I am writing this with the assumption that you are tacitly asking about US politics because of the moment in history. What I have to say will make people mad, but here goes:
A lot of the people on this webzone are what Eitan Hersh called “political hobbyists”. These are people who do not really take political action in their daily life despite voting or occasionally attending a rally. They may be well informed about politics, but being well-informed in itself is not really effective at changing politics. You can get on your phone and “rub the glass” to complain about politics, or to find people who agree with you. But outrage on social media won’t change anything, and if rubbing the glass and occasionally voting is all you do, then you are a political hobbyist.
Political hobbyism mostly functions as a consumerist approach to political engagement. A political hobbyist will passively receive news and information about politics, but will never really try to change anything, because to them engaging in a news feed is all they really do. That consumerism is painfully apparent here when, for example, posters denounce a Democratic candidate as being “not exciting” or someone they are “not passionate about” as if the candidate was the newest model in a brand of laptops that failed to zazzle in Q3. We see signs of political hobbyism again when political parties are treated as entities that are somehow completely separate from the public. For example when a lemmy user denounces the Democratic party for not doing what they want. “The Democrats need to do X!” Why are you complaining about that on the internet? You know the DNC isn’t reading these threads right?
If you really wanted to influence the Democratic party (which I think is the best bet for resisting fascism right now) why aren’t you lobbying the party? Why aren’t you mobilizing voter bases? Why aren’t you building political power in your local community so you can influence larger political organizations? Because its hard, because you don’t know where to start, because you are busy? Ok, but fascism is coming, and you are too busy to do anything about it. Or too overwhelmed to even try?
The truth is, if you wanted your ideas (and I am including here opposition to fascism as an idea) to influence policy, or what candidates gain traction in nomination races, then you should have been working on that LOOOOONNNNNG before the national candidate was nominated. Treating the Democratic party as a vendor that offers political products is a losing strategy for gaining influence. There will be an endless parade of glass rubbers ready to denounce the various political parties, but by and large, they didn’t do anything to gain influence with those parties. Their denouncements are ignored, they are irrelevant. My advice is to ignore the glass-rubbers. Identify one or two local issues in your physical area and try to improve them. What you should do is find a little slice of America (or your own country if you are not American) and try to make it better. Use those efforts to build up influence at higher levels. My goal here was to convince you not to listen to the glass rubbers. But my advice for resisting fascism is: Try to build political networks, try to mobilize local voters in local issue elections. Doing this will make your network an invaluable asset to larger (state and national) organizations. If you have a network of voters, of issue conscious citizens, or donors, larger organizations are going to want to leverage that network when it comes time for lager races. That gives you leverage. That gives you power. The glass-rubbers are going to tell you that is impossible. Its not. People do it all the time. The book I cited has examples of people doing it. Fascist conservative groups do it all the time. So why not you?
I will admit, this is hard. When I first read Hersh’s book I was offended, because when he was describing political hobbyists, he was describing me. But it did give me some motivation to think about politics from the perspective of power. And set me down the road of trying to do all things I wrote about here. It is early days for me yet, and I have only seen limited success. My work complicates things. I am busy, and often overwhelmed. But fascism is coming.
Violence really, really fucking sucks.
It may be necessary, but if there’s any other option you should look to that first. If it legitimately comes to violence a lot of innocent people are going to suffer in a big way.
The only peaceful method i can think of would be for enough people to collectively get together and agree to completely stop buying stuff, other than food and absolute necessities. No luxuries, none. But you’d need enough people and to do it long enough to completely destroy the economy. It would be very boring for a long time.
Not gonna happen.
More realistically, we need more Luigis.
“I’ll preemptively give up that anybody will make any effort so I don’t have to either and I’ll just wait for somebody else to step up save us all.”
/The Devils Advocate.
That’s a ridiculous argument. You saw how many people voted out of the total number of eligible voters, and how many of them sat out because not voting for a democrat was more important to them than ending up with trump.
And that was just voting, a few minutes or hours out of one day out of the year, and here you are mocking someone suggesting that massive numbers of people will refuse to band together for months or longer to wreck the economy while inconveniencing themselves materially? Dude’s right all day long, your comment is pointless.
So be the change then.
Don’t be trite.
Guitars
This machine kills fascists
Only with the right stickers
Ok, so serious answer for our friends who don’t live in places without an active culture of protest:
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Vote. No, really. If people actually fucking voted, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
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Give money to advocacy organizations
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Give your time and money to mutual aid organizations
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Read the news (not just on lemmy either)
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CALL your congresspeople. Emails and letters are better than nothing, but do not have the same impact.
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Try to get your friends to do #1-5
Vote. No, really. If people actually fucking voted, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
Trump won with the popular vote.
A key element to defeat things like fascism, which build themselves on the popularity of fear, is that voting can’t be free-for-all. Voting should require, or be weighed with, some sort of licensing, testing of sane mind, awareness and understanding of at least current events, review of known association with dangerous anti-society parties, etc.
A key element to defeat things like fascism, which build themselves on the popularity of fear, is that voting can’t be free-for-all. Voting should require, or be weighed with, some sort of licensing, testing of sane mind, awareness and understanding of at least current events, review of known association with dangerous anti-society parties, etc.
This is inherently anti-democratic. Who decides who’s qualified to vote? Is it you, with your infallible understanding of every issue?
Me? Aaaahahaha lol no. If I can’t solve this problem I should also not be put in charge of what happens after the solution, ya know.
As for how to solve it: again, no idea. But that does not remove the fact that it’s an actual problem. Another option would be to allow everyone to vote but weigh the votes on what differently, but I’m sure it’s just about another flavour of the same intrinsic limitation. But it’s defo not something “anti-democratic”: for a system to actually represent and help people, it has to somehow prevent them from shoot their own legs off. If the system allows leg chopping, then those who already have an advantage due to more resources, more reach or more entrenched power, are going to have more, not less, of an advantage once legs start chopping.
Oops, replied to wrong comment.
Yes, we had this kind of logic before. https://allthatsinteresting.com/voting-literacy-test Turns out that “regulations” that restrict key democratic functions of societies are actually weaponized by tyrannical states against marginalized people.
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Ok but I just want to clarify before we valiantly and romantically take the fight to fascists…
… Did you muster the courage to vote for Harris, return2ozma?
Did you muster the courage to vote for Harris, return2ozma?
No. I said I wouldn’t vote for a genocider multiple times throughout the year too. I’m in California so my POTUS vote had zero effect. I voted for everything else and left POTUS blank. Trump won in a landslide. Even if single issue voters about Gaza 100% voted for Harris, she still would have lost.
If down votes were votes, maybe Harris would have won in the swing states, and not California where your vote literally didn’t impact anything, except local elections.
Don’t let them gaslight you into thinking that you somehow personally swayed every swing state to Trump’s fascism, while they stick their head in the sand of how Harris lost and why.
Last week a dude was swearing to me that Kamala lost because of the “I did that” Biden stickers
Jesus fuck
Sure did, donates too. And id do it again. Worth noting, I live in WI, my vote definitely mattered
Compulsory voting.
If you don’t vote, you don’t get to take deductions on your federal taxes and you don’t get any owed tax refund. When you do vote, you also get an extra 3% discount on federal tax owed until your AGI is over $190k.
