There's not a lot we can do through the established democratic channels because - well - they're not democratic.

I'm putting my time into delivering for my local foodbank (despite faith issues) and banging on about the progressive alliance for PR, which will mean fuck all until (& if) Labour chooses to endorse.

But there's a great deal of good in bringing up your kids as best you can.  Mine make the world a better place, better than I could do or have done.

Milko, if you really want to know how I voted, and frankly if it matters at all, read post 18.  California always votes its very large block of electoral delegates to the democrats, so actually no one's vote here matters at all, regardless of how you vote. 

The Presidential primary elections are typically decided long before the CA primary election, so there is no federal level influence.

The state and local primaries are designed so that the only candidates in November are "The two that received the most votes in the primary election".  Usually this means that in most offices, there is a choice between two democrats, and all other parties are excluded from the main election.

Regardless of which party you support, imagine if nearly all of the offices on the ballot were two candidates from the same political party.    That is the so-called democracy we have here.  Of course, America has never been structured as a democracy and would be an even bigger mess if it were, but nearly all candidates from one party is a bit - limiting.

 

>Cast a vote for people expressing such views and you back them up. I don't, personally, give a fuck if you're not actively doing it. You are a part of it.

I agree. And similarly if you cast a vote for the other you're part of our treatment of the middle east which really set the stage for the current batch of racists, mass unwarranted surveillance, sweat shops, the increasing wealth-gap etc. etc.

>Xen, I know full well the people voting Brexit weren't voting so because of the economy, they were mainly being racist and scapegoating the 'other'.

I absolutely disagree on this. I believe they are being used to push through a racist agenda and, of course, some are racist, just as some labour/tory/lib dem/whatever voters are - we are a racist society.

I'm not even arguing that they wouldn't espouse some views that we'd find racist. But, again, this didn't come out of nowhere - in the climate of post 9/11 jingoism politicians on the right decided they could win votes with an anti-immigration stance and they could do so without losing votes from the centre if they contextualised it economically. Which is fine (by which I mean unsurprising), it's the centre right being the centre right.

The problem is that, seeing what a populist issue this was, the left (I mean centre left, labour, lib dems) accepted that contextualisation, as did the largely liberal popular media. We've had over a decade of this validation of racist views to which *everyone* is subject - all mainstream parties, the media and people in general have moved to the right in this regard and literally no one in the mainstream has offered an alternative formulation.

A labour politician, for example, will express this stuff with more sophistication and subtlety than your average brexit voter but, really, they're expressing the exact same things.

People voted brexit over the bullshit issue of sovereignty (which, again, the left didn't have the balls to actually argue *against*) and alienation from neoliberalism in general and austerity in particular (which, again, the left didn't meaningfully oppose). The racist stuff is context, not substance, for most.

I want to be clear that I'm not arguing for Trump or Brexit nor that they should be acceptable to *anyone*.

I'm saying that the left has entirely failed. On post 9/11 stuff, on immigration, on the EU and on austerity. The left *should* be offering the disenfranchised many an alternative formulation of what our problems are but they're too shitscared of losing all the middle class votes they won by going the 'third way'. So we've got two parties:

One who favours neoliberal economics and globalism, largely in the pocket of big business, historical record of continuing to widen the wealth gap and is pro-austerity.

And one who favours neoliberal economics and globalism, largely in the pocket of big business, historical record of continuing to widen the wealth gap and is pro-austerity.

All of which either actively hurts or does not meaningfully apply to anyone but business owners and the middle class.

We (you and I and most people here) are privileged as all fuck. We've benefited from (most of) this stuff. Not as much as the super wealthy but enough that we can see it. Some people haven't benefited, or have benefited so little as for it to be insulting. Why *the fuck* should they care that one option is slightly better than the other when that betterness doesn't even meaningfully apply to them? To keep you and I content while we continue to fuck the poor both here and in the rest of the world?

Brexit and Trump offered an opportunity to vote against *that*. Against the whole system. To reject it all. It's not *effective*, of course, because Trump and the brexiteers are just as deep in that bullshit as are the mainstream politicians. They have been sold a false narrative and that was possible because the left abandoned them.

We need fundamental change - you mentioned climate change and that's a prime example - and *no* mainstream party or candidate will deliver that.

I agree with Manthorp. Because the left has failed there's no democratic path to the change we need. We have one ideology to vote for and that ideology is incapable of meaningful progress. We're not even really capable, as a society, of actual political discourse because we've all validated the same context. There *is* (aside from Corbyn who is being fucked by the neoliberals in his own party) no mainstream anti-austerity argument, no pro-Europe critique of the EU, no discussion of the wealth gap, no rational discussion of immigration, no rational discussion of security issues and surveillance and certainly no intent to do anything effectual about climate change.

I do think there's some hope in that people like Yanis Varoufakis and Paul Mason seem to get what's actually going on and are talking about it to anyone who will listen and movements are forming around their ideas - a good example being DiEM25, with whom I don't agree entirely but for whom I'd be *more* than happy to vote unlike any of our current parties.

Not much hope though. I think, if we don't make the planet inhospitable making it all moot and the left doesn't get its shit together and offer a workable interpretation of that alienation and disenfranchisement, we're heading for something like the 1930s again with something at least superficially like fascism on the rise and, this time, without anything like communism to stand in opposition to it.







 

Hi Harry, I don't much want to know how you voted, I just wanted to be clear I wasn't personally attacking you with my post; it seemed as I wrote that it could easily be read that way. I think our own so-called democracy has much the same problem as yours at the moment, as Xen describes.

It is only this year that I realised that was the case for the primaries in California, very odd system.

Ok, we agree on plenty there. I'm not so forgiving of people of people being taken along in the mainstream/allowing themselves to be used to push that agenda, at the moment.

I think the view that racists voted for Brexit/Trump but not all of Brexit/Trump voters are racist holds true. By voting for those things you are at fault for legitimising them, much like we would be continuing to vote for a neoliberal left.

I don't think this is necessarily the case for Trump (based on the income demographic break downs I've seen, unless I've read them wrong), but for Brexit it was heavily backed by the traditional working class low income people who feel "left behind" or totally unrepresented by the current mainstream parties. In a lot of people's eyes things can't get any worse so why not vote for an alternative new option, a vote for change and hope it works. I suppose many people with literally no money can't see how it's possible to have less (it definitely is possible when austerity bites even more, but they already feel like they have no hope).

More or less forgiving than of us continuing to vote for these parties who favour an economic system which relies on working poor people elsewhere, including children, to death so we can have cheap stuff; bombing civilians if it looks like it might be vaguely maybe possibly in our economic interests; systematically alienating and at times brutalising minorities; destroying the economies of entire nations to prevent our currency from losing a few % of value etc. etc..

We've been voting for this shit for *years* and because they offered us the exact same lie: "we'll make it all better and keep you safe, we promise".

 

Exactly, yeah, and yeah it applies to Trump too.

Well indeed, I don't try to excuse us of that. I'm just not sure voting to make everything universally worse for all (except, somewhat ironically, the elite top few % generally) is a good answer. To blame things like migrants from places that the aforementioned system has caused to fail (or simply blown it up). I struggle even with applying 'understandable' to it, honestly, and I don't actually see much value in this thing I'm seeing all over the place post-Trump and saw a lot of post-Brexit where we must try to understand and sympathise. That seems to be being done in really shit ways, like putting Le Pen on telly for a soft interview, giving Farage a bit more air time, an opinion column from some white middle-classer saying Trump might not be so bad really, that sort of thing. Fuck it!

I don't buy it at all. People should be grouping together for better change more inclusively, not falling for this fascist shit yet again.

Nobody's making that argument though. No one's saying that all of this means that voting Trump/Brexit is in any way good.

It's just not fundamentally worse than what we've been doing for decades. People voting in what they mistakenly perceive to be their own self-interest and/or wilfully ignoring the damage the ideology they're validating does to others.

Neoliberal policy has done immense damage to the world, including but definitely not limited to paving the way for Brexit and Trump. We swallowed it because we believed we were getting incremental progress, but we weren't really, not meaningfully. It was ok for us, we were comfortable, but everyone else (besides the wealthy, who were benefiting disproportionately more than us) was getting fucked.

We don't get to be angry at the people who voted Trump/Brexit for being tricked in exactly the same way we've been tricked for the last 60 years just because their racism is slightly less sophisticated than ours (and is really given life by our own complacent acceptance of a decade of racist rhetoric).

We should be angry at the centre-left - labour and the lib dems, for abandoning the only possible counter-narrative. At the media for happily stirring the shit so long as they made money and reducing political discourse to inane, artificially polarised superficial drivel because it made their work easier. At the political class in general for deserting democracy.

And that anger should be directed at the actual enemy, the ones who actually caused all this and who benefit no matter who's in power because all politicians are selling their ideology - the wealthy and big business. If we fight amongst ourselves, they're fucking laughing.





 

I AM angry at the centre left! I'm angry with all of it and all of them! But I'm not persuaded that means I should be less pissed off with people going along with it. I don't believe that they're that easily ignorant of what's happening here.

Righteous!

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot?CMP=share_btn_tw

(agreeing with the Guardian makes me feel a bit  (ill) )

It's Monbiot innit, when he's right, he's pretty good at it. I wonder if his book goes on to explore what he's talking about in the final paragraph at all, because that seems like the hard bit.

I didn't visit here during the "event" because I figured it would be you lot against me.