I cant do it anymore without yelling at people, and thats not who I want to be.
Joined a few "antifascist" circles on my socials, and fuck, its...rough. Just spent 10 minutes going back and forth with a 
defender who refused to google anything. Tons of anticommunism. Lots of "vote blue no matter who." Their idea seems to be that fascism begins and ends with Trump/Maga and is not the natural state of Amerikkka.
Every now and then I'll come across someone who has done the reading, learned the history, and is trying to teach - but 9/10 times its a meme page and not an individual person, which us...surprising for some reason.
Anyways ive hit the point where "social media has sent me a silly notification, i shall neither read nor respond to it." Fuck it is slept like shit and am grumpy so im napping.
This is more or less why I walked away from any electoralism in the USA. So many people, even good people who do actually understand the core fascist nature of this country, are like "but we can fix it." I stopped believing it needed fixing and started realizing that it just needs to burn down. I truly believe that the greatest good that can possibly happen in the world today, the most beneficial thing, is the complete and utter demise of the USA. Whatever comes after it will be so fundamentally different it will be no question that it was destroyed and what is new is different. There will be nobody saying, "well it was reformed." It will be a clear demarcation of "the old was bad and is gone and has been replaced." Maybe that happened in whole but I suspect that some sort of Balkanization. I'm not interested in speeding it along but I'm certainly not going to do anything to slow it down.
EDIT: Let's turn this in seriousposting for a moment.
I have no problem with going to a protest to "keep hands of Iran/Cuba/Venezuela" and I've marched many times for Black Lives for all the good any of this has done. I'll do it again. I also have no problem voting on some ballot initiative to protect abortions or trans people or anything like that. Those things aren't going to help America as a whole but they will protect marginalized people and basic rights.
When someone is like "but we need a balanced budget" I roll my eyes. No we don't. We need the budget to burn and collapse. I want to see budgets "shut down the government." I laugh when I hear soldiers and cops aren't being paid. Oh no! Our government contracts to pay bomb makers that burn Palestinians to death and blow them to bits might not get their deposits from Uncle Sam? Good. I'm fucking glad. I hope they never get it.
"But we'll never get healthcare if everyone believed like you." I've had people tell me this with a straight face. We ain't getting healthcare. Everyone wants it and it will never happen and we don't deserve it anyways. We got no fight in us for it. Not the kind of fight we need and if we did get it it would be dismantled by the corporate state we live under anyways.
I don't even consider myself a doomer. I'm optimistic. I see a world without the USA and it's beautiful. We deserve that. It is a goal that's more than achievable.
Yep last time I voted in a federal election was 2008 for Obama and only because he promised to shut down guantanamo and prosecute Bush. Of course he lied but at least in my day they used to pretend.
Yeah, it's my main issue with so-called "leftist" people in government right now. People like AOC or Bernie, or Mamdani or even someone Omar. I respect Omar or Tlaib as people despite that they might not be perfect or may have said a bad thing here or there. My main issue is fundamentally their role in the US government has been to maintain it and "fix" it. Just stop. Let it end. It needs to end.
It is the good cop dilemma. If you actually try to do good they fire you or kill you.
Right, because they don’t yet understand that anti-capitalist revolution is the only way to secure the promises of the liberalism
Same, I last voted in ‘08 as well, and was one of the ≈160,000 people who voted McKinney/Clemente. The last (and only) election where I actually kind of sort of believed in a “major” candidate.
Yeah I'm in the same boat. The greatest obstacle to any serious, revolutionary change are the liberals who think their reactionary friends, family, and coworkers aren't planning to have them all lined up against a wall and shot. Actual leftists recognize the danger we're in, have severed all contact with contact with conservatives, and are ready to throw down. But the liberal, especially the "white moderate" MLK warned us about, gets in the way.
They still think this country is salvageable because they believe in the Great Man and End of History. If we simply change the person in charge, we can go back to the way things were at the end of the '90s. Everyone else with object permanence knows the rot started decades before then.
I also think the real ones can imagine a world without American capitalism in it. A future where the USA doesn't exist that isn't some apocalyptic wasteland. That's the hurdle. The moment you mention you want America to end people think you mean some kind of desecrated, scorched earth Mad Max future. Like, no motherfucker, I'm envisioning a world of peace and harmony and people living happy, fulfilling lives. If you can't see that then you've let the reactionaries rob you of your soul.
Nailed it with this one. Anyone at this point who thinks we can get M4A in this country if we just elect hard enough has not been paying attention. I've heard this deployed to defend the guy with the giant totenkopf on his chest. "Guys we have to support him even though he's not perfect because that's how we'll get M4A." Its pathetic
It may have been an achievable goal like 10 years ago but now? It's a carrot on a stick.
I don't if it actually was achievable, but it wasnt ridiculous to believe it was achievable 10 years ago. If that makes sense
The system is designed to consume all movements like this. 10 years ago it had legs and the system didn't know what to do with it. Now, it's figured out ways to neutralize it.
National elections in the US are fundamentally scuffed. However, like you note - local referendums and protests are still valuable for actual harm reduction (versus Kamala vs. Trump style choices).
I think that most electoralism as change dies right now at the national level (i.e. house of rep/senate elections). Until either a proletarian party emerges or the dems do purges, no amount of left candidates can actually achieve anything since they'll just be rotating villain'd.
However, I do think that a succdem prez could potentially be interesting if they were willing to wield authority to punish ICE, etc. Doubtful, but who knows, maybe dems will put up a candidate worth voting for just for revenge against fascists.