Transcript
The “For the better”, also known as Anakin and Padme 4-Panel and Clueless Padme meme. The first panel shows a guy saying “You should vote dem and push them to be better.” The second panel shows another person saying “So you’re going to push them to be better after you vote?”. The third panel shows the first person saying nothing and staring. The last one shows the second person with a concerned look on her face saying “you’re going to push them to be better after you vote?”.
I mean, it’s a big party and there’s a lot of different members with a lot of different takes that exist on a wide spectrum.
But we watched politicians like AOC and Warren get chewed up. And we watched politicians like Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman get spat out. We’re watching the folks who were crying “Our Party Needs To Win More Young Men To Beat Donald Trump” turn and piss all over Zohran Mamdani, a candidate who has been absolutely magnetic to anti-Trump young men.
There’s a real contradiction between the folks voting Team Blue and the folks claiming to represent those voters. Until that contradiction is reconciled, there can’t be a united front against fascism.
There can be no united front with any liberals. They will use the first opportunity they get to betray any such united front and help the fascists out. Please learn that from history, we need not repeat it.
No liberal organisation is in our best interest. The only thing that helps against fascism are left organisations, extra-parliamentary opposition and extra-legal action.
FFS, even Mao and Lenin didn’t think that way. But then they didn’t see the lay liberal as a serious impediment to their efforts at de-colonization. They saw them as an impediment to the yeoman’s work of reorganizing the body public on a mass scale. And they addressed the impediment through Mass Line politics and iterative, experimental reforms.
Liberals are going to organize whether you want them to or not. And in a country as heavily weighted towards older, liberally educated service sector professionals as your average western state, you’re going to get a lot of them popping up under every regime of any political valiance.
Conservatives have spent 60 years building a media and a body politic that manipulates liberals into supporting their agenda. Leftists will have to learn to be at least as persuasive and compelling. Because liberalism isn’t something you can ignore. And the western leftist movement isn’t in any position to call the shots. The whole point of a Vanguard Party is to spearhead a revolutionary program that can sway and mobilize the body public. It isn’t going to be able to staff every bureaucratic position, much less to impose a universal orthodoxy on everyone, nor should it try.
United Fronts with liberals were a Stalin thing, can’t double check but I’m pretty sure Lenin wasn’t an endorser of them given how he used elections to show that liberals and other bourgeois parties were against worker interests to gather support.
And historically, united fronts were literally against workers interest - just look at Mussolini’s Italy and the united front there against fascism. Workers were forced to accept monarchists and turncoat fascists by liberals as comrades in arms, after fascism got taken down you had armed guards actively shooting at workers who stopped working for 5 minutes and also betrayed the proletariat by sidelining every demand of theirs like councils or nationalization