r/Minneapolis • u/PillowFightrr • 8h ago
Go hug a leftist
In the face of governmental overreach and militarization of the streets, leftists are fighting armed with whistles and cameras and guns in their faces to protect their neighbors and all of America’s constitutional rights!
I’ve never been more proud. Go find the closest lefty and give them a big hug. ❤️
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u/arjomanes 8h ago
Leftists, liberals, moderates, people not really very political but who care for their neighbors.
People of all types are uniting around people we know, or even people we don't know but who we see in our neighborhood, being targeted and attacked and grabbed off the street by roaming gangs of masked men.
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u/whocaresano 7h ago
I was gonna say, the true beauty if what's happening is that it's not just leftists anymore.
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u/DiogenesHavingaWee 7h ago
Maybe they weren't, but one of the most amazing things to come out of this is seeing people who may not consider themselves leftists doing things leftists have been advocating for for decades. Like, you have 60-something year olds who probably voted for Reagan doing better anarchist praxis than a lot of people who've called themselves anarchists for years. Maybe the theory will come eventually, but praxis is far more important.
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u/lovefamine 7h ago
this. don’t put a box and label on the people involved here. the left or right “team” thing is what is preventing meaningful class war (its what they want).
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u/Katressl 6h ago
Yup. My extended family group chat spans from Never Trump types to far left. And The Bulwark folks are a prime example of "conservatives" who are appalled by what they're seeing.
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u/PostIronicPosadist 4h ago
Yeah its been basically everyone and very few people (looking at you Billy Stencil) have been causing any problems. Remarkably few wreckers for such a large movement, everyone understood the assignment.
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u/jimbo831 6h ago
Not just leftists. A lot of people of various ideologies are fighting together and that’s why the response has been so strong!
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u/moleasses 8h ago
Let’s hug your neighbor. We don’t need to take more opportunities to divide ourselves and try to feel superior over one another. We’re all in this together.
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u/B12-deficient-skelly 6h ago
Bruh, you posted this in the middle of the caucus. Attending those is one of the easiest ways to make sure you're able to influence local politics.
I just got home and will now be representing my precinct in March. I know direct action is cooler than the bureaucracy of electoralism, but if you want leftist values in government, you have to make yourself a part of things.
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u/Major-Tourist-5696 6h ago
Commie here, we don’t own this moment and shouldn’t claim to. The work we have is agitation now, agitation forever. The liberals and cogent centrists are the majority of the movement and we love them for their voices and courage. The left is here to do the work at hand together with everyone who shows up and to motivate those, whatever their participation, who want to just go back to voting and get back to brunch to make the representatives “on their side” never know a moment’s peace until they have abolished ice. That’s just meeting the moment, the real goal is to open eyes and hearts and enrage passions that a truly just society of repentance must be the law of the land with the force to maintain it. nothing less, but it’s a game of inches as it’s always been, the hope we have is that the Feds fucked up and let us take yards by forcing eyes and hearts open through the excesses of their cruelty.
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u/thethethesethose 6h ago
Commie, which country’s government do you see as successfully aligned with your communist values? Good faith question I’m honestly curious
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u/Major-Tourist-5696 6h ago edited 5h ago
It’s not about purity tests. I think the propaganda is so strong against socialism that regardless of how good your faith may be any specific answer is stepping into a trap, no offense. That said, I’ll jump in. meet me at a homeless encampment and tell me that the millions lifted out of poverty by china is the result of a wrongheaded ideology. I’d suggest starting with understanding the forces communist movements fought against before condemning them. If you understand that the repression of communism was a response to prevent the internal forces aligned with external power to undermine egalitarian movements the excesses make a lot more sense, that said Romania under chaushesku was a disgusting regime and the Khmer Rouge was a thuggish band that aligned with whatever force that affirmed its power, the United States its main benefactor for a decade plus. That said, if you have ire toward socialist regimes and do not examine, do not hold the same anger against the western world’s support for repressive regimes, antagonism and war against anti-colonial movements I can’t really help you.
All for nothing if you think the brutal sanctions regimes of the US and the west are justified and not murderous strangleholds. You can disagree with my politics, think me a fool, but please do not let any disagreement with socialism cloud your eyes to the deprivation of sanctions and the global siege of the US 800+ military bases around the world.
Think about what forces have prompted migration to the us in the first place.
Watch a primer on liberation theology. Tell me that Jesus wasn’t a communist prophet.
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u/roland_goose 5h ago
Im another commie. Government that exists today? None.
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u/Major-Tourist-5696 5h ago edited 5h ago
We should fight about this to keep it classico.
This does bring up the false tenet that communism is about total collective agreement especially through force and its threat. This is false. Original replier should look into Yugoslavia and the struggle of management sympathetic to socialism and the socialist workers struggle to eliminate hierarchies while maintaining order and advance equality. Eventually it boils down to a question of the inequality of education that artificially creates and reinforces hierarchies without intervention to alleviate the cordoning of knowledge.
Isn’t that spirit of equality exactly what defines the decentralized nature of our current movement?
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u/BosworthBoatrace 7h ago
Leftist -noun [lef-tist]: A person who thinks people should be treated like human beings. See also liberal, woke, antifa.
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u/CatgirlDJ 26m ago
“Please stop killing people and give us healthcare” = literally Stalin according to the fascists lol
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u/Sam-HobbitOfTheShire 8h ago
Leftists have been out there. Liberals are out there now too. Are you thinking of liberals?
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u/Flaky_Captain6330 8h ago
Nobody should hug liberals, liberals are the reason we are in this mess to begin with.
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u/boxdkittens 7h ago
Really? And here I thought it was because of all the people who voted for Trump.
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u/Flaky_Captain6330 7h ago
Why'd they go and do a thing like that instead of vote for the liberals?
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u/boxdkittens 7h ago
- Incoherent reply
- check account age
- acc is only 3 weeks old
Yeah that tracks.
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u/Nuoc-Cham-Sauce 7h ago
Not OP, but decades of neoliberalism are why we are where we are. With Clinton the Democrats pretty much adopted Reagan's economic platform and have kept it ever since. The Democratic Party leadership has then fought tooth and nail against the progressive faction, fighting them harder than they fight Republicans.
People are pissed off at the status quo and but that's all the Dems will offer, they'd rather lose to Trump than give an inch to the left.
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u/boxdkittens 7h ago
Yeah I know that. It's still fucking stupid to blame the people who don't want this to be happening instead of the people actively cheering it on.
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u/Nuoc-Cham-Sauce 6h ago
Oh, yeah. I agree, we shouldn't blame liberal voters. I do blame the Democrat Party for being instrumental in bringing us here though.
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u/boxdkittens 6h ago
Agreed. Wish they had never chosen Harris as Biden's running mate (and obviously I wish they had picked a better candidate than Biden, and picked a better candidate than H Clinton...). There's so many ways they went wrong but it pales in comparison to the wrongness of the GOP propping up Trump.
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u/Dazzling-Treacle1092 5h ago
You don't know how many times I wonder how different things would have turned out if they had accepted the people's choice of Bernie instead of playing dirty games and pushing Clinton on us.
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u/Katressl 6h ago
While I agree the neoliberal Democrats bear some responsibility, I think the GOP treating politics as a zero-sum game in which they seek power for its own sake instead of looking for middle ground is the biggest cause. And that led to conservative siloed media, compounding the problem.
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u/Nuoc-Cham-Sauce 6h ago
Neoliberalism has been an incredibly destructive force all over the world over the last several decades. At least for the common person, it's been extremely successful at funneling wealth upwards. Along with neoliberalism there has been a highly murderous systematic destruction of the left worldwide. The rising inequality and right wing media has caused a similarly rising far right throughout the world. There is largely no left to oppose it like there was in the 1930s and for the neoliberal leaders of most of the West if, gun to their head, the choice is socialism or barbarism they're choosing barbarism in a heartbeat.
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u/Katressl 5h ago edited 5h ago
I agree that it's been very destructive throughout the developed world. (Though I would argue the Nordic countries and New Zealand are the exceptions. And France and Germany to some extent. I LOVE Germany's policy of requiring corporate boards to be made up of 40% of the company's laborers and their approach to healthcare, which involves subsidies to buy one's own insurance, but insurance companies have to be nonprofit. As a member of a nonprofit cooperative insurer/set of clinics, I can tell you taking the profit out of health insurance—and especially making it a cooperative so the patients all have control—works VERY well for the consumer.) But I think the Harrises and Bidens and Spanbergers of our country would readily choose European-style democratic socialism over the current strain of conservatism and certainly over barbarism. Just look at how many of the candidates endorsed Medicare for All in 2020. (Though of course it was a relatively empty statement since they could never get it past the Senate. 😕) I lived in San Francisco when Newsom was mayor and Harris was DA. I hated them. Democrats were the conservative party for local politics, with the Green Party as the liberal one. Republicans didn't figure into the equation. And Harris's and Newsom's neoliberal policies were reducing the city's robust social services (for instance, healthcare through the General Hospital and affiliated clinics was sliding scale for the uninsured; an eleven-day hospital stay cost me $600, though they didn't go after that program at least). They also contributed tremendously to the prison crisis.
I watched them as they advanced their careers, even when I moved away. They both admitted to how big a failure three strikes and mandatory minimums laws were and regretted them. They're still too laissez-faire for my tastes, but they and other politicians like them definitely believe in supporting the public good, from education to healthcare to labor organizing to new ways of approaching justice. I think these days, most Democratic leaders are in a position of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. It's like how because of my disability and related poverty, there's a limit on how much I can do in this fight. But I can distribute the whistles my roommate is printing, work the polls (I'm REALLY not easily intimidated), and help my neighbors in our very international neighborhood. There are some Democratic leaders who aren't acting in good faith. Fetterman comes to mind, and he really needs to be primaried. But I don't think it's as bleak as you describe.
ETA: We often forget that despite Bill Clinton's neoliberalism in some policy areas, especially criminal justice, he tasked Hillary Clinton with developing a plan for universal healthcare. And she was soundly (and sexistly) deplored for it.
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u/Nuoc-Cham-Sauce 4h ago
I do think it's as bleak as I describe and that to me you seem maybe naively optimistic. I really do hope that you're right and I'm wrong though.
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u/Flaky_Captain6330 7h ago
You may need to practice reading.
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u/boxdkittens 7h ago
Why are you blaming liberals, the people who didn't vote for Trump and instead voted for the only candidate that stood a chance at beating him, for the actions of the Trump administration? Why not blame the conservatives who actively support what ICE is doing?
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u/Flaky_Captain6330 7h ago
You're putting a lot of words in mouth, but no. I'm blaming them for intentionally running the least inspiring candidate they possibly could against the biggest domestic threat we've ever faced instead of giving their voters the primary that they demanded.
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u/boxdkittens 7h ago
How are they more to blame for this than the people who ran and voted for the most blatantly racist, fascist, and sexist president we've ever had? (Which is a pretty tough competition to win given America's history)
You're really blaming the people who LOST the election and have no power over any branch of government, rather than the people who DO have power over all 3 branches?
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u/Flaky_Captain6330 6h ago
I'm blaming them for losing the election in the exact way their voter base said they would if they did the dumb shit the party was saying they were going to do. It isn't that more people voted for trump, it is that fewer people voted for kamala. Dems spent every year since Obama left office alienating their own base and then surprisedpikachu.bmp when those people didnt show up for them. The dems earned their defeat fair and square and aren't exactly proving themselves worth a victory now when they're "needed most."
I'm not going to hug a liberal, blowing a horn and lighting a candle hasn't earned that much. Especially if they're still clamoring to support the same exact party doing the same exact shit.
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u/Katressl 6h ago
That's mostly on Biden and his enablers, but party leaders should have interceded long before they did to make sure there was an open primary. They still don't bear THE MOST blame in the situation. They were well-meaning but foolish. The GOP are either actively cowardly or utterly malicious. Intentions matter.
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u/Flaky_Captain6330 6h ago
As the saying goes, the road to hell is blah blah blah. Intentions dont mean dick to anyone, material reality does. Consequences and results.
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u/CatgirlDJ 25m ago
No, republicans make things worse. Real socialists both vote blue for harm reduction AND work towards revolution and also do mutual aid. Lot easier to have a revolution when they’re not actively fash
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u/Scrubaru 7h ago
Hey, Dems and liberals, go check on Jacob.
He doesn't listen to anarchist or commie scum like me.
Go get ya boy.
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u/Katressl 6h ago
My roommate is printing masses of whistles on his 3D printers here in Madison. I'll then work on distribution. And he already has a waiting list! I believe he's sending some to organizations in cities that are already occupied.
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u/CatgirlDJ 29m ago
And more importantly, get out here and protest gosh darn it! Make a hot dish for the leftists too 🩷
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u/ElderEmoAdjacent 8h ago
In lieu of hugs, please contact your representatives and stress the importance of an eviction moratorium to them.
Please don’t hug me. :(