The 'third wave of autocratization': Analyzing red-state America's place in a landscape of democratic decay ~~ Paul Rosenberg

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/autocratization/

~~ posted for dmorista ~~

Social Democracy- An Unworthy Goal ~~ Kacey SW

https://usa.anarchistlibraries.net/library/kacey-sw-social-democracy-an-unworthy-goal

SOCIAL DEMOCRACY IS NOT DESIRABLE

The Envy of the World Still has no Functioning Democracy ~~ Paul Street

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/11/11/the-envy-of-the-world-still-no-functioning-democracy-here/

~~ posted for dmorista ~~

Nobody Said Biden’s Name

I walked up to Chicago’s Trump Tower down the middle of Michigan Avenue last Saturday night. Within four blocks of the hated structure, both sides of the street were jammed with cars full of young LatinX, Black, and white folks honking their horns, hanging out car windows, waving, roaring their engines, playing YG’s chart-topping hit “(FTD) Fuck Donald Trump,” and aiming bird flips at the Trump building. Young people of all races and ethnicities danced on all four corners of Michigan and Wacker.

It was one Hell of a celebration. As well it should have been. Donald Trump is a vicious, pandemic-spreading white-supremacist, eco-exterminist, uber-narcissist, and instinctual fascist who richly deserves Noam Chomsky’s description of him as “the most dangerous criminal in human history.” A second Trump term would be a tragedy from which the nation and world might never recover.

Anyone on the “the left” who wouldn’t like to see Trump removed from the world’s most dangerous job is morally and intellectually comatose.

The United States is not a Democracy. ~~. Ben Hiller

https://mronline.org/2020/11/04/119166/

~~ posted for Collectivist ~~

The United States boasts one of the most farcical democratic systems to have been invented. The country’s constitution is an eighteenth-century relic penned by merchants and slave owners, amendments to which can be blocked by as few as 13 states representing less than 4 percent of the population. Its Supreme Court, conservative by nature and stacked with tenured-for-life justices, provides an institutional anti-majoritarian check on the popular will.

Presidential Debate #1: The Squabbles of Capital ~~ Ezra Brain

 

https://www.leftvoice.org/presidential-debate-1-the-squabbles-of-capital

The first presidential debate, for all its drama and chaos, showed that there are actually very few political differences between the two candidates. While it is certainly alarming to watch Donald Trump continue his increasingly overt overtures to the far right, we must understand that it is the working class, not Joe Biden, that has the power to fight back against the far-right.

What the Current Moment Tells Us about Revolutionary Politics

https://www.leftvoice.org/what-the-current-moment-tells-us-about-the-importance-of-revolutionary-politics

Written by

Thomas Hummel

The past three months of social unrest have highlighted the need for broad social change. But we cannot achieve a better society through a reformist approach. A revolutionary alternative is needed. 

For years, we have been hearing that anything but the most modest social democratic politics are impractical given the material realities of the present moment. According to this argument, the degree to which capitalism has a stranglehold upon our ways of thinking, the low level of struggle, and the power of the state, all make revolution look like a romantic and impractical goal. 

But in the past three months, we have seen a nationwide rebellion against the police and racism. By some estimates, it has been the largest protest movement in U.S. history. We have seen ordinary people spontaneously embrace militant tactics with street fighting across the country. Police stations have been raided and, in some cases, burned to the ground. The early days may have been the most militant, with 10,000 being arrested in the first ten days, but that militancy has sparked up again periodically, most recently in Kenosha. What does this development say about the view that we should focus on building socialism through social democratic strategy and elections within the Democratic Party?