California’s governor is being touted as a successor to the Biden throne. Though he’s often imagined as a beacon of progress, his feckless record shows otherwise.
Just like Biden Kamala Harris wasn’t what America needed right now.
Uh… Literally yes. We are currently living in the timeline brought about by the fact that neither of them were what America needed. That is, in fact, my point.
Here, let me draw you a pie chart of what happened in the election:
US media is awful: 25%
US political education is bad: 20%
Deliberate propaganda flooding into social media, such that a ton of Hispanics including undocumented immigrants voted for Trump: 20%
Democrats are corporate dogshit: 15%
People just don’t care: 10%
Inflation / immigrants: 8%
Democrats failed to make a clean break, stand up for Palestine and unions, et cetera, and galvanize the activist left: 2%
Election fuckery: ???% but probably not 0
I actually 100% agree with you that modern Democrats are horrible. Like I said at the beginning, I definitely don’t like Newsom, and then you saw fit to lecture me about how I need to understand that he’s not all that good. The problem is that our political system rewards people for being dogshit, and punishes them or casts them out if they are not. So yes, it’s not real surprising that most of the Democrats are shit. IDK how people who seem so informed about politics and talk about it so incessantly keep being surprised by that apparently.
We need to fix our political system. There are a million ways to do that. Some people are working on them very hard. We need to be in the streets, right now, we need to be working hard to make a future before we all wind up in the camps. Sure, let’s replace Gavin Newsom WITH SOMEONE THAT WILL BE BETTER. Just shitting on him randomly is not going to improve the system. Neither did it for Kamala Harris, neither did it for Biden.
I voted for Bernie. I voted in the primaries. I’ve been to protests. I’ve contacted my congresspeople. I did some volunteering in this last election. I honestly don’t really know what to do. But it constantly pisses me off to see this lazy and entitled mindset where people are just going to sit back and let the whole place slide into the fucking ocean because our “left” party hasn’t reached the point, independently, that they feel like it needs to have reached before they’ll feel comfortable supporting, and so who cares what happens even when people are straight-up dying at the hands of the government.
My sibling it’s not going to get there on its own. It’s American politics. It’s fucking horrible. The DNC will not redeem itself just through people withholding votes. They’ll shrug, walk across the aisle, and keep making six figures. They don’t give a shit.
Tell me: What activist organization can I sign up with? What can I do? I’m genuinely asking. I already know that spending time online shitting on the Democrats will accomplish fuck-all to save the country. It’s just you and me wasting our ever dwindling allocation of remaining time wasting our fucking breath.
So, okay, you’re lecturing me on what I need to understand. Tell me: Who should I sign up with? How should I get involved? How can I fix this? If Gavin Newsom is a POS, then who should I be supporting and working for instead? And what on God’s green earth is the point of spending any energy at all shitting on Newsom in the meantime, to suppress by one little sliver some of the outrage when Trump puts him in the camps because he’s “not a progressive” and that’s super important to remember right now? I mean, fuck it, don’t answer that last part, you don’t need to. But what should I do?
I disagree with your chart, but let’s not get into that.
Just shitting on him randomly is not going to improve the system.
True, but what it will do is keep the good things he’s doing now in perspective. Half this very thread is a demonstration of why that’s necessary; he’s gunning for more influence in the party and a 2028 presidential run and both are capital B, capital T Bad Things. It’s not a full solution, but that’s neither here nor there.
What activist organization can I sign up with?
Any local leftist organization that’s actually doing things, when it doubt choose the more militant one. Frankly the time where supporting political candidates was a worthwhile affair is over; from now (or really since January) on it’s the people vs authoritarianism and that fight will be won or lost by bodies in the streets. Look into the examples of Euromadian and the Arab Spring for what will be necessary here. Neither were won (for some definition of “won” regarding the latter) by politicians getting votes.
And what on God’s green earth is the point of spending any energy at all shitting on Newsom in the meantime, to suppress by one little sliver some of the outrage when Trump puts him in the camps because he’s “not a progressive” and that’s super important to remember right now?
The neoliberals absolutely don’t want anything of the sort happening, because then they might have to actually answer to the working class. They’ll hold back any such effort in any way, just like they always have, and it’s within this context that saying “Newsom is actually pretty bad, y’all” accomplishes something. The neoliberal black hole uses people like Newsom (and, for a less recent example, Obama) to suck all efforts at resistance and redirect them into dead end electoralism. And when I say “dead end electoralism” I don’t just mean that the Democrats don’t represent the working class; I mean that democracy will have either been saved or destroyed by the midterms, so a conclusion will have already been reached before the ballot box starts to matter.
Uh… Literally yes. We are currently living in the timeline brought about by the fact that neither of them were what America needed. That is, in fact, my point.
Here, let me draw you a pie chart of what happened in the election:
I actually 100% agree with you that modern Democrats are horrible. Like I said at the beginning, I definitely don’t like Newsom, and then you saw fit to lecture me about how I need to understand that he’s not all that good. The problem is that our political system rewards people for being dogshit, and punishes them or casts them out if they are not. So yes, it’s not real surprising that most of the Democrats are shit. IDK how people who seem so informed about politics and talk about it so incessantly keep being surprised by that apparently.
We need to fix our political system. There are a million ways to do that. Some people are working on them very hard. We need to be in the streets, right now, we need to be working hard to make a future before we all wind up in the camps. Sure, let’s replace Gavin Newsom WITH SOMEONE THAT WILL BE BETTER. Just shitting on him randomly is not going to improve the system. Neither did it for Kamala Harris, neither did it for Biden.
I voted for Bernie. I voted in the primaries. I’ve been to protests. I’ve contacted my congresspeople. I did some volunteering in this last election. I honestly don’t really know what to do. But it constantly pisses me off to see this lazy and entitled mindset where people are just going to sit back and let the whole place slide into the fucking ocean because our “left” party hasn’t reached the point, independently, that they feel like it needs to have reached before they’ll feel comfortable supporting, and so who cares what happens even when people are straight-up dying at the hands of the government.
My sibling it’s not going to get there on its own. It’s American politics. It’s fucking horrible. The DNC will not redeem itself just through people withholding votes. They’ll shrug, walk across the aisle, and keep making six figures. They don’t give a shit.
Tell me: What activist organization can I sign up with? What can I do? I’m genuinely asking. I already know that spending time online shitting on the Democrats will accomplish fuck-all to save the country. It’s just you and me wasting our ever dwindling allocation of remaining time wasting our fucking breath.
So, okay, you’re lecturing me on what I need to understand. Tell me: Who should I sign up with? How should I get involved? How can I fix this? If Gavin Newsom is a POS, then who should I be supporting and working for instead? And what on God’s green earth is the point of spending any energy at all shitting on Newsom in the meantime, to suppress by one little sliver some of the outrage when Trump puts him in the camps because he’s “not a progressive” and that’s super important to remember right now? I mean, fuck it, don’t answer that last part, you don’t need to. But what should I do?
I disagree with your chart, but let’s not get into that.
True, but what it will do is keep the good things he’s doing now in perspective. Half this very thread is a demonstration of why that’s necessary; he’s gunning for more influence in the party and a 2028 presidential run and both are capital B, capital T Bad Things. It’s not a full solution, but that’s neither here nor there.
Any local leftist organization that’s actually doing things, when it doubt choose the more militant one. Frankly the time where supporting political candidates was a worthwhile affair is over; from now (or really since January) on it’s the people vs authoritarianism and that fight will be won or lost by bodies in the streets. Look into the examples of Euromadian and the Arab Spring for what will be necessary here. Neither were won (for some definition of “won” regarding the latter) by politicians getting votes.
The neoliberals absolutely don’t want anything of the sort happening, because then they might have to actually answer to the working class. They’ll hold back any such effort in any way, just like they always have, and it’s within this context that saying “Newsom is actually pretty bad, y’all” accomplishes something. The neoliberal black hole uses people like Newsom (and, for a less recent example, Obama) to suck all efforts at resistance and redirect them into dead end electoralism. And when I say “dead end electoralism” I don’t just mean that the Democrats don’t represent the working class; I mean that democracy will have either been saved or destroyed by the midterms, so a conclusion will have already been reached before the ballot box starts to matter.