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- cross-posted to:
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Summary
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemned Donald Trump and Elon Musk at a packed Arizona rally, accusing them of harming working-class Americans and promoting oligarchy.
Sanders denounced corporate CEOs as “major criminals” exploiting workers, while Ocasio-Cortez called for stronger Democratic leadership.
Rallygoers urged Ocasio-Cortez to challenge Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer after he supported a Republican funding bill.
The rally, part of Sanders’ “Stop Oligarchy” tour, follows criticism of the Democratic Party’s weak response to Trump’s agenda and features further events in Colorado and Arizona.
What do you suggest Americans do? Say someone is a working class American who didn’t vote for Trump. They can barely make ends meet and have no power or political sway. What does that person do? I’m not trying to be funny, I’m simply interested in your take and perspective as a non-American.
You’d know more than someone outside of the US.
I saw something recently that was talking about how individualism has led us to this situation. Everyone is thinking what they can do. We lost our collectivist spirit. We don’t think about what we can do.
An individual has essentially no power. A group does. We need to get better at organizing. This is made hard because we are so separated from each other, driving individually to work, then back home, largely to houses where you don’t interact with anyone else. We have basically no third places anymore where you’d typically organize. This situation was designed, and it’s going to be hard to get out of, but we need to get better at forming groups and organizing.
Nothing can be fixed until it’s understood to be a problem, and AOC from her stump speeches and emails seems to at least recognize the problem you’re pointing that American systems are essentially “massively scaled up isolation from others”.
Rugged individualism has failed us. It’s going to take a reclamation of collectivism to fix our problems.
And while we’re at it, why don’t people in China have the freedom to speak out against their government and not have censorship? Maybe if they all just got together in a big public square and really protested, I bet that would end really well.
China never really had functioning democracy to begin with, so this comparison doesn’t really apply. The point is to rise up before it gets as bad as in China.
I mean, if they all did it, it absolutely would make shit happen
The whole issue stems from most people wanting to just keep their heads down
(The parent commenter was making a Tiananmen Square Massacre reference.)
I am aware
They are powerless if everyone stops giving them power
The country is nothing without its workers
Of 10-20% of the population actively protested and actively tried to halt any functioning of society, you’d be surprised at how much you could get done. A that large mass of people is absolutely hell to control and subdue, and they certainly cannot arrest even a significant fraction of them. If the threat of protests of that scale were real every time they tried some fuckery, they would give in very quickly
The problem is that almost everyone thinks like you say, “what am I to do? I’m powerless”, and give up before even trying
I’d love leaderless movements to have a better track record than they do, but the reality is that I think they fail much more often than they succeed in this country.
People can’t just quit their jobs and occupy wall street forever.
I am aware it’s difficult, but my point was that you aren’t powerless
As an unconnected individual with a middling net worth, you are powerless in this system. Whole movements of people are powerless. The only way this could possibly work is with the numbers and probably a leader organizing it.