• Beliriel@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Because you’d have to run on a whole lot of bullshit arguments and by the end of it (if you make it there) you’re just another brainwashed republican. A takeover is not a sudden process it’s slowly boiling the frog and you can’t take over the regressive republicans with a progressive argument set. They would laugh you out of the room. Your platform has to be similar enough that they tolerate you.

    You wanna take over the republicans only with “I wanna be against dems”? Try it. But what are you gonna tell the antiabortionists, what are you going to tell the rightwing antigovernment people, what are you going to tell the fascists and nazis and what are you going to tell the racist rural white folk and the bible belt? Are you going to support prolifers suddenly, are you suddenly going to rant against the criminal black population? Congrats, you successfully integrated into the republicans and became invisible.

    • JucheBot1988
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      11 months ago

      A takeover is not a sudden process it’s slowly boiling the frog

      Let me see, when did “progressives” start turning on the heat? Must have been, oh, 2003 with the Kerry campaign. A good twenty years (at least), with nothing to show for it but lots of corpses in Iraq and Syria and the Ukraine. That’s a slow burn, all right.

      You wanna take over the republicans only with “I wanna be against dems”?

      All right, I’ll entertain this thought experiment.

      But what are you gonna tell the antiabortionists

      I’d tell them that while I may not agree in total with their beliefs, anti-abortion sentiment recognizes a fundamental truth, which is that in the US, abortion is promoted as genocidal tool against the working class. And this is something nobody wants to talk about. Working class people have the most abortions, but also tend, statistically, to oppose abortion more. This is because for many working class women, abortion is a matter of economic neccesity; they would have liked to carry a pregnancy to term, but had to abort so that they could continue to pay rent and put food on the table. In other words, the US makes reproduction a hobby for rich white women and their mates – i.e., parasites. Poor and especially poor non-white women are granted the “mercy” of termination. Every working class person has either been in that situation or knows someone who has.

      Furthermore, I would say to anti-abortion activists that, unlike liberals and radlibs, I don’t make a fetish of abortion. If they want to set up a system, such as existed in Stalin’s Russia and which exists in present day Nicaragua, where abortion is illegal but extensive social services exist for pregnant women, I would have no particular objection. Socialism is different in different countries, and the flourishing of the working class in their particular material setting is more important than any abstract liberal “right.”

      what are you going to tell the rightwing antigovernment people

      That their distrust of government, this particular goverment, is more than merited. I too am opposed to the US goverment. We want very different things to come after. But because historical and dialectical materialism are a thing, any actual effective movement against the US government will take place in the context of the ongoing global anti-imperialist struggle – which latter is moving objectively towards socialism.

      what are you going to tell the fascists and nazis

      Do you mean the Democrats who are arming and funding ideoogical Nazis in Ukraine?

      what are you going to tell the racist rural white folk and the bible belt

      Lemmygrad rules prevent me from saying just how much this disgusts me. I lived among these people. A lot of them hold stupid views and are not sensitive in their language, but few of them are actual racists; I’ve encountered real, blatant racism far more often among the middle class. What working class are you actually in support of? College-educated champagne socialists with apartments in New York and LA?

      And there you have it, my plan to take over the Republican party. It wouldn’t work. But I’d have at least as much success as you “progressives” have ever had in taking over the Democrats.