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From Fascism and Big Business by Daniel Guerrin

From Gramsci's Prison Notebooks

None of this shit matters anymore jfc. There won't be real elections in 2026. Stop drinking Democrat collaborator diarrhea and start preparing for mass street level resistance. In case it somehow isn't glaringly obvious, when the mass protest encampments shut down cities the Democrats will be the ones telling people to go home and vote instead. And when Trump nationalizes the national guard and sends them in to break up the encampments at rifle point the Democrats will wring their hands and put out a milquetoast statement about how they support peaceful protest but that disruption can't be tolerated. Were none of you alive yet in 2020? Did none of you get guns pointed at you by national guard sent in by Democratic governors?

The Democrats are sitting in congress making word-shaped noises that gesture at displeasure with the ongoing fascist coup. A Republican Nazi could walk around congress putting them down with a cattle gun and the remaining ones would smile tightly and put out a statement about how "this is a serious violation of democratic norms" and then vote in favor of the next Trump nominee. These people are collaborators. They will do nothing to stop the fascist coup because they don't want to.

It's a psyop

They appeal to leftists by saying electoralism won't bring revolution, which is true... But then say don't vote.

Makes no sense to me. Use any lever you have. You can advocate revolution and pull the lever for lesser evil. It reduces the concept to black and white thinking while appealing to people's sense of self righteousness and laziness.

The same tactics and arguments are deployed on maga, only they're encouraged to vote

I 100% agree with this post. I do believe many of these attackers are sincere, but that it's time to recognize it doesn't matter and the end effect is the same as if they had acted in bad faith.

They give permission to be cynical to the less informed who might otherwise feel guilt to support one candidate or the other. They create an argument that no one needs to pick a side, which a lot of people take comfort in because our politics are so divisive and polarizing that many don't want to wade into them if they can stay above the fray.

The message in the 2024 election should have been "Biden has been great, if you think he was bad you don't realize what he's had to deal with caused by Trump and the pandemic and the not-entirely real Democratic majority in the Senate which includes two turn-coats. His only issue is he's old so let's go with Harris." That's all. But that kind of messaging was never possible because most of the left wanted to always frame things by starting with their laundry-list of all the things they didn't like about Biden to prove their independent thinker bona-fides, and then circle around and say "BUT here's the thing-" which is lousy messaging.

Even today, when it's clear Biden fixed the economy and passed a ton of great legislation we can't frame the discussion as "Biden was great and now Trump has ruined the economy and defunded all these programs that were working" because people still want to start by crapping on the Democrats and sabotaging their own case. It's a great plan if the goal is to have the left perform weaker than they should have in all future debates and elections.

EDIT: This is my first post on this platform, so when I say I see people on the left doing this I'm talking about other places I frequent like Reddit, Mastodon and BlueSky.

Hey, have you used Tumblr? I ask, because I don't think that this is always people trying to infiltrate a political discussion to paralyze effective leftist organizing. I do think it totally is sometimes- but sometimes it's because of how people structure their values and philosophy of engagement with the world, politics and moral actions.

I have become very familiar with how, on Tumblr, the dominant cultural paradigm has a strong tendency to several of those traits purely because of a combination of ways that the internet, and that website, is structured; and, the ambient cultural values of the US informing how they structured their beliefs about morality and politics.

People who are part of this paradigm tend to have a strongly dentological bent, and are obsessed with if an action is good or bad in and of itself; and, especially critically- if there is any part of it that represents any moral compromise, no matter how small. They do not want to ever have to compromise their principles, and frame those principles as actions and behaviors and not ends. They are very focused on maintaining a sense of moral purity and superiority, which naturally leads to inaction due to the inherent compromises present in political action and general life.

Paired with this is a deep desire to prove one's virtue, which is done by performing it- frequently by finding an acceptable target for harassment or abuse, then heaping unpleasant behavior on them in order to show that bad people are bad and they, a good person, is good. It's very simplistic and results in people who are constantly vigilant of if anything they do can be construed as wrong, because then it becomes a vector for harassment and attack, and who are constantly trying to discern if someone else is currently vulnerable to the same.

This mixes with a general lack of critical thinking skill, reading comprehension and fact-checking that so defines our modern septic pit of an internet; and, you have a cycle of inaction and abuse that accomplishes very little. It's very frustrating, and a major contributing factor to me not using Tumblr anymore. I got really burnt out on people who would use, for example, you not reblogging a post supporting a specific political point as proof that you were maliciously against the political point, even if you openly advocated for it, or it was about a marginalized group you were a part of.

I feel like you are identifying a pattern that is very real and important, but I think your conclusions about why it happens may be too narrow. I think there's a multiplicity of groups of different political and philosophical tendencies that are contributing to this atmosphere. I also feel like sometimes people need a place to vent about how incredibly infuriating US politicians and politics are- I try to keep that to my friends and personal writing, nowadays, but there was a point when I was incredibly bitter about how the Democrats continued to neglect and ignore people in need due to political exigencies. Sure, I get it, and sure, I support them whenever I get a chance to, but damn if it's not frustrating.

I increasingly feel like there needs to be more sectioning of discussions on platforms to allow constructive discussion and vent-posting to be clearly separated and have that be aggressively enforced.