put all of your election posting here so it doesn’t bother anyone else!

from @CoolerOpposide@hexbear.net:

For Agitprop purposes, I’m asking comrades to help aggregate any and all effortpost responses, critiques, or general thoughts that you have seen or written pertaining to yesterday’s U.S. election that you think have standalone value for discussion either online or IRL.

I made a post for that purpose here, and ideally it can be used not only for general discussion, but as a reference for well thought out responses in discussions about the election to save all of us some brainpower.

No shitposts please, as we’d like to highlight some comrades’ actual effort in constructing responses or analysis, but humor is 100% welcome to help make your point!

  • Venat [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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    6 days ago

    I know people are kind of enjoying schadenfreude here, but it is alarming how many liberals are just going mask off in their tantrum against ethnic minorities in the US, and just brazenly expressing not only depraved indifference to Palestine/Gaza but active contempt and hatred of them and their sympathizers which liberals blame for losing the election. Their coping mechanisms are devolving into *maybe we shouldn’t protect trans people, immigrants, BIPOC. PEP is also clearly the right choice."

    I felt like our secret shared hope was that liberals would somehow rediscover their affection for organizing, protesting, canvassing for causes, but AOC encapsulated it in her video about #resistance being ceremonial and performative bullshit.

    Life is going to get worse, and I’d be fooling myself to declare that the difference between a Harris defeat from a victory is the normalization of reactionary politics. It just stings differently because in 2016 there was a vague hope, given Sanders’ campaign and reinvigoration of socialism/leftism, that life did not have to be that way.

    • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      6 days ago

      100-com

      I think left organizing will become more prevalent under Trump than it was under Biden/would be under Harris, but the Resistance Libs are not even remotely part of that discussion, they’re an irrelevant and useless political bloc. A thousand #resistance libs are worth a single disaffected Harris voter becoming radicalized and entering into left-wing politics. We’re gonna have to be patient with them as they arrive to various left spaces, including Hexbear, seeking answers. Just as many of us turned from Bernie/Corbyn libs into outright internationalist communists

    • Sebrof [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      6 days ago

      Edit: my phone’s giving me so many problems. I wanted to respond directly to a comment @Venat@hexbear.net made.

      Sorry if this sounds harsh, but my thought is that liberals were never going to rediscover their affection for organizing. Sorry if I’m coming across as too cynical and harsh, but liberalism is a death cult. It’s a philosophical dead end and it’s true believers are too comfortable in the empire to do anything that’s not posturing, symbolic, and ultimately meaningless. Americans needs to divorce themselves from the Democrats and see them as a bourgeoise parties that don’t express their interests. I think the die hard liberals do have their interests represented by bourgeois parties and so they were always a lost cause. Working class people who are either checked out of the process, or only go with the dems out of fear of Trump need to be reached with a political message they can actually see and believe in. Bernie was that for people at a time, but he’s useless now.

      Sorry for the rambling. I think my main point is that liberals were never going to organize and we actually shouldn’t wait or want them to. I have no faith in them nor expectations. When they do organize it just absorbs movements back under their fold. The working class itself needs to be the ones organizing. We shouldn’t rely on, or expect, or want, liberals to do the tasks of the working class. Working class movements and institutions have to be the ones taking the active role in history

      • Venat [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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        6 days ago

        I think at the very least, I’d have expected them to pushback against the bigoted rhetoric from becoming normalized within their own dominion of culture, but seeing as they just normalized a genocide because not doing so would make them become uncomfortable again (another term of Trump) it was a moot point.

        It wasn’t a ramble, I appreciated the perspective. What you were referencing about liberalism being a death cult is on point.

        • Sebrof [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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          6 days ago

          Thanks! I didn’t want to come off as needlessly antagonistic toward a comrade and it’s hard to tell tone from text. I think we should always be actively rooting out the liberal in our head. And as it’s the hegemonic ideology it can be buried deep inside. Engaging in struggle helps, but I’ll be the first to tell you I’m nowhere as engaged as I should be. So that liberalism can creep up in insidious ways. Especially for those in the imperial core. I’m assuming you are, as I am, but I may be off base.

          I think this quote from Assata Shakur is good to keep in mind when thinking about liberals.

          As far as i’m concerned, “liberal” is the most meaningless word in the dictionary. History has shown me that as long as some white middle-class people can live high on the hog, take vacations to Europe, send their children to private schools, and reap the benefits of their white skin privileges, then they are “liberals.” But when times get hard and money gets tight, they pull off that liberal mask and you think you’re talking to Adolf Hitler. They feel sorry for the so-called underprivileged just as long as they can maintain their own privileges.