this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
2215 points (99.0% liked)
Microblog Memes
7130 readers
2453 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Form a new party!!! Don’t call it Labor or Labour. Don’t call it Green. Don’t call it progressive. Don’t call it socialist or liberal.
Just give it a name that people understand and don’t have preexisting bias against. “For The People”
Take on BOTH the democrats and GOP. Become popular overnight. Keep hammering home it is not about skin colour, race or country of origin, but about the billionaires that aren’t happy with paying no tax and having billions. Make it about the 99%.
It is the only way you’ll get your country back without excessive violence. The two status quo parties are hollowed out from the inside. And both are infiltrated by foreign interests.
That's what Bernie is saying. He's calling all progressives to run as Independent, aka No Party Preference, down ballot so we can shove the Corporate DNC into the GOP where they so desperately want to be anyway.
IIRC, he also called for the corpocentrists to get primaried.
“People” = “Communist”
Agreed.
Gotta take a page out of idiocracy here folks.
The Cowboy Party (Named after the most popular/recognizable NFL team)
Or, how about:
The Murica Party
Then you put Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as your president. I’ve had debates about the feasibility of this approach and this is the modern Ronald Reagan play.
Please anyone but “The Turd” he’s just another slimy businessman and will grift this country out of more money.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=j_6bscCG7OA
The 99% Party. It's a slick way of calling it a worker's party without sounding like a communist party.
The Bull Moose Party. It will call back to Teddy Roosevelt and the first time we used progressive policies to take back from the robber barons.
The thing is, you can "not call it socialism" all you like. The fact is that it is socialism, you have to respect people's intelligence enough to know that they will figure that out (or be easily convinced of it, if you really need an argument that doesn't respect their intelligence). When this happens, and even moreso when you inevitably reveal yourself to be socialist, it will make you look deeply insincere and subversive, because you yourself will have fed into this taboo and not done the work of separating the term from its negative stigma or generating positive media for it.
Socialism is simply the fact of the matter and being socialist means caring about material reality enough to not just lie and gaslight as a means of convincing people. When you get attacked for being socialist, you will not be able to backpedal without sabotaging your own movement, because there will be a litany of evidence that you are socialist. As there should be, or you would not have the support of actual ideological socialists (remember that whole material reality thing I just mentioned).
The material reason why socialism is a "no-no" word is because when the right attacks it, the liberal establishment does what they always do; they backpedal. Not only does this make the right's criticism look reasonable, because it confirms there is real reason to fear being associated with socialism; but it ensures that the people only ever hear the arguments against socialism, never the arguments for it. All of the arguments which are intrinsically associated with socialism; which you have done all this work to propagate; are never connected to it optically, and the people never learn what it actually is, leaving all of your policy open to attack.
What you are suggesting here is not the solution but exactly the issue that has brought us to this point.
The only way that you will ever launder the term "socialism" is by openly advocating for socialism and calling it what it is when you do. You just aren't going to beat the establishment at their own game; rather, we must show the people what it is to be respected and hear policy based in material reality that will actually address their needs, and you will win support from across the spectrum.
I disagree. And I don't mean to preach, but there is a power in words and using them (or not using them). The fight over the word and meaning of socialism is not what "the people" need right now, that can come later. This has been happening in the US closing in on a century. It's not those tolerant of material reality (as you say) you need to convince, it's those that would benefit from "the peoples" agenda that don't acknowledge material reality. Ride the wave of making billionaires pay.
Don't swim against this right now. These programs from the new deal and fair deal are not even called socialist by American standards anymore.
This quote is an example of what I am talking about though. Roosevelt had to take great strides to ease the great depression, because of mass protest movements at the time openly led by socialist/communist parties, but he could not go so far as to address the economic system that created the great depression. Nor could the capitalist class allow these policies to be associated with the socialists that visibly fought for them. Doing so would threaten the power of capital; this is not long after the bolshevik revolution that created the USSR, so there was major fears of similar movements taking root in the US.
This is not Truman defending the new deal, this is him distancing the new deal from socialism.
The new deal was not socialist, which is by design, but it was made up of things that socialists would have certainly fought for and taken even further if their effort was sincerely meant to achieve socialism.
It's time to stop letting socialism be used as a scare word. Sure, the loudest ones will continue to bury their heads in the sand, but those people weren't going to be won over anyways. Furthermore, you aren't going to win people over by talking down to them, and you cannot address their needs in a sincere manner if your base assumption is that they aren't intelligent enough to understand their own lives.
Buddy half of American voters voted for trump. We are well past “insulting their intelligence”. The reality is that the majority of American voters are stupid, lazy, or both.
Separately I don’t think you know what socialism is if you think progressive policies are socialist. Just because “social programs” and socialism share a common word doesn’t mean they are the same thing.
Incorrect. Only 63.7% of eligible voters turned out to vote in the 2024 US General Election.
That comes out to around 155 million voters, of which around 77 million voted for Trump or ~49.8%. Democrats on the other hand got around 75 million or ~48.3%. of the vote.
This comes out to ~31.7% of eligible voters voting Republican with ~30.8% voting Democrat.
Less than a third of Americans wanted Trump in office, not half. Let's get the facts straight.
~31.7% of Americans is not a majority, according to the American Heritage Dictionary.
Have you considered that the actions of Republicans gerrymandering voting districts to hell and passing anti-voting laws and policies, that the actions of Democrats failing to represent their constituents by veering more and more Right, and that the pressures of capitalism, rising inflation, stagnating wages, and a lack of a national holiday where people take off work to go exercise their civic duties are reasons for why more people don't go out and vote?
Noooooooo, that can't be. Voters are stupid. Voters are racist. Voters are lazy. And it isn't the system that has stripped away their material needs that is the problem.
based and chad the numbers comment, we love the numbers, they dont lie.
the defining trait of the Trump voters is that they're so scared that they will vote for whoever makes them feel safe while asking absolutely nothing of them except cowed obedience
If American voters are as stupid as you claim then it shouldn't be hard to trick them into changing their vote.
that's the hard part. That's why trump is so effective at winning, he somehow figured out how to make the vote for him. That's the fundamentally difficult problem to solve, and trump is the only one who seems to have a good solution right now.
Not very practical while the US voting system is still first-post-the-post. Y'all need to fix that first.
lets just suck off the people currently in charge until they give up the thing that keeps them in power, then. yeah. that will work.
Now is the perfect time. Breaking with the Democrats mean they have to play ball now or get electorally buried.
They will chose that latter, for sure.
there's also a good chance that fixing it will simply fuck us even harder.
How's that?
FPTP ensures that every vote in the winning party goes to the electoral college.
So if you vote 51% dem, and 49% republican, in a FPTP state 100% of all electoral votes are dem.
If you have a system like IRV where you split it between the electoral as fairly as possible, you lose literally half of your votes. And given that EVERY red state uses FPTP, aside from nebraska you're running a wildly uphill battle. You should be targeting red states first. And blue states last, otherwise we will almost certainly end up in a worse position, losing TONS of our voting potential.
Yeah, right. So almost like a prisoner's dilemma bind. And I guess a national change is fairly unlikely any time soon..
If the Dems don't want to win an election, they don't have to run a canidate.
Unless it really works like it has the potential to. Then the repugs and dems would be totally cooked.
Don't worry about getting it right 100% perfect in the planning phase, the important thing is to just get fucking moving. If either trying to shake up the democrats or forming a third party end up being wrong, then learn from it and keep moving. We can't afford to miss the launch window because we couldn't agree that the plan was perfect.
The "We can't do this because it doesn't solve 100% of our problems" excuse.
Yeah, I've noticed that about the left in general, that the perfect is always the enemy of the good. Meanwhile the right's out there like "yeah, a lot of you are going to die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make".