A conservative plan for Donald Trump’s potential transition into the presidency calls for dozens of prisoners to be executed, according to HuffPost. An 887-page plan by Project 2025, led by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, says that if elected, Trump should make a concerted effort to execute the remaining 40 prisoners on death row. The section’s author, attorney Gene Hamilton, advised that Trump “do everything possible to obtain finality” on the current list of people until Congress forces them to stop. Hamilton is the vice president of America Legal First, a group of former Trump lawyers bent on attacking “woke” companies, headed by Stephen Miller. Trump’s approach to the death penalty stands in stark contrast to that of President Joe Biden, who has openly opposed the death penalty, but done little to move forward legislation to reform or abolish the practice since entering office.
For those of you not in the know Project 2025 is Republicans plan to turn the USA into an authoritarian state.
Ah yes, they’re so intense about fighting capitalist oppression they’ve circled around to… checks notes defending police brutality and advocating for the further privatisation of every public good and dismantling all worker protections.
The difference between “eat the rich” and “feed the rich” is really just one syllable, right? Almost negligible.
(Also, no, they don’t call everyone fascist. They just don’t think being liberal is enough for change, when the “liberals” of the US have a history of complaining about the things they don’t stop the regressives from doing. There’s a difference between calling people “naive and spineless” and “actively pursuing oppression”.)
I will say that there is a marked and growing distain for mixed liberal ideologies. There is a lot of this idea that every socialist needs to be some kind of pure strain to count or take basically the Marxist definition as the only viable one. It kind of ignores a couple of centuries of Socialist thought. A lot of people basically think “means of production” means nothing less than everyone working in a co-op and discounts a lot of past socialist wins as “not socialism”. It’s an important thing to remember about Marx, the world he lived in was very different. Damn near everything at the time was privatized. Water, sanitation, post, fire service, public health and public health regulatory bodies… None of that existed under the perview of Government auspice. Socialist strains more to the legacy of Robert Owens, Daniel De Leon, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and other ethical socialists have had significant wins. Some places took it further than others but the one thing that was allowed to happen in a lot of places was complacency. The 1980’s and 90’s created a liberal fervor that has continued to walk back a lot of significant wins made by the Socialist movements of the early 1900’s and the civil rights movements… But because a lot of the functions of Socialist wins have become the air we breathe people do not associate them with socialism anymore. The issue with peaceful integration is that private gains are always incentivized so complacency cannot be afforded.
It seems weirdly controversial but Non-Marxist socialists exist. Marx was one very popular voice in a sea of people with somewhat related but sometimes contradictory ideas. Some philosophers have been retro-branded as proto-socialists because they existed before Marx who just coined the term. Looking at his contemporaries there’s good reason why he became popular. A lot of what was out there was much drier, committed to peaceful reform. It didn’t tap into people’s anger or emotion in the same way. Right now we deal with a lot of that issue on the left. It is an old struggle. People who are bombastically angry and turning around and biting people for not being “enough” of something. Not fitting a narrow definition. Half my issue with Communist parties I have looked at joining is they aren’t great at being collaborative. Increasingly I have found the argument around “centrism” to stop meaning “people who support the basic status quo” which it seemed to have evolved to being interpretable as for a minute… To a more worrying definition about anyone willing to work across any ideological lines set down by the one guy people bothered to read.
This use of “centrism” as though it’s a plotable point on a map seems to me a worrying fiction. The post moves to create division and self satisfaction where none need exist.
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Dangerous to democracy? Where’d you get that idea? I’m not the one trying to install an authoritarian plutocracy.
I’m a staunch believer in educated democracy, but that requires education in the first place. Education regressives have been undermining forever, because it would inform the people of their actual democratic power.
Which would be? What, in your opinion, actually matters?
My priority is a sustainable and enjoyable future. One where you can grow old without worrying about our pension or affording medical care. One where you no longer pay a cut of your work to a person just becaude they’re rich already. One where you can do the job you love without worrying about how well it pays or whether you’ll get fired.
The Liberals keep bartering for compromise instead of progress, gradually ceding ground to the Conservatives. The spoiler effect means an actually progressive third party has no chance and risks handing power to the regressives by splitting the vote. Because all the Liberals have to do is “be less bad”, you get the choice between right-of-center and far right. This isn’t democracy, it’s slowly dismantling it.
I’ll take the Liberals, because they’re “less bad”, but it’s not a solution. It’s buying time in the hope that we can actually fix the underlying issues.