"Progressives should not make the same mistake that Ernst Thälmann made in 1932. The leader of the German Communist Party, Thälmann saw mainstream liberals as his enemies, and so the center and left never joined forces against the Nazis. Thälmann famously said that ‘some Nazi trees must not be allowed to overshadow a forest’ of social democrats, whom he sneeringly called ‘social fascists.’
After Adolf Hitler gained power in 1933, Thälmann was arrested. He was shot on Hitler’s orders in Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944."
Plus we keep using this outdated first-past-the-post voting system in the 21st century.
That’s why one should always vote for Democrats who support voting system reform.
Are we talking about the same Democrats that sued to keep ranked choice boating off the DC ballot this year? or the Democrats that chose to keep ranked choice voting that had already been passed by voters off the Alexandria VA ballot?
We need the presidency first. We need a majority in both houses first. We need a supermajority in the senate first. We need a 2/3 majority in the senate first. We need to completely overhaul the voting system first.
There’s always something we need to do first. It’s right there on the timetable. Timetable subject to change. Offer void in red states.
Do not forget that in '32 the SPD backed Hindenburg… who then nominated Hitler as chancellor.
Thälmann was foolish, but even if he didn’t run, Hitler would still get into power. If the far right is strong enough, mere electoralism will not stop them. Fighting them must happen on the street level.
Genuine question - at what point?
You do it early (now), and you push swing voters away and hurt your cause.
You do it after they have power, and you’ve manufactured the pretext for your extermination.
Hitler didn’t win because he beat Hindenburg after Thälmann split the vote. He lost to Hindenburg, the center-right candidate endorsed by the social democrats, then won anyway because Hindenburg appointed him Chancellor.
The social democrats were the ones who refused to back Thälmann, the only anti-Hitler candidate in the race. And the same way that the communists called them “social fascists,” the social democrats used similar rhetoric, frequently saying that the communists were no different from the Nazis, that there was no difference between the far left and the far right.
But also, we don’t have to keep rehashing 100 year old grudges from another continent.
That was going back much further. The Communists had tried to overthrow the Weimar Republic in the Hamburg Uprising a decade earlier. So the social democrats, who were a key supporter and really the creators of the Republic, saw them as an enemy. Thälmann was especially outspoken against the social democrats. Hence they saw supporting Thälmann as supporting an enemy of the Weimar Republic.
However Jill Stein and co policies are mostly about as radical as the German social democrats back then. All of it could be done by reforming the US political system. At least near term.Also the German communists were much better organized then the US left. They were sitting in most parliaments of German states and cities. The US Green Party has no officeholders on a federal or even state level right now. Of the 8 state level officeholders they did have only 3 have run on a Green Party ticket, the rest was elected Democrat and switched to the Greens. That has to be changed first, before running for president. Seriously if you can not take state seats, then you can not win the presidency.
The background for the KDP’s uprisings is WWI. The war was incredibly destructive and pointless for every country in Europe. Before the war, the Second International (of which the SDP was a founding member) put out a manifesto with unanimous support that said:
In case war should break out anyway it is their duty to intervene in favor of its speedy termination and with all their powers to utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war to arouse the people and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.
However, once the war actually started, the SDP (along with many other social democratic parties in Europe) suddenly found all sorts of reasons to rally around the flag and support it unconditionally. The British socialists would point to problems in Germany under the Kaiser, the German socialists would point to problems with Russia under the Tsar, and each side would talk about how it’s not that they support the war, it’s just that they don’t want to lose. And so there was a failure across Europe (except in Russia, of course) to create domestic pressure to put an end to the war, and result was that it raged on until it had claimed 20 million lives.
It was only at the end of the war, when it was clear that Germany was going to lose regardless, that a revolution occurred, initially supported by both the SDP and the communists, which is what brought an end to the German Empire. During that uprising, the SDP and communists split over the direction of the country, and the SDP won and sent in the Freikorps to exterminate communist leadership. So when you talk about Thälmann trying to overthrow the government, I think it’s important to put that in the context that the government in question had come to power only 4 years prior by overthrowing the government - and that government would go on to last only 15 years in total before the Nazis were able to seize power through it. All of which is to say, it was a chaotic period, and there were reasons for the KDP to resent the SPD as well.
The tendency to force history into boxes defined by modern day politics loses a lot of that nuance. In contemporary American politics, there is no Second International. There is no Great War. There is no Sparticist Uprising. It’s bad enough when contemporary politics outside of the US are forced into the boxes defined by American politics, we don’t need to extend that throughout history.
The Nazis had also tried to overthrow the government once by that point, so making a coalition that included the Nazis is no less backing “an enemy of the Weimar Republic”. The difference is, of course, that one is an enemy to capitalism and the other is an enemy of communism. It’s no wonder that liberals would choose the latter.
Hitler and Thälmann lost to the center right Hindenburg who was backed by the social democrats. Hindenburg was already president since 1925, so he was seen as no direct threat to democracy. Then Germany had parliamentary elections in July 1932. Those had a Nazi + Communist majority, so they repeated the election in November as they did not have a majority to form a government as both the Communist and the Nazis were against democracy. That however although slightly better did not solve that problem. So Hindenburg used decrees to work with the Nazis so they could form a government.
So if the Communists and social democrats would have worked together and elected a left president. That might have been somebody from the social democrats or indeed Thälmann, then a minority centrist or left wing or a majority centrist and communist government would have been possible. The Communists however never tried to work with the democratic forces. The Nazis actually did exactly that, which they were able to use to gain total power.
Point should be obvious.
The liberals fucking won that election and it was the liberal Hindenburg appointing Hitler to the Chancellorship that facilitated his rise to power, not anything the KPD did. This is disgusting historical revisionism that a search engine could dispel in 5 seconds, but you choose to warp history to make it look like Hitler actually won the election and make the liberals who enabled him seem blameless. It is, in effect, apologia for Nazi collaborators. Exactly appropriate for someone shilling for Dems while they gleefully subsidize genocide.
there sure seems to be a lot of Nazi apologia coming out of .world recently. wonder why that is 🤔
We could avoid this with ranked choice voting.
Yes, but you’re going to need to find a way to think beyond that, because both parties understand that it’s in their interests to oppose rcv, so “vote democrat until we get rcv” effectively means “vote democrat forever”.
Fundamentally, there is a limit to the extent that a capitalist democracy will tolerate actual democratic power, because eclipsing the power of capitalists obviously means threatening their position. They will not sit idly by and allow their power to be voted away.
Oh, you mean like these two Democratic reps and the one Democratic Senator who just introduced a bill to do ranked choice voting for all 2028 congressional races? https://rankthevote.us/raskin-beyer-welch-bill-would-bring-ranked-choice-voting-to-congressional-elections/
There’s no need to be so smarmy. Anyway, the individuals may behave in aberrant ways (or perhaps as a red herring, up to your interpretation), but the Democratic Party will reject it just as the Republicans will. I’m talking about classes and political parties, not every person as an individual.
If it passes, I’ll eat my hat, but it doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell.
Or will they? You see, this is what I don’t understand about MAGA congressmen. If they make Donald Trump their dictator, they are abdicating their own power and giving it to him. How is this in their best interests?
Well, two things:
One, that is a very alarmist view of Trump. He liked slinging around executive orders, but he had neither the ambition nor the audacity to be a Hitler. It simply isn’t realistic to think he’ll execute his second term by toppling the Republic, he doesn’t have visions like that, even if many people have visions like that for him (including Mike Lindel, somewhat hilariously, with his apparent attempt to get Trump to do a false flag and establish emergency powers).
Second, look at history. Inevitably, some people who release leopards do get their faces eaten, but becoming an executor of a fascist regime isn’t a loss of power, it’s a change in title at worst and, if anything, something of an increase in power. Imagining Trump becomes a fascist autocrat, that doesn’t actually mean that his whim is enough to unilaterally move things however he likes, and that is true of every leader in history. The reason for this is that his power, his authority, doesn’t come from himself, it comes from the class (or classes, historically) that support him, so he needs to make sure to keep them on his side or they will absolutely just kill and replace him. The petty Congressmen that support him know this, and are fine with working in a paradigm where they benefit from his support and are left with a broad range of things that he views as acceptable (since Trump won’t try to micromanage the whole country) in which to exert their personal agendas as they see fit.
But again, Fuhrer Trump is a fantasy. Maybe Tom Cotton poses such a threat, but Trump does not.
Does this all make sense?
I appreciate the kind words and am glad to see an open socialist on .world
Ranked choice voting probably leads to two-party domination (see Australia or Malta), and even without that caveat it’s otherwise suboptimal. Score voting is the way to ensure voting for your favourite comes with no strategic tradeoffs.
This might work, but in our current situation I don’t see the outcome as much different than what I’d expect now. MAGA would give Trump the highest score. Dems would give Harris the highest score and the rest would split.
I also don’t agree with the part of the premise that says our system is prone to fraud. Because each district does things differently, it makes it hard to hack. In Miami for instance they had hanging chad, because they used a punch system. Where I live, we fill in a bubble and in some states only mail in ballots are used. The real hacking takes place before the vote, in social media.
First time around Dems would probably vote Dems 99, GOP 0 and leave every other party blank, but over time people would realise that you can ALSO score your actual favourite (think of all the people that would vote Green if it wasn’t a wasted vote) a 99 without hurting the “lesser evil’s” chances. Greens 99, Dems 99 and GOP 0 is just as bad for the GOP as Greens blank, Dems 99 and GOP 0. That’s the magic of score voting. And people who are really apathetic and refuse to vote because they think all parties are bad could still express an opinion akin to Dems 10, GOP 0, rest empty.
in ranked voting there is still the possibility that a fear of a deeper evil driving straight to a bipartisan situation again.
You still have all the same campaigns exacerbating fears with just a different look to the ballot. Ppl could easily fall into the trap of picking their top 1-2 choices based on who they don’t want in power after glued to the screen watching all the drama.
Rcv just seems like the new ev where someone oversells that it fixes all things but hides the cons that we’re all pretty much in the same spot we started.
I agree with this assessment for the most part, but it does seem like the best method for introducing a third party, which the US desperately needs. Do you have a better EV?
