Tinidril

Neoliberalism and liberalism are two different things. You can't just swap out one for the other. It's precisely the difference between the two that ultimately result in fascism.

Wikipedia - Neoliberalism is contemporarily used to refer to market-oriented reform policies such as "eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers" and reducing, especially through privatization and austerity, state influence in the economy.

Biden, in stark contrast with his predecessors and his own congressional record, moved away from neoliberalism. All of the good things he did were a direct result, but they were far too little and far too late, as evidenced by the routing of Democrats in 2024. Democrats tried to blame it on a global rejection of incumbents, but the lie of that is demonstrated by the one big exception, Mexico. Mexico, a far more conservative country than the US, somehow managed a successful transition from an aging male left wing leader to his chosen replacement, a younger female. The difference is that those leaders were populist left, not neoliberals. Media propaganda is just as bad in Mexico too, so that doesn't follow either.

Digging further into the right wing takeover of media, that is a direct outcome of neoliberal policy and doomed Democratic efforts to suppress populism. For corporate media, neoliberalism allowed corporate consolidation to turn all the cable news sources into media wings of the two parties. Online media is different.

10-20 years ago the online media space was absolutely dominated by grass root progressives. Democrats and Republicans cooperated to pressure social media companies to start driving users to more "trusted" (corporate owned) media. Democrats assumed the job was done and largely disengaged while Republicans began investing in and networking right wing voices online. Again, Democrats suppressed healthy populism while Republicans fostered and tried to make use of right wing populism. Ultimately, right wing populism couldn't be controlled and, with Trump's assistance, it ended up overrunning the Republican neoliberals.

What you described is not an alternative to what I described before, it's just the details of how it played out. Even now there is a lot I'm leaving out, but I'm really not looking to write a book here.

I'm going to give this one more try without the metaphor because I think this is an important point that everyone should understand.

Cutting funding to AIDS research and medical care is a very fascist thing to do, and fascist Republicans are the ones responsible for doing it. Fascists are what formal logic would label the proximate cause for the change. Events also have what are labeled as distal causes which include the broader set of circumstances that led to the event happening. In that case that would include the societal factors that led to the rise of fascism in the first place. That is where neoliberalism gets to shoulder some of the blame. Neoliberals aren't the ones cutting AIDS funding, but they set the stage for fascists to take over.

Neoliberal policy has led (as it always does) to massive wealth inequality and a general mistrust in government. That leads to populist movements. Populist movements seek to reform "the system" to fix real or perceived injustices. They can be positive (think Bernie or AOC) or negative (think MAGA). Negative populism includes racism, xenophobia, nationalism, and all kinds of scape goating. When politicians ride negative populism into power, that is fascism.

In a society like ours with record setting inequality and a marketplace where predatory corporations are ripping people off as a regular business practice, stopping populism is like trying to stop a tide from coming in. Neoliberals (Republicans and Democrats) have been trying to do that for 50+ years. When "anybody but Bernie" Democrats crashed into MAGA and Trump, the rise of fascism and, ultimately, the end of funding for AIDS research was locked in. Democrats fought tooth and nail to suppress healthy populism, so most of the populist ferver went to supporting Trump.

Populism is here to stay, until some real reform starts to happen. As long as Democrats keep trying to suppress it, fascism will continue to benefit.

No, it's a salient example of how (metaphoric) pneumonia kills us.

Damn. So, no right wing government exists or has ever existed will ever exist or could ever exist. What a clever model you dreamt up. No wonder you find it so easy to defend establishment Democrats. Everyone is just as good as everyone else if just put in the right context. You are certainly right about the math. It's a pretty damn useless way to model the world though.

It's called an analogy. Actual AIDS policy is irrelevant to my point.

But hey, "both sidez" lol

Here is something "both sides" do, thought terminating cliches.

So, half of the Taliban is left wing? Half of the third Reich was left wing? No, the center of office holders is not how we measure political leanings. You can go with political theory that defines left and right in a pretty fixed way, or you can go by the center of the population. By either of those standards, the Democrats are moderate right wing.

There is nothing particularly "stupid" about Americans. They are just flawed humans, and there is a reason for the mismatch between where they fall on issues and where they fall on (let's call them) themes. The themes come from the narratives they receive from our two right wing parties. Ask them about particular issues and they think like individuals. Ask them about themes and they line up with the narratives coming to them from our two right wing parties.

That's not even a proper use of that meme.

If Americans don't wake up to the fact that both of our parties have been leading us down a road that only leads to fascism, we will just keep sinking in the quicksand.

Look at it like this. Democrats are AIDS and Republicans are pneumonia. AIDS will never be the thing that kills you, but it's the thing that should have been addressed to avoid the pneumonia. Pneumonia will absolutely kill you, but only takes hold when there is already a broader issue.

Democrats took away our ability to effectively fight fascism, and now fascism has come for us. We might beat fascism back for a time, but failing to address the broader issue means that time will be short.

Huh? What center are we talking about? Democrats are left of Republicans (marginally before Trump, but still) but the center of office holders is a pointless measure. Issue by issue the Democrats are solidly to the right of the vast majority of the US population.

To be clear, you already have to prove you are a citizen to vote. It's done through the voter registration process which has to be done before you can vote. The new requirement would be that the ID used at the polling place include proof of citizenship, which is completely unnecessary.

There is zero evidence of any significant number of non-citizens on the voter rolls, and zero evidence of a significant number of voters using false identities. The few cases we have seen could never swing an election and are almost entirely done by Republicans.

Neoliberalism is proto fascism. Fascism is where the Democrats have led us. They are not anti-authoritarian, they are just not as authoritarian as the fascists.

Neoliberalism is not a left of center political philosophy. We have to right of center parties and a moderately left of center population. That's why the Democrats are always referred to as the lesser of two evils.

The problem is that every time Republicans get something like this passed, their very next step will be to make it harder to get. Maybe they add new requirements to get the ID, or maybe they close half the administrative offices in "undesirable" districts, or maybe they raise the cost. It's always something. Their goal is not to secure elections, it's to discourage people from voting. The people it discourages most are the ones with the least free time to jump through hoops. A single mother with two jobs is not going to allocate too much time to voting.