While neither party can be trusted, I’ll take socialism over fascism every damned time.
It’s the catchy songs right?
Nope. It’s the catchy original definitions untainted by despots.
You. All the upvotes to you.
and what does socialism mean in this case
what does democratic socialism mean
is it just defund israel or is it defund the police? indeed is it destroy israel or own that means of production you love so much?
i guess we and you will find out which fantasy we’ll all be larping eventually
Socialist: We want you all to have free readily available healthcare
Republican Base: OVER OUR DEAD BODIES!!
*“OVER YOUR DEAD BODIES!”
ftfy
WHERE IS THE MONEY COMING FROM screams my family as I tell them that they will pay the same or less in taxes than they were for insurance in the first place.
Then the USA would actually have two parties instead of one?
But there are the De…
~Oooh. I see what you did there.~
This would be far more accurately titled as ‘returns to’ given FDRs New Deal and the fact that 99% of socialist policies enacted over the last century are from the Democrats, instead of the inflammatory weasel-wording ‘what if socialism takes over’ like it’s some kind of coup.
It might be some dumb play to drum up clicks from right-wing people who have never seen a Jacobin article I guess, but it puts off their base, and looking through the article… it doesn’t hide its socialist-positive bias at all even from the first few sentences, so I kinda doubt that intent. Just dumb.
instead of the inflammatory weasel-wording ‘what if socialism takes over’ like it’s some kind of coup.
If I can give some context, as a DSA member, while DSA is parasitizing the Democratic ballot line, it essentially acts like an independent party.
The goal isn’t necessarily to “take over” the Democratic Party. Rather, the dominant position in DSA is what’s called a “Dirty Break”, where the org parasitizes the Dems in the short term, essentially until they kick us out (Ideally in such a way that DSA comes out the stronger org, and that the Dems whither not unlike the Whigs).
Something which is already starting to happen, with Democrats telling us to go “make our own party” as though we haven’t looked at the US political system, and ruled that out for now.
Further, DSA is a big tent organization, with everyone from reformist social democrats, to Anarchists, Trotskyists, Marxist-Leninists, etc. And the DSA party platform (the updated version of which gets released on the 14th, I believe) expresses an overt desire by DSA to transcend capitalism. So this isn’t just a return to FDR style social Democracy, like you’re suggesting, there’s a bit more going on
Thanks for the clarification, I feel like very little of this was discussed in the article and you explain it better.
Good luck getting that motley crew to get along. Everyone can agree on anticapitalism but that’s basically it. How exactly to go about it is going to vary widely. It’s hard to see Marxist-Leninists wanting to play ball with reform advocates.
It’s still a good idea worth trying. I’m just skeptical of lefties ever turning into a cohesive force since there’s such a wide array of leftism and some of the particulars of given ideologies are mutually exclusive.
Good luck getting that motley crew to get along
I mean, this isn’t a project that started yesterday, and it isn’t some hypothetical. DSA has existed in its current form, a big tent with ideological and strategically based caucuses, for a little over a decade at this point. If anything the caucus system, which currently codifies those different tendencies in the org, makes it stronger. People within DSA debate endlessly about everything under the sun, but the minute any one part of the org is attacked by someone on the right, the org rallies around them, generating greater organizational coherence. It’s like having siblings. You can bully your little brother, but god forbid anyone else tries it.
Additionally, caucuses allow DSA members to collaborate across chapters in ways that national is improving on, but not currently able to fully facilitate. Caucuses also exchange ideas, strategies, etc. in ways that general membership might not do otherwise.
And that, I think, is what has allowed DSA to grow in the way that it has. All of these left tendencies are forced to come to the table in order to get what they want, instead of just imploding into a billion little sects. And those negotiations, both among caucuses, and with material conditions, mean that DSA is able to formulate a cohesive program and strategy.
I think the Caucus system, as it currently stands, will probably have to be done away with at some point, if DSA is to cohere more power, and thus a greater sense of party discipline, but for now, I think it’s a strength of the org, not a weakness.
Yeah, the left is unfortunately mired with purity tests and No True Scotsman fallacies. Meanwhile, the right is laser focused on marching directly towards fascism. It’s like watching a game of tug-of-war, except one side has people tripping their teammates, or loudly complaining about how they got rope burn one time so they’re going to refuse to participate.
I’d be okay with just democracy taking over the Democratic party
You just get another Trump like candidate sooner or later. Recognize the symptoms.
I’d love to go socialist at this point. Capitalism has only fucked me over and over and over.
I’m pretty wealthy and I want the USA to be way more socialist. I want medical for all, free daycare, food security for everyone, and a huge expansion of public education. Unfortunately about 50% of the population equates any socialism with Marxism and refuses to even hear how bad they’re getting screwed by their Corp sponsored overlords.
I’m literally explaining social democracies vs Marxism to grown adults on nextdoor constantly. These knuckle draggers have the strongest political opinions and the weakest base of knowledge, it’s infuriating. The 24 hour news cycle has turned our dumb neighbors into hateful mean little people.
Social democracy isn’t socialism. Which is why it has the same problems as capitalism.
Nice of you to give socialism its turn.
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Alternatively workers should earn a pension for every hour they labour on behalf of someone else.
Anyone under a predetermined amount when they retire should be able to collect the difference between the what they received and what they are short.
Any business that does not pay enough to those working for them should have their taxes increased to double the difference, as a punitive action.
Also do this with other things
They had decades to figure out how to unite their base. Obama and Bernie’s popularity gave them the building blocks. They remained willfully ignorant because they like those corporate checks too much.
Author of the article never got to any sort of point. Just some random rambling. Jacobin needs to do better than this garbage.
Instead of a “what if” we need a “how” and “when”
100%!
Good. Elected representatives funded by their constituents and others in the working class mean there’s less of a risk they pull up the ladder behind them and fuck those who got them into power.
Doesn’t mean this won’t ever happen. That’s why I said risk.
Long term goals are of course to ban Citizen’s United, set a cap on money needed to campaign for an elected position, and pass Ranked Choice Voting (RCV).
What if a foreign genocidal ethnostate takes over the Democratic Party?
Russia took over the GOP, not Democrats.
Democrats are very obviously in bed with Israel (not to say GOP isn’t as well).
Don’t play dumb. Of course you know I meant Israel. Here you are discussing and downplaying the Gaza genocide:
I guess they wanna throw a shade by contrasting the numbers. 1.5 million deaths in 2 years vs 76000 deaths in 3 years. Or in relative terms, 60-70% vs 4%.
They kinda have a point there, even though the official UN definition of genocide of course doesn’t rely on number of deaths but intent. But usually, genocidal intent leads to high number of deaths, doesn’t it? Especially when your military is so much more powerful.
Using a death toll that quit counting YEARS AGO because the people doing the counting (Gazan health ministry) were wiped out. You think Israel is counting? Who is counting how many people they’re rounding up and killing and putting mass graves in occupied Gaza?
Good?
Good.
Doog?
Not good enough. Wake me up when its Scientific Socialism and Capitalism is dead.
The right wing has been pushing the Democratic Party to the right by making the Republicans more conservative/fascist. This pulls the Overton window to the right and the Democrats with it.
Socialism in the Democratic Party is the natural reaction to this pull. While welcome, the real solution is to do away with the two party system. Otherwise, it’s just a see-saw forever swinging back and forth.
the real solution is to do away with the two party system
How do envision getting from here to there?
I think it has to happen locally. Ranked choice voting (or similar) needs to be pushed through. Then, school boards, city/county councils and state elections.
People need to recognize and relate to new parties. National elections are not the way to do it (fuck you Stein and the American Green Party).
Ranked choice voting (or similar) needs to be pushed through
People need to recognize and relate to new parties.So I’m inferring you believe people will suddenly start voting for 3rd parties in order to then get voting reforms enacted, rather than voting reform being the necessary catalyst to making 3rd parties viable?
Just look at the numbers. At present there are a grand total of 3 (out of 535) federal legislators who are not either Democratic or Republican. Bernie Sanders ran in the Democratic primary for Senate in 2008, winning the nomination but then declining it to run as an Independent. Kevin Kiley was first elected as a Republican and then declared as Independent after several years in office. In all state legislatures combined, there are a total of 6 state senators and 22 state representatives out of 7,578 total state legislative seats.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_and_independent_members_of_the_United_States_Congress
- https://ballotpedia.org/Current_independent_and_minor_party_federal_and_state_officeholders
- https://www.ncsl.org/about-state-legislatures/state-partisan-composition
Fewer than half of US states have a process for voters to initiate new legislation by direct ballot initiative (if you include voter-led veto ballot initiative of existing legislation, or state Constitutional amendments it’s 26, but strictly for writing and passing new legislation it’s 21).
https://ballotpedia.org/States_with_initiative_or_referendum
And 13 states have already banned RCV.
So I think we need the 3rd party candidates and voters to run and vote in the major party primaries in order to get elected. Like we’ve been seeing with DSA candidates winning Democratic primaries and previously Tea Party candidates winning Republican primaries. Either that or successfully calling a new Constitutional Convention to rewrite the whole damn thing, and I really don’t think that will play out the way we would want it to in the current political climate.
Rank choice voting
What do you think of my observations on that in my other comment I’m this thread?
Gotta win elections to ram that through, though.
Well, I’m not a one issue voter…but if someone says they’ll implement rank choice voting than that tends to get my vote.
Are you using that metric to vote in the primary? Major party or 3rd party?
Well, I vote in a rank choice district, so all. But I want our politicians to get it to be federal
Nice. You’re actually free to vote for 3rd parties!
RCV is just one of many alternative voting systems that has alot of warts. I think there are better options that should be explored:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison/_of/_electoral/_systems
Accept that a centuries old constitution is totally outdated.
How do we action the acceptance? What actual step comes after that?
Just copy European countries that have renewed their constitutions as time passes instead of asking empty rhetorical questions.
Just copy European countries that have renewed their constitutions as time passes
Which of our existing processes do you think will produce the result you want? Passing an amendment through Congress seems quite unlikely with our current field of partisan legislators. We can’t even meet the lower thresholds for passing legislation for things like raising minimum wage, which is supported by about 2/3 of the population. The Koch brothers were highly successful at stacking state legislatures with Tea Party nutjobs with the ultimate goal of calling for a Constitutional Convention to rewrite it. Republicans still control 28 state legislatures, and they’re generally pretty beholden to Trump and the MAGA base, so I don’t think we’d have a positive outcome with a Constitutional Convention.
So in my opinion, we need to have favorable majorities in our representation before we can have a favorable outcome with amending the Constitution. Do you have a different approach in mind?
instead of asking empty rhetorical questions.
You have this backwards, you’re giving rhetorical answers to non-rhetorical questions.
Which of our existing processes do you think will produce the result you want?
I started by the need to acknowledge centuries-old constitutions are outdated. That is the first step. Get citizens being a push for change. No “existing process”, that is the main point.
So in my opinion, we need to have favorable majorities in our representation before we can have a favorable outcome with amending the Constitution. Do you have a different approach in mind?
As stated, the first step is really to push the idea of rewriting a constitution.
If you don’t have the people pushing, you are never getting a new document or a positive vote for such a document. And you won’t even start to have a favorable majority for something that is not claimed.
Then people in power (elected or through a crisis caused by an uprising) can push a new constitution, with no care for the old document. This is how European countries have mostly done it.
Plus US is not facing a simple constitutional crisis, it is a religion-like crisis seeing how the document has been sanctified for so long. So no amending. Rewriting. And won’t happen without a huge push for trashing the old one.
the first step is really to push the idea of rewriting a constitution.
I’m asking what does that look like to you? Voting? Protesting in the streets and/or at the capitol buildings? Armed revolution?
My own belief is that it comes down to voting. We do not currently have a legal means for the people to directly initiate a Constitutional Convention. So we need state legislators who say they will vote to call for one, and federal legislators who say they will vote for Constitutional Amendments. But I don’t want the current majorities to be in charge of that. We would just end up with a fully Christo-fascist Constitution given the makeup of the delegations. Most states don’t have any means to recall legislators or for voters to directly initiate ballot initiatives to write new legislation. So we need to put better representatives in office first. My belief, as stated in other comment in this thread, is that we have to have 3rd party and independent candidates run in the major-party primaries, and we have to vote in those primaries for those candidates. We’re seeing it work more and more for DSA-aligned candidates, so hopefully we can keep building on that momentum and finally get some real change.
The Democratic Party needs an anti-trump:
Someone who is the opposite of trump in every way…
Smart, wise, humble, charitable, brave, gregarious, kind, caring, socialist, democratic, and good.Essentially, someone who embodies all the virtues that the hypocrites of the Christian Right eschew.
Smart and wise folk generally do their best to stay out of formal politics. politics sucks.
Closest I can think of is Bernie Sanders, but he may have aged out of a presidential run.
Like Obama?
That person is very much staying at home happy and content with their loved ones.
