a lemmitor is claiming that Hilary lost because she moved left
Hillary Clinton: After the population hopefully warmed up with Obama, she stuck her head out just a tiny itty little bit left with the Map Room to fight climate change. And guess what happened? Bam she lost. Thanks protest non-voters!
Ah famous climate warriors Obama and Hillary. She really stuck her neck out with, checks note, more halfed assed measures with goals set so far off into the future they may as well just start building the sea walls and plan how to block out the sun by man-made methods.
Hilary Clinton was a climate change candidate? Even she would tell you she's a center-right, middle-of-the-road candidate that ran mostly on the "I would have voted Obama a third time" voters.
Maybe if they bothered proofreading their lazy propaganda poster they would’ve caught “Theodre” and “Lynden”
This is part of why the American “left” is getting nowhere: sitting around projecting your fantasies of power onto lazily made shitty historical revisionist art of your favorite war criminals while the material world passes you by, and maybe going outside to hold a sign for a few hours if you’re feeling adventurous. Welcome to the world of online DemSoc.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery with regard to that second graphic there, but I guess people from across the political spectrum imitating communists is nothing new.
jesus lol teddy roosevelt, dwight eisenhower, lyndon johnson? Those aren't even left wing by US standards. Half of these people would absolutely fall for a little fascist pandering pretending to be socialist. And the others would vote for spineless liberals until they took power regardless.
They certainly weren't leftist but they were all (except for roosevelt) "American consensus" style new-dealers, and except for many foreign policy & culture issues were to the left of Bernie economically, because that's where the country was when they were in power. The country shifted massively to the right between LBJ and Reagan, although it realigned to be much more progressive on race during that period. Actually these things are quite interlinked - there's a book called Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus that covers this pretty well - how Republicans went from being the party of Lincoln and political home of black people to shrugging off that legacy and becoming the party of unbelievably frothy white reaction to basic civil rights for black people.
OK, but when liberals screech about personality cults under Socialism, I always like to bring up President For Life, FDR.
Obviously that shit can be bad, and we should avoid that kind of dogmatism, as it can lead to a litany of errors. But also, these kinds of things Happen organically all the time, Because people like it when you make their lives better.
Having a single leader or party for a long time is actually an expected symptom of an actually democratic system. The people who protect the interests of the majority, the workers, stay in power indefinitely, why would they not? This is why we see Cuba keeping Fidel around until he died. Not because of cult of personality, but due to stable leadership and going in the correct direction. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
The unstable multiparty system and flip-flopping and rotating door of politicians you see in western bourgeois dictatorships is due to competing elite interests. There’s two or more factions of bourgeois interests battling it out behind the veneer of ideology and legalism. Various ones fall in and out of favor, and chaotic markets shift, and crisis due to contradiction and instability occurs.
I don't disagree. There's something to be said for regime stability, institutional memory, etc. That's all fine.
But that's not the same thing as a personality cult. A personality cult is what allowed Ceausescu to get a goofy-ass scepter, as a silly example, and they can undermine the process of Democratic Centralism.
It's another episode of Socialism is when the government does stuff
It's another episode of confusing social democratic with democratic socialist
It's another episode of Americans doing Great Man Theory of history harder than any "authoritarian tankie" ever could
Let me not spend an hour writing an effort posts on all the other critiques I could make of this image, such as the failure to understand that anti-trust just fetishizes competition between small producers and intends to reintroduce an earlier stage of capitalism rather than simply nationalizing the monopolies, or how FDR used social democracy to save Capitalism from collapsing and postpone revolutionary conditions by decades, or how Dwight Eisenhower felt about Cuba and DPRK, or how Lyndon "Forgorn Leghorn" Johnson said this or how Bernie bent the knee to Genocide Joe... I'm barely scratching the surface here.
Social Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism. And I don't care if Stalin retracted that quote. He was being polite.
i think it's relatively accurate and illustrative to put FDR/LBJ/Truman into a socdem box--they point out, with Typical American Extravagance the inherent contradictions of this political programme. the rightful disdain these names elicit is what people should feel for "social democracy" writ-large.
putting Teddy Roosevelt, a naked imperialist & Bernie, an unaccomplished collaborateur on the ends really completes the picture
e: im sorta dumb i copied their demsoc framing when its obv about social democracy, not democratic socialism.
Per wikipedia (sorry):
"Eisenhower also gained an appreciation of the Reichsautobahn system, the first "national" implementation of modern Germany's Autobahn network, as a necessary component of a national defense system while he was serving as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II."