the_dunk_tank
It's the dunk tank.
This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.
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On the bright side, I think plenty of people currently on the U.S. left went through a pro-Obama phase at some point that was not too far off.
A big appeal of neoliberalism is the idea "hey this works, unlike leftism, which is nice in principle but just doesn't work in the real world." This tracks as long as (1) you don't look too closely at the people neoliberalism chews up and spits out/blame those people for their own lot, (2) you measure the success of neoliberalism by "is my guy in office" instead of "are we doing good things," and (3) your knowledge of leftist projects is limited to propaganda.
I went through a pro Obama phase, though I did not understand what neoliberalism was yet. Going through high school, I naively thoughts the Democrats still operated under the assumptions of the New Deal/Great Society. I definitely had points 1 and 3 as blinders before I learned more during college. First the old subreddit and then the pod helped with that iconoclastic process of scrutinizing and tearing down the old ideology.
I too was an Obama supporter who naivly believed he was a socdem
Not even a socdem. I just thought at the time that liberalism was always that way. When I realized it wasn't was when I went on to the socdem phase.
I went from supporting Kucinich in the primary to being totally behind the Obama presidency because Barack somehow fooled me he stood for the same shit
Anecdotally, I had a Black teacher who was so excited for the Obama victory in '08. He gave us a starting question asking what two Presidents Obama was like. Everyone guessed Lincoln at first but, I was the only true-believing lib nerd who guessed FDR correctly as the second part of the answer. In hind sight he was more like Reagan, at least according to his own self-admission.
Honestly he's one of the most well-spoken U.S presidents I've heard talk in awhile - gotta look out for charismatic neolibs or they just might make their ideology sound inspiring