Part of what I see with 50501/Hands Off protests is that they have a theme of “defending the Constitution” from Trump. This is really a somewhat conservative position and doesn’t have much historical rigor to it.
Prof. Aziz Rana of Boston College Law School is having a moment on Jacobin Radio right now. His basic thesis is that the Constitutional order is so deeply antidemocratic that the left argued with itself and the liberals over whether to focus efforts on challenging it in the early 20th Century. In the broad sweep of history since then, Americans have come to view the Constitution as a sacred text, but in fact, that order is part of what gives the Republicans and the far right their advantages despite losing the popular vote.
The shorter interview: https://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#S250424 (April 24, 2025)
The 4-part long interview: https://thedigradio.com/archive/ (see the Aziz Rana episodes starting in April 2025) - Part 4 isn’t up yet.
So why should we venerate the Constitution, when it holds us back from real, direct democracy? I think part of what our liberal friends and family hold onto is a trust in the Constitution and the framers. They weren’t geniuses, they were landowners worried about kings taking their property. Use these interviews, or Prof. Rana’s book, to handle those arguments.
Yeah. Why do you think that Lemmy, a markedly leftist platform, is so inundated with people talking about how useless all our imperfect tools for making the world slightly less authoritarian are? Why do you think they’re trying to get us to abandon them rather than bolstering their support?
I’ve been saying this for months. The people who are trying to get the left to abandon the effective means we have for shifting the overton window to the left are right-wingers or being manipulated by right-wingers.
The people who spend their days banging away about how we don’t have democracy, we’ve never had democracy, the constitution is useless, the democrats never accomplish anything, etc, are literally agents of the right whether they know it or not. But many of them probably literally do know it.
Why do we see this more on Lemmy than in real life or on other platforms? Because we’re being targeted.
It’s amazing how often I see someone proclaiming to have a deeply held belief only to turn around and immediately support a political pathway that is objectively detrimental to their cause and crow about how their position is the most moral while ignoring the 100% predictable consequences. Bonus points for them also arguing that picking the obviously better choice is wrong because both sides are the same, or the other person would have done the shit that only one of them was saying they’d do.
Almost as if they are being disingenuous, and the theory under which what they’re doing makes perfect sense is more likely than the one at face value which makes 0 sense.
Absolutely! I had the same impression with the Gaza protests. The Biden/Harris administration handled the situation absolutely horribly, but anyone who had watched #45 knew that things were going to get a whole universe worse for Gaza if Trump got reelected. And yet, there was that strange bombardment with “I can’t vote for Harris because of Gaza” that seemed astroturfed.
In no material way has the gaza situation become worse. The only change is our president is no longer shaking his finger going ‘oh no, bad isreal please stop’ and is extending the prosecution to Palestinians in the US.
You sound like one of those people who stopped caring about the child cages soon as biden was the one doing it.
All harris had to do was say ‘i will ensure american laws are enforced with respect to weapons sales to isreal’ and her major campaign problem would have disappeared.
Wouldn’t have helped with all her other shitty positions but at least we would have had a candidate who didnt support genocide.
Its not astroturfing when your candidate is so bad most people in her base dont actually support her but are voting against trump. Not a recipe for success.
We’re getting exactly what we deserve atm for running genocidal candidates. Next time tell your candidate to get a fucking clue and not support a fucking genocide and maybe she’ll win. Though i doubt it since shes a gaslighting fuck who doesnt give a shit about the working class. Her and biden cant disappear fast enough from the political sphere as far as im concerned
That’s interesting, because unlike so, so many of the people that took on the mantle of the righteous cause of the Palestinians, I’ve been talking about it since last century. The Palestinians have been mistreated since at least the 80s, and in an ongoing fashion for now 40 years.
Did I hear anyone on the American left complain about it until 2023? Not really. It was really lonely in that camp. It somehow feels that if it hadn’t been for TikTok taking up the cause, this would have been another one of those times when Palestine is forgotten.
I am delighted that Palestine has gotten more attention, and I am very hopeful that somehow the situation can be stabilized and improved for a people that has suffered way too much. But not preventing Trump from taking power was honestly a very bad thing to happen for Palestine.
It’s fucking harrowing right now. The food is gone. The amount that can come in has been cut to 0, and the aid agencies that were operating inside the country have run out as of this week.
I think May might be the month that everyone dies. That’s not an exaggeration. I hope I am wrong.
The best I can hope for, honestly, is that they didn’t die in vain and the holocaust beginning for real, combined with the strength of the recent protest movements you talk about, is what finally motivates the international governmental community to act in a big way. None of this “divest.” None of this “strongly worded statement.” I don’t know what it should look like instead, but it is heartbreaking that they want to just stand on the sidelines and watch it all happen. And, maybe with Trump and his dysfunction disabling the US’s ability to defend Israel as they usually would, maybe there is a little window of opportunity to make a better life for the people in the West Bank and really hold Israel to account for once.
I am not hopeful, to be honest. But that is all I can see of hope, is that something better will come from it in the long run. Right now it is very, very grim.
What a shit world this has turned into if we let a whole people starve to death.
Yeah. Like I say, it is heartbreaking.
I have a horrible feeling that we may, this month, be watching the final death of Gaza. And everyone’s too distracted or too powerless to do anything about it.
They’ve just run out of food. There’s none left. I think this might be the end. I think by this time next year, what was “Gaza” may simply be Israel.
There’s a lot to criticize about Biden’s response to Gaza (Basically all of it). But, it’s outright absurd to pretend that all of that instantly applied to Kamala Harris, for more or less literally no reason at all, or that it represented a sensible reason to let someone come to power who turned “I’m going to hem and haw and at the end of the day support Israel in 90% of what they’re doing while making noise about humanitarian aid” into “Fuck it, kill 'em all, I’ll send their supporters to El Salvador to help support you.”
Incorrect. I think it would have lost her a lot of support. A lot more American people support Israel than Palestine, because they’re as unaware of the nature of the genocide as you are about the shockingly-good-for-American-politics steps Biden took to support the working class and a lot of the key issues the people on Lemmy are constantly clamoring about (police brutality, unions, climate change).
Fun fact: gaza lacked clean food and water for almost a year now. Its old news and was allowed under Biden. Its not a material change.
And no she wouldn’t have lost a ton of support. The jewish community is 1) small, and 2) divided on the issue. Further more most of zionist are literally christians thinking isreali reclaiming the holy land is a precursor to the rapture and don’t vote democrat. So no she lost more support from the antiwar Democratic base than she gained. (Fun fact she gained nothing by being pro genocide what were her % repub voters again? Oh right less than the typical. Good job)
Finally harris lost in no small part by demonstrating she’d throw any minority group under the bus and exactly how out of touch she was on working class economics.
Both issues are why the blue wall crumbled. She lost 2 critical states over gaza and support tanked even in blue states. The remaining support in the mid western states tanked due to her absolutely clueless positions on the economic hardships faced by the working class. Biden’s Presidency did not make any real gains for the working class and rhey didnt have a single policy on their platform that would. Trying to say he was ‘good for the work class economically’ is an absolute farce; at best he was neutral.
So kindly fuck off with your genocidal apology nonsense and go fuck yourself i have no interest in engaging with your stupidity further.
You really don’t know?
There is 0 food coming in. The aid agencies inside have just run out. I’m not talking about “clean food.” I’m talking about mass starvation.
People can’t survive for a year with 0 food. That’s what I am talking about. There was food coming in before, including with that pitiful effort to build a pier to get the US military directly involved in providing it. It was terrible, but whatever, it was something. Now it’s 0.
No, Harris lost because masterpieces of propaganda convinced people that she would be worse for the working class and Trump would finally set things right. Her actual positions had literally nothing at all to do with it, and Gaza was a tiny sideshow to it that was only occasionally deployed to people on the left who it would influence.
They actually did opposite propaganda sometimes, depending on who was being targeted: To mainstream Americans, she was a friend to “terrorists” who was on Palestine’s side, and that’s why we can’t vote for her, and to leftists, she was a friend to Israel who was responsible for 100% of Biden’s Gaza policy, and that’s why we can’t vote for her.
And people bought it. Like you! Good job. And look at how we’re fucked now.
Lol im aware. They were fucked either way. Bombs or food. Pick one. Just happens to be bombs are more expensive. And biden let Israel murder aid workers and block food and aid literally until a month before November election when he wrote a strongly worded letter. Ooh ahhh so moral, 😍 so principled.
So yes no material difference the only difference now is the hostages are all dead or returned so no point in keeping up the farce of troops ‘fighting to retrieve them’ which you know got most of them killed. There is now no need to waste bombs and troop efforts. So they stopped that and just rely on starving them to death.
Funny, I was just thinking the same thing.
Yeah you guys lack both critical thinkig, 2nd order effects, and a moral compass and its caused everything to get worse. 👍 Remember you lost. Maybe you should revisit your analysis and try harder this time.
For example: thinking a base heavily populated with antiwar individuals will support a candidate advocating for a genocide. Jfc you’re idiots .
Its not propaganda to tell people what she supports. My entire argument is she and the Democrats are fucking idiots who can’t read the writing on the wall.
She needed to give reasons to support her and her entire campaign gave her base reasons to reject her.
Jfc christ and you wonder why people didn’t show up for her.
In what way exactly? So far it’s just a little more of what they’ve been doing since October 7th. Gaza was not a distinguishing factor between Republicans and Democrats in November unless you consider genocide with rainbows a distinction.
You do realize that there were multiple large real-life movements about exactly that right? Like it or not that shit was real.
I guess you have never heard of Mahmud Khalil then, or any of the other students arrested simply for speaking out about Palestine.
Nothing prevents an astroturfed movement from attracting real life supporters. I saw the genuine anger and upset at the protests. The problem is that it was all very convenient for Trump and his people. They were absolutely delighted at the self-inflicted vote suppression.