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Blackentheborg's city council archive filing cabinet

Hot take of the century; I don't think Bernie should've won back in 2016.

Two terms of Democrat liberalism would've meant a muted reception to Sanders' plans for Medicare for All and other economic initiatives, not to mention the fear mongering the GOP could've done with a proper responsible COVID lockdown period. Trump, by contrast was the perfect system shock for middle America to recognise that, yes, actually, the Republicans are not only bad at their jobs, but actively psychotic and self-interested.

On top of that you have the Democrats rallying behind Hillary Clinton. Clinton is the smug brunch neoliberalism distilled, like the water of life from Dune or some shit. The DNC going full-cock-and-balls for her ascendancy means a Bernie primary victory in 2020 gives Democratic Socialism a mandate. It gives it all a chance to show that not only does it work but that people want it. No more compliancy with the establishment pro-capital order. Biden's election has settled into a simulacrum of Obama-era normalcy, business as usual but with little bon mots for the Union workers. If the opposition wasn't trying to enact progroms against trans people he wouldn't be giving the Unions a second thought.
 
Blackentheborg said:
Hot take of the century; I don't think Bernie should've won back in 2016.

Two terms of Democrat liberalism would've meant a muted reception to Sanders' plans for Medicare for All and other economic initiatives, not to mention the fear mongering the GOP could've done with a proper responsible COVID lockdown period. Trump, by contrast was the perfect system shock for middle America to recognise that, yes, actually, the Republicans are not only bad at their jobs, but actively psychotic and self-interested.

On top of that you have the Democrats rallying behind Hillary Clinton. Clinton is the smug brunch neoliberalism distilled, like the water of life from Dune or some shit. The DNC going full-cock-and-balls for her ascendancy means a Bernie primary victory in 2020 gives Democratic Socialism a mandate. It gives it all a chance to show that not only does it work but that people want it. No more compliancy with the establishment pro-capital order. Biden's election has settled into a simulacrum of Obama-era normalcy, business as usual but with little bon mots for the Union workers. If the opposition wasn't trying to enact progroms against trans people he wouldn't be giving the Unions a second thought.
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I'm inclined to agree as far as saying that Bernie '16 would be heavily handicapped by Congress (probably made worse [potentially far worse] by '18) while Bernie '20 would have the opportunities to make much of the same gains that we've seen.
 
Blackentheborg said:
Hot take of the century; I don't think Bernie should've won back in 2016.

Two terms of Democrat liberalism would've meant a muted reception to Sanders' plans for Medicare for All and other economic initiatives, not to mention the fear mongering the GOP could've done with a proper responsible COVID lockdown period. Trump, by contrast was the perfect system shock for middle America to recognise that, yes, actually, the Republicans are not only bad at their jobs, but actively psychotic and self-interested.

On top of that you have the Democrats rallying behind Hillary Clinton. Clinton is the smug brunch neoliberalism distilled, like the water of life from Dune or some shit. The DNC going full-cock-and-balls for her ascendancy means a Bernie primary victory in 2020 gives Democratic Socialism a mandate. It gives it all a chance to show that not only does it work but that people want it. No more compliancy with the establishment pro-capital order. Biden's election has settled into a simulacrum of Obama-era normalcy, business as usual but with little bon mots for the Union workers. If the opposition wasn't trying to enact progroms against trans people he wouldn't be giving the Unions a second thought.
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this has been one of the great debates on the left in the United States over the past few years and i initially found myself consistently agreeing with this perspective, however in recent light my opinions on the subject have changed.

it is generally argued that Trump's election set in place the destruction of the Republican Party in the long term and put the electoral Left in a far better position, but neither of these are really correct assessments of the situation we find ourselves in currently. something people seem to always forget is that before Trump, the Republican Party was already in a state of accelerating decline. we all laugh at those articles from 2009 and 2010 talking about the "Death of the Republican Party" in the aftermath of Obama's landslide first election, an idea that was quickly dispelled after the disaster that was the 2010 Midterms, but in truth it wasn't too far off from the truth, they were just a few years too early. much of the gains of the Republicans under Obama didn't stem from the GOP actually having a popular political program or functioning electoral apparatus, but came from the weakness and erosion of the motivated, organized and rapidly widening Democratic coalition that Obama had initially assembled before leaving to rot after his election like the egomaniacal striver that he was. by the time 2016 rolled around, even this erosion had not allowed the Republicans to seriously hope of contesting political power at the Federal level because of their total inability to assemble a coalition that could win a legitimate Federal legislative mandate outside of the heavily gerrymandered and at that point dubiously democratic House. the public was uninterested at best in the rising Tea Party's promotion of laissez-faire economics and more to the point, were beginning to completely abandon the "culture war" as a legitimate point of political contention as the country began to rapidly secularize and depolarize around issues like same sex marriage and shit, even immigration, much of which we owe to the rising mass use of the internet. despite their down ballot victories in 2010 and 2014, they lacked a bench of serious Presidential contenders with any type of sauce or widely applicable program to promote, all of their "rising stars" were absolutely sauceless and most were loosing by pretty decent margins to literal Hillary Clinton in a lot of reputable polling at the time. people like to paint McConnell as some kind of twisted evil genius as an excuse for why the Obama Administration was able to get jack shit done domestically despite holding Supermajorities in Congress during his first two years in office, but for as much as McConnell is (or rather, was) procedurally gifted, he is also an absolute moron electorally. the GOP was running out of places to go, they were lost in the woods with no reputable ideological direction, no real forces of personality that could carry them forward, and no way to assemble a winning coalition that could win the Presidency. it's why they focused on obstructing Democratic nominations to both the Supreme and Lower Courts so much, they were very well aware that their Party was, simply put, running out of time!

then Trump comes along and everything changes. all of a sudden, the GOP has a palatable figure to break into new constituencies and a new ideological direction to mobilize support around and more than anything, a man who knew how to sell it in a way people could relate to if not really fully understand. it's why most voters, especially those crucial Independents, thought of Trump as more of a moderate than Hillary was! he knew how to cut through the noise and speak directly to people's fears and real material demands while cloaking his more hard-line reactionary cultural attitudes in his veil of personality.

when Hillary lost to this bumbling fucking moron, the general assumption most of us on the political left had, including myself, was that the established Democratic Party had just had its back completely shattered by one of the most embarrassing electoral losses suffered by any political party on Earth in the last seventy years and by all means, it probably should have! but not only did this not happen, as the 2020 Democratic Primaries demonstrated, if anything it institutionally entrenched the neoliberal centre even further! many would argue as a counter to this reality that Trump's election made a lot of the let's recent downballot successes possible, but i would also very firmly dispute this as simply an inevitably of the degradation of material conditions, as we have seen in other Western Capitalist Democracies since the early 2010s.

meanwhile, if Sanders had gotten elected in 2016, he may have suffered from a contested Congress with a more prominent intraparty conservative element, he also has a lot of work arounds to this. besides just the insane amount he could have accomplished through utilizing executive authority alone, it's very likely that, like Trump's ascension did to the Republican Party and as Biden's victory did to a lesser degree in 2020, Sanders' election would have likely completely reframed the Democratic Party's electoral coalition and created an openly progressive current within the party out of pure financial necessity. while it's not nessecarily in the class interest of much of the Democratic Party's donor class to allow the establishment of a Social Democratic program in America, the larger corporations absolutely could have learned to live with Sanders' frankly very modest reform proposals and the Democratic political leadership absolutely could have learned to live with it. there's just no way to fundraise off of attacking a firmly entrenched President of your own party! not to mention, one of Sanders' main selling points was that his credibility with the American public and his willingness to wield the bully pulprit would actively force the realignment of intraparty interests hostile to his agenda and there's actually a very good deal of truth to this. especially because Sanders, even if he achieved reforms that would have frightened investors and established wealthy interests, would have still absolutely benefited from the strong economy that Trump did and it would have served as a very critical boost to Sanders' domestic political program and his electoral prospects in turn. voter fatigue may be a real thing, but i will remind all of you that in American political history, it's a relatively new phenomenon and that's because politics in the modern era are completely stagnant and people will ping pong between the parties when they feel like the other isn't doing anything to help them before inevitably coming to the same conclusions about the next party and trying the other again because there are no other options. as 2022 demonstrated, when the incumbent party actually has some kind of forward political momentum and the opposition is fractured and unpopular or at least just as unpopular as the incumbents, voter fatigue is largely neutralized as a major deciding force in elections, especially downballot elections.
 
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Glad to see Slenderman is doing well for himself
 
new headcanon for that one Russian cannibal cult I use; they're only cannibals through post-ironic spite. The guy who started it was a Russian former NrX/Nick Land/theory-fiction kid who never got punched enough, using speculative realism to ad-hoc vilify shit. He and his followers fully start eating people and act real smug about it because metaphysically it transcends the moralist common law to synthesise a speculative realist framework and taking an issue with that means you're a fed/NPC/soyboy/woke/etc. Like he and his inner circle know they don't actually believe in anything they're saying but are unflinchingly committed. Jreg meets Jim Jones meets the Hills Have Eyes.
 
Blackentheborg said:
There's gotta be some, surely? Dugin and his Eurasianist movement are pretty much a gateway to the dark enlightenment
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Maybe, but Dugin is already kinda on the fringe and from the few times I have frequented zetnik/neo-Nazi-adjacent Telegram I haven't seen any mentions of Nick Land beyond his own English-language channel
 
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