Skip Navigation
Pragmatic Leftist Theory @sh.itjust.works
PugJesus @lemmy.world

Liberals are bad, yes. They are not the equivalent of literal fucking Nazis - or even of conservative parties in general

The issue on here, on Lemmy, where we're speaking, is that many leftists don't care to make a strong distinction between 'flawed liberal moderates' and literal fascists. A constant refrain on here is the idea that things have been getting worse since, apparently, the inception of liberalism itself, and steadily spiraling towards fascism, so what does it matter if fascism happens today or twenty years from now? Electing non-fascists just puts off the inevitable. And, for reasons both personal and philosophical, I find that an immensely repugnant way of thinking, not to mention strategically and historically unsound. "Trump is worse than Harris - so what?" Fucking people suffer because of it, millions, including many whose lives will be ruined or ended, and for no gain to marginalized folk anywhere.

I came back from a family reunion discussing the very real threat of ICE against my relatives. I spent the past week struggling with my health insurance over recent policy changes (a dive I'll have to take again soon, since nothing was resolved, for better or worse - gotta love the run-around). I've had half-a-decade of mental health progress unraveled by six months of this administration, and all while I watch foreign affairs get worse and worse under the influence of the wannabe fascists who were elected. And then I come on here to blow off steam, and I find many people who claim to be leftists and who so 'boldly' stood against the anti-fascist coalition candidate in the name of 'solidarity' proceeding to express no solidarity with anyone who's suffering or going to suffer under this regime, either under the banner of "Things will get so bad that they'll HAVE to get better" (accelerationism) or "They're Americans mostly, so they deserve it anyway" (some weird form of campism).

I'm further left than 95% of Americans. I'm further left than 95% of Democrats. But because I have the audacity of regarding harm reduction as mandatory and not optional - a position which I take on abstract policy, but which is also strengthened by my own uncertain future under this fucking regime - I'm a turbolib, a shitlib, a moderate, a conservative, a fascist, a genocide supporter, and a Zionist.

Lemmy is the fringe, and while I definitely point to issues like Leftists choosing to abstain and let the greater evil win, I do so not because that's the biggest problem in society in general (in the broader situation, leftists could've saved us in 2024 - but so could a dozen other fucking groups that screwed the pooch in 2024, the DNC et co highest on that list second only to the actual, literal fascists), but because it's a problem that, on here, still meets with a resistance to acknowledge that it was a bad fucking move that millions of marginalized people are going to pay the price for - only a few of whom are those who fucking sat out and let fascism win in this country.

I find celebrations of that repugnant, and, for that matter, exhausting.

Aren't current affairs and the potential of being told to fuck off and die on my kitchen floor of a chronic disease exhausting enough without having to add people on my nominal left cheering the whole fucked situation on, because they bizarrely imagine the oppression of marginalized individuals as some kind of blow against the oppressors?

Fuck me. Guess this is really just a rant.

37 comments

  • 100% agree. Genocide in Gaza still happening. US falling down the authoritarian rabbit hole. Government enforced climate change denial. I don't like establishment dems either but there is not a single thing that would be worse if the dems had won and many things would be better.

  • Any time someone is being entirely unreasonable, self-destructive as a leftist, and inhumanly callous to the harm of absolutism, I find it easier to assume they are either a troll or someone who is having a mental health crisis of their own and in any case, I need to walk away from them.

    We're all living in hell right now just for the crime of paying attention and having a heart. It's stressful, and I have to assume some of us are going to weaken from time to time. I say let's try to give each other the grace to be utter assholes once in a while, and still smile back when someone is having a good day for once.

    • I wish I had your optimism. I grew up knowing too many nice, intelligent people who believe in blinkered conservative pigshit of the worst kind to think that leftists would be immune.

      Many of these people are not bad people at heart. But I accept that, largely, they absolutely believe what they're saying.

      Ideological insanity knows no boundaries.

      That being said, I'm generally not put off by people being assholes. I've been cussed out by folks and easily not held a grudge (at least, not about that - God knows I can hold grudges on other matters). Hell, as any number of people can attest to, I have plenty of asshole moments myself. It's when the assholery comes not from attitude, but from the construction of a coherent-if-counterproductive-and-hypocritical worldview that sanctions fascism and mass-murder because "Libs bad" that I get bent out of shape.

      I want to be Kerensky and say no enemies to my left. But every fucking day I'm confronted on here with the fact that that just isn't true.

      • Well, you know - this is the internet. Infinite keyboards make monkeys of us all. Sometimes the only sane answer is to block a fool and talk to real people until you feel sane again.

      • There are paid trolls here on lemmy, I know their schedule. Those aren't real people in the sense of being a normal person. They are paid to cause chaos and in fighting.

    • As someone who has been unreasonable and self destructive when having a breakdown about living on a dying planet surrounded by psychotic apes: I appreciate your understanding.

  • Love you bro, but..

    Your premise is backwards.

    Outright fascists don’t come to power in a vacuum; they ride in on the back of flawed liberal moderates. It’s the incrementalism, the “half-a-loaf” social policy, the permanent “maybe later” on universal programs that manufactures the very desperation fascism feeds on. You’re treating moderates like innocent bystanders when they’re the enabling architecture.

    So no, the task isn’t “convince fascists.” It’s break the chokehold of moderate liberalism that keeps material improvements off the table and leaves people to rot. The causal chain is not complicated: weak liberalism fails to deliver universal gains → pain and cynicism compound → fascism colonizes the space that liberalism hollowed out.

    We’ve lived this. Obama-era “pragmatism” bailed out banks, not people. No meaningful accountability for 2008. The bill was mailed to workers. That wasn’t fascism; that was liberalism creating the conditions fascism later exploited. And every time universal policy is kneecapped in favor of means-tested crumbs and donor-approved gimmicks, the door opens wider.

    Case in point: the mealy-mouthed line about arming Israel with “defensive weapons.” That’s an intentional obfuscation. Without U.S. diplomatic cover, aid, and arms, Israel’s genocide doesn’t continue. Full stop. Moderates keep that pipeline open while scolding everyone else about “harm reduction.” Harris (or Biden) says their halting ALL aid to Israel? They win the 2024 election.

    On 2024: there’s no more spectacular demonstration of “flawed liberalism” than that debacle. The party apparatus smothered enthusiasm with donor-class signaling, Gaza hedging, and moralizing lectures about lesser-evilism while offering nothing people could want. Youth, renters, labor talked down to, not organized with. Primary energy sandbagged. Material promises traded for vibes and scolding. Then, when the bottom fell out, the same moderates turned around and blamed the left for not worshiping at the altar of harm reduction hard enough. That’s not strategy; that’s malpractice.

    And Mondami’s win in NY just underlines it: when voters are offered something they actually want, they show up. Shockingly, people prefer a program over a guilt trip.

    It wasn’t fascists who spent 2016-2024 waging a total war on democratic socialism. It was “moderate liberals.” If we can’t beat them, we never get to fight fascism, because they’re the ones manufacturing the runway. Stop absolving the arsonists because they call the fire “defensive.”

    • Outright fascists don’t come to power in a vacuum; they ride in on the back of flawed liberal moderates. It’s the incrementalism, the “half-a-loaf” social policy, the permanent “maybe later” on universal programs that manufactures the very desperation fascism feeds on. You’re treating moderates like innocent bystanders when they’re the enabling architecture.

      My point here is not to absolve liberal moderates of doing a dogshit job at fending off fascism. My point here is that between the two, it should be a no-brainer to anyone with a brain.

      Liberals are bad. That's in the title. If we're checking out and leaving the task of fighting fascism to liberals, we're screwed. At the same time, refusing to work with liberals, especially in a context like the US where the electorate remains overwhelmingly right-wing, even in the Dem electorate, is nothing but a path straight into the gullet of fascism.

      This is WW2. I don't know which side you want to regard as the Western Allies and which as the Soviet Union, but either way, in this analogy, we need each other to overcome the fucking Nazis.

      And Mondami’s win in NY just underlines it: when voters are offered something they actually want, they show up. Shockingly, people prefer a program over a guilt trip.

      I have to disagree with this - Mamdani's win is spectacular and encouraging, but attempting to extrapolate the primary of a city where liberalism has a pretty firm hold wherein the establishment Dem was a sexual predator to a national template is not the easy connection many try to make it seem.

      I mean to emphasize here that I don't disagree that we should run left, nor that the 'triangulation' of Dem leadership saps enthusiasm rather than generates it. Only that Mamdani's win - like Bernie's generation of enthusiasm - does not necessarily extrapolate to progressive victories nationwide.

      Look at previous national or even state Dem primaries, even in liberal strongholds like Maryland. "People want an actual program" is not high on the fucking agenda. People want someone who seems to stand for something, regardless of whether they know jack about shit. And even then, appearing too 'socialist' can still scare many voters off.

      I've been a part of enough failed progressive campaigns to know that simple standing for left-wing ideals with a good and clearly expressed plan is very often not enough.

      Material promises traded for vibes and scolding.

      The problem with this is that there were extensive material promises by Harris in 2024 - and like Hillary in 2016, they didn't matter a single goddamn whit. For the record, I made the questionable decision (if in a safe state) to protest vote against Clinton in 2016 - something I moderately regret, but which reflects that, even then, before I really radicalized, I regarded Clinton as a do-nothing neolib. Yet she quite distinctly had an extensive program with very real and serious material promises to the electorate. I followed Hillary and her platform closely, and her reputation as a policy wonk was not undeserved - reading through her 2016 platform, it would be hard to argue that Obama, who was much more popular, had more extensive material promises to the electorate in '08 or '12. But those promises didn't matter, for two reasons.

      One, because most of the electorate doesn't actually give a shit about plans. They don't want material promises. They want vibes - but they want good vibes. The Republicans asspat their electorate with identity politics - the Dems, as a demographically broader coalition, have less leeway with that. You are right that the electorate doesn't want to be guilted (though I would argue that for people who are politically involved enough to be discussing the relative merits of socialism and abstention online, questions of moral culpability are not amiss) - but they don't want policy discussion. They want to feel like heroes or martyrs. And they want candidates to give them that.

      Second, because Hillary didn't 'appear' to stand for anything. This is a broader problem with the Dem mainstream - they think that because there is a position between two extremes where most people fall, the 'smart' thing to do is to 'triangulate' to that position. But people overwhelmingly don't vote based on actual policy positions, they vote on fucking vibes. If you 'vibe' like you're going to 'fix' things, it doesn't matter that you couldn't spell potato with unlimited time and a dictionary. What matters is that they're 'getting' that vibe from your pretty words.

      Both of those problems were repeated, without imagination or, apparently, the capacity for pattern recognition, by the Harris campaign in 2024. But it wasn't a lack of promises made - it was the lack of passion they were delivered with. The electorate didn't want anodyne policy details regardless of how moderate or radical they were, they wanted a show. And Harris failed to deliver an entertaining show, unlike Obama - or unlike Trump.

      • You’re ducking the core point.

        Fascism doesn’t just happen, it incubates inside a political ecosystem curated by “moderate, liberal pragmatists.” You keep pivoting to wartime-coalition metaphors, but you never touch the causal chain: these people manufacture the terrain fascism walks in on.

        And let’s drop the misnomer. These aren’t “moderate liberals.” They’re pro-corporate Democrats with jobs inside the party: keep the donor class happy, keep the Overton window narrow, and dress it up as realism. Same template as the AIPAC slate. Functionally tasked with keeping the party pro-Israel. This isn’t liberalism; these corporatists have no political identity. They're job is to manage the party to support a very small number of very big dollar donors. It’s brand management and policy capture by the capitalist class.

        Coalition with that bloc doesn’t beat fascism; it reproduces the conditions fascism feeds on, austerity, managed decline, means-tested crumbs, and endless “later.” Every cycle you call that “pragmatic,” and every cycle it demobilizes the people we actually need to win. (Side note on “pragmatism”: what exactly is pragmatic about choosing to lose to fascists in order to protect donors’ priorities? That's what 2024 was. That’s not pragmatism; that’s capitulation.)

        Your approach has a clear, repeatable outcome: we lose the midterms and bleed the future. There is no path forward where “pro-corporate, pro-Israel Democrats” lead a winning coalition because their core function is to veto the material program that would bring disaffected voters back. If they stay in the cockpit, the plane keeps nosediving. If we don’t push them out, we don’t just lose leverage; we lose the election. Period.

    • guess you got what you wanted then. it's working out great.

  • I am trans. The liberal media decided after this last loss that they might as well abandon trans people and see if it helps polling numbers. My chances of actually being able to transition medically in the near future are near zero because of the current administration. My life and the lives of thousands of others like me is so much worse than it would be.

    That's not even talking about the other groups of people I fall under that are being targeted. I feel abandoned when people pretend that somehow this is a better situation because they think they'll be able to overthrow fascism and establish their flavour of authoritarianism or anarchy (not anarchism because that requires far far more planning then they are willing to put into it).

  • We know the right is bad. We know. But it's tiring when repeatedly reminding us of this seems like nothing more than a tactic used to deflect from and shut down any conversation about the problems within the Democratic establishment. And when we're told that we have to accept anything the party does without question in order to win, well you can surely see how it's a problem to openly declare that they're allowed to get away with anything, right?

    If you wanna win the next election, learn from the mistakes of this one instead of just spending all your energy yelling at the left. You know what they say about the definition of insanity?

    • There's a difference, in my view, between good faith criticism of Democrats that's rooted in reality - which is necessary and for fucks sake should have been listened to last year ... ...and hyperbolic performances of ideological purity for in-group approval - which social media has made far more common and popular.

      The former might recognize the complexities of political coalitions, the American electorate, and public policy while offering prescriptive recommendations on how Democrats should advance - and win with - left-wing policies.

      The latter is steeped in black-and-white absolutism, hyperbole, no true scotsman bullshit, fantastical thinking, and whatever this month's overused leftwing meme phrase is ("HAND IN GLOVE!"). There's usually zero depth there because it's a worldview shaped by soundbites on social media, not nuanced reality. It's nice to believe that there's a magical dormant socialist majority just waiting to be activated in the United States but no, there isn't. We have to build it first.

      Mamdani succeeded because he had the energy of the former, not the latter. He spoke directly to peoples' issues, went out into the community to build bridges, and so far he's seemed flexible about the specifics of his policy proposals - like, he cares more about moving things towards a more equitable, just, left-wing outcome than making sure what he does is the purest socialist magic this side of Karl Marx, popularity and effectiveness be damned. He's building an actual broad fucking coalition of support, an exercise that necessarily requires dialogue, compromise, realism, etc. That shit functions much better in the real world than ideological absolutism. Even Lenin himself had to adapt the NEP, after all.

      Building a somewhat large coalition must precede durable political or systemic change. Either that or you enforce it at the barrel of the gun and, uh, fuck that.

      We'll see if other Dems try to throw sand in Mamdani's gears or not; they seemed like they were going to at first but now they seem like they're scared off by his genuine popularity (which they all wish they could emulate). Let's hope he can keep his plot armor here - and that he SUCCEEDS as mayor. If he ends up more popular than other Democrats and his left policies are successful we'll see more new young faces following his lead in other places.

      I joined this community because I want to read and participate in more discussions with - and build coalitions with - more of the former, the Mamdani's. I'm fucking tired of the vocal idiots demanding space communism TODAY while refusing to engage with reality and the steps necessary to get from here to there. That bullshit is getting us further from a left-wing populace & world and it needs to be shot into the sun.

    • If you wanna win the next election, learn from the mistakes of this one instead of just spending all your energy yelling at the left.

      I’m old enough to know that Democrats will never do this.

  • I understand where they’re coming from. I don’t want to vote for these Democrats either.

    They saw the horror unfolding before them and they knew they were impotent to do anything about it. So in frustration they took the one modicum of control they had.

    But since I knew humans are awful and this was going to happen anyway I voted for someone I knew wouldn’t help. Because I know everyone everywhere is awful.

    Apathetic bloody planet. I’ve no sympathy at all.

  • Well said.

    I'm on your side. I don't experience the same struggles and will never pretend to. But I do my best to empathize and do best to put myself in shoes like yours and think "what if this were me".

    I do not just allow fascists to say things without me coming back at them. But, I'm not a leftist either, or right. I'm just different and think different.

    Know that there are some of us who is not putting up with this. We're all supposed to be in the same family in this country and if someone fucks with my family then I'm going to stand with you and fuck someone up along the way.

    I am soooooo tired from major medical disabilities myself and never wanted us to be here. It sucks that now is the time it really ramps up.

    But my shit doesn't matter now. I'll strap my boots on and come stand with you.

  • Yeah its annoying so I get having the rant. I will argue some and in the more extreme cases I just block. I usually end or throw in my basic mantra. Better is better than worse.

  • But because I have the audacity of regarding harm reduction as mandatory and not optional

    You do that when it means siding with the right. When it would mean siding with the left suddenly moral perfection is nonnegotiable and anyone who disagrees with a red fash authoritarian tankie whos just as bad as the Nazis.

    I came back from a family reunion discussing the very real threat of ICE against my relatives

    Damn, now try to imagine how the Muslims you were spitting venom at for not voting for the people exterminating their families must have felt.

  • Self proclaimed "Leftists" are closer to fascist than any left wing or right wing liberal. Once they get power they will wield it exactly like trump.

37 comments