Monday, August 19, 2024

i'm a revolutionary socialist.

i don't support any of the capitalist parties, and the fence-sitting position the democrats are taking on hamas is one of the symptoms of why i could never support them, as a socialist. 

any actual socialist would have no patience for a barbaric, fascist, right-wing group like hamas and be far more brutal with them than the israelis are being.

as a socialist, my critique for the bourgeois left is that they are not being aggressive enough against right-wing islamic extremism, not that they are being too aggressive against it.

what's going on is that people are confused about language, and that isn't new. what people want to call left-wing in the united states (people like bernie sanders) are actually conservatives, not socialists. they are better on some issues than other other capitalists (conservatives have historically had support for social systems), and arguably worse on others (their foreign policy is at times awful), but they are not leftist and not socialists. progressivism has always been a branch of conservatism, and the democrats have always been the conservative party in the american spectrum.

i am not a progressive. at all. i don't claim i am; i am forceful about rejecting that label. i try to stay very far away from what that word represents, nowadays. i am a socialist. i do often call myself a liberal, but carefully, and only in specific contexts.

i have frequently endorsed the green party, and i've at times been critical of democratic party propaganda (i would rank trump as a better president than biden, a better president than reagan and a better president than george w. bush, but not as a better president than obama, and as about the same as clinton. he's in the middle of the pack of the last dozen presidents, not the worst. i argued very clearly that trump was less of a threat to world peace than biden and i think i was right, but that is a reflection of how horrible a candidate biden has been since day one, and not a kind word directed at trump or his policies.), but i've never endorsed the republican party and it's not likely that i will any time soon. i don't usually endorse the democrats, either.

as somebody outside of the current spectrum, the way i tend to explain it is that i have an equal level of disagreement with republicans and democrats, but i disagree with them on different issues. if you did a survey and asked me to rank 100 of their positions, i would disagree with about 70 positions taken independently by each individual party, but they would be different positions. i am strongly opposed to recent democratic party foreign policy, but i disagree strongly with the republicans on climate policy. both are potentially apocalyptic. one is not less dangerous than the other. the difference between how i approach this and and how most other people do is that i'm supposed to layer the disagreement, i'm supposed to consider my disagreement with the republicans as more fundamental or foundational than my disagreement with the democrats, but i don't. i really disagree with them equally.

i'm going to hate whoever wins equally much. 

the data continues to point to a likely trump victory, in my analysis. however, it would probably be better for the country to have generational change, even if it doesn't result in a substantive change in policy. i don't think that's going to happen. kamala harris is less of an old lady, but she's still an old lady; she will carry out her second term past the retirement age, if she wins.

i would hope that the next election is between much younger people in their 40s that have legitimately new perspectives. this could have been better, but biden held on too long, and it's not going to be an actual turnover, one way or the other.