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kleinbl00  ·  151 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: January 24, 2024

    There's been huge left wing movements with

Let's look at that through the cynical eye of the survivors, shall we?

    Obama

Obama is and was a textbook neoliberal. There's nothing left wing about a guy who wishes to control the global economy through liberal application of drone strikes. I voted for him twice and would do so again but Biden is substantially to the left of Obama, who was substantially to the right of Clinton, who was substantially to the right of Carter and now all of a sudden it's fucking 1980 do you realize how fucking far back we have to go.

    Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street petered out and died because neoliberalism has no room for lefty market outrage. It was a moment that the Bush and Obama administrations agreed would fuck with their donors so they pulled out all the stops to snuff it out. Had Occupy Wall Street become Occupy Main Street things might well have happened but Obama bought everyone a new refrigerator and gave them a rebate on a new Honda so that it wouldn't. It was like when Bush gave everybody an Xbox so they wouldn't realize that he'd given like $100b to the Walton family.

    BLM

BLM was driven in very large part by the African-American community pointing out that they experienced life-threatening racism in appalling quantities with shameful regularity in the modern United States. It was and is a movement of well-justified anger at the institutions of American culture, society and government. It could not and did not provide any solutions to the grievances beyond "stop doing that" which would be enough if there weren't broad sectors of American culture, society and government whose livelihoods are dependent on that racism. "Defund the police" is a hard sell even if you know and mostly agree with ACAB. It's a non-starter if you're more comfortable with the Thin Blue Line. The latter have so much more institutional power that it isn't even worth bringing up.

    and all of them have been squandered when the democrats refused to do Anything Whatsoever

As I mentioned elsewhere, the Obama administration pitched ACA to Congress by saying "this is something worth losing your jobs over" and an absolutely appalling number of them did.

At this point in time, the Republicans want to repeal Obamacare, outlaw transgender everything, ban abortion in all cases, build a border wall and drill Martha's Vineyard for oil for all I know. They haven't really been successful at any of it. The Democrats want single payer, the universal declaration of human rights and a sparkling city on a hill and they haven't really been successful either. Democrats can point to polls and go "but but but everyone wants what we want" while the Republicans can point to electoral results and go 'but but but everyone wants what we want" and the way both things can be true?

Is that the game is rigged heavily in the Republicans' favor and thank god they don't suck less.