For Frell's Sake

[PerrySimm]

Are there a lot of folks on Breitbart or whatever that wear the label "alt-right" proudly? I've mainly heard the label used as a pejorative.

Six years ago everyone was talking about the "Tea Party", a label that *was* embraced by its members. What's changed such that the Tea Party was supplanted by these "alt-right" folks? And what are the key policy differences?

[GandALF]

Clear up some facts here:

1. The Fascists would have killed more people than the communists if the allies hadn't stopped them. That's why they are considered worse.
2. Communism is an ideology centred around economics. The political and economic cannot be separated. Political murders by capitalist dictators cannot be attributed to capitalism because capitalism on its own isn't relevant to the subject. The full political ideology behind capitalism is liberalism which explicitly forbids political murder.

[LittleRaven]

Are there a lot of folks on Breitbart or whatever that wear the label "alt-right" proudly?

There are certainly a lot of people at Breitbart that wear the label proudly...but that's literally their main rallying point, so don't take that as being representative of much. Nobody really know just how big the Alt-Right is. They have an absolutely massive online presence and a demonstrated ability to flood the Facebook feeds of Republican voters with news stories of dubious veracity, which is why a lot of Republican officials are pretty scared of them right now. But how many actual bodies are behind them? That's anyone's guess. Most American's don't really know what the Alt-Right is.

Ten percent of those surveyed said they support the “alt-right” movement, 50 percent opposed it, and 41 percent had “no opinion” of it, indicating, as ABC noted, wide unfamiliarity.

Thirty-nine percent of those surveyed said the “alt-right” holds neo-Nazi or white supremacist views, 21 percent said it did not, and 39 percent had no opinion.

Charlottesville was certainly bigger than anyone expected, but still quite tiny in comparison the population at large.

Six years ago everyone was talking about the "Tea Party", a label that *was* embraced by its members. What's changed such that the Tea Party was supplanted by these "alt-right" folks? And what are the key policy differences?

What changed is that the Tea Party won a lot of legislative victories, and as a result, were able to steer the Republican party towards adopting their stances. If you recall, before the Tea Party, the Republican party wanted a comprehensive immigration solution. That's gone now - the official Republican position is that we're going to have a wall instead. With that issue settled, there isn't much difference between a 'Tea Party' politician and a typical Republican one, so nobody cares about the Tea Party anymore.

But of course, people still weren't happy, because electing Tea Party candidates didn't make things any better. So they elected Trump, who is kind of Tea Party 2.0 - now with even more populism! His big breaks from the newly revised Republican orthodoxy is that he wants to spend lots of money on infrastructure while cutting taxes, and he takes a much dimmer view of free trade. The jury is still out on how much of this the Republican party as a whole is willing to swallow, but evidence suggests Republican voters like it, anyway.

But at least so far, Trump hasn't actually managed to make things better either, so already there are people looking for something even more extreme than what he offers....and the Alt-Right is already there, waiting to welcome them to the fold. The exact policies of the Alt-Right are still coalescing, but we have a few hints:

• America's tax dollars should not be used to support 'unproductive' populations.
• Police must take a harder line on controlling rioting populations attempting to disrupt the lives of the productive class.
• The government should stop promoting 'diversity' and make attempts to prevent drastic demographic change.

[Wild_Kraken]

2. Communism is an ideology centred around economics. The political and economic cannot be separated. Political murders by capitalist dictators cannot be attributed to capitalism because capitalism on its own isn't relevant to the subject. The full political ideology behind capitalism is liberalism which explicitly forbids political murder.

And yet we see capitalism spring up in the most illiberal of places, like monarchies (German Empire, Russian Empire, Empire of Japan), dictatorships (Zaire, Indonesia under Suharto, Chile under Pinochet), and fascist regimes (Nazi Germany (inb4 but they were National SOCIALISTS!!1)). Capitalism and liberalism are two different things, and history shows us that you can have the former without the latter.

[GandALF]

2. Communism is an ideology centred around economics. The political and economic cannot be separated. Political murders by capitalist dictators cannot be attributed to capitalism because capitalism on its own isn't relevant to the subject. The full political ideology behind capitalism is liberalism which explicitly forbids political murder.

And yet we see capitalism spring up in the most illiberal of places, like monarchies (German Empire, Russian Empire, Empire of Japan), dictatorships (Zaire, Indonesia under Suharto, Chile under Pinochet), and fascist regimes (Nazi Germany (inb4 but they were National SOCIALISTS!!1)). Capitalism and liberalism are two different things, and history shows us that you can have the former without the latter.

Yes, that's what I meant, capitalism and tyranny aren't inevitably tied together. Communism always is.
(Also, while the Nazis certainly weren't clear cut socialists, they weren't exactly enthusiastic capitalists either, four year plan and all)

[Wild_Kraken]

Yes, that's what I meant, capitalism and tyranny aren't inevitably tied together.

The problem we're running into is you're getting hung up on individual states when the problem is the system those states exist in. Capitalism is a tyranny regardless of the government that surrounds it. This is how so-called "liberal democracies" like the USA and Great Britain can start an unprovoked war and kill a million people in Iraq for oil. Or how Switzerland can house the headquarters of Nestle, a corporation that's responsible for the deaths of infants. The development of capitalism also saw the worst excesses of colonialism. Tell the citizens of the Congo Free State that capitalism and tyranny aren't inevitably tied together. Or tell the victims of the 1943 Bengel famine, or the victims of the Irish potato famine, etc. etc. These were not crimes committed by dictators or absolute monarchs, but by liberal democracies.

While on the other hand, there's a very simple historical reason why there seemingly aren't examples of communism not tied to tyranny, as you would say. Every time socialism has been tried peacefully it has been brutally suppressed by capitalist states. Hence why there are so many capitalist dictators installed by capitalist liberal democracies whenever the population of a country was too leftist for their liking. Arbenz in Guatemala and Allende in Chile were both democratically elected, but we'll never know how socialism would have been expressed under their governments because they were both destroyed by capitalism.

Hell, the capitalist nations even intervened in the Russian Civil War in an an attempt to crush the Bolsheviks. But what excuse could they have had so early in the conflict? "Yeah, in a few years this guy named Stalin is going to come to power and he's going to be really bad." lmao.

[Arkle]

On paper communism looks great, but in practice it usually ends up getting overthrown by a CIA backed military coup.

[GandALF]

Hell, the capitalist nations even intervened in the Russian Civil War in an an attempt to crush the Bolsheviks. But what excuse could they have had so early in the conflict? "Yeah, in a few years this guy named Stalin is going to come to power and he's going to be really bad." lmao.

They intervened because the Reds were de facto allies of the Germans. They're the ones that organised Lenin's return to Russia in the hopes that he would cause more chaos which he did.

Did the allies force Lenin to overthrow the (mainly non-communist socialist) February revolutionaries?

Did the allies force Lenin to create the Cheka and prosecute the Red Terror?

Did the capitalists force Khrushchev to put down the Hungarian uprising?

Did the capitalists force Brezhnev to put down the Prague spring?

Did the capitalists force Clement Attlee's Labour government to turn Britain into a police state? Oh wait that never happened.

Communism and Liberal Democracy are clearly not morally equivalent. I think you're pulling a Trumpian "many sides" thing here.

[Wild_Kraken]

Did the capitalists force Clement Attlee's Labour government to turn Britain into a police state? Oh wait that never happened.

You've come extremely close to proving my point for me, that all expressions of socialism need not be Stalinism. Attlee didn't form a secret police, and he didn't purge the government and military of "revisionists", he even disbanded the SOE. Good for him.

And yet so many coups, so many anti-communist purges, so many red scares, so many dead and disappeared bodies.

Communism and Liberal Democracy are clearly not morally equivalent. I think you're pulling a Trumpian "many sides" thing here.

I 100% agree, they are not morally equivalent. Communism is morally superior to Liberal Democracy, because again, it's not about the form of government, it's about the underlying economic system. The mechanisms which lead capitalist states to exploit, to wage war, to conquer, and ultimately kill are baked into capitalism, they define capitalism. Which is why under capitalist Liberal Democracies you get atrocities as bad as under capitalist dictatorships (just externalized to foreign populations).

Under socialism and communism, there aren't these mechanisms for exploitation in the underlying economic framework, thus you would not get the same result from a communist democracy that you'd get from a communist dictatorship. And again, why aren't there communist democracies? Because any that tried to develop were brutally crushed by capitalist democracies.

Finally, your bringing up Attlee is illustrative of the flaws of liberal democracy under capitalism, so I'm going to expand on that. The forces that tend towards plutocracy are always present in capitalist societies, regardless of how many regulations are placed on the market. While it is possible to reform the system, as Attlee and FDR did, the forces of capitalism will always push back against it. This is inescapable due to the profit motive. The quest for profits is never and can never be sated under capitalism, and so capitalist firms will seek to destroy anything that prevents the expansion of their profits. Thus, while under a liberal democracy you might have good times under someone like an Attlee and a FDR, inevitably there will come a Thatcher and a Reagan to undo any progress done. We've seen this happen in the US, and are seeing it happen in the UK and throughout Europe. In order to make any sort of permanent positive changes, you have to change the underlying economic system. And between the two options of capitalism and communism, communism is the vastly more moral choice.

[GandALF]

You've come extremely close to proving my point for me, that all expressions of socialism need not be Stalinism. Attlee didn't form a secret police, and he didn't purge the government and military of "revisionists", he even disbanded the SOE. Good for him.

Democratic socialism =/= communism. Attlee was a bonafide cold warrior, he was involved in the Malayan emergency and the Korean war, and encouraged the U.S. to take a firmer stand against communism.
And last I checked the Soviet Union didn't stop being a totalitarian mess after Khrushchev denounced Stalin.

Finally, your bringing up Attlee is illustrative of the flaws of liberal democracy under capitalism, so I'm going to expand on that. The forces that tend towards plutocracy are always present in capitalist societies, regardless of how many regulations are placed on the market. While it is possible to reform the system, as Attlee and FDR did, the forces of capitalism will always push back against it. This is inescapable due to the profit motive. The quest for profits is never and can never be sated under capitalism, and so capitalist firms will seek to destroy anything that prevents the expansion of their profits. Thus, while under a liberal democracy you might have good times under someone like an Attlee and a FDR, inevitably there will come a Thatcher and a Reagan to undo any progress done. We've seen this happen in the US, and are seeing it happen in the UK and throughout Europe. In order to make any sort of permanent positive changes, you have to change the underlying economic system. And between the two options of capitalism and communism, communism is the vastly more moral choice.

Firstly, FDR was a new liberal not a socialist. Secondly the capitalist push back isn't supposed to happen according the Marxist view of history. There's supposed to be an inevitable and permanent worker's revolution which should lead to the establishment of a socialist state which should wither away into full communism. No backsies. "Communism in 20 years" Khrushchev says "history is on our side, we will bury you". Didn't happen. The Bolshevik overthrow of the provisional government wasn't supposed to happen. Prague and Hungry shouldn't have happened. 89-91 shouldn't have happened.

For all their imperfections, fanatics willing to murder people who get in the way of a Utopian prophecy aren't inevitable features of liberal democracy or capitalism.