this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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Thing is that Biden has been in office for over three years, and all the trends leading towards the outcomes you've noted have only gotten worse in that time.
Same solution as people faced under every oppressive regime. Organize, educate, and build a worker movement. You can start reading about how worker movements were organized in US back in 1930s that lead to the New Deal.
Not everybody is going to be receptive, especially if they're not experiencing the problems you're concerned with themselves. The best strategy is to focus on people who are already starting to question things and to help them develop a better understanding of what's happening and what effective actions they can take. Ultimately, every movement starts with a few people and then grows as the ideas spread. It's very likely there are orgs around you that you could participate with. So, that's certainly something to consider.
The question you're asking is probably the most important question that needs to be asked right now. How to organize and how to find like minded people is something that's the first step towards any real change.
I can't help you with the specifics since I have no idea what the situation is like in your area. In my city there are a number of socialist orgs, and they meet face to face. I definitely think any actual serious organizing needs to happen offline, and if people can't be bothered to make even the effort to meet in person it's safe to say they're not really serious about effecting any actual change. Perhaps look if there are organizations that meet up to do mutual aid, help homeless people, and so on. There must be shelters where people volunteer at to help. Getting involved and talking with people like that would be a good start.
If there really is nothing around you and you genuinely feel motivated enough to organize people then stepping up might be the thing to do. To do that you have to first figure out what your politics actually are. How you think things should work, how they work now, why the problems you see exist, and how you think they should be solved. It's also worth thinking about why current movements in US are failing and what you think needs to be done differently to succeed. The reality is that there are millions of people just like yourself who are in the same situation as you. And as long as people stay atomized and isolated, then they stay powerless.
Unfortunately, there's no recipe that you can follow here, and there's no guarantee of success. This is a process of trying things, evaluating the results, and iterating on what you're doing. Good news is that there are lots of examples of successful worker movements around the world that can be learned from. There are no easy answers here, but the only way that's guaranteed to fail is to do nothing but vote every 4 years.
Glad to help. I can very much relate to the frustration you're feeling. I live in Canada, and a lot of the same dynamics are happening here as well. Each and every year things get worse, and there's no clear path to change. What I've come to realize is that meaningful change takes time. It's not something that will happen as a result of a one time action like winning an election and putting your guy in charge. It's a long process that requires long term commitment. People in US are just entering the stage where they're starting to become politically aware and to ask questions about why things are the way they are. It's going to take time for people to develop solid understanding of the issues and to learn to work together towards solving them.
Thanks, and you're absolutely right that right wing populism is taking root because there is fertile ground for it. In my view, the question of why people are becoming increasingly enamoured with these ideas is the one that really needs to be asked more. People like Trump have always been around, so what factors are enabling these opportunists today that didn't exist previously. The systemic pressures leading us where we are today are the real problem that needs to be addressed.
I'd actually argue the internet has been a net positive overall because it counters a lot of the control the oligarchs have over the media. For example, if Israel was conducting the genocide before the days of the internet we simply wouldn't know about it. And we've had the internet for a long time now, so access to things like social media and different views doesn't really explain why particular views become more popular than others.
In my opinion, the main driver of discontent is the deteriorating economic situation. We have major crashes roughly once a decade, and each time a crash happens we see a massive wealth transfer to the top occur. This happened during dot-com bubble, then in 2008, and now with the pandemic. Each time the rich got bailed out while the public was left out to dry. People end up being pushed further and further to the margins, and they have less and less of ability to absorb the next crash that comes. Many people are losing whatever savings they had, and have no hope of retirement. Younger people see little opportunity for themselves, while becoming increasingly pessimistic about the future and problems like the environment.
All of this is pushing people out of the mainstream because they see that the system is not working in their interest. Once people leave the liberal mainstream they become open to different ideas. These come either from the right or the left, and because the left has been effectively gutted in the west, the right is the main source of alternative ideas.
Right, consolidation of the internet under a handful of large companies has been a big concern. Notably, that's precisely why stuff like the fediverse is so important. Decentralized social media that's run by regular people is precisely how the internet was meant to function. I'm optimistic that things are looking up in that regard. Platforms like Mastodon and Lemmy are still niche, but they're starting to gain momentum and they show a path forward. It's encouraging to see that people are actively tackling the problem and we have tangible results to show now. The fact that we're having this discussion here as opposed to a closed platforms like Reddit is a huge success.
That's the beauty of open source platforms, the dynamics are very different. With a commercial company you're stuck with whatever the company decides, and that's what drives enshittification. Companies ultimately exist to make money for the owners and the shareholders. The users aren't actual stakeholders on these platforms in any meaningful sense.
On the other hand, open platforms are developed by regular people because they want to have publicly owned social spaces. Even when a project starts going in a bad direction then anybody can fork the code and take the project in a different direction, and anybody can run a server the way they like.
I wrote an article on the subject a little while back, talking about these dynamics in more detail https://justiceinternationale.com/articles/2020-12-02-we-must-own-our-tools/
This isn't a hypothetical, Mastodon has millions of users now and it's working fine. Larger instances run on donation, and it works fine. It only takes a small percentage of users to contribute at the end of the day. The nature of federation also helps amortize costs. You don't need to have millions of users all on the same server. It's a different model where you have many smaller servers with thousands of users, and there's overlap between them. This is also how internet worked during the time of BBS and IRC. The model of big companies running walled gardens is an aberration, and it's not how things were meant to work. The internet took a wrong turn for a period, and now it's self correcting.
Overthrowing capitalism.
They're either not going to respond, or provide a solution which helps Trump ("vote third party", "Don't vote!").
The 2 party system of the US is what's causing this issue. If there was a way for multiple parties to exist in the US, Biden would have to worry about a non Trump candidate who would advocate for all the similar things as him, while also agreeing that what Israel is doing is genocide.
The reality is: either vote Biden to push for a Democratic president who is slowly moving towards criticizing Israel, or vote for Trump to push a Republican president who would probably be completely fine with Israel's genocide so long as Netanyahu say's he's a nice guy.
Palestinians pushing to oust Biden are either knowingly or unknowingly pushing to have continued genocide under the leadership of a republican president.
Regardless, I feel for the Palestinian people's frustrations. The US is providing support for genocide, even if the Biden administration and congress are slowly beginning to criticize Israel.
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I guess you're trying to insult me. Feel free to correct me. Otherwise your lack of a real response just proves me right.
The reality is that it doesn't matter how many parties you have. What matters is whose interests these parties represent, which is governed by who has actual political leverage. In pretty much every western society, large capitalists are the ones who control the political system. These are the people who own the media, pay for political campaigns, lobbying, and other forms of political influence. The working majority has little leverage within a system where money plays such a disproportionate role. The political system is built by the class that holds power in society and it's built to function in the interest of this class.
I'll agree that the wealthy have more control and influence than the average person. That said, multiple parties at least makes it more expensive and difficult to influence politicians. As it is now, you only have to contribute to 1 of 2 parties in order to push your agenda. If there were 3 or 6, you'd need to push several in order to gain the same amount of control.
We have over a century of evidence that it's not difficult at all to influence politicians, especially when there's practically no working class representation in politics. Also, when you have a bunch of parties then they all just pull things in different directions making it nearly impossible to do any sort of long term planning. This is why a lot of large infrastructure projects China is able to do are basically impossible in the west.