Happy seeing other liberals notice their abhorrent position on Ukraine. I have written about it in detail, and if we skip the details its really just Russian propaganda. With more and more instances of authoritarian countries utilizing sharp power, I wouldn't be surprised if their ties to Russia become public in a few years.
I am never quite sure just how many of the politicians who are DSA members, or who are not DSA members but are chummy with the DSA and accept its support, are actually closely aligned with the full DSA platform. Some might be playing a game of bait and switch with voters, selling them social democracy while secretly hoping to appropriate the means of production, which wouldn't surprise me. Perhaps others are just opportunists using the DSA's resources, but never really intending to try to carry out socialist policies?
Btw, when the DSA says they just want to nationalize a few major industries, I would recommend that you do not believe they would just stop there. Their antipathy to private enterprise is manifest in various other statements of theirs about capitalism, one of which you cite.
So, you got me curious. I read their program. Weirdly I found no talk of Castro or NATO or support for any other dictatorship. I didn’t find anything about not being able to own personal property. It did talk about the right to housing and certain companies being publicly held. That makes sense if you consider food, medicine, housing, and utilities essential for our survival. I did find anti-capitalist language, which when you understand how capitalism has enslaved us and created nearly every bad circumstance in our country, from the housing crisis to people dying from lack of healthcare—pollution, poverty, inflation, crime, sickness, starvation. Not only in our country, but we export our capitalist horrors in the form of wars, genocides, sanctions, and colonization.
As for the three branches of government. Trump has shown us that there’s no such thing. Especially when they’re all just piggies slurping from those billionaires' troughs, doing their bidding.
Meanwhile, they have us at each other’s throats, ginning up bigotry to keep us distracted. Think about it, they even have white folks claiming that Mexicans are taking white fruit-picking jobs! Of course, after the AI layoffs, those may be the only jobs left for humans.
They’ve made us OK with slavery in the form of a prison system, with the incarceration of over 2 million mostly black men. Now they have us OK with the legal government hunting, brutalizing, and now often shooting brown people.
It seems to me that our form of capitalism has gone down the same dark roads as the worst examples of socialism and communism. A cruel authoritarian, surveillance state that silences opposition. Maybe these atrocities are what we should expect. Maybe it’s what we deserve. We vote for it don’t we? Or maybe we can consider a different approach. Not all democratic socialist countries turn into authoritarian states.
There is a movement of neoliberalism within the center-left personified by scoundrels like Tony Blair, The Clintons, Obama, Biden, which this Substack seems to be a mouthpiece for. It would be interesting to research the money trail funding this movement with unsurprising ties to Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
This Substack seems to be a front for Clinton style ‘centrism’ which really means GOP lite corporate Democrats whose neoliberal economic policies inflicted massive social and economic damage on large segments of the U.S. population through support for Tax cuts for corporations and the billionaire class and disastrous ‘free trade’ deals like NAFTA which encouraged outsourcing and destruction of our manufacturing base, weakening of labor unions, mass immigration, both legal and illegal, and a host of other destructive social and economic policies to the current crisis we find the country in at present.
Contemporary "really existing populist regimes" both left and right have so far shown deep procedural isomorphisms and an authoritarian "systemic equifinality"
Happy seeing other liberals notice their abhorrent position on Ukraine. I have written about it in detail, and if we skip the details its really just Russian propaganda. With more and more instances of authoritarian countries utilizing sharp power, I wouldn't be surprised if their ties to Russia become public in a few years.
I am never quite sure just how many of the politicians who are DSA members, or who are not DSA members but are chummy with the DSA and accept its support, are actually closely aligned with the full DSA platform. Some might be playing a game of bait and switch with voters, selling them social democracy while secretly hoping to appropriate the means of production, which wouldn't surprise me. Perhaps others are just opportunists using the DSA's resources, but never really intending to try to carry out socialist policies?
Btw, when the DSA says they just want to nationalize a few major industries, I would recommend that you do not believe they would just stop there. Their antipathy to private enterprise is manifest in various other statements of theirs about capitalism, one of which you cite.
So, you got me curious. I read their program. Weirdly I found no talk of Castro or NATO or support for any other dictatorship. I didn’t find anything about not being able to own personal property. It did talk about the right to housing and certain companies being publicly held. That makes sense if you consider food, medicine, housing, and utilities essential for our survival. I did find anti-capitalist language, which when you understand how capitalism has enslaved us and created nearly every bad circumstance in our country, from the housing crisis to people dying from lack of healthcare—pollution, poverty, inflation, crime, sickness, starvation. Not only in our country, but we export our capitalist horrors in the form of wars, genocides, sanctions, and colonization.
As for the three branches of government. Trump has shown us that there’s no such thing. Especially when they’re all just piggies slurping from those billionaires' troughs, doing their bidding.
Meanwhile, they have us at each other’s throats, ginning up bigotry to keep us distracted. Think about it, they even have white folks claiming that Mexicans are taking white fruit-picking jobs! Of course, after the AI layoffs, those may be the only jobs left for humans.
They’ve made us OK with slavery in the form of a prison system, with the incarceration of over 2 million mostly black men. Now they have us OK with the legal government hunting, brutalizing, and now often shooting brown people.
It seems to me that our form of capitalism has gone down the same dark roads as the worst examples of socialism and communism. A cruel authoritarian, surveillance state that silences opposition. Maybe these atrocities are what we should expect. Maybe it’s what we deserve. We vote for it don’t we? Or maybe we can consider a different approach. Not all democratic socialist countries turn into authoritarian states.
There is a movement of neoliberalism within the center-left personified by scoundrels like Tony Blair, The Clintons, Obama, Biden, which this Substack seems to be a mouthpiece for. It would be interesting to research the money trail funding this movement with unsurprising ties to Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
This Substack seems to be a front for Clinton style ‘centrism’ which really means GOP lite corporate Democrats whose neoliberal economic policies inflicted massive social and economic damage on large segments of the U.S. population through support for Tax cuts for corporations and the billionaire class and disastrous ‘free trade’ deals like NAFTA which encouraged outsourcing and destruction of our manufacturing base, weakening of labor unions, mass immigration, both legal and illegal, and a host of other destructive social and economic policies to the current crisis we find the country in at present.
Contemporary "really existing populist regimes" both left and right have so far shown deep procedural isomorphisms and an authoritarian "systemic equifinality"
Surely you jest. 😊