• Unruffled [he/him]MEnglish
    2•7 months ago

    FYI I’m not American so I won’t be voting for either. But I think you are contradicting your own argument when you say:

    tl;dr: the distinction between dems and reps is not one of “left/right” but rather one of “right/further right”.

    What I was arguing was that the Democrats (aka liberals) are further left than the Republicans (at least in some key social areas). So, while you have defined the difference here as right/further right, that is still an acknowledgment that they are to the left of the Republicans, even if they are “not-quite-left-enough” to qualify as leftist from your ideological perspective. So, it still makes no sense to treat them as equally bad options - there are still degrees of ‘bad’ we should be concerned about to minimise harms.

    It seems to me that many people on the left are currently earnestly trying to destabilise the US by pushing it even further towards right wing fascism, in the hope that it’ll eventually provoke some sort of domestic revolution or an international backlash to US influence. This seems to me like a high-stakes strategy that could horribly backfire in so many ways, and I just can’t get on board with it.

    • алсааас [she/they]OPMEnglish
      3•6 months ago

      I fail to see the contradiction tbh. It is precisely bc I am aware that the Dems are more progressive than the Republicans, that I said “I’d vote for the dems” (despite both of them serving capital).

      And ofc the Dems are not leftists if we define the status quo as capitalism and leftism as the progressive opposition to the status quo (and those are the definitions I uphold).

      Also I (unfortunately) am not posting from a socialist agitprop centre. I am under no illusion that my (shit)posts will destabilize anyone or anything. They are meant for other socialists and are a way of venting frustrations among other things.

      tl;dr: one can recognize the Dems as the “lesser” of two evils, while still heavily criticizing the fact that the only choice is between two (or more under multi-part bourgeois “democracy”) evils in the first place…
      “If voting changed things systematically, it would be illegal”