The Democrats should OFFICIALLY declare the Republican Party dead, and only refer to the MAGA Party from now on. Do an actual press conference, and make an official announcement - the Republican Party no longer exists, and has been replaced by the MAGA Party. That will make the traditional Republicans absolutely crazy, and the Dems should keep it up.
Never use the word Republican ever again, refer only to the MAGA, or MAGA Nazi Party. On talk shows, interviews, sound bites, fundraising texts, etc., use the term MAGA Party exclusively. When asked about it, simply say casually and matter-of-factly “The Republican Party is dead, they are the MAGA Party from now on,” and leave it at that. Make the MAGAs cry.
The Republicans tried doing a similar thing to the Democratic Party by calling it the “Democrat Party”, but members of the Democratic Party basically just ignored this and treated those who used it as stupid, or offered “helpful corrections” to the user’s “inadvertent mistake”. Eventually, it lost currency because it failed in its goal of upsetting people.
The Party Formerly Known as Republican
ITT anti-leftism.
yall not solving fascism with neoliberalism, a capitalist ideology. just saying.
It has never worked in the past. Germany, Italy and Japan are famous communist nations, that’s the only way to defeat fascism and Co.
Too many people here just blindly hating on Bernie and nitpicking how “Stalinism is technically incorrect”. Where’s the Trump hate? Bring some of that shit out. I’ll start.
Fuck Trump, MAGA, and their entire cult of personality.
Because turbo libbing is not the solution to defeating Trump. It is similar to saying Israel has the right to defend itself before each statement. Bernie is actively antagonizing commies by repeating US imperialist propaganda and applying it to someone he does not like.
Stalinism isn’t actual leftist politics. It’s sycophantic moronery, just as Bernie used it.
So when Stalin collaborated with Nazis to kill and chase away my relatives from what is now Ukraine that was imperialist propaganda? Why did so many of my ancestors flee Russia at that time?
You mean the peace treaty he signed with Hitler to stall for time and build weapons after France and Britain refused to join forces with him to fight Hitler.
Have you considered asking yourself why France and Britain refused?
It is quite astounding to blame Stalin, the guy who basically fought Hitler all by himself, for the Holocaust.
If you feel antagonised when someone criticise Stalin then that’s a you problem though.
Staline’s Image Cult isn’t “imperialist propaganda”
Americans using their global opponents which they demonize in all their media as insults is an all too classic trope.
I am sure we are all extremely well informed on Stalin because of our unbiased media.
Yes, the US has red scare propaganda.
Historians exist outside of the US, though. We have decades and decades of non-US, non communist-scare historical research to know what the USSR and Stalin did. If you don’t want to recognise the errors of the past, you will repeat them. If the most you can do is aim for Stalin’s USSR but 2025 version, then you’re as much an enemy of the people than capitalists are.
Let’s hope he keeps doing it. Unless commies are out there fighting ICE with fire they can go get fucked.
Quite frankly, I think that the voters who would be put off by Bernie stating that MAGA and support for Stalin share similarities are both worthless and minuscule.
You have to make bridge statements in order to reach a broader audience
The GOP has become a Stalinist Party
They haven’t killed remotely enough fascists to earn this distinction.
They have deported enough people.
I’d argue it’s a satanist party as well. They’re doing all the shit that was prophesized that the devil would make dumb people do, worshipping false idols, worshipping money, getting the mark of the beast, that sort of shit
This is coming from an staunch atheist who just notices the irony
I was confused on what was Satanic until I realized you were talking about the Christian version on Satanic and not the Church of Satan.
I was super surprised by the irony after I saw all those golden idols of trump. If I was a Christian I would be highly offended at these people trying to align with me. Those are $100 bills with trumps face on it, that they covered the goat idol. 2 separate events. 1 was a CPAC and 1 was at Mara Lago. 🙄
Satanists are cooler than these assholes.
I cannot imagine being enough of a sycophant to wear a hat that says “Trump was right about everything”. Nobody’s right about everything, and Trump is less right about things than most people because he’s incredibly stupid.
So much of the last 30 years of Republicanism (maybe 60 years, if you’re a Nixonian) boils down to Owning The Libs.
The guy with the “Trump was right…” hat will happily bitch about all the things Trump is doing wrong. He just won’t do it in earshot of anyone he thinks is to his Left.
Trump is less right about things than most people
Trump is turning the rhetoric of the Reagan Era into reality. He’s taking the orthodoxy of the party seriously, rather than using it as bait to gull the rubes into another round of tax cuts and privatizations.
It’s this commitment to orthodoxy that his base loves. Also what makes him look stupid.
I agree that the party orthodoxy is stupid and contradictory. But he’s also profoundly stupid which is why he’s such a perfect fit as its mascot.
Eh. Intelligence is clearly not how you get ahead in elected politics. Even when Biden wasn’t teetering on the edge of senility, he was still dumb as bricks. Didn’t stop him from being a senior Senator, then a VP, then a President. Meanwhile, the Smarties like Romney and Cruz and Buttigieg and Bloomberg routinely face-plant in the face of even the most mild popular opposition.
Intelligence is sometimes a handicap in politics. You’re right, and that is especially the case in American politics. As far as Trump goes, I would say his intelligence was never a hindrance he had to manage in any way because he is, was, and always will be abundantly stupid.
Intelligence is sometimes a handicap in politics.
Idk if I’d call it a handicap. I’d say it is tangential to the goal of building a large base of supporters, particularly when the “intelligent” move you see before you is to fatten your own wallet or adhere to some big money economic orthodoxy in order to climb the corporate ladder.
Like, the classic examples of this were Hillary v Obama in 2008 and Hillary v Donald in 2016. Hillary Clinton was clearly smarter - and in many ways more politically savvy - than Trump. She was arguably more experienced and politically educated than Obama. And they were both miles ahead of the rest of the GOP field. Hillary had run circles around her Republican rivals for decades, cultivated networks of plutocrats that would have otherwise been Republican stalwarts, built large organizations throughout the Atlantic Coast and the Southwest to power her ambitions during the Bush Era, and added substantially to her family fortune from historical right-wing sources while at the head of the liberal leadership team in an era when Democrats as a party were on the decline.
But she got the rug pulled on her in the '08 primary, simply because she refused to admit she was wrong on her Iraq War vote six years earlier. And she got beaten again, by a whisper thin margin, because her business friendly calculus in backing NAFTA for thirty years finally caught up with her.
As far as Trump goes, I would say his intelligence was never a hindrance he had to manage in any way because he is, was, and always will be abundantly stupid.
I would argue that Trump was significantly smarter than the median GOP primary candidate in '16 and '24. A lot of folks love to pillar him as stupid, but he clearly has an ability to read a room and reflect those feelings back to a crowd in a way DeSantis and Huckabee and Jeb! did not. He wasn’t afraid to say the Iraq War was a mistake. He regularly bragged about his role in government corruption when it was clear voters assumed everyone was corrupt and considered this a point of transparency. He was more openly racist, when the base demanded more racism, and (often quixotically) more openly LGBTQ+ friendly when the base stopped giving a fuck about villainizing gay relationships. Call it Emotional Intelligence, if nothing else. The man might not even be literate, but he’s clearly clever as a fox and twice as predatory.
But I also think he’s a product of the historical moment. His popularity is largely a consequence of decades of political orthodoxy on Rich People Being Better Than You, hammered into the heads of his base voters. He was given a big megaphone to say “I’m a rich white guy with a hot wife, vote for me” in an era when being a rich white guy with a hot wife was a great way to build a popular base of voters.
He lucked into office in 2016 in the same way Obama lucked into office in 2008. In a prior moment, it wouldn’t have worked. In this moment, he was the man that fit what Americans were being sold as Presidential.
I would argue that Trump was significantly smarter than the median GOP primary candidate in '16 and '24. A lot of folks love to pillar him as stupid, but he clearly has an ability to read a room and reflect those feelings back to a crowd in a way DeSantis and Huckabee and Jeb! did not.
He was a frequent guest on the Howard Stern show. He continually forced himself into the lime light every single chance he got. Even the stupidest of fools is bound to develop a skill or two along the way, and over time he did develop media skills and the ability to read a crowd. But he’s still as stupid as a bag of soup.
But I also think he’s a product of the historical moment. His popularity is largely a consequence of decades of political orthodoxy on Rich People Being Better Than You, hammered into the heads of his base voters.
I largely agree with you, but I think his stupidity is a selling point as well. It’s what endears him to “the base”. He thinks like they do: poorly, infrequently…stupidly.
Even the stupidest of fools is bound to develop a skill or two along the way
“He’s the worst chess grandmaster of the lot. Never stops playing, keeps ranking up, just coasting along on the sheer number of games he’s played badly and learned from. Hands down, dumb as shit, I would only lose to him 99.95% of the time.”
Again, I think the term “stupid” is just a pejorative at this point. If he was a democrat who kept winning upset elections and outfoxing supposedly superior opponents, what kind of liberal would talk about him this way?
I think his stupidity is a selling point as well
He’s not fixated on looking like a braniac, which means he’s not getting caught in the Tucker Carlson trap of “You don’t even know how many people are in Iran! How can you support bombing them?” Trump isn’t claiming he’s got the encyclopedia memorized. Much like Bush Jr and Reagan, he’s focused on what plays well with the audience, not what sounds “smart” to the debate judges.
Is that stupid? Not when it accomplishes your intended goals.
Incidentally, one of the “dumbest” things Trump did in the wake of his '24 win was that ridiculous cryptocurrency that let him take bribes openly from foreign governments. It quickly restored him from “billionaire on paper” to “real fucking billionaire”. Not because it was so insidiously clever or legalistic, but because the Biden DOJ never prosecuted him when he was out of office. What’s more, the courts that Democrats refused to stack when they had a majority, have given him a free pass on criminal misconduct.
You can give a lot of credit for that to Mitch McConnell, as he spent his whole Senate career carefully staking appointed positions and encouraging career hires with Federalist Society flacks. But Trump’s the guy who is going to capitalize on all McConnell’s hard work and Clinton/Obama/Biden’s passivity. So who really looks like the dumb-dumb here?
On a similar note, I’m going to start calling republicans red coats.
Whoa man, Canadians don’t want anything to do with that tangerine tyrant.
And I doubt Brits or Germans would either.
This rhetoric adds nothing of subtance to the political understanding of either contemporary Trumpism or the history of Stalinism. Sanders only serves to obscure the meaning of this critically important understanding. Fascism and Stalinism are not the same.
To be clear, Stalinism took hold in the Soviet Union as a result of its historic backwardness and international isolation. The failure of the revolution to take root in Europe (largely a result of the historic betrayal of Social Democracy in the Second International) created conditions for the consolidation of a nationalist clique and a bureaucratic degeneration of the workers state that formed from the victory of the October Revolution. That is Stalinism. This political form was responsible for mass murder of the old cadres of the revolution who opposed it, systematic betrayal of the workers movement internationally, collaboration with imperialism allowing for the restabilization of capitalism during its repeated periods of crisis, and ultimately the destruction of Soviet Union union and the restoration of capitalism in 1991. A detailed and correct historical understanding of this history is critically important for the working class as it enters into a new period of revolutionary struggle.
Sanders use of the term as a political slur wrongly directed at Trump confuses the issue, and ultimately gives capitalism a pass for its own crisis. Trump is not simply an evil individual responsible for wrecking America. He is the product of the terminal crisis of capitalism at the center of world imperialism. He represents a financial oligarchy whose wealth and influence has grown increasingly disconnected from social development and the process of production. The historic content of Trumpism has a stronger relationship to the fascism of Mussolini and Hitler than the national labor bureaucraticism of Stalin.
This is no small error by Sanders. This is a deliberate falsification that is calculated to confuse political consciousness and hinder the development of revolutionary conclusions. It should be clear to anyone who takes more than a second to think about it that the comparison to Stalinism is shallow. The historic content of Trumpism is its own.
The failure of the revolution to take root in Europe (largely a result of the historic betrayal of Social Democracy in the Second International) created conditions for the consolidation of a nationalist clique and a bureaucratic degeneration of the workers state that formed from the victory of the October Revolution.
What path should the USSR have taken instead? (genuine question)
Fascism and Stalinism are not the same.
People who unironically support Stalinism in the modern day are red fascists. Whether they are technically the exact same thing or not isn’t a meaningful discussion considering the commentary that Sanders is offering here. He is specifically operating within the context of modern American politics. Something average academic/armchair/larpy leftists are often completely fucking incapable of. His main use of analogizing Stalinism with Trumpism is the Cult of Personality not that they are literally the exact same thing. It is exhausting that this needs to be explained.
Sanders use of the term as a political slur wrongly directed at Trump confuses the issue, and ultimately gives capitalism a pass for its own crisis.
How does it give a pass to capitalism? Sanders himself would agree that capitalism contributed to Trumpism.
This is a deliberate falsification that is calculated to confuse political consciousness and hinder the development of revolutionary conclusions.
This is a level of paranoia suggesting actual brain damage, seek medical attention.
One is fascism, the other is red fascism. Different ideologies but same cheeks from the same arse as one might put it.
I reject this analysis as unscientific and ahistoric. The similarities are entirely superficial. Its not a matter of different ideology, but different historic content of the regimes themselves.
You may reject, but the empirical basis is there. Different cheeks from the same authoritarian arse.
stalin also evetuanlly purged his own loyalists after becoming paranoid.
I mean a less harsh version of that has been going on. Trump has ejected many people that used to be in his inner circle, and has, or has tried, to fire almost the whole federal government, too many people who got there without him to trust
Oh don’t worry, he’s still trying to get feds to quit, and they’re drooling at adding sycophantic bullshit to the hiring process. All while eroding union protections, benefits, and pay.
All while the Democrats vote down attempts to combat Trump, but have all the time in the world to sabotage the primary resultant nominee in NYC. Why have a primary if you’re not going to go with the results? That’s not a primary - that’s just bullshit.
This country is a fucking joke.
Why have a primary if you’re not going to go with the results? That’s not a primary - that’s just bullshit.
Welcome to the DNC. Their primaries (at least the bigger ones) have been bullshit for a long time. Like, they’re notorious for bullshit regarding primaries. I like to point to my own state in 2016 as an example, where Clinton won the primary despite getting around 35% of the vote while Sanders won in every county and Clinton didn’t even manage second in every county.
The main difference is that this time the “wrong” candidate won despite the bullshit, so now he needs to lose the general, whatever that requires. Again, welcome to the DNC.
here’s hoping
Not exactly. While I understand the satisfaction of seeing these asshats getting their faces eaten by the leopard, the ones being purged are the ones that are most likely to keep him somewhat in check, leaving only scared little yes men behind.
In a one party system that would be a problem. In a two party system, it just drives the ex-communicated into the arms of their past enemy. (Whilst weakening any progressive thought within that party as they bend over backwards to appease the new influx of political support…)
You misunderstand the nature of the US right now. It is not a two-party system anymore.
well I was hinting at the partisan ratchet effect in the last part of my comment there, but fair
It turns out the Red Scare was about the wrong Reds the whole time.
Been saying it for a while, better dead than red.
Hah use their communist rhetoric back at them
I fucking love that he chose to call them stalinists. In addition to it being true, it send a fuck you to the alt-right and the alt-left (who love to talk up stalin as of late)
Who in the alt left is talking about Stalin lol maybe some whackos online
Stalin took the Russian state from an agricultural backwater to a Space Age superpower in a matter of twenty years.
If he’d started out a Virginia plantation owner instead of a Georgian bank robber, capitalists would have loved him. He’d be bigger than Churchill.
American liberals love (the whitewashed version of) FDR because they see the quasi-socialism of the mid-20th century as the morally correct path. Eastern Europeans - who came through two world wars and repeated genocides on every front - have a lot more of an appetite for Iron Fisted Dictator[Communist] after enduring generations of Iron Fisted Dictator[Monarchist]
But the way in which he did it was very costly. Stalin is comparable to Musk in that sense. In love with technology and factories, but too focussed on advancement no matter the human cost. Everything was about efficiency.
If he hadn’t been, would the USSR survived? That focus on technology, factories, and efficiency, no matter the cost, seems like the right approach when there’s Nazis at your doorstep, conquering all of Europe and conducting mass exterminations.
Stalin is comparable to Musk in that sense.
Christ. Musk is, if anything, more comparable to Henry Ford.
Billionaire car magnet with whole municipal governments in his pocket who wrecked public transit and spread antisemitism all over Europe? That’s not the editor and chief at Pravda.
If you were to put Stalin anywhere in contemporary US politics, I’d say he’s comparable to Shyam Sankar - the Palantir CTO who was recently granted the rank of Lt. Colonel in the US military. Or, perhaps, just straight up comparing him to Peter Thiel minus all the buggery.
In love with technology and factories, but too focussed on advancement no matter the human cost. Everything was about efficiency.
Silicon Valley has swarms of these guys. Most of them aren’t constantly pissing themselves from too much Ketamine.
From someone who has gone to more than a few political protests and rallies in Boston:
Every fucking time Socialist Alternative shows up, it’s fine until some edgelord dipshit unfurls the fucking huge Soviet flag with Stalin and Mao silk screened on it. It’s like they’re trying to alienate reasonable people as well as historically-informed people. I consider myself a staunch socialist. I also outright detest Stalin and Mao because they were fucking authoritarian despots who wrapped their regimes in “communism” banners.
Sure, some of the systems at lower levels were socialistic, but at the end of the day, it was all in service to the cult of personality in charge of the whole gig. And yes, that’s what the US has devolved into (and arguably had done so quite a while ago, just not so overtly), but that doesn’t excuse Stalin or Mao, nor does it justify being an apologist for them.
From that perspective, any thoughts on Ho Chi Minh?
Of all the leaders good, bad, and, ugly over the last century, he doesn’t seem to be brought up as much by propaganda machines.
Why is it always Mao or Stalin? Can’t they at least go with folks who shed the blood of fascists like Tito or Castro? They werent particularly good either but at least they were doing the best with their dealt decks. Mind you I fucking loathe elevating folks to positions of respect unless they were my ancestors or damned well earned it via death and glory.
I also outright detest Stalin and Mao because they were fucking authoritarian despots
You could easily say the same of Washington or Eisenhower or Churchill or DeGualle.
Hell, Lincoln got got by a guy who was literally shouting “Sic Semper Tyrantus”.
The thing that sets Stalin and Mao apart from the Francos and Mussolinis and Tojos and Chang Kai-Sheks and Churchills was their break from the old line aristocracy. The thing westerners hate more than anything was their overthrow of the local monarchies.
That’s why you have folks weeping big crocodile tears over Anastasia and Puyi, while they whistle past the graveyard of the countless Chinese and Russian victims of Romanov/Qing Dynasty misrule.
Mostly the tankies on .ml
maybe some whackos online
Checks out.
Who, you know, MIGHT be real people but probably aren’t for the most part…
I just assume any .ml account is a propaganda bot. Because even if they are real people… they are propaganda bots.
Lemmy is far too small to bot.
lemmy.ml is just friendly to those people, so it attracts them.lemmy.ml was built by those people, sometimes it feels for the express purpose of spreading their bullshit.
Yeah, that’s plausible.
Lemmy.ml only has ~2100 monthly active users. I would guess that likely at least half of them are randos who just joined what they thought was the default instance.
That leaves about 1000 or so (likely even less) active tankies. That’s not a lot of people. I’m pretty sure you could find more than that amount of tankies in pretty much every single metropolis worldwide.
If its only a thousand people, can we just ignore them then.
Currently, Lemmy only has 46 000 monthly active accounts in total, so 1 000 is quite a significant share of that. Especially considering that these 1000 are very vocal.
Remember, this is not Reddit or Facebook with billions of active users. Lemmy in its entirety is smaller than some phpbb forums used to be.
I mean, ~3500 of these monthly active accounts are from lemmynsfw.com alone, and these are most likely double accounts for people who have accounts on a non-nsfw instance. And in general it’s quite likely the the amount of monthly active accounts is much larger than the number of actual monthly active users, considering that a significant portion of users will have more than one lemmy account and that there are some moderation bots and stuff like that around.
dude what the fuck
If you’re not a tankie, you shouldn’t be offended by, “tankies on .ml”
That instance actively and demonstrably moderates counter-opinions to tankie rhetoric, to the point where the instance is just a field of landmines for those that don’t tow the line. They are a terrible, gross farse of “leftists” and deserve all the shit they catch and more.
They’re robots, Morty, I don’t respect them
Aw I thought he called the sanatists but I think either would work
Modern Satanists are actually extremely progressive. The Satanic Temple makes a point of using legislation intended to promote Christianity to promote their own religious organization.
It pisses off the reactionary religious zealots and shows them to be hypocrites, and there’s nothing legislators can do about it without blatantly giving preferential treatment to the “correct” religion.
I’m talking about their version of satanists not the real people
To be fair, the Satanic Temple isn’t exactly satanic per se. It’s more of a parody religion to point out the unfair law exceptions churches get. They are more anti-church (or maybe even anti-religion) than actually satanic.
I’d be very surprised if a significant portion of members of the Satanic Temple actually seriously believe in the existence of satan.
It’s about the same as e.g. the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
sanatists
Ah yes. Sanat, Satan’s lesser known brother.
I think you see how I got satanists from stalinists now
Who would win, Sanat or Craig?
Shame they’re not santanists
Great guitarist
We worship that tone amirite?
I voted for him in the primary, then in the general as a write in and I would fucking do it again. Bern the billionaire’s faces off.
Spot fucking on
Oh, libs. When will you learn that the right is immune to these sorts of accusations? Nobody is swayed by this “Trump is a communist” rhetoric, the only people who agree with it are people who already hate Trump and would clap along with any comparison or accusation as long as it’s negative. Trump has “Only Nixon could go to China” powers.
It’s the same sort of thing as the Dems trying to attack Trump as weak on immigration and pass themselves off as border hawks. Liberals can’t help but to concede this whole moral framework to the right and argue purely along technical lines of efficiency.
Of course the liberals clap along because it owns the “tankies,” and in their minds, if they just punch left enough they’ll convince everyone that they’re “one of the good ones” on the left, as if they’re not going to be labelled Stalinists anyway, like they did with Obama.
It’s bad enough that it’s not true, but even worse is that nobody buys it (who wasn’t already “vote blue no matter who”).
he said “stalinist”; not communist… one of the primary things that differentiates stalin from marx and lenin (afaik; i’ll freely admit i’m not reading books on the subject, but that’s also the perspective of the mainstream and thus afaik the communication he’s going for) is the authoritarianism, purges, etc: he’s trying to say that trump is a cult of personality of equal substance to the mainstream understanding of stalin
i’ll freely admit i’m not reading books on the subject
Let me first clarify a few points then.
Marx and Lenin were also “authoritarian.” You should read Engles’ On Authority, it’s not long and explains his position on the matter, which was consistent with Marx.
“Stalinism” isn’t really a thing, nobody calls themselves that, it’s just a pejorative for Marxism-Leninism, which was Stalin’s stated ideology (in fact, he’s the person who coined the term). Marxism-Leninism (“Stalinism”) is the most prevalent ideology among self-described communists globally, particularly in the global south.
If Sanders just wanted an authoritarian figure to compare Trump to, there are no shortage of right-wing ones who have much more in common with him. The choice of Stalin seems to be intentional, to distance himself and his own brand of socialism from Stalin and other M-Ls.
I believe this is a flawed strategy, in the same way it would be to accuse a witch-hunter of being a witch. The problem is that you’re accepting the premise that witches are real and need to be hunted, and at that point it becomes a question of who can better make the case that they’re not a witch - which is going to be the witch-hunter, because that’s their job, they know how to play the game, they made the rules. In the same way, right wingers are always going to be more convincing anti-communists than someone who calls himself a socialist, they made the rules of the red scare and they know how to play it. The real way to defeat the witch hunt is to have enough people who aren’t afraid of being called witches, and the way to defeat red scare stuff is not to accept the framing and punch left, but to say, “So what if I am a Red?”
Cowards driving by and downvoting without addressing any arguments: where is the lie?
Is it unfathomable that someone could see something they think is wrong but doesn’t think starting a long-winded Internet argument wherein neither party will in any scenario whatsoever convince the other of anything is worth their time?
I take drive by downvotes as a compliment, the meaning I get from them is, “I don’t like this because it challenged my beliefs in a way I can’t answer.” Great! That’s what I was going for.
if you say “libs” it instantly puts people in the headspace of “own the libs”, “everything i don’t like is woke”… it’s a dog whistle, and thus sets people up to think the rest of what’s being said is tainted
the ideologies in the group are not a cohesive block
Part of the reason to use the word is to expose liberals to the idea that they are not in fact the Left and their policies support capitalism at every turn
