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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • First in our current system the president needs Congress to get things done

    There is quite a lot that the President can do independently using Executive Orders. Even tasks that, on paper, require congressional approval can be subverted, and you can look at the US’s record of entering undeclared wars as evidence of that.

    Beyond that, see what I already said about how there’s no such thing as an autocrat.

    Second, we’ve seen with the freedom caucus that a small group of congressmen can wield a lot of power

    These are people who would do the best in an imaginary Fuhrer Trump political machine. Think of it like getting promoted to a bigger, more powerful Freedom Caucus.

    Third, I think we definitely can expect a very different Trump in a second term versus his first term and he definitely HAS expressed an interest in this with all of his dictation envy too become Fuhrer and worse there is a large portion of the population that is content to be rolled under a Trump dictatorship.

    People have been talking about him admiring dictators before he was elected and all throughout his first term. There’s nothing new here, no evidence that suggests something has changed.

    I promise you it’s just hysteria. So there’s a chance of something beneficial happening in this conversation, I want you to just take note of this conviction you have that Trump will be Hitler and then, if he is elected, just remember it as he blunders his way through being racist and doing war crimes just the same as he did before with no particular change besides Vance leading a new rhetorical tact.

    No, I won’t be doing a mirror version of this exercise. I’m a communist, so if I’m wrong and he’s a neo-neo-Nazi, I get the wall anyway and it’s no harm done.


  • It has very little support, it’s DOA. That’s just what happens. Look at all of Bernie’s failed bills; they just don’t push the needle. You can tell me that at some point in the future the Rapture will definitely happen, the righteous will be saved and the sinners will be cast into perdition and so on, but I don’t see any reason to believe it considering the history of the Democrats for the last 40 years and their incredible ability to pretend to want good things while either conspiring with open rightists or making limp gestures like this.

    You will not see the Democratic Party vote its own power away, it just won’t happen.


  • Making a declaration is worthless. This is three people saying that they’d like to do something and they will fail just as these attempts have always failed. I can give them as people some amount of credit for trying to make the world better, but that does not exonerate the system! The system – including the rest of the Democratic Party – will still put their attempt down regardless.

    Do you not see the difference here? The fact that people can and do propose to do good things now and again and those attempts are shot down even by the so-called left wing party is not a defense of the republic, but an indictment!


  • There’s no need to be so smarmy. Anyway, the individuals may behave in aberrant ways (or perhaps as a red herring, up to your interpretation), but the Democratic Party will reject it just as the Republicans will. I’m talking about classes and political parties, not every person as an individual.

    If it passes, I’ll eat my hat, but it doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell.


  • both the Communist and the Nazis were against democracy

    This is ridiculous, the Communists opposed the Weimar Republic, but they absolutely supported democracy. In their view, in fact, they supported a much more authentic form of democracy by extricating private interests from the process.

    Hindenburg used decrees to work with the Nazis so they could form a government.

    We keep glossing over this “liberals siding with Nazis” thing

    The Communists however never tried to work with the democratic forces.

    I really think the word you’re looking for here is “liberal”

    Point should be obvious.

    You’re making significant assumptions, such as any of the liberals actually being willing to work the with the Communists, which would be a hell of a change for the SPD after that business with the Freikorps. Otherwise, the argument is just “join the SPD” and assume that they can bring their voters with them while completely abandoning their revolutionary project and putting themselves under the discipline of a liberal party. I feel that this is something of a muddy issue that you’re interpreting in a convenient way.

    “Aren’t you as well?” Fair question, and there’s a lot about this situation that I can’t speak to, but what I said before I am completely sure holds, which is that Hitler gained power, on the most proximate level, because of liberal collaborators.



  • Well, two things:

    One, that is a very alarmist view of Trump. He liked slinging around executive orders, but he had neither the ambition nor the audacity to be a Hitler. It simply isn’t realistic to think he’ll execute his second term by toppling the Republic, he doesn’t have visions like that, even if many people have visions like that for him (including Mike Lindel, somewhat hilariously, with his apparent attempt to get Trump to do a false flag and establish emergency powers).

    Second, look at history. Inevitably, some people who release leopards do get their faces eaten, but becoming an executor of a fascist regime isn’t a loss of power, it’s a change in title at worst and, if anything, something of an increase in power. Imagining Trump becomes a fascist autocrat, that doesn’t actually mean that his whim is enough to unilaterally move things however he likes, and that is true of every leader in history. The reason for this is that his power, his authority, doesn’t come from himself, it comes from the class (or classes, historically) that support him, so he needs to make sure to keep them on his side or they will absolutely just kill and replace him. The petty Congressmen that support him know this, and are fine with working in a paradigm where they benefit from his support and are left with a broad range of things that he views as acceptable (since Trump won’t try to micromanage the whole country) in which to exert their personal agendas as they see fit.

    But again, Fuhrer Trump is a fantasy. Maybe Tom Cotton poses such a threat, but Trump does not.

    Does this all make sense?






  • Yes, but you’re going to need to find a way to think beyond that, because both parties understand that it’s in their interests to oppose rcv, so “vote democrat until we get rcv” effectively means “vote democrat forever”.

    Fundamentally, there is a limit to the extent that a capitalist democracy will tolerate actual democratic power, because eclipsing the power of capitalists obviously means threatening their position. They will not sit idly by and allow their power to be voted away.



  • There’s a difference between history being people and history being Great Men tm. They are including people in material reality and saying that material reality is what creates the basis for the procession of history, not the appearance of great individuals who stand outside it and move it unilaterally.

    I don’t understand why people are even arguing against this. It’s widely understood even in popular liberal academia that Great Man Theory is primitive, idealist, childish, and absurd and that you need to look at material circumstances, class interests, popular movements, and so on to understand why things happen.



  • The Social Democrats won 121 seats in November 1932, the communists won 100 seats. The Social Democrats were socialists and the communists were communists. The nazis had 196 seats in the 1932 election. So if the socialists and communists had combined they would have had 221 seats which is more than 196. And those were leftist parties who were bickering.

    The problem here isn’t “leftist parties bickering”, it is self-evidently “the SPD aligning themselves with liberalism and fascism”. It’s not like the KPD refused to form a majority with other parties.

    As an aside, “socialist” and “communist” are generally interchangeable terms and the SPD were neither by conventional definitions, but were instead (being very charitable to them) what we would call DemSocs.



  • The liberals fucking won that election and it was the liberal Hindenburg appointing Hitler to the Chancellorship that facilitated his rise to power, not anything the KPD did. This is disgusting historical revisionism that a search engine could dispel in 5 seconds, but you choose to warp history to make it look like Hitler actually won the election and make the liberals who enabled him seem blameless. It is, in effect, apologia for Nazi collaborators. Exactly appropriate for someone shilling for Dems while they gleefully subsidize genocide.