Beefing up the institutions through which the fascists will enact their policies is complicity. Normalizing violence against the people that the fascists intend to target is complicity. Turning over the communications platforms via which people share information is complicity. Discouraging people from the kind of tactics one needs to fight against a fascist regime is complicity. Over the past four years, the Democrats have done every single one of these things.
In many ways, the Democratic leadership responsible for Donald Trump’s return to power. Let’s explore why.
Fixed the headline.
I mostly agree with the article itself. I would just urge anyone who wants to read the headline and absorb only the general sense-picture “Democrats = bad” to read the whole thing.
Assigning some blame to corporate-friendly Democrats who turned their backs on most of the people on the ground fighting for real change, and failed to do much of anything successful when the wolves arrived at the door for real in 2016, is completely fair.
Now that the shit-storm has arrived for real, though, I think that deciding you want to make anyone who’s a Democrat into your enemy, and so reduce your coalition size from 70 million people to maybe 1-2 million if that, sounds like suicide. We will either hang together or we will surely hang separately. Nobody you’re talking to, or going to be in a position to be talking to anytime during the coming storm, had anything to do with failing to prosecute Trump effectively or betraying Bernie Sanders. They worked with what was in front of them, same as you.
Read the article. I’m usually in defense of Democrats, but I fully admit that I think it’s a mostly fair assessment of how we got here and what we do from here.
Agreed. Anarchists often find US liberals incredibly frustrating to deal with, for some good reasons. A lot of that comes from them being one side of the status-quo ideology, in that both US liberals and US conservatives are descended from classical liberals. They’ve tended to resist scrutinizing most of their received wisdom because they largely haven’t needed to.
However, they’re currently more likely to be receptive to our ideas than they’ve ever been before. Some will end up being “go along to get along” Good Germans. Many others, possibly even a majority are somewhere between nervous and terrified about the future right now, and would welcome new ideas on how to deal with the situation.
They may not be ready to fully switch ideologies, but that’s something that depends on a more gradual background process. If we can refrain from anarcho-purism and meet people where they are, we can make a lot of progress and put ourselves in a much better position to survive and resist.
