The number of people who do not know that the America in the Golden Era (50-60s), for white people especially men, was fairly socialist, is extremely high.
Funny how it coincides with the highest union density, none of the new deal being rolled back and the rest of the world basically still being rubble from WWII.
I was going to mention some of that… but then I remembered that facts don’t actually matter to them in the slightest so…
And that’s the rub. One side is sending death threats and attempting kidnapping of the other, plus the whole storm the capitol thing, plus actively rooting to support not only Russia but Israel (tbf the other side is doing that too, at least the politicians even if not the voters) and even somehow North Fucking Korea, oh yeah and wanting to become fascist, while the other side… doesn’t do most of those, at least to the same degree.
In WWII we fought fascism, but it went underground (cough Fox News cough) and now it’s back all over again, and this time it looks to be winning. Both globally, and almost if not quite at home (it may not have “won” yet, but at best things seem to be tied, and remember that SCOTUS ruling that nobody seems to be talking about anymore…? yeah that’s not exactly a resounding defeat of fascism or at least authoritarianism there, when you can kill your political opponents at will).
We are boiled frogs in regards to fascism in the US.
Look at the facts:
We have the largest prison population in the world, which is mostly black. Slavery is still legal as punishment for crime.
We have a surveillance state that watches all of us all the time.
Dissent and protest results in brutal militarized police response.
We have militarized police. With tanks.
We scapegoat immigrants (Biden hardly changed any trump policies.)
Criticism of US policy and actions is instinctively seen as unpatriotic by a large number of citizens.
The existence of our country is largely due to the genocide of native Americans, but that really triggers the national cognitive dissonance.
The wealth of our country was in large part built on the backs of slaves, and continues today in prison labor, but also in regular workers who get a tiny fraction of the wealth they generate for corporations and billionaires.
We do not have a democracy. Corporations and billionaires have captured our government and control 80%+ of the media we consume, easily drowning us in the propaganda they want to push. Nobody is immune, not me, not you. The largest consent manufacturer in history is operating in front of our eyes, but we can’t see it because it’s the sea we swim in.
Corporations and billionaires control who even gets to run in national elections by promoting those that will toe the line. Why bother fixing the actual elections when you can just control who is allowed to get the job in the first place.
The fascism people are worried about came in quietly and made itself at home. It isn’t a Hitler. It isn’t a Mussolini. Hell, it isn’t even a Trump (although he would make things much worse.) The fascists are who they’ve always been. Pick your name - corps and billionaires, the 1%, the bourgeois.
It’s already here.
And on top of all of that, one person wants to actively make it worse, just bc he gets to skim a bit from the top. We deserve our fate I suppose, when we refuse to see something even after it is painstakingly pointed out to us, but damned if I’m not still sad about it.:-(
then Reagan set the conditions for Musk to happen
By deregulation of what is allowed to be called “news”, yeah. Though if we were that fragile to begin with… I wouldn’t put all the blame onto him.
Reconstructionism in the American South also played a role, in papering over some of the differences that lead up to the war, rather than dealing with them in a forthright manner, see e.g. Nuremberg trials.
And ofc before that, people outright owned people as slaves, and even today the number of people who simply don’t care in the slightest is extremely high.
i.e., we aren’t so much suffering from something like cancer as we are something more akin to a genetic defect, which even predated the Constitution. That is not to say this was inevitable - we’ve had so very many opportunities to turn back from where we’ve been headed… But neither we, nor the Russian disinformation campaigns directed at us, seem to want that to happen.
Good, because that’s wrong, social democracy and regulated capitalism is not socialism.
Think about it: obviously I don’t mean in relation to actual socialist countries today, but rather “fairly socialist” = more along the scale of socialism than the USA is currently. For instance even before there were 50 United States that joined together, the postal service allowed people to send mail to one another across vast distances of thousands of miles, from east to west coast and back again.
While today… well technically it still exists, but it’s slower and less reliable than ever before, and conservatives are talking about dropping a lot of “last-mile” delivery options, in states such as Idaho where population density is much lower. This is funded by taxpayer dollars, where the government completely owns and operates the means of production of this enterprise (though capitalist alternatives such as FedEx also exist beside it). Or at least used to in the past, but this is becoming increasingly less so over time, in a variety of ways.
Or we could look at public schools, which especially with No Child Left Behind and the like, is beholden to capitalist interests that provide e.g. the standardized testing services that suck off the teat of taxpayer dollars, siphoning away much-needed funds for such things as food (nobody can learn who is hungry, most especially children - not that conservatives care about that, either the “learning”, or taking care of living humans once we leave the womb, very much in direct opposition to the name of the program that I just said).
Back then, more American services were owned and operated by the government, as compared to today. So yeah, in relative terms, we were “fairly socialist” by our own internal metric. Moreover, my point was that we were so socialist (how socialist were we?:-) we were so socialist, that it rose to a degree that many Americans would consider to be outright shocking. If they could read that is (or rather, they can, they just won’t).
Tl;Dr Words have meaning and the systemic attempt of liberalism and fascism to obfuscate the meaning of socialism out of fear of loss of privilege is irrelevant to what it actually means.
It would be extremely juvenile of either of us to presume that only purist extremes are allowed to exist, with literally nothing else capable of doing so i.e. in the middle.
However, irl is the precise opposite: there is absolutely nothing that exists that conforms to those particular purely theoretical terms - i.e. you cannot point to any irl so-called “socialist” nation that actually conforms to the pure theoretical principles of socialism, nor btw is the USA purely capitalist, and it is especially not purely a democracy either (yes we go through the farce of voting, but then regardless of who wins we do not get what we want - e.g. school shootings continue - and instead monied interests control all, a better term would be a plutocracy, though we are not “purely” that either).
If you didn’t know, then now you do. While if you were trolling, please block me and move on. I know what I said, and I know what I meant, and those words you tried to put into my mouth are neither of those.
The problem with Late Stage Capitalism is that we don’t have any of that sweet delicious Terra Nullis to ruthlessly exploit. We no longer have a rich and fruitful supply of easily oppressed indigent labor to extract surplus from. And we lack the capacity for endless imperialist expansion such that all our surplus male population can be sent abroad as soldiers of fortune.
We’re stuck with a degraded ecology, an enclosed commons, an armed and agitated indigent population, and intercontinental rivals that we can’t just roll over while waving our bibles and firing our guns.
We need to get back to that Old School Capitalism by recreating our frontier. And to do that, we need to bring the empire back home. We need to do imperialism on our own citizens.
Anyone remember what the word for that is, again?
Love? It’s love, right?
No, hypnotoad, I’m sorry to say that that is not love.
Is it fascism? Did you write that from innate knowledge, or was this something you read recently? It’s very coherent and comprehensive.
I thought the same thing. I think there are just some really smart people on here 😂
I tend to get too involved when trying to communicate an explanation, when an overview would suffice. It’s a struggle. There are some really knowledgeable people here. They tend to observe and stay above the fray. I’ve had exchanges with quite a few that are great resources for information.
Second thought is a tankie, but I do agree with this.
Sometimes wisdom comes from the most unlikely of places.
That’s fair. The tankies do have some absolutely valid criticisms of the rampant capitalist orgy we find ourselves in today.
Capitalists at least are human beings.
Corporations are demonic spirits incorporated into robotic bodies of flesh and machine who endlessly scream “mooaaar profit” in blood curdling agony.
That could be a Junji Ito horror manga
There’s quite a difference from stage 1 to stage 4 cancer.
Would be funny if it wasn’t true.
