and ensuing pollution. What fuels capitalism? Oil, gas, technology, nukes and hydro-power, and their latest handmaiden - AI computing. There is nothing NEW about any of this - it is the well-paved road to Perdition, which all capitalists believe they will escape with the religious get-out-of-jail-free card or self-defined repentance. In order to infuse Stockholm Syndrome on the rest of us, they employ pernicious dominance and many forms of violence.
Rallies actually threaten them. Why else do they desire so savagely to eliminate them and hold those leaders hostage? Rallies are much more effective than tired and useless Party Politics, especially the Fascism-Lite of the modern neo-liberal Democratic party. I have never been in any party other the SWP decades ago. The reason people like Bernie, AOC, Crockett, Omar and others have agency is because they are ecological socialists who comprehend that capitalism is a parasitic dead end of ignominious death for much of the planet,
Stress within the populace will evince its own new path forward. As Harris often said, 'we are not going back.' The quantum field is massive when compared to the cancerous nihilism of Putin, TFG, Muck, Leo, Orban, et. al. But you must understand that no omelet will be made without a lot of broken eggs. The tragedy is that material and psychological addictions must fail before a desperate realization emerges that there are no off ramps to courage, strength, honor and reverence for life and Earth.
It appears to me that you are one important person among many to continue to create, via healthy stressors, ideas, strategies, observations, inventories, analyses, and energies so that many others will eschew depression and choose the power of humble cooperation. As e pluribus unum states quite clearly - from many, ONE.