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I'm kind of on the fence about how to vote on this post. On one hand it uses liberal as an insult, which is usually a red flag I use to identify tankies and their dupes, but this clearly isn't a Tankie because it supports the idea of electing Democrats which the CCP and Russia wouldn't support.
I think if we can't acknowledge our own flaws and imperfections, we give the right and tankies the ammunition they need to spread both sides disinformation.
We should be the adults ready to acknowledge what went wrong and discuss ideas for how we can fix a broken system, instead of rationalizing it by pointing out they did it too, or doubling down on revisionist history that places flawed humans on a pedestal. We should be able to critique elected leaders because we don't need any one individual to be the single representative of liberal policy.
Being a literal advocate for human rights is not a flaw or an imperfection. that is the same vein as thinking of empathy as weakness or of logic as heartless.
Who is saying being an advocate for human rights is a flaw or imperfection? I'm saying the opposite. You can't ignore human rights to justify the actions of a leader or movement, even if the actions were allegedly done for a greater good.
That's what authoritarians always do. We can only achieve utopia if we get rid of the people standing in our way. We can only achieve X ideal tomorrow by sacrificing liberty today. We have to trust that the leader/party knows what's best for us, even if we disagree with their actions.
More people are liberal than they want to admit because it's become such a "dirty word" and I do think that is by design. What we're seeing is both these groups becoming victims of a campaign that is simply anti-humanitarian. What I try to drive home is that liberalism can exist in any economic system, and it will thrive in places that aren't authoritarian.
If you believe the government shouldn't attack free speech or any one's rights, rights should be expanded, that immigrants deserve to exist, or a mass defense of freedom means we all stay free then YOU ARE LIBERAL
NoOOo LiBeRaL iS tHe wOrSt tHiNg tO bE!!11
..except there was plenty of actual both sides stuff going on under Biden/Harris. Stuff like immigration crackdowns, and support for increased police powers and budgets, a failure to show up to protect Roe, a willfull failure to hold trump accountable for an insurrection and collaborating with Russia, and with Biden throughout his career-- always a lack of respect for our civil and human rights. Lets be honest for once and not pretend the dems didnt veer hard right on a lot of things under Bidens watch. As an example, Biden led the country in enabling and funding a far right genocide and Harris said she'd do the same. People were murdered on Bidens watch via war crimes he actively participated in. Americans, some of them. Biden/Harris lost the left and a good part of their base doing it. Is any of that "both sides disinformation"? Did or did not harris talk lovingly about her glock on the campaign trail? she did. While students across the country cower in live fire drills and kids and parents are terrorized in the name of pewpew ownership for all, wondering if someone will kill them at school. Thats both sides supporting those bad policies, which is why a cheney could hover unironically at harris's elbow during her campaign.
This is simple reality that a lot of centrist liberals refuse to acknowledge, and they need to in order to move forward with their left flank-- who they cant win elections without. Dems arent simply "the good guys" lately and thats why a big chunk of their own voters and almost all youth effing hate them and only vote for them because they are the second party of a 2 party system. Biden lost the left because he's had an entire career of being a racist halfwit republican-curious dealmaker instead of a leader. He was a bad candidate and had dumb, bad policies that polled badly on all sides. And harris couldnt order her own lunch without help from someone else. And the centrists in the party cant admit to Biden leading the way away from the traditiobnal Dem party platform. Theres our problem.
And this is what taking AIPAC's money gets you. An utterly destroyed party on life support. And aipac couldnt care less.
That is literally what this report says. The Dems didn't pick their fights to prove who they were fighting for.
and yet you call out "both sides" as a "tankie" and right wing attack. Why did you do that?.
The problem is that the article doesn't explain what it means by "liberal" or which aspects of it the author considers problematic. This leads to conflating different issues and different criticisms of liberalism.
Liberalism in its traditional sense is not a left-leaning political stance. But in the USA "liberal" can either have its traditional political meaning or be a catch-all term for anything not fully right wing. So you get a lot of confusion around the term.
The left criticises liberalism, understood in the traditional sense, for being capitalist and, as such, unable to solve the basis structural problems of capitalism. Liberals don't even recognize capitalism itself as problematic, which ties their hands for solving social problems, and when the chips are down they defend capitalism against the left and abandon the working class to become allies of the right. And the left will say liberals are unrealistic about the historical forces that have effectively reined in capitalism, and how hard the system had to be fought to win even the smallest concessions from capitalists.
You absolutely don't need to be a tankie to criticize liberalism like this, you just need to be on the left.
The right criticises liberalism, in the "not right" sense, for caring about people those on the right deem not worth caring about. It criticises it for regulating businesses to protect people the right deems not worth protecting, and for suggesting that the poor are not poor through their own fault. It also criticises it for being too thoughtful and compassionate and not cruel enough.
The article seems to contain a bit of this right-wing-style criticism of liberalism, which is off putting, but the author also doesn't seem very clear about what they mean by liberalism. And so we get arguments in the comments that perpetuate the ambiguity and confusion.
Where does it uses liberal as an insult?
There's a whole subset of actual leftists and progressives that use both tankie and liberal as insults. Like, most of us probably would.
Lmfao anything is a tankie these days according to Lemmy. Anarchist? Tankie. SocDem? Tankie. Says the word liberal? Tankie.
I don't believe that. I honestly also believe the majority of internet tankies probably originated as an unfortunately successful psyop campaign against the left.
True tankies and right wing extremists have a lot more in common than they seem to be willing to acknowledge. If you're unable to critique authoritarian policy or murder of innocent civilians and political dissidents, regardless of which side of the political spectrum the policy was coming from, then you're helping to normalize authoritarians like Trump, Putin, and Orbán.
For example, I have a very hard time believing this is not a right wing psyop disguised as a radical leftist movement in France:
I believe it's fact that Robespierre had people conspiring against him, but "one mistake?" That seems to be an extreme understatement/deflection of reality. Robespierre initially had (or at least claimed to have) beliefs that most rational people would probably agree with. Like the belief that no one has the right to hoard heaps of wheat while his fellow man is starving.
That doesn't change the fact that way too many innocent civilians were sent to the guillotine under his rule. Or the fact that people continued starving under his rule while his cabinet made some very odd financial decisions. Why does anyone need to prop a historical figure up as the representative of a modern leftist movement, and rationalize the mistakes he made in order to argue that you don't believe anyone has the right to hoard money and resources by exploiting individuals who are starving and being oppressed?
The historian she cites in the article seems to argue the reign of terror was basically fake news created by Robespierre's enemies after he died. One of the more recent articles I could find about the historian is an interview he gave discussing his work in a right of center publication. In the interview, he says that it was a complex period and shouldn't be reduced to its decapitations. Seems reasonable.
Then he goes on to talk about examples of good that came from the time period, like the idea of free education for children. I understand you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but you also shouldn't conflate achieving something positive with very unnecessary political violence. Choices were made. Decapitating everyone was not somehow excusable because Robespierre had reason to be paranoid/it was a chaotic time, and some good did come from it. That is exactly how people always manage to justify clearly unjust bullshit.
It just means we have another couple of decades of suffering to do before people catch on and decide to organize, but hey, that's cool. 🤷
All I'm saying is it would be really very easy to oppose authoritarianism instead of railing specifically about liberals and very specifically western capitalism. It doesn't help that such a large tankie community and psyop exists on Lemmy in the first place, if it didn't then maybe we wouldn't have to be so skeptical of everyone.
And what happens when the liberals kowtow to the authoritarians? You know like they have been doing. They supposed to be off limits from being called out?
I'm skeptical of people sounding like they're well-off capitalist investors afraid they'll have to pay a dime on a dollar in taxes.