My answer was that the Democrats aren’t who we think they are. Once, perhaps, they were the wide-awake guardians of blue-collar prosperity, but today they understand themselves differently.

maybe the book itself treats this subject better, but i think it's really important to not spread ahistorical myths about our capitalist parties. the democrats today are doing what they (and the republicans) have done for their entire history, namely to systematically destroy any actual left-wing movement, whether that's by force or half hearted reforms that get circumvented or progressively weakened.

[–] BoxedFenders@hexbear.net 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Today's struggling working class would kill for some of those half hearted reforms from the Dems of yesteryear. They can't even manage to go through the motions anymore.

[–] bestmiaou@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 2 weeks ago

for sure. the fall of the soviet union really convinced a lot of them that they would never need to worry about labor rising up in an organized fashion ever again. we must make good use of the amazing opportunity that they have provided us with.

[–] JoeByeThen@hexbear.net 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Even if they were only doing so to prevent the commies from making the US look bad, the democratic party was once the party of abundance for the white working class. The book gets into how neoliberalism has completely ripped that facade away to reveal a party that now doesn't even bother pretending. If you've got a better book to recommend, I'm all ears. But I find that Listen Liberal, combined with Dark Money and Democracy in Chains, gives even a lib a pretty solid understanding of how the two parties became masked off representatives of the rich. If they're a big reader, i'll add in Nixonland as all the familiar names really lock-in just how much our politics are pretty much family dynasty type shit. Then I'd hit them with Parenti and the class consciousness stuff.

Two pretty good excerpts from Listen, Liberal, if you're interested.

Thomas Frank, The Inequality Sweepstakes

Nor a Lender Be: Hillary Clinton, liberal virtue, and the cult of the microloan

[–] bestmiaou@lemmygrad.ml 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

i read those excerpts, and while the recounting of recent history and the ways that disagrees with dem's marketing is good, i think there is too much brushing over a critical analysis of the past.

Even if they were only doing so to prevent the commies from making the US look bad, the democratic party was once the party of abundance for the white working class.

this is exactly what i'm talking about. the dems were not ever that. they were using racism as a wedge issue to break a working class movement that was an increasingly credible threat to the capitalist system. we can clearly see the institutional role of they play in the passage and congressional veto override (supported by about half of congressional democrats) of the Taft-Hartley act barely more than a decade after the NLRA.

as for my recommended starter book to move a lib toward the left, that really depends on where on that trajectory they are. if they aren't scared by the word socialism, i'd go for Socialist Reconstruction, published by the PSL. it makes a very compelling case for abandoning the democratic party by presenting policies that would actually fix the problems in our society that the dems would never even mention, much less advocate for.

[–] JoeByeThen@hexbear.net 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Lol, I have a feeling you and I are talking about very different libs. No way in hell am I getting the libs I'm talking to to read a book from the psl without priming them quite a bit ahead of time. You can complain about the framing and you're not necessarily wrong, but for a large chunk of white America the democratic party was perceived as the party of abundance. Expecting the folks who were raised on that to leap right into class consciousness and socialism isn't gonna work very well, in my experience.

[–] bestmiaou@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 2 weeks ago

maybe so. i'm pretty open about being a communist, which does do a bit of filtering with who would be willing to take a book recommendation from me. i think that we are in a historical moment where there is a lot to gain from being bolder about what we believe, but it's always good to have a variety of tactics.