The vast majority of Americans don’t even really understand these labels anyway. The way labels are used here is designed to point the average moron at the enemies of the party, and while I would love if people had more nuanced views, it’s just not where we’re at.

The vast majority of voters in our 2024 election had no idea who to vote for. I actually read the exit polling and it’s depressing as fuck. The lack of understanding of what different parties and ideologies represent is what’s causing ALL of this. People who voted for Obama and supported Bernie Sanders voted for Trump because they just had no idea what he represented, in HUGE numbers. So in this context, we definitely need labels so people who work 6 days a week and get all their news from Facebook memes sunday night for 30 minutes have a clue who represents what.

The labels aren’t the problem, it’s the atomization and tunnel-perspective that makes people ONLY see their own feelings validated and have that tied to a label or 'team" they can get behind like sports fans. People need a standardized, required way to see who does and says what with neutrality and fact-based reporting, but people don’t want that, they want their goddamn feelings stroked.

This is some internet-brain panic, if you think it’s “lecturing” you really need to go outside and spend time with the vast majority of America who are in their own states who have their own agendas and laws in play. The ICE thing is happening in isolated areas with the intention of making people like you say things like this:

“they have already declared war on the United States!”

I’m not saying it’s not bad, I’m saying focus for fuck’s sake. There is no revolution happening, there is no civil war, there are politics happening and we beat it with counter-politics, no other way. Keep marching and protesting, it’s helping, but it’s not the solution by itself.

It’s blunt and disappointing to people who want to see justice, but it’s just the way it works. I promise you, it will be okay… if the US is really in the decline, which it might be, you likely won’t be alive by the time states stop sending representatives to DC.

Progressive Victory is a national organization but they are a very strong presence for endorsing and organizing oppositional efforts on a political level, and helped get socialist and progressive candidates elected in places like Seattle and New York. I know for a fact they have a very strong California presence and can help get you lined up to support those candidates in a variety of ways.

You might not get your glorious Californian empire, unless the San Andreas fault does something wacky and the whole state ends up in international waters, but you can help keep a lot of people from suffering needlessly under authoritarianism in the immediate coming decades. I hope you make good choices and find your calling and reach out to others to build community.

It kinda sounds like roleplay but at least you have passion. Get involved in your community, you wont get that NC Ranger Armor outfit in your lifetime but you can make a world of difference understanding the current politics and supporting people who actually represent values for better outcomes. Less fun, a lot more realistic.

I guarantee private equity is circling them like a flock of buzzards smelling death. This is why they’re preemptively making the same actions that a private equity company would do after acquisition, layoffs, restructuring “bold new plans” and a bunch of lip-service to inflate value before divvying up any resources of value like licenses and senior programmers to form a new brand, and throwing the rest away.

I love it even more when they force their employees to return to office work, nothing makes me happier as a gamer than knowing the people making the games I love are miserable and the company has a much narrower hiring pool.

implementing cost-cutting, project cancellations, and a return-to-office mandate.

Yes, as a gamer, I cannot count the number of times I’ve thrown the controller down and screamed “WHY WON’T THESE EMPLOYEES RETURN TO THE OFFICE?!”

I’m literally shocked how many people on Lemmy actually believe establishment Dems are functionally different from the GOP.

I would get it on some liberal fortress like Reddit, but Lemmy was supposed to be some far-left, socialist bastion. I always feel very suspect of sudden shifts in community attitudes as elections grow closer, and I’m seeing it ALL OVER Lemmy right now.

Could make a good president.

For all the same reasons that he would be a good president, make him someone who will never try to break the rules to become president. (He was not born in the USA.)

The current DNC will never allow AOC to take the Iron Throne, they have the same donors as the Republicans. If we want actual change, we need to vote out all incumbent democrats in midterms, vote in fresh ones, and most of all GET INVOLVED IN YOUR LOCAL ELECTIONS.

That’s where we got Mamdani. (who was not born in the US and not eligible, I don’t care if you see Trump stomping on the rules, see above, the people maintaining the rules want it this way. To say nothing of the fact that someone like Mamdani isn’t going to try to break the system in the first place, perish the fantasy.)

You want more Mamdani’s in seats of power? Go find them in your community and support them. Progressive Victory is a very well-established platform for finding candidates in your area and organizing public support for campaigning, phone banking and volunteering and have been a major force in getting the recent wave of Democratic/Socialist mayors and governors elected in the US. We need more of it.

Honest. Points for not trying to paint it with some kind of liberal aesthetic like most people.

Understand though that if the USA dissolves, and the Cascadian states form their own power bloc, which may well likely happen, it most likely won’t be in your lifetime.

There were more deportations under Dems, the difference between the parties is how they present themselves and what methods they go about plunging the nation into neo-liberalism. I implore you not to be naive about this very, very well-established system for manipulating the attitudes and feelings of a half billion people.

I am not saying don’t empower Democrats, the DNC is just a container, we vote out the previous contents of that container and put new contents in. It has worked before and we need to do it again.

Unless you actually, truly, in your heart believe that Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and their contemporaries are looking out for you. If you do, I can’t help you, but I’m sure they will hear your support when you’re in the camps.

You are sadly right, the Dems wanted this. They support it, they are enabling all of it.

The public outcry they pretend to display is just theater. These people all have the same donors who benefit from domestic destabilization.

It’s all performance.

If the Democrats didn’t want ICE and domestic chaos that will pave the way for more corporate involvement in all our lives, it wouldn’t have happened.

We have one party with two narrative faces. They all have the same donors, they all serve the same masters. The rest is just WWE theatrics.

It doesn’t even have full democrat support.

This is more kayfabe, this isn’t real. We have ONE party in power, with two public facing personas.

I wish people actually looked at the money and realized that republicans and democrats all have the SAME FUCKING DONORS.

If we want to beat this, we have to flush every incumbent out of office and start fresh. We need community and organization and grassroots like they did in New York but all over the goddamn nation.

, it’s a when

About a hundred years.

I’m sorry, but I know a little history and politics. We’re about a century from an actual internal civil war because a LOT of things would need to fall into place and be normalized before we had two opposing armies actually going at it on a large scale. I don’t care what grifters trying to sell substack subs say, words have meaning and we’re nowhere close to an actual “civil war” because that term has a LOT of meaning behind it, and a LOT of consequence.

Right now we have civil unrest, it could turn into armed unrest, it could turn into destabilization or an insurrection or coup at the most in the current state, but for there to be a civil war proper, we would need a coalition of states raising their own military and openly going against federal mandate and we’re so far from that happening in this current environment that it’s pure fantasy.

I’m not saying it can’t happen, only that it’s much further away than the headlines are making it out, because they know that a lot of people really, deeply want some kind of populist justice, so it sells clicks and views.

If we want to fix this, we need to lean in a LOT harder on community and organization. It’s not fun, but I promise a real civil war would be even worse and there wouldn’t be a winner.

civil wars take many forms

Definitionally it’s when two internal armies clash on a large scale. Everything else is considered civil instability, armed rebellions or coups or insurrections, there IS a difference and words have meaning. Because the outcomes of each can have profound consequences.

The better question we should be asking is why do you want it to be a civil war?

I see “civil war” posts pop up in Lemmy as often as I hear Tim Fucking Pool talk about “civil war” it’s just bait and pandering bullshit. We’re about a century from a civil war and a lot of things would need to line up. Even the violence in Iran is barely approaching a “civil war” because they don’t really have an opposing army… I see that turning into is an “armed rebellion” or a “coup” at most, but I swear the majority of people just say words without knowing or caring what they mean.

Open civil war is starting right now.

Has this term “civil war” just lost all meaning along with “literally” and “gaslight?”

A civil war is definitionally when two internal armies of a country fight on a large scale.

We do not have that, we do not have an army. Organized protests turning violent are “civil disruption” or “destabilization” at worst. We’re about a century off from this turning into a “civil war” because there would need to be opposing armies.

I get that it feels viscerally satisfying to imagine actually firing weapons at these assholes but we’re not in that world yet. They have the system, they have the national guard and other armed forces. They have most of the police and most of the justice system.

If we want to change this, we do it with community and organization. In the words of one powerful protestor in Minneapolis: “The democrats will not save you. The republicans will not save you. Nobody is coming. Only your neighbor will save you.” We have to get back to community and organization or this will go from isolated protests and unrest to a quiet, locked-down nation of people too afraid to move LONG before it turns into an actual war. Despite what grifters on both sides want you to believe.

I despise these headlines and stories, it’s just attention-baiting, and you’re all falling for it because you want to see change happen but you don’t know how to get there. There are better ways to get there, but they require involvement in some boring shit. I’m sorry and I wish there was a better answer for this.

edit: here, this group has had a hand in electing the most recent wave of progressive and socialist state leaders and mayors around the country. They need volunteers, they need people to help them. It’s not as fun as imagining throwing molotovs at feds, but it does a lot more good:

https://www.progressivevictory.win/

Reminder that Mussolini was not overthrown by a ragtag band of plucky rebels, he was handed over to the opposition by his own government and arrested by the king of Italy himself as political pressure grew and the establishment feared the approach of allied nations. Pressure and politics still moves mountains, and even if we had that band of armed rebels, we would need politics to figure out how to live next to the millions of people who didn’t vote for a coup or civil war. Lets fix this by starting in our communities and do a Mamdani-Effect across the whole country. It will kick the legs out from this current kleptocracy.

I don’t understand. In the house there are 213 democrats, so that means more than half of them is thinking that is perfectly fine and normal having someone like her?

I AM an American and I don’t understand this either.

The sad reality is our democrat party is powered by the same donors and investors as the republican party. They’re all the same, the conflict is entirely Kayfabe, a type of vintage American-spawned brainrot from decades ago when people realized you could charm the population with absurd storylines.

If we had a proper opposition party, they would be capitalizing on this massive mandate against people like Noem and sweeping all of Trump’s henchmen out of office with huge public spectacles and their own World Wrestling Extreme Politics theater. Instead we get frowns, stern letters and finger-wagging at the masked death-squads and foreign-power kidnapping.