It still seems to be a thing, that the only possible communism is post Stalin USSR (or 21st century China).

Not discussed often is the degree to which western industrialist interests aggressively acted to sabotage efforts for societies to form an egalitarian socialist democracy. Both the British empire and the US empire are guilty of this, often to the point of brutally overthrowing such governments in favor of puppet dictatorships.

So one criticism of communism might be that they are susceptible to intervention by larger bullyish states, but that’s true of any society, regardless of how it’s organized.

Plenty of political assassinations in history have been committed not by faction agents or hit men commissioned by a conspiracy but by solitary individuals with a grudge and a will.

The classic move is to drag their lifeless body through the streets of the capitol to the cheers of people and the rain of ticker-tape confetti.

The reason Hitler killed himself and had his remains burned immediately was because he was afraid of this very fate.

Burning, as in common cremation, turns someone to ash with some components that are not fully reduced. Vitrification homogenizes them even further.

But the point is also to take them out of the ecological cycle. The material of scattered ashes are processed by the ecology and eventually are reintegrated into larger and larger life forms again. By reducing a tyrant to a solid and locking them in a vault, their material is removed from the life cycle for as close to eternity as we can fathom.

Now if we had the option of throwing them into the sun, that would nicely reduce them to plasma, but that involves a heavy duty launch vehicle like the Atlas V. (My dad did the calculation once, and that would get about 150 lbs into the sun. Escaping earth is expensive.)

Actually, I said nothing of adding any markers to indicate the remains are there, buried with the toxic waste.

I grew up to effing Sesame Street teaching me about pluralism and accepting neighbors that are different color / religion, etc. (But not gays. LGBT+ were still expected to stay in the closet.)

So I grew up believing that ours was a plurality. The great melting pot.

Then as I grew up, the Southern Strategy moved pluralism to the edge of the Overton window and then outside it. And despite that we promised not to turn into Nazis the way Germany did, we totally went there.

Though, thanks to the internet and Breadtube, I now know the US only aspired to be an all-encompassing pluralism one day, and that the ownership class was always, always working to sabotage any progress, since it was a direct threat to their wealth and power.

You’re assuming that the military would willingly be deployed in the US against civilians. While that has happened with various state National Guard reserves, it is not legal when it comes to the other branches.

This is not to say they won’t given that plenty of flag officers have been replaced with MAGA loyalists, but doing so would destroy unit cohesion and would risk mutiny. More likely, so long as the US military remains professional (and not conscripts), they’re likely to respond via malicious compliance, much the way parade discipline was lacking during Trump’s birthday parade in 2025.

I’m not in the service, but I’ve heard from many veterans that an attempt to deploy the armed services against US civilians, or to engage in law enforcement action would cause far more problems than it would solve. This is why, when Trump has deployed the Marines on US soil, their duties have been limited to protecting federal buildings and not engaging with civilians, assisting ICE or controlling crowds.

The Civil Rights movement comes to mind, as do the numerous labor movements.

Or do you believe revolutions have to be violent to count?

Is that a version of KYS? Because it sounds to me like a version of KYS.

Among all the possible examples of revolutionary action in US history, you chose the most pathetic of the lot.

The Republican party is dead set on ending elections altogether and installing a one-party autocracy. What we have is bad, but it’s not as bad as it will get once the parties don’t have to compete for votes.

So long as its possible to vote out Republicans by voting for Democrats, then voters need to be voting for Democrats, even if they block strikes and do nothing about genocides abroad. They might be bad but their Republican counterparts are far worse.

Civil war will certainly not look like the first one with battle lines, though if we see an interstate conflict, we might see fights over strategic points. The experts I’ve read suggest there would be flash strikes coordinated the way that flash mobs are, only armed.

We certainly have enough firearms to make for a bloody mess.

I certainly cannot afford to just… leave America, and that’s the case for the majority of US citizens. Given how immigrants are unpopular everywhere, there are few places that are ready to take Americans as refugees.

That’s not a power I personally have, though there have been two attempts to amend the Constitution to eliminate it, and currently there is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is only a couple of states away from having legal force.

The worst of Democrats, establishment Democrats who focus on serving their donors are not fascist. They’re neoliberal, and granted, neoliberalism makes states vulnerable to fascist movements (a problem faced in the EU, Australia and Canada as well as the US) but that doesn’t actually make them fascist.

The difference is actually greater than that. Jamelle Bouie breaks down how the Democratic party is way, way less destructive, here. (on YouTube).

They might reform SCOTUS now that their careers, and possibly their very lives, depend on it.

I do fear they might not do enough. The damage caused by allowing this Supreme Court to run amok is overwhelming and might not be easily reversible. They need to not merely add term limits and expand the court (possibly to over a hundred) and mandate an enforceable code of ethics, but it may be time to strip SCOTUS of jurisdiction so that they no longer have total veto power over legislation and executive action.

Curiously, term limits might require an amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Stripping them of jurisdiction only requires legislation.

At what point am I deflecting responsibility away from liberals? Saying voting is important is different from saying one needs to do more than merely vote.

Part of why that strategy lost to Donald Trump twice now is because the Republican propaganda machine, including Russian state actors and Cambridge Analytica levied a massive campaign against the Democrats. And its largest push was to get Americans – black Americans specifically – to not vote. Tens of millions were spent discouraging voting.

So regardless of what you or I think, the Republican strategists that decide how to budget their campaign believe Democrats voting is pretty darned important. Perhaps that’s why voter suppression is central to the Republican platform: if more people vote, Democrats win. If fewer people vote, they win.

I do agree with you. It’s not enough for Democrats merely to campaign harder (as Biden advised soon after his presidential victory). And I admit I don’t have all the answers, but this single graphic is not the sum of my effort.

If I preferred MAGA to far-left politics I wouldn’t be looking for ways to aid the resistance at all.

So your complaint is that we’re not moving far enough fast enough?

I share your frustration, especially as the Trump regime is moving fast and breaking things, breaking laws and then defying either courts or Congress to stop them since much of law enforcement is on its side.

I don’t know if we’re still at the point where we can a) get the Democrats back into sweeping power and b) depend on them to make sweeping reforms of elections and the US Supreme Court, and then start to rebuild what the Trump regime has destroyed, or if we’re already doomed to a one-party system and need to focus on organizing resistance like a general strike. Spelling it out like that, it seems like a long shot.

Part of it depends on how the 2016 2026 mid-term elections go, if they go. I suspect that swing voters may still be under the influence of the massive far-right propaganda machine that dominates social media and mainstream news. If that’s the case then the US will fall to one party autocracy and then to civilization collapse.

All that said, so long as we do have elections, it’s still worthy to consider voting defensively, especially if the alternative is voting third party or not at all.

That’s the problem. More people voted for Biden than voted for Harris or Clinton. Democrats were unmotivated to stop Trump from winning, and in all three elections, he was a greater threat no matter who was running against him.

I don’t like the EC either. In fact, no-one other than the far right likes the EC.

And curiously, you think the solution is to let the Republicans, who hate you even more and have now set up concentration camps, win.

I do not refute that some of the Democratic organizations are captured by corporate interests, but the Republicans are even more captured, and pose a dire threat to the meager democratic features of the US political system.

Maybe you’re an accelerationist?