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?”.
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