Ooh, the fascists aren’t gonna like this one
I’m okay with it.
I hate those stupid transphobic hats.
I can see why we lost the election considering people like OP.
That’s why I’d rather call myself center left. By US standards I’m still probably “far left”, because I’m for public healthcare, strong regulations and very robust social safety net. But unlike probably most people here on lemmy, if someone runs a business that’s not completely out of control and has unionized employees, I don’t think there’s a problem with that.
There two sides.
1% and their zombies
The rest of us.
Let’s not split up and weaken. 💪
That is indeed the two sides depicted in the meme
Who mean those on the right? They don’t even self identify as leftists, why should some of their followers say that?
Yeah a better title would have been “I’m left wing” or something but I hate the English language and refuse to respect it.
Who are those ninjas?
Zapatistas
Both are good, one is better
should i mention that under one of them many coups around the world were orchestrated? no, dems are no better than gops.
dems are no better than gops
Unless you’re gay, lesbian, trans, atheist, Muslim, Jewish, Satanist, black, brown, female, an immigrant, or really anything other than a straight white Christian man.
What an incredibly privileged take. Try having some empathy for other people sometime.
No way you’re unironically pulling out the identity politics when just about every single revolutionary party in the US’ history was led by minorities. We are the first to feel the brunt of capitalism and for that reason we are the ones to lead the charge against it while the privileged sit in their condos waiting for everything to blow over so they can say “Oh I actually supported civil rights this whole time :)”
And also, the US bombs all the groups above you just mentioned without distinction. The Obama administration for example dropped an average of 80 bombs every day of his presidency on the middle east and north africa.
For trans people in the U.S., the difference between a GOP win and a Dem win in the house, senate, and presidential elections is the difference between having or not having certain rights.
Federal prisons now will force trans women to be transferred to male prisons and they will be denied gender-affirming care like access to estrogen.
If you are a trans person in the U.S. there is a clear difference between the Dems and the GOP - one is clearly better than the other.
Nothing has responded to this, shown it to be false, etc.
It does not require that we overlook that the Dems have far-right policies, especially on immigration and international affairs. It does not require we defend U.S. imperialism to say the Dems are better than the GOP for trans people in the U.S. Both are true.
I understand the moral disgust and the impulse to see how villainous the Dems are, I feel the same way, but if you care about the political outcomes, you can’t ignore that there remain significant and tangible differences between the parties and their policies.
Rights are proclaimed and fought for by the marginalized, not gracefully given by our rulers. If you put so much emphasis on which group of tyrants to vote for, you’ll never think “maybe I should become a Stormé DeLarverie and actually make a difference”
Ah, I think you may have missed my point - I am responding to the claim that both parties are equally bad. While I can understand if you are primed to expect my points to be accompanied by a liberal attitude that voting is the main form of political action, let me clarify for you that this is not what I’m saying.
Obviously middle-class Americans have a tendency to think voting is the most significant political action that can be taken, maybe if they are really into politics they might make different consumer choices (avoiding Chick-fil-a, refusing plastic straws, etc.), and even more extreme people might participate in a peaceful protest.
Brick throwing on the other hand is something people who have nothing left to lose do, desperate acts from those who are barely surviving poverty, who are being harassed, jailed, raped, and killed by the police, and so on. Brick throwing isn’t done to carve out civil rights, it is survival.
To that end, Democrats who might advocate for and uphold civil rights have a pacifying and stabilizing effect in so far as some of those pressures that result in marginalized groups throwing bricks are alleviated. The GOP on the other hand seems to care little about stability, they are unskillful tyrants in that sense.
Ultimately all I am saying is that elections do have consequences, which is so obvious it should not have to be said. My statements do not imply elections are the only political events that matter.
Just because US democrats stopped calling them “detention camps”, and prefer “influx” facilities, doesn’t mean they did anything to dismantle the immigrant prison system that’s currently holding 30,000+ people in camps.
Well, except you are wrong. Biden reversed Trump’s decision to pull out of Somalia. You are just being fed right wing propaganda to make one of the groups seem better than the other.
of course. let’s have some respect for the american minorities while minorities abroad can be tortured in some basement in a third world shithole while being watched over by a cia agent.
and i get to be called privileged by some oversized gringo. oh the imperialist exceptionalism.
Both can be correct, it’s not a hard black and white split
The leftist revolutionary heroes are resisting the people on the right, it is a hard split. The people on the right are shepherds of the US carceral state and imperial murderers
Last time I checked, that’s not how that works, everyone has a wide range of ideals and views. Not 1 or 2, there can be 1 1/2, 1 1/3, 1 1/10000, whatever
Until we get ranked choice voting, you still need to support them though.
Alternative voting methods have proven useless against capitalist power. Countries like Australia and Japan use them, and it does nothing. It might make candidate stacking a little more expensive, and they have to pay more to advertise their candidates, but that’s it.
Alternative voting methods allow for smaller parties, ones who’s values may align more with the general population, an actual fighting chance. You gotta admit at some point that having only two realistic choices is a bit of a problem, right?
It seems like it should help, but in practice, its been useless. You end up having a greater diversity of candidates and parties, but if capital still stands above the political system and controls it, it just means more capitalist puppets, and more advertising money required to get those preferred puppets elected.
Multi-party Bourgeois parliamentarism is not really any different from the ancient roman imperial senate. Its government by oligarchy / the wealthy entrenched class.
In current Polish sejm there is 17 parties and 42 indpendents (on 460 seats). But every single one of them is procapitalist, proimperialist, pro USA, anticommunist. Alternative voting methods do literally nothing by itself.
Ranked Choice Voting is both too ineffective to make any change, and too difficult to get in the first place. It’s the perfect endless carrot on a string, the eternal “just one more lane and traffic will be gone.”
Even if that’s so, you’d still need to vote for the people on the right, because voting third party in first past the post is objectively just terrible for everyone with similar goals.
The people on the right work with the Republicans. They aren’t resistance. Revolution is a necessity.
Even so, voting third party or not voting is worse than voting for the people on the right.
This makes me sad, I thought we mostly agreed that what FDR did is a good way forward.
All he did was save capitalism which inevitably led to what the US has today. There is no future for humanity with oligarchs like him and his family despite their supposed good intentions
He did a lot more than “save capitalism”. Social Security, the Citizens Conservation Corpse, and the full blown WW2-era command economy (complete with ration cards and production quotas and public housing for all the rapidly mobilized industrial workers) had far more in common with Stalinism than Coolidge’s laisse-faire market economy. Hell, FDR even had his share of gulags, when you consider how Japanese Internment Camps were created and administered.
There is no future for humanity with oligarchs like him and his family
There’s a sharp line between an oversized land baron clutching a fist full of stock certificates and a popular elected bureaucrat charged with administering the public labor force.
Oligarchy can’t just be “guy with rich parents” or it quickly descends into austerity fetishism. Oligarchy is fundamentally anti-populist. It requires a strong centralized police force to compel a broad, disorganized public into acting against their own material interests. FDR’s New Deal was a meaningful shift away from oligarchy precisely because he adopted policies from his left-leaning proletarian base in defiance of the Depression-Era economic elites. And he implemented them with the enthusiastic support of the body public. Nobody was getting held up at gunpoint to take a salary from the Parks’ Department or to pile into Keynesian school house construction programs or to patch up wounded soldiers at the VA.
FDR’s personal wealth gave him a platform upon which to propagandize left-liberal policies on a national stage. But his messages resonated because they had a popular basis not because he simply hammered people with Madison Avenue propaganda.
You seem to be arguing that FDR was a leftist because of the policies he implemented. But I think what you are missing is why he implemented those policies. I think the truth is he didn’t really have the public interest at heart. His agenda was to contain a growing threat to capitalism in the form of the Communist Party of the 1930s. His strategy to contain the CP was to neuter the party by bringing it into the Democratic party fold, alienating their most militant members, and slowly squashing their agenda. Of course he had to appeal to their interests to do so. But it was a temporary strategy, not a real shift in US policy. There are a few articles on the topic if you are genuinely interested. Here’s one. And here’s a quote from another.
The New Deal reforms Sanders evokes were not the product of a farsighted, enlightened reformer, but responses to tumultuous class struggles in the early and mid-1930s. These reforms sought to contain explosive social struggles and were never truly universal, excluding women and African-Americans, for example. After mass struggle ebbed, Roosevelt shifted back to his original goal of stabilizing US capitalism while moving toward establishing US global domination during World War II. Progressive reforms came to an abrupt halt in the late 1930s, allowing the rollback of many popular gains during the 1940s.
FDR was a leftist because of the policies he implemented.
Its hard to argue a politician is something other than his policies.
you are missing is why he implemented those policies
The why hardly matters. Only the consequences. You can definitely argue that FDR failed to cement the more progressive programs (fully employment through public agencies, public control of finance and agriculture, a long term peaceful coexistence with the Soviet states). And for that reason, he was a kind-of failure. But I would argue putting the weight of the world on one man’s shoulders is deeply unfair. FDR took US policy as far as he could. Then it was Truman and Eisenhower and their lackeys who fumbled the bag (or capitulated to corporate interests deliberately).
His strategy to contain the CP was to neuter the party by bringing it into the Democratic party fold, alienating their most militant members, and slowly squashing their agenda.
The Democratic Party, as a whole, has a vested interest in neutralizing rival movements and harvesting their members. That’s not a strategy FDR invented or pioneered. Neither was the DemSoc liberalism of FDR incompatible with a more Reform Oriented American Communist Movement. The strategy worked in large part because American Communists saw FDR’s outreach to Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China as a positive turn foreshadowing a real global movement.
I might argue that Stalin’s “Communism in One Country” and Mao’s failure to open China up until Nixon, thirty years later, that did more damage than FDR’s liberal-washing of Communist organizing efforts. I could easily argue that the Truman/Eisenhower Cold War was what ultimately did in the American Communists. Socialists couldn’t uproot Hoover from the FBI or unseat McCarthy from a strong union state like Wisconsin or keep guys like Nixon or Kennedy from worming their way into the upper echelons of the US government on a wave of mafia money.
At some point, you have to acknowledge the failures within the leftist organizing movements that happened in the US. Deng and Khrushchev and Ho Chi Mein and Kim Il Sung didn’t collapse in the face of these problems in their home states and they all had it much worse.
Which side are you on?
The title says, Leftist.
The left side with the heroes and not the right side with the imperialist murderers. You should read Fanon.
the fucking hat lmao
It’s always the people who say ‘I’m a hardcore leftist’ or ‘I’m as left as they come’
New bit idea: tell people you’re “as left as they cum,” and always cum facing your left.
I’m like Zoolander, I can’t cum left
i’m as left as they come but I think Israel should “clear out” Gaza and that Trump makes some good points about woke going too far
Always relative to the point of view, for an far right wing everybody else is an leftist/communist.
nope, they are objective and discrete categories. The left are anti-capitalist, while the Liberal centrists are not. The rightwingers are just factually wrong and incredibly uneducated and ignorant when they miscategorize liberals as communists
The “left” is way too broad of a grouping today. The classic political compass is 2D with left-right referring to economic and up-down (authoritarian-libertarian) to social policy. And even that is oversimplifying it, many saying it should be 3D. Grouping everyone into either A or B is I guess what humans do when their understanding of a topic is too narrow.
I find this especially funny with Trump’s tariffs. You know, the mechanism with which you control the market… closing it… like leftist economic policy does. Trump is a leftist now? Any more tariffs and he’ll be a complete communist! Dismantle more government and he’ll be an anarchist! It just completely falls apart.
While this is somewhat true, in all of the west there are only 3 groups currently : liberals, fascists and leftists.
Liberals are a diverse group, ranging from socio-democrat and liberal green parties to libertarian who leans on fascism.
Fascists are all the brands of conservatives who leverage racism, authoritarianism and nationalism.
Leftists are basically the groups opposed to both fascism and liberalism.
Those are 3 objective groups. They are the groups that determine how likely they will cooperate or oppose each other, or how elections will turn.
Some parties will be a bit in between, but that’s merely political communication. In practice a group that promote itself as a middle group is actually leaning right. This means that “leftist liberals” (who range from some green parties and movements to the socio-democrats) will always pick liberals if they must choose between them and the left. Likewise, conservatives and libertariens are leaning toward fascism when given the choice.
The political spectrum is radicalised and triparted. You can deny this model and blur the information, but it usually means that you are leaning more to the right than you are pretending.
This is supposed to be a tetrahedron, but I suck at drawing 3D shapes. Just imagine that anarchism is the top of the tetrahedron and that the triangle is the base.
EDIT: Also, yellow is liberalism, if you can’t read it
EDIT 2: I have no qualm with down-voting, but I would prefer a comment explaining what parts specifically you did not like, so I know how to not make the same mistake in the future.
I’ll offer an explanation, I think it would be helpful.
First, mapping complex political beliefs on ill-defined and vague lines adds more confusion than it clarifies. What is authoritarianism? What is meritocracy? We have a general idea, but these aren’t useful for measuring ideologies.
Second, making it 3D makes little sense. Why is Liberalism in the “meritocracy” column, when one of the most widely agreed countries to focus on an idea of meritocracy, China, is a Socialist Market Economy? Why is liberalism distinct from conservativism enough to be an entirely separate leg?
All in all, it’s nice to think about how to view ideologies, but we should view them as they are, and not on some map that doesn’t exist. For example, why is a fully publicly owned, democratic society considered more “authoritarian” than society decided by the whims of few Capitalists competing like warlords?
Those are all good points. Thank you.
No problem!
EDIT 2: I have no qualm with down-voting, but I would prefer a comment explaining what parts specifically you did not like, so I know how to not make the same mistake in the future.
Political compasses are silly and pointless brainrot. Yes, this includes trying to make new and better galaxy brain political compasses. It especially includes that. “Meritocracy” lol.
The right side is just liberalism. This is what happens when the left and liberal are melded together in everyday western society/language and the water is muddied. It’s intended. It confuses people, overwhelms them, and leads them to use the apparatus that the ruling class has placed in front of us to circumvent true working class interests and movements. It’s why liberals scoff at potential allies (leftists), instead of seeing the truth: a unified working class.
Nice instance name.
For real lol
Thanks! Never thought I’d own a domain with “yachts” in the name 😂
True. Always good to unpack it. It’s therapeutic lol.
