slowly radicalizing me and I don’t like it
:sicko-blur:
Can’t wait for all my leftist friends that I managed to convince electoralism works rubberband back into tankies bc moderates are massive bitches
:sicko-beaming:
this is literally half my friend group rn and I’m running out of counters
:sicko-crowd:
People posted a looooot about radicalization between 2016-2020 and then we hit the general election and all those baby leftists went right back to :vote: rhetoric. I don’t have high expectations for 2024.
A lot of people stuck and a lot of people are going to be easier to stick in the future. There’s no such thing as a success with no ebb and flow that follows it. We’ve made net gains on the left since 2016. It’s our job to find the people that haven’t completely lost ground and usher them along into meaningful political action
Radicalism – with as little power as radicals have now – offers very little in terms of immediate impact and almost no hope of major change. What did we get out of the BLM protests, really?
So of course people are going to continue to entertain mainstream Democrats. They at least have the power to make some immediate impact and at least offer some hope of major change (and showing up to vote takes very little effort compared to radical political organizing). It’s nowhere near what’s needed, but if it’s the choice between that and essentially nothing, people aren’t going to take the nothing on principle.
What’s probably happening is that more and more people are getting primed for radical change, but voting D until some radical political project comes along that offers a real shot at substantive improvement. It’s like working a shitty job until a decent job presents itself. Most people aren’t going to quit thinking anything less than decent won’t cut it. They’re going to work what’s in front of them, but they’ll start contemplating how good it will feel to jump ship when they finally get something better.
BLM didn’t achieve any structural changes, but it did actually have some immediate impact In getting the police officers arrested and charged
I think it also showed a lot of people that they aren’t alone. With how alienated we all are, protests like that start the process of healing the bonds necessary for having a society.
Those were the largest peaceful protests in American history. I really don’t think that they’ll be the largest for long, but they could very well be the largest peaceful protests for a while.
It did some good things, absolutely. It got the cops charged, it showed people that direct action can move the ball forward where going through proper channels has failed (tearing down statues), it moved a lot of once-radical race and class discussions much closer to the political mainstream, etc.
But compare the material value of that to the cost people paid in time, effort, bail money, criminal records, and getting beaten by the police. How many people are going to sign up for that trade again? Isn’t it telling that there’s been no structural change, cops keep killing black people in egregious ways, and yet we haven’t seen protests anywhere near the scale of last summer’s? There are plenty of other factors in play (tons of people are still naively giving Biden a chance, or less-naively exploring local efforts that don’t center on protests), but it’s also rational to conclude that the cost-benefit of the BLM protests shows it’s not a winning strategy (at least not right now). People don’t want to invest in failed efforts, and if we’re even half as skeptical of direct action as we are of elctoralism, we’d call the BLM protests a failed effort.
Note also that you can come up with a list of modest wins accomplished by the Democratic Party, too. People aren’t going to look only at the good things done by protests and ignore the costs, but then flip that around when they consider the value of elections.
Setting aside the debate about whether anything “radical” can be achieved through electoral politics, I’d say Bernie was the harbinger of this. He didn’t even set out to run a serious campaign in 2016, but people were so fed up with mainstream Democrats that they threw tons of energy and votes at him anyway because he was actually a “legitimate” candidate (a sitting senator, running on an issue tons of people cared about, in a Democratic primary instead of a near-hopeless third party bid). In 2020, when he ran a serious campaign from the start (and when people had another four years to radicalize), he had more success than any U.S. candidate who’d ever embraced the word “socialism” (including Debs). It wasn’t enough to overcome the trifecta of Democratic ratfucking, poor luck with the timing of major campaign events, and an incredibly popular Republican opponent, but there was a pronounced upward trajectory. You can see that trajectory elsewhere, too, in the victories of additional DSA-backed candidates, progressive prosecutors, and explicit socialists like India Walton.
People will support the “radical” option if it has a chance. What they won’t do is get so wound up in radicalism that they spike the football when there’s nothing left to gain (e.g., after a leftist candidate loses a primary). Most will turn out for a backup option before not voting at all.
Basically, yeah. However much it may appear that Americans are coming to hate centrist neoliberalism, their voting habits suggest otherwise.
What did we get out of the BLM protests, really?
Materially, little to nothing. But we gained a lot of knowledge. In my life, I have never seen a domestic insurgency on that scale, and likewise, I have never seen the state employ such sophisticated counterinsurgency measures. Theory is great and all, but it is these practical experiences which solidify and refine it.
