General Politics Discussion (XI) [ARCHIVED] World • Page 1054

Yeah having COVID still fucking sucks, small periods of feeling okay and then waves of hell. Can’t imagine being an old ass man with it…though this medical care is much different than mine.

 

*Sniff*

Ahhhhh, there it is. That “new tone” of Unity’s in the air.

 

Fetterman's just upset because it's made his job as the mole ten times harder.

 

yep not a POC or non-slim body type in the shot…never change Fire Island, never change…

 

It’s so unbelievably funny to see Republicans referring to this as a coup and betrayal to voters, citing Biden’s primary win.

 

As for the left, our conversation is often garbled by inadequate abstractions, be it the academic discourse of “populism” or the uninformative, parochial American pseudo-debate about whether Trump is really a “fascist”. As Marx would have said, the correct method is not to start with the abstraction but to “appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development and to track down their inner connection”.

What is distinctive about this new far-right and its growth? Notwithstanding wannabe “insurrections” in the United States, Brazil, Germany and even Russia, it remains largely parliamentarist for now. The new far-right provides an advantageous milieu in which neo-fascists can thrive but its immediate objective is not the overthrow of electoral democracy but a constitutional rupture breaking with all humane and “woke” constraints on the exercise of power. In most cases it starts out poorly organised, with meagre civil society roots, achieving what it does with an assemblage of online networks, media connections, sporadic street mobilisations, dark money, electoral campaigns and random violence. The one salient exception is India, where the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) gives Modi paramilitary heft. Otherwise this movement thrives less on its own inherent dynamism than on the decomposition of the old parliamentary centre, and on lurid apocalyptic fantasies: “white genocide”, “the great replacement”, “the great reset”. It is not yet fascism, but something else, which we might term “disaster nationalism”.

Disaster nationalism evinces not the least trace of the utopianism of historical fascism, with its colonial fantasies of living space and a “new man” equipped for global domination by race science. Rather, apart from the Israeli far-right’s expansionist vision for Gaza and the West Bank, it offers a meagre, defensive nationalism scaled to an age of deflationary politics. It doesn’t feign anticapitalism or proffer what Michael Mann calls “class transcendence”, as fascists did in both Italy and Germany. To the contrary, it defends a more muscular capitalism freed from “woke” constraints, albeit with ethnic protections. There is no sense of the futurist Aufbruch (departure)that Roger Griffin says characterised interwar fascism, apart from the pathetic, suicidal romance of the lone-wolf [RS1] . Tomorrow doesn’t belong to them; they don’t want tomorrow. On the flipside of their obsession with disaster scenarios is nostalgia for a version of normality that is slipping away.

 

Elon also melting down apparently lol

 

Biden giving the scoop to Twitter is concerning and hilarious at the same time

 

Dude is SO mad about this lol. It’s like watching a kid throw a tantrum after you took their toy away, he knew he had a great chance at winning with “Biden too old” and the entire strategy was built around that but now it’s ruined and he’s the too old bumbling candidate. Plus, I think he wanted retribution for losing in the last election and that his main goal other than staying out of jail is just to beat Biden for beating him and now he can’t.

 

tbf he posted it on all his socials at the same time I think

 

Booker’s face in the background always cracks me up. Like he’s holding in a giant “oh shit she’s got him” smile lol

 

She has Charli XCX’s endorsement, that’s worth its weight in gold right now

 

I’m surprised Fox keeps letting him on tbh. I know they relish any time they can get a Dem on thinking they can “get them” but Pete just demolishes them in every clip that goes viral