I never finished writing my response. ADHD and too many tabs :/
We lump them together because liberal and conservative politicians are unanimous on a lot of topics we care about.
off the top of my head, US politicians from both parties:
- do nothing about climate change
- want owners rather than workers to control production – this is sort of a big deal to communists!
- serve (and often are themselves) business owners, bankers, and landlords rather than working people
- Clinton deregulated finance and contributed to the 2008 crisis, allowed huge corporate media mergers, and tried to privatize social security
- Obama let Citigroup pick his 2008 cabinet, did fuckall to help foreclosed Americans, and presided over the largest upward transfer of wealth in US history
- Biden has done next to nothing to protect American workers from COVID, and rail workers are still on-call 24/7 with only eight sick days a year
- 70% of Americans want single-payer healthcare but it remains politically impossible
- support wars and coups
- Clinton bombed and sanctioned Iraq back to the stone age, causing around 1.5 million deaths
- liberal media helped sell the Iraq war, which caused over a million further deaths in Iraq
- Obama obliterated the once-prosperous country of Libya, and there are now open-air slave markets
- Biden continues to support the siege in Yemen, which has killed hundreds of thousands
- support massive wealth extraction from the global south
- IMF and World Bank loans that enforce austerity and depress wages
and on social issues, democrats are one half of a one-way ratchet: republicans make it worse, democrats do not make it better
some more thoughts
I think there are two reasons democrats are ineffective on social issues, and maybe you’ll find them too cynical: 1) as long as our basic rights are in jeopardy, we have no leverage to ask for progress, on things like universal healthcare, that the rich donors oppose, and 2) offering effective resistance would set the precedent that the government has the power to help people, and then people might ask for more improvements to our lives, which, again, the rich donors oppose. And for that matter, a lot of the politicians themselves have backgrounds as rich businessmen, bankers, executives, and landlords, so their own class interests oppose ours.
So, anyway, liberal and conservative politicians look similar to us.
But sometimes the voters also look similar, especially the well-off ones! I have heard so many disgusting takes about the homeless from well-off liberals. And no one seems to really oppose the massive wealth extraction from the global south. And too many support wars and coups at the time and then oppose them later when the lies come out, only to support the next one and believe the next lies. Too many liberals seem to support awful things, tolerate them, or have no knowledge of them.
Now this is me going on a petty tangent, but I also think there are some annoying cultural differences between certain liberals and socialists. Many liberals buy into meritocratic myths. They see liberal politicians as the adults in the room making the hard decisions, while ignoring the class interests of those politicians. They fawn over British royals. They watch shows about aristocrats and DC politicians. They watch game shows where working class people try to appease a panel of rich judges. And way too often, liberals seem to care more about civility and norms than about what actually happens in the world. As soon as Trump came to power, W. Bush was fucking rehabilitated in an instant. Never mind the wars, never mind 2008. At least he was civil.
Maybe I’m being too harsh, but this is the impression I get.
…But anyway, the bottom line here is that we’re socialists. We want workers to control production. Liberals, and conservatives, don’t.
you might disagree with the points I raised, and that’s fine — just realize that we communists do have our reasons to lump liberals and conservatives together. It’s not just vibes. We have an actual coherent perspective lol.
