Is the West Experiencing a Left-Wing Drift? (the international left politics activism, news, and strategy thread)

impressionistically, i buy warren getting stuff passed more than bernie.

I don’t really get this line of thinking - chances of a Dem Senate are extremely slim, and a Republican Senate will try to block everything either one proposes. It seems to me like the main question is who can rally public support and anger during the inevitable prolonged shutdowns and stonewalling of their agenda. My impression right now is that Bernie would me more successful in that arena.

are they that slim though? i thought the CW was that 2020 was a better senate map for dems than 2018, and in a world where bernie wins that probably means high dem turnout. not saying it's something to bank on, but i do think it's possible that if someone beats trump in 2020 they will be able to pass legislation, and that the big challenge will be making sure all dems vote for that legislation (could imagine certain dem senators already salivating at the prospect of being their party's susan collins).

https://www.270towin.com/2020-senate-election/

shows 3 tossups (AL, CO, AZ), 5 lean dem (MI, NM, MN, VA, NH), 3 lean rep (NC, GA, and ME). dems need to keep their leans, win the 3 tossups, and one lean rep. or if they lose jones' AL seat, they'll need two lean rep seats. it'll be a challenge but i think if they can amass a turnout similar to 2018 they could grab CO, AZ, NC, and ME.

GA sen becomes competitive to me only if abrams runs. likewise tx if joaquin castro runs.

Means TV with a cute bit featuring some Pod Damn Venezuela podcasters...

All the U.S. media coverage of Venezuela: pic.twitter.com/LKdCARrUOg

— MEANS TV (@means_tv) May 15, 2019

U.S. media coverage of Venezuela: 2/2

w/ @feraljokes @melisshious @andersleehere pic.twitter.com/dBxbh3qjPu

— MEANS TV (@means_tv) May 15, 2019

The left has won the elections in Denmark, w/ Labour being the biggest party and enough left seats to form a coalition, aiui. But I'm hearing Labour won because of a tougher anti-immigration stance? Care to elaborate for us, Fred B?

Yeah, it's a massive victory for the left of centre. The far right collapsed, DPP, the populist anti-immigration 'economic anxiety' type party suffered what seems to me to be the biggest collapse for any party in a 100 years, lost 12,4% and went from 21,1% to 8,7%. The Libertarian party collapsed as well, from 7,5% to 2,3%. It's true that 'Labour' (the Social Democrats) has moved to the right on immigration, and the leader underlined that fact a lot in her victory speech, but the result is that they've stayed steady, and every other left wing party has had a huge increase. Except for the far left, the party I vote for :( So all in all, a good evening, and the voters has pretty conclusively rejected the alliance of small government libertarianism and harsh immigration policy, which has basically dominated the country for twenty years at this point. in the end, it was unstable, the racists wanted bigger government, not smaller, just only for whites, so it can't work anymore. We'll see what happens, I don't expect the country to become a multiculturalist utopia, it's too far gone for that (a party of pretty straight up nazis/alt-right 4chan weirdoes very nearly made it into parliament) but I do think the consensus has been shattered. We'll see.

Thanks for that! This is all good news, esp the DPP's disintegration. With the far right on the rise in Sweden I thought perhaps it might stay that way in Denmark too, but I'm glad I made the wrong assumption. I read a profile about Mattias Tesfaye here, his story seems to have caught the media's attention. Frederiksen will be your youngest ever PM no?

She's probably the youngest at 41, yeah. But not by a lot. I'm not sure what happened to Tesfaye?

They profiled him as a "popular" politician under both Danes-by-birth and immigrants because of his half-Ethiopian background. He's in the running for integration minister? It was a bit of a "succesful immigrant" story (even though he's from Arhus iirc).

before we rushing to push our narratives on the Danish election results, it's important to remember the impact of local factors in Sunderland

— James (@Gilofthepeople) June 5, 2019

Oh, okay, I didn't know that, I honestly thought he was still a Socialist. Mep. Too many young socialists move to the right.

America's appetite for "big government" is at a 68-year-high. But the electorate's liberal mood may prove less durable and consequential than the leftward shift in elite economic opinion, after a decade of humiliations for center/right orthodoxy. https://t.co/1Z9phzvybk

— Eric Levitz (@EricLevitz) June 8, 2019

The elites who matter most got massively wealthy during those "decades of humiliation" and those elites are still gung-ho for the orthodoxy that further enriches and empowers them. I predict that all those endowments the rich made to subsidize conservative economists, whether in universities or 'think tanks', will continue to serve their purpose by ensuring a steady supply of center/right orthodoxy, promulgated by well-fed economists who know enough not to bite the hand that feeds them. Eric Levitz sounds like a Sunday NYT feature writer looking for a crazy new "trend" he can be the first to discover.

Tesfaye just became integration minister. You really have the finger on the pulse LBI.

Not the right thread for this but Ive been watching a few prison channel youtubes this year (after prison show, big herc, lockdown 23and1), and a few recurring themes stood out

1) The relatively high levels of NON-partisan support for Trump. At this point in the cycle we're all "well people have made their minds up now, anyone still supporting him is unreachable, how can they be ok with whats happening", but nearly all the people here support Trump in an almost apolitical way. I could easily imagine these people saying exactly the same thing about Obama (or Bernie!), a kind of accepting, "well he's the boss, it can't be easy, I don't really know to be real with you".

I've always believed its better to go on the offensive with positives/policies than on the negatives with attacks on Trump (or anyone else), but really felt the futility of attacking Trump, "why you got to attack the man, he's just trying to do his job" instead of selling them something different

2) A general feeling of "they don't want us men to be men anymore". Ill-defined, as these things tend to be, and I don't know how much of this is a result of the horrors of the prison experience and what was needed to be able to come out the other side of it in some reasonable mental condition.

These are people invested in helping others, no obvious traits of conservatism or brain-worms. But I still found it easier to imagine them voting Republican rather than Democrat, and easier still (much easier!) to imagine them not voting at all

In Atlanta for the DSA Convention. Helluva time.

try not to elect any police union people to the steering committee this time!

jokes, that sounds fun, have some good praxis

The window on policy has shifted to the point that the guy running on *automatically enrolling every uninsured person in a government plan" is the let 'em die candidate https://t.co/9NAYPjDp1m

— Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) August 2, 2019

I liked this, anice essay on organizing and the very different yet heavily personalized ways people get radicalized: https://firewithfire.blog/2020/05/10/organizing-is-not-about-getting-people-to-agree-with-radical-ideas/

the washingtonpost.com liveblog

https://i.imgur.com/u0AWfy8.png

woah

Who's been out protesting? How was yr experience?

i'm going to the American Embassy in London this Sunday

2014:
43% of Americans said that the killings in Ferguson and NYC were "signs of a broader problem" and 51% said they were "isolated incidents" in a Post-ABC poll

Today:
74% say George Floyd's killing was a sign of a broader problem in a ABC-Ipsos pollhttps://t.co/zsoaNVqCrG

— Emily Guskin (@EmGusk) June 5, 2020

Black Lives Matter. pic.twitter.com/JpXUFlxH2J

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) June 7, 2020

No comment

I'm once again glad I made this thread

difficult listening hour wrote this on thread Democratic (Party) Direction on board I Love Everything on Sep 18, 2017

this country's going so far to the left you're not going to recognize it

^^ I think about that post a lot

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/10/upshot/black-lives-matter-attitudes.html

It’ll be interesting to see how this is handled by the Sanders-aligned wing of the Democrats in the US and by left-wing elements of parties in other countries if it spreads. A lot of the defund / abolish positions I see are either far too radical for traditional electoral politics to encompass (abolish all police and prisons, remove the ability of the state / capital to enforce its will over the people, let new grass-roots organisations take their place, Sawant getting shouted down in Seattle for proposing a 50% budget cut, etc) or they’re not really that left-wing at all (if you defund the police and redistribute the money, you can set up new organs of the state to ensure that everyone’s material needs are met - like there’s one weird trick to achieving the outcomes of socialism, or more accurately ameliorating the effects of capitalism, without actually needing to have socialism).

idk, lets see what they do with it. Police budget cuts and redeployment of funds can obviously sit alongside a broader raft of reformist policies on education, labour relations, etc but there’s also a risk, as with Sanders’ own position, that this is simultaneously seen as not enough and way too much by different elements of the potential base.

basically the entire problem with the "Sanders-aligned wing" in the first paragraph there

A Sanders diehard wrestling with this:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/bernie-sanders-defund-police-uprising

In short, he implicitly said the police should be partially defunded and resources spent elsewhere but didn't say so explicitly, or go further and call for abolition - so by simply clarifying his call for something his supporters assume he already believes, he can capture the spirit of the time and successfully plot a course between people who want too much change and want no change at all.

idk who's going to find that enormously compelling.

I assume he needs this sort of "read it how you want" ambiguity to keep the more & less radical elements of his support however united they still are, he would have relied on it even more if nominated. like an angrier leftier obama

the generosity extended to him by this writer, and by jacobin in general, is not really merited on this issue. corbyn was similarly appalling on the subject, and similarly more or less given a pass for it by jacobin's uk equivalents. i hope we can move on

sorry for Sh*r*l S8ndb*rg-referencing content but

In May, the Harris Poll and Just Capital, an independent research firm founded by the billionaire investor Paul Tudor Jones, surveyed 1,000 people on their thoughts about capitalism amid the pandemic. Only 25% of respondents said they believed our current form of capitalism ensures the greater good of society.

For many this doesn’t come as a surprise. Prominent voices ranging from a top Harvard economist to the billionaire hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio have warned that capitalism would soon face a crisis because of the massive inequality exposed by the pandemic.

Temporary hazard pay has shown how little grocery employees, food-delivery workers, and other essential workers are being paid (not to mention that many don’t get health insurance). The national closure of childcare centers also laid bare the unpaid work women do in the household. Black people, specifically Black women, were most at risk of layoffs and furloughs, and were less likely to survive (pay for groceries or rent) without work, according to research from Lean In, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s nonprofit.

https://www.businessinsider.nl/capitalism-in-crisis-how-to-fix-capitalism-for-workers-2020-6?international=true&r=US

anyway, nothing radical in there, but at least there's /some/ movement.

I think it's fair to say Sanders' statement on that issue was just bad, and also that Sanders is going to fade out of relevance fairly soon because he's old and no longer running for anything (presumably won't even seek another senate term is my guess).

anyway, nothing radical in there, but at least there's /some/ movement.

Sanders is going to fade out of relevance fairly soon because he's old and no longer running for anything (presumably won't even seek another senate term is my guess).

Even if he doesn't run again, he'd still be in the senate for another four years. And he could stay in the senate...there are three 86-year old senators right now. His voice will remain relevant because there are millions of people who trust him and do not have much affection for the Democratic party.

enh I think he'll lose prominence over time as people become more desperate to cut ties with this whole awful period and find new figureheads to focus on

Holy shit. @KatyTurNBC just told everyone to read Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States."

— Zach D Roberts (@zdroberts) June 11, 2020

lmao

I can't believe vacuous lump of misshaped ham actor Matt Damon lied to us all about Howard Zinn!

I just realized I don't really have any sense of how Zinn's rep has held up over the years, I barely see him referenced any more unless people are discussing Baby's First Radical Text or whatever

I think Sanders will lose prominence for the quite natural reasons that due to his age he will not be a viable presidential candidate in the future, due to the success his ideas are having nationally many younger leaders will emerge into prominence to carry the banner and consolidate national organizing, and due to the reluctance of the media and the Democratic leadership to give him the use of their platforms his major influence will be channeled through quieter back channels, as it has been for most of his career.

I'm hoping Sen. Jeff Merkley (D- OR) will be one of the leaders to emerge in the next several years, but it's pretty clear to me the House of Representatives is going to be the hotbed for emerging progressive talent, not the Senate.

"Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. The current crisis proved the opposite. Capitalism was remarkably easy to stop—or at least to interrupt." The great @MacaesBruno. https://t.co/16lFHvaPU8

— David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells) June 23, 2020

The first student presentation of the semester began with, “I’m not gonna explain the anti-capitalist part of the reading — we’re all Gen Z here, we hate capitalism.”

Most of the students nodded vociferously.

— Zachary Levenson (@grundrza) September 3, 2020

h-how... how do you... how do you nod vociferously