Earlier this year, Democrat Josh Shapiro spent $840k dollars on this ad for far-right Republican
candidate Doug Mastriano.
In June, the Democratic Colorado PAC, funded this ad for far-right candidate Ron Hanks.
And you better believe that back in May, the Democratic Governors Association ran this
ad for the far-right Republican Darren Bailey.
Before I explain what’s going on, look at this ad.This one was funded by a Nancy Pelosi
PAC in California.
Try to remember that while you’re watching it.
Because this is what these ads look like
in practice.
All these ads are essentially the same.
They’re all targeted at a conservative audience and they all paint these candidates in the
same way: as the most conservative candidate that’s closest to Trump.
In other words, as the Republican voter’s best choice.
What the **** is going on?
In simple terms, the democratic party is literally funding far-right politicians.
Not just the opposition, not just any republican, but the extreme wing of the GOP.
If you’re new here, allow me to be the first to welcome you to the shining city on a hill
and beacon of democracy that is the US.
Don’t mind the fire.
These ads are really, really weird.
Not just because one party is funding another, that’s already insane, it’s the specific
kinds of candidates being funded.
The kinds of candidates Democrats say they hate.
If you’ve been following them for a while you might remember this clip of Joe Biden
talking about how America needed a “strong and principled” Republican party.
“We need a republican party.
We need an opposition that's principled and strong.”
And it’s not just Joe, Nancy Pelosi said the same thing about needing a “strong Republican
party,” earlier this year, in February.
She told the press that she was really bummed about the GOP being quote “hijacked” by
extremists.
But less than four months later she was the one paying for the hijackers plane tickets.
At first this might look like hypocrisy.
Democrats say they want a moderate opposition but they fund the far-right.
They say one thing, do another, we, the public, catch them in a lie and bim bam boom, democracy
is saved and we can all go home.
But that’s actually not what’s happening.
There is nothing hypocritical about Democrats saying they want a moderate republican opposition
and then funding a far-right challenger.
That’s because these are actually two sides of the same political strategy coin.
A strategy that, as we’ll see, not only reveals the class interests of the Democratic
Party, but shows us one of the mechanical ways our capitalist society is decaying into
fascism.
If that sounds dramatic, just wait, I promise you it’s not.
But let’s go from the beginning and start by explaining why Democrats are funding these
candidates in the first place.
The first thing to know is that midterms are coming up and democrats are terrified.
Biden’s numbers are in the trash and ol’ reliable, funding a war in a foreign country,
isn’t working as well as it usually does.
There is little hope that democrats will get a majority again so they need a way to tilt
the odds in their favor.
And they’ve figured out how.
Democrats are hoping that by making a bunch of far-right nutjobs win GOP primaries, two
things will happen in general elections:
One, moderate Republicans will be outraged and vote for a more centrist blue candidate.
And two, solidly left-wing voters will also be outraged and vote for the lesser of two
evils out of necessity.
And the problem is that this strategy has worked for them before.
In 2012, another democrat, Claire McCaskill, spent $1.7 million dollars on ads for the
ultra-conservative Todd Akin, more than Akin spent himself.
The result?
Akin got a boost in the polls as soon as the ads started running, won the GOP primary,
and then lost against McCaskill in the general election.
This wasn’t an accident and it wasn’t even a secret.
McCaskill herself said "There were three viable candidates and Todd Akin was kind of the weirdest
one [...] I knew he might say some weird things if he were nominated.
And he had less money, so we took a poll and figured out what Republican voters would really
like about him."
She even went on to write this article about it.
Democrats fund these campaigns because they win when their opposition are far-right weirdos.
Except when they don’t.
Funding a far-right candidate and saying they want a moderate opposition are two ways for
the democrats to do the same thing: to position the democratic party as the only reasonable
political choice.
By saying that the Republicans are being hijacked by extremists and then actively funding that
hijacking, the democrats are creating an image of themselves as the only remaining bastion
of democracy, the only party that is even remotely worthy of your vote, the only way
to vote that won’t actively tear the country down, at least until the Republicans go quote
unquote “back to normal,” which democrats know will never happen.
Democrats are reliant on the right being represented by the worst guy imaginable, and will actively
work to make that the case.
Either, as we see here, with direct funding or, more commonly, by pitting themselves only
against candidates like Trump.
Clinton never campaigned against guys like Jeb Bush, her opponent was only whoever was
the farthest to the right and could make her supporters most upset.
She drummed up a radical opposition because it’s a much safer strategy than running
against someone who shared a lot of her ideas.
But this strategy has a couple different outcomes.
It might, as democrats hope, bring some moderate republicans to their side and get more blue
voters out to the polls.
Maybe.
But it might completely backfire and their funding will just have gotten more far-right
wackos into politics.
No one can know for sure what’s going to happen come election time.
What is guaranteed, though, is that this lesser of two evils strategy allows the democrats
to move further right and still get votes from left-wing voters, and it actively promotes
fascism.
More ad spots featuring quasi-fascist politicians, brandishing fascist slogans and actively supporting
the president who, so far, has embodied fascism the most, these things promote the popularity
of fascism in the US.
That is undeniable.
At the end of the day, fascism is getting more airtime, convincing more conservatives,
and the Democrats are absolutely to blame.
With not-the-best odds of winning and with the knowledge that this strategy promotes
ultra-conservative politics in America, why would the democrats run these ads?
After all, democrats aren’t fascists, they’re liberals.
There is a difference.
Why are they going with a risky strategy that, even in its best case scenario, actively makes
society worse?
There’s two explanations.
One, mechanical, at the party level – this strategy is a direct product of the way the
Democratic Party is organized.
Another, at the societal level – this strategy is the product of how our entire economy is
organized.
Let’s start with that second one.
You might’ve heard the sentence “fascism is capitalism in decay” before.
That sentence is used to say that, as capitalism starts failing the people it usually benefits,
starts decaying, it concedes strategic ground to fascism in order to survive.
It’s an idea that gained traction in the 20th century when socialists realized that
capitalism wasn’t being replaced by socialism like they expected.
WWI and the Great Depression brought on by a global economic crash didn’t lead to socialism
replacing capitalism’s global hegemony.
Instead, reactionary movements started popping up everywhere, most notably in Germany and
Italy.
Capitalism hadn’t been replaced by socialism, it had adapted into something new: fascism.
A political-economic system that didn’t look like capitalism, and that often even
gave up on “free-markets,” but that preserved the private ownership and profits of the capitalist
class.
The same people were on top, but things looked a little different.
Here is how socialists explain something like this happening.
As capital concentrates into fewer and more powerful monopolies, as the rate of profit
falls, as more and more people are kicked into poverty and those remaining in the workforce
are increasingly overworked, the conditions that produce fascism begin to appear.
Monopoly capitalism, the inevitable outcome of winner-take-all competition, leads to economic
stagnation and crashes.
The first victims of this stagnation and these crashes are of course the working class, as
we saw in the Great Depression, 2008, and with the COVID recession.
Millions of people are suddenly thrust into poverty and can’t make ends meet.
The thing is that, within this context, governments are no longer able to rule as they usually
do.
They have to resort to more direct violence to keep their hold on power.
People’s demands are no longer brushed away by politicians in assemblies, they’re actively
resisted with cops on the street.
For example, when people start demanding to defund the police or a price freeze on basic
necessities.
Political stagnation is just no longer an option for capitalist governments now that
tens of millions of people’s immediate needs aren’t being met, so to preserve that political
gridlock that is so stable and profitable, governments get used to scaling up the violence.
But when people need to vote you in to govern, governments need to find a justification for
this sudden growth in state violence.
And this is where fascism comes in.
Fascists usually explain the decay of capitalism not by the inherent flaws of the system but
by its corruption by a small minority.
A minority usually separated out from the rest of society along arbitrary lines, like
race, ethnicity, or place of birth.
Fascists explain that it is these minorities, not the natural tendency for wealth to accumulate
into fewer hands under capitalism, that has pushed the masses into misery, and therefore,
that state violence is legitimate in order to punish those minorities and anyone who
defends them or advocates for system change.
After all, the system is perfect, it’s those people that are the problem.
Fascists explain away the failure of the system and its sudden uptick in violence with scapegoating.
It’s as simple as that.
Because this kind of narrative is beneficial to established capitalist governments, this
struggle for power gets mirrored at the state level.
Governments that benefit from capitalism would rather concede to fascism and keep their benefits
rather than allow for socialism to grow in popularity and upset their power and private
interests.
This theory of fascism is how socialists explain the 20th century, but practically speaking,
how does this concession to fascism actually happen?
What actually has to take place for fascism to gain this kind of place in society and
government?
This is where the Democratic Party comes in.
You probably know that another idea, socialism, has gained traction these past few years.
Around 70% of millennials and Gen Z say they are somewhat or extremely likely to vote for
a socialist and nearly a quarter of them believe “society would be better if all private
property was abolished.”
Faced with this demographic information, the Democrats have two choices: either they adopt
socialist policies, or they win elections.
The thing is that they can’t do both.
Not at a party-wide level.
That’s because the Democrats aren’t just contending with the public’s pressure when
they run for office.
While the public may want socialism, more than ever before, not every democrat can adopt
socialist rhetoric and policies into their program.
That’s because at the core of every Democrat’s strategy is the question of “how do you
get funding?”
Average people don’t contribute that much to political campaigns and very wealthy people
will not fund a party with policies that threaten their profits.
They just won’t.
Not if that threat starts becoming real.
A few socialists in the party is okay.
But a party that embraces socialism can’t afford to run nearly as many ads.
That means that democrats who support socialist policies will have to fight an upstream battle.
They’ll need to fundraise at a much more grassroots level, will have to contend with
constant villanization in media institutions owned and operated by some of the wealthiest
people on earth, and will constantly deal with the pressure of simply existing within
a party that is not hospitable to socialist ideas.
That doesn't mean they can’t succeed, that means it’s the hardest path to success.
With those kinds of challenges, many more democrats will take the easy win of running
against a far-right opponent to try and capture centrist voters.
Fascism grows just because it’s easier.
This kind of system doesn’t need anyone to be evil, it doesn’t need anyone to lie,
nobody needs to be actively dishonest.
Enough people just need to follow the path of least resistance.
It is in the material interests of democrats to not concede any more ground to socialism
than is absolutely necessary for their survival and, by comparison, it’s much easier to
fund and then run against the far-right.
The more their platform is influenced by the anti-capitalist left, the more likely they
are to lose elections.
So, without trying to make fascism more popular, just by being okay with it happening to win
elections, fascism gains traction in our society.
This is not the only way fascism takes over, but man is it an effective one.
That is why I constantly talk about alternative networks of power on this channel.
Why I focus so much on the institutions of our government and how they’re constructed.
Why I keep telling you to organize, unionize, participate in mutual aid, and study up and
disseminate information on alternatives to the capitalist economic model.
The natural tendency of our elected institutions and political parties is to prioritize capitalism,
even when it fails most people and starts relying on fascism to survive.
Our institutions were built with preserving capitalism in mind, not to be accurate reflections
of the public’s will, especially when the public turns to socialism.
Without building institutions that can resist this natural tendency, this country will comfortably
slide into fascism.
We can and we must put a stop
to it.