Morning, Threaders, Threadheads, and all in between. Coffee in the rain again.
Consequences.
They are a result of our actions and choices up to and including what we say. We may have freedom of speech but speech is not free from consequences. We all have felt this in our lives, talking with friends. They get closer or cut us loose as a result of our speech. It defines us.
The more radical your speech becomes, the less reasonable friends you are left with and you tend to gravitate to other radical thinkers or attract them to you. Radical is a good word. We need radical thinking and radical change. It’s easy to embrace radical ideas in a world requiring radical change. “Rad” is cool and will remain cool as the fuel feeding the engine of change. It’s also a great risk.
Being radical effectively requires a lot of effort and critical thinking. What are we doing? How are we going to change the world? How far are we willing to go and, very important, what are the consequences? Being radical can also help us identify opposing radicals and learn from them. “Know your enemy” implies the ability to recognize their impulses and what they may lead to. Like looking in a mirror. Knowing our enemy both helps us to fight it and understand our own radicalism.
The benefits from studying a radical enemy are not just reflected on our strategy to defeat it, but especially on how we progress. How we avoid turning radical into extreme. How we allow room for reason in our strategic and tactical processes. Or not. It may well teach us to be like them. Fire with fire, and all that. Radicals can be reasoned with, extremists cannot.
Going back to one of my previous pieces, that’s the reason why Europeans were able to improve their democracies faster than we could, in America. And that extends to all the Americas with the notable exception of Canada, by virtue of its commonwealth nature. You see, social democracy was born and raised in the dialogue between two radicals, capitalism and socialism, while rejecting two extremes, fascism and communism. We never had that.
In the United States, especially since the 1980s, we were all capitalists. To say otherwise will, to this day, throw you into an imaginary field of dreams, bad dreams, where fascism and communism merge in the collective psyche as one: socialism. We never allowed socialism to emerge as a partner to be reasoned with and as a result we allowed the radical capitalist thought to slip into the realm of the extreme, where it withered and died alone, becoming this thing we have today.
We haven’t been capitalists for a very long time. We keep using the word but it lost its meaning. Without a middle class to support it and in the absence of a radical friend to make it realize its excesses, it morphed into a cult driven by kleptocrats and technocrats, where the first are insatiable thieves and the second their tool makers. They would eventually merge into kleptotechs for which Elon Musk is the poster child. The epitome of a system in which people are redundant.
The few kleptocratic fools who started the downfall of capitalism are waking up to this reality: without the knowledge to morph into kleptotechs they are becoming redundant as well, hostages to those who can, with the literal flip of a switch, make them disappear, like their beloved extreme capitalism did, smothered by the new greed: the one technology delivered, unimaginable at the time its predecessor was engendered by Reagan, who had no clue what technocracy was.
Did any of us? As I turned on my little Apple computer and later even sent my first email I certainly didn’t. Too much capitalism didn’t get us here; no socialism did. Without it there is no reasonable exchange of ideas and no progress. I may not agree with some views expressed by socialists in the Democratic Party, the so called democratic socialists, but without them we’ll never have a reasonable discussion that will allow us to move forward.
Regrettably, that discussion can only take place inside the Democratic Party itself. There are no longer any reasonable interlocutors in the Republican Party. This means changes to our political system will take longer and be harder to achieve, but from this internal discussion the Democrats may just avoid our greatest enemy: the rise of a third party on our left flank. Those 10 spineless Democratic senators who voted for cloture yesterday did a lot more damage than you may think.
The continuing acquiescence towards the old ways, the failure to oppose this Republican Party in all things, and the disgusting flirting with fascists, combined with a decades long stonewalling of socialists inside the party itself have been feeding the third party beasts and transforming them from radical to extreme, to the point where they can’t be reasoned with. Yesterday’s failure to stand up against fascism opened the door, again, to the third party extravaganza.
If this attitude persists, if we keep pushing socialists back in the Democratic Party and fail to grow a steel spine in the face of a fascist kleptotechcratic coup, we will cause a wave of dissension benefiting third parties that will destroy any hopes of wining an election again. If we ever get elections worthy of their name after so much caving. So let’s be radical recognizing these facts. It’s the only way to protect us from extremism. Of any kind.
Resist & Oppose!
