purpleworm [none/use name]

I’d also point out that countries like Australia don’t have a constitution at all and they’ve lasted longer than that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Australia ?!?! I’m genuinely a little baffled by this. Reading about it, it looks like there are some important elements of the structure of the government that aren’t part of the Constitution, most notably the office of Prime Minister not even being mentioned, but that’s extremely different from there not being a Constitution at all.

I think that you need to find a better argument to promote a worker based economy. Perhaps the co-op based system in Italy, which has lasted longer, is a more sustainable way to go.

“X country was defeated, therefore a better example of a government is a bunch of cooperatives that exist inside of an imperialist state that is building up toward being taken over by fascists again.”

I’ve got nothing against those co-ops, but this is apples to oranges and just seems like motivated reasoning.

I always feel sad when I see someone incompetently trying to do the “I’m not touching” you style of debatelord tactics. I don’t have any particular reason to believe you’re a kid, but I really hope that you are so that there’s a better chance you grow out of this.

Don’t you think that if a system has you year after year advocating for “moderate” reactionaries who, even by your concessions, are still doing a tremendous deal of net-harm, that destroying the system trying to convince you those are the only two options is a much better use of your time than doing your best to make sure we all bleed out, but slightly slower?

China is a bad example since there’s no opposing party in Chinq.

The historical example they were giving is of China invading and annexing Tibet, wherein the vast majority of the population was brutally enslaved and a small class of theocrats lived on top of a huge and ever-expanding mountain of corpses, upon which they sexually abused and murdered countless serfs besides the ones being tortured and killed by the basic mechanisms of the system under which they lived.

So the “opposing party” in this context is the other side of the war, the western-backed theocrats who wanted to perpetuate their slave state.

For the sake of not completely spamming your inbox, I’ll just reply to a few more things within this comment if that’s alright:

Huh, I actually didn’t know that, point taken. I didn’t know China had elections in general

It’s only maybe half-true to say China internally has opposing parties. There are other parties and many of them are dedicated entirely to pulling the government onto a different path from the current one, but those parties also are constitutionally barred from controlling high offices.

However, China does have elections and those elections are meaningful, because you don’t need separate parties to have meaningful elections. You believe that primaries are meaningful, right? In many places (e.g. NYC), they are much more meaningful than the general. Intra-party elections are meaningful in the same way and for the same reason that primaries are, because there are still differences within a party, even more so in a country where there is only one full party and party membership is massive and pretty accessible.

I think it’s perfectly fair to criticize various aspects about Chinese democracy, but neoliberals characterize it in a hopelessly slanted way.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the senate controlled by the right? Wasn’t it them that pushed for mass deportations?

You are wrong, deportations picked up immediately and were high for his entire Presidency, especially his first term. Dems lost the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014.

Obama is significantly liable for those loses too, because he immediately revealed that he was a complete fucking liar and didn’t want to actually pursue a progressive agenda. Even if this scapegoating were true, I’d still blame Obama because he had every opportunity to keep control of Congress but didn’t, and then it’s not like he actually opposed mass deportations.

I suppose you do have a point though, Harris wouldn’t need to be the only one who wins to make an actual difference, even if she would have just upheld the status quo that led to the rise in fascism. Still would have preferred that over what Trump is doing atm

I would never vote for Trump and would strongly discourage others from doing so, but there’s a meaningful sense in which his winning is less bad. Bear with me for a second: If Trump loses, he’s not actually the anti-christ who is thwarted, banished to hell, and then the Unique Threat to Our Democracy is gone. There will be more reactionary leaders who are as bad and worse who will immediately take his place. Holding him off from reclaiming office for one more term on a platform of adopting his old policies is not the victory some people depict it as.

What we need if we are taking Trump-like threats seriously is not to bail water, but to smash the Republican Party to atoms and scatter it to the wind. The Democrats can never do this, and over and over again insist that the thing to do is to adopt further and further right positions, to the point that you had Kamala commending the idea of the border wall construction project, merely saying it was mismanaged but she believed we should do something like it. That’s not hard-nosed pragmatism, that’s throwing red meat to reactionaries and supporting the cult of xenophobia to try to be Republican-lite, or more accurately to compete with 2024 Trump by becoming 2016 Trump (in terms of actual policy).

Kamala winning would have been catastrophic, not because she would have implemented worse policies than Trump, but because it would be a complete defeat of even berniecrat left-opposition in favor of a race to the bottom with Republicans of who can be more bigoted, as they get worse and then Democrats move to take up their old positions. The canonical answer in American politics would be even more cemented as “We need to get Republicans to vote for us by being racist,” and freaks like Ezra Klein who say we need anti-abortion Democrats.

If this is what the Democratic Party is, then they need to be destroyed just as much as the Republicans, because all they do is redirect “resistance” to becoming Republican on a slightly slower timetable. We need an actual left opposition to destroy reaction and the Democrats would rather lose to Trump than be that opposition, so we should be allowing them to take us hostage like we could ever give into enough demands from them that they will release us.

If the system is demanding that you support concentration camps, your main concern should be the destruction of the system by any means necessary, not the reduction of harm within it, and any measure that could be directed to the former instead of the latter probably should be.

If, hypothetically, the government demands that you choose between Hitler and Mussolini, the correct measures to be taking are ones directed at toppling the government.