US, EU, even China and India. Regardless where you are, the economy sucks, housing is not affordable, prices are high, jobs are stagnant and class mobility is nonexistent (except maybe in China).
US, EU, even China and India. Regardless where you are, the economy sucks, housing is not affordable, prices are high, jobs are stagnant and class mobility is nonexistent (except maybe in China).
Again, you are still not getting my argument. First, they came for the gun rights. What do you think is going to happen next? Do you think they’re going to stop there? You aren’t thinking far enough.
Minorities are getting terrorized by ICE everywhere across America and do you see any leftist opposition? No, that’s why fascists are bold enough to roam the streets. Do you think the fascists are going to stop at deportations?
And that’s my point. The American left isn’t ready and willing to fight the fascists yet. In that case, it is objectively better to have a Democratic administration while using that time to build the strength. It isn’t so hard to understand.
No, you don’t get it.
The terror is how resistance is built, it is organizing during it that is effective here. It is built as more and more people are either directly affected, know friends and family or who are affected, or and this is the important one, fear that they will be affected by these right wing terror gangs. Those are the people that are susceptible to recruitment and your message. It’s how people like Mamdani are able to usurp traditional democratic messaging. Mamdani doesn’t happen if Trump is not in office.
When the Democrats are in charge, your rights are stripped away and the fascist gangs are just as empowered and the libs think everything is fine and that leftists are just paranoid (until of course election season where they become hyperbolic shrieks). You can only recruit from the directly affected, as the family and friends think the Democrats will help them, and there is no fear of the Republicans because the Democrats always think that they have everything under control and that they can’t possibly lose the next election, and nobody reports on the violations even though they were still already happening.
You do not build strength, you suffer de-radicalization and demobilization of the left. It’s why their strategy works so well, because people fundementally misunderstand what radicalizes people. It is not ideological potential, but actual material reality.
But we are going to talk past each other again here, as we do every time during this conversation. And you will claim victory because the reporting follows your narrative, but I am telling you, the land has never been more fertile here for the left. How this energy will eventually be applied is anybodies guess, but this organization shit was dead in the fucking water under Biden.
Tbf, I think chuddier areas tend to always have okay potential materially, but those that are most likely to already be radicalized are those that would be targets in those areas. And frankly, I’m personally not gambling on someone I see waving the Confederate flag to be a potential Young Patriot type, rather than one who asks their spouse to grab the shotgun cuz they glanced at me and saw a removed
NGL, I can see TreadOnMe’s idea due to the thesis I had during our last discussion, the type that is mostly recruited from in the modern American left is the type that I referred to, which I do think lacks the same material incentives to be radicalized, with the lower velocity of worsening conditions and the subtle cruelty of democratic administration. Many of those types are in absolute panic right now and find themselves reconsidering many things, such as gun ownership.
Edit: Thus, under modern left recruitment strategy, I think TreadOnMe’s idea is closer to reality for radicalization. Whether this is the best strategy for doing so?
I do have concerns related to the strategy and recruitment flexibility, since I do think there were potential radical bases at were underrecruited. But I wasn’t organizing at the time, believe there is some demographic distrust there, and I am still working out what I want to see in my own organization attempts, so I don’t want to judge too harshly on a problem that the solution I have yet to figure out.
I want to be clear here. I am not particularly thrilled that this is my experience of the reality on the ground. I don’t know if this is the ‘best strategy’, but I do know that attaching your wagon to the Democrats, in particular those closely associated with the DNC, is a death sentence for a radical movement. If they lose, people don’t trust you, and if they win then people tune out because the ‘grown ups are back in control’.
You don’t have to discourage your recruits from voting, but you need to emphasize to them that voting does not change the trajectory we are heading towards, hence it’s outcomes cannot affect our overall political strategy. You have to hammer this point home repeatedly whenever it comes up.
There are segments of the population that are inherently radicalized, however they are radicalized specifically in a way to distrust leftists, particularly white leftists because of their general lack of long-term political commitment, and particularly in well organized Latino and African-American (in particular recent Somali) communities. They have their own radical traditions, and it is imperative to be sympathetic to those movements and synthesize yours into their efforts, which have likely been going on for decades.
The most important thing is to say what you are going to do, and do what you said you would do. You don’t have to be clever about it.
Yeah, this is what I was thinking of lol. I’m Black, and I personally had some of that distrust that prevented me from becoming a leftist sooner. If I hadn’t studied the Panthers, no way some white person would’ve convinced me, and I’m pretty sure it still informs a lot of my ideas, particularly since we have been stabbed in the back for the thinnest slice of pie by previous labor movements. But my organizing experience has generally been that white leftists have nearly wholly given up trying to convince Black folk, at least in my area, which has several nearly purely Black communities, or Black dominant ones. That’s also ignoring the general lack of familiarity with black radicalism by white folks in orgs (Then just about all of the black members have read, or at least own and are reading damn near all the same black radical books, having decided to read them completely independently).
I just guess I find myself cynical because I don’t know how white folk finna synthesize anything when they don’t have any familiarity with half of what they’re synthesizing.
As a white person, I don’t personally have alot faith in it. However, there is still a better chance of it happening with Trump in power than a Democrat.
That said, imo it is the primary dialectic that needs to be overcome for larger organized change to occur. It cannot come from white leftists, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be trying to. I certainty do when I can, but I currently live in an area with literally like three black people. My biggest thing that I can do rn is just convincing white people that their interests and those of black people align.
But everybody is frustrated, even your ordinary conservatives. It’ll be interesting to see where things go from here.