3d ago

American "left" and "liberal" can't decide if they're in the same nutshell.

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I feel like online lefties are all performative and have no genuine strategy for building power. So they resort to the usual purity testing and punching out at liberals non stop. Meanwhile, conservatives are literally ripping people off the streets and putting them in cages. But hey, did you know liberals are actually centrists?
It's like, my dude, learn to build political power first. Then you can move on to putting liberals in concentration camps like you've always been wanting to do. This here is just posturing
- I mean, it's a meme not a dissertation, but also breaking away from liberals is a precondition to building any kind of real power. As long as the left is only an appendage of the liberal establishment, it'll never appeal to the broader working class.
  
  I don't disagree with this sentiment. It's also hard to entertain these types of conversations online because I never know who I'm talking to. Am I interacting with a tankie, an anarchist, or even worst - lemmy's worst nightmare - a soc dem? Each will have a different position and mandate it's own type of discourse. But regardless of what your political alignment, you should want to build power.
  If you're a tankie, you will completely eschew building coalitions with liberals. And there's nothing wrong with that! But then, I don't know, build an independent party and do something instead of removed 24/7 about liberals.
  If you're a soc dem, you could try to rebuild the democratic party from within. It's already undergone several waves of changes, so whose to say it couldn't happen again? AOC and Mamdani are trying. I support them.
  If you're an anarchist, the same principle applies. You should want to build power. You don't have align all the time with liberals, but maybe you can form coalitions around policies that highlight the goals of anarchism in a way that makes the movement visible to the general public. You know, building power.
  Posting memes 24/7 about liberals is like screaming into the void where all your friends are standing next to you and clapping. Like, ok? What's next?
  
  I mean, I'd guess most people here don't think posting memes is a substitute for effective political action. I share your disdain for terminally online lefties (which I guess includes myself), but someone could be dunking on liberals online and doing politics offline. OP could be an active member of their local DSA chapter for all we know. Posting and looking at memes is just entertainment; it doesn't need to automatically come at the cost of productive work.
  
  Right. You could totally be right about OPs offline political engagement. My critique is more directed at the entirety of the online leftist media apparatus (the twitch streamers, the youtubers, the online pundits, etc). These people are so wrapped in their own personas and audience capture, that they are essentially worthless at building any political power or anything that resembles a movement.
  We have twitch streamers with insanely huge audiences like Hassan, who claims to be a socialist, but whenever he's offered a chance to expand the message or gain some kind of momentum he shoots it down. There seems to be no will or strategy to expand this effort beyond maybe growing youtube subscribers. That's it. So when I see the same memes posted on lemmy, day after day, I have to wonder: what is the end goal?

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