Notices by Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social), page 3

Or you can try to build a movement out of mildly disaffected white suburbanites.

We know how that goes.

The Woodward and Bernstein theory of politics is dead. You can't name and shame these people. You have to stand for something else. You have to attack the foundation of their power and build solidarity outside the status quo.

Maybe it seems pointless talking about Black leftism and queer radicalism in the Age of Trump but those movements came about in response to cultural and political threats as bad as he is, and they are infinitely more informative and useful going forward than whatever normie white Democrats are going to come up with next, which is probably capitulation.

A lot of liberals reflexively reject the word "elite" because right-wingers often use it with racist and antisemitic intent. But there are obviously elites. A handful of billionaires have enormous influence over our lives. Policy and campaign decisions are made by wealthy donors and party apparatchiks.

But they're not elites because they're white men? Is that the takeaway here?

Or is it that these elites know they're elites and hold the line against the rest of us?

"The result of having killed off the Left in the US is that the word populism now exclusively refers to the bad kind, the kind where the literal richest man on earth can point to an unemployed trans woman and call her an elite."

https://bsky.app/profile/pookleblinky.bsky.social/post/3ky4f6dwr3p2w

Left-wing populism has been demonized in this country precisely because it often manifests as Black socialism and poor people's movements, even when those movements exist purely as survival strategies against the racist capitalist system. They correctly identified who the elite in this society are. That's why they got shot.

News Flash: There are plenty of bigots in the Democratic Party, too, they think the Republican bigots are right, and that's why they want to work with them so badly.

I don't have an ideological axe to grind other than stop taking good people for granted and treating them like shit out of some fake, amoral "pragmatism," and stop reaching for the simplest, least challenging explanations for why things happen. Bad people exist. It's our job to work around them for the collective good.

"Nobody cares about X" and "people should just vote for Democrats anyway" is very convenient for established Democrats but it's how we just lost an election and it's how we will lose again if it comes to that. If you flatten politics and human nature to "just obey" then you're not actually better than the authoritarians.

You have to make people want to vote for you.

I don't care how much you don't like it.

It's how things work.

Never discount racism and misogyny and other forms of bigotry. We have to guard against that shit ourselves. But a theory of politics where nothing else matters and there's nothing to be done is absolutely useless.

People for whom bigotry is their primary motivator should simply be shunned, not courted, because nothing else you do matters to them. So like, the first thing is to get the nominal opposition to stop ignoring this fact and stop coddling these people.

@smutek "The far left" is a favorite Democratic punching bag because it means whatever they want it to mean, the same as when Republicans use it. Saying it basically signals: "I'm a conservative!"

The thing is, Democrats have been asymptotically approaching "the center" for my entire life but never -- quite -- making -- it -- because what these people really want is for Democrats to be Republicans. Not even "friends with Liz Cheney" Republicans either but like full on white hood wearing motherfuckers.

This is a white male supremacist power play and it makes me sick that white Democrats have played along for their approval for so long.

The "solution" to this problem, even in supposedly "democratic" societies, was exploiting bigotries to create a social underclass whose enslavement was considered widely acceptable and the creation of a constantly mobilized militarized force (police) to keep them and the populace subdued.

A funny thing about hierarchical societies is virtually all of them figured out they needed a welfare system of some kind and a way to redistribute food and other resources so people wouldn't just rise up and murder them.

It's only comparatively recently under capitalism and industrialization that the idea of threatening people with starvation and homelessness to force them to work became "normal" even though it creates a huge social instability.

https://kolektiva.social/@RD4Anarchy/113449092616566095

People who still insist Democrats are "too far left" and need to "moderate" more just want them to throw Black people and LGBT+ people and women under the bus.

That's it. That's all it means.

The hard right turn on immigration signals a willingness that they will continue trying to exploit.

Don't be a collaborator.

That's a good start.

Spontaneous mass protests across the country don't happen until shit has truly hit the fan and the situation is unsustainable. We're talking the collapse of the dollar, food riots, widespread power outages, that sort of thing.

In the absence of an organized resistance, there isn't much any of us can do aside from protect ourselves and our communities and show defiance even through little acts of kindness.

I swear, some people would have expected Anne Frank to be out there throwing bricks at Nazis and getting her family shot to death for it.

"What were you doing during the fascist takeover?" Trying to survive. I'm not fucking Superman.

Another thing, which I also mentioned early in the Biden years, is the price gouging ("inflation") by many corporations was a deliberate political ploy to make Biden and Democrats look bad.

Which unfortunately Biden and Democrats doubled down on by talking up the "Biden Boom" and basically ignoring the cost of living crisis for everyone in the lower half of the economy. They could have at least aggressively campaigned against corporate greed but they opted not to.

Investors were doing great!