This should tell you what absolute garbage most American administrations were for the working class.
FDR was the last president who was really afraid of Marxism at home, while Nixon was probably the last president even slightly afraid of the people.
FDR was the last president who was really afraid of Marxism at home
So in order to get actual progressive change, we need the looming threat of Marxism?
Yes.
You aren’t going to get meaningful progressive change by just asking for it, and certainly not by hoping for it. The powerful need to be afraid that a worse alternative awaits them before they’ll acquiesce to sharing what they have.
"Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.” ― Assata Shakur
I give the Democrats a really hard time (mainly because I have much higher expectations for them, and so I hold them to a much higher standard than the Republicans), but I can’t deny that Democrats, generally, listen to experts and follow their guidance much more than Republicans. I would even say the Democratic party is somewhat of a technocratic party, for better or worse. It is in this light that the apparent “flip flop” regarding unions should be seen. Both parties became anti-union during the neoliberal era because economists were largely anti-union. Their models or formulas were telling them that unions were bad, so that became the orthodox position of mainstream economics, and Democrats trusted in their expertise. Now, many mainstream economists have decided that unions are good, actually, and so Democrats have once again followed the experts. I’m not sure what changed in the economists’ models or formulas that made them rethink their position on unions, but then economics has always been a bit of a mess.
That says a lot and not in a good way.
We need another FDR.
It’s why democrats are so insistent on pretending that Biden is the second coming of FDR.
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Grading on a curve, here.
They mispelled Julie Su.
Hollow platitudes, conduct a general strike and see how hard they come down on labor. In the same way they proclaim we have free speech until we start movements against capitalism like Occupy Wall Street, or protest genocide in Gaza. Then the state, in full force, does everything it can to silence that speech.
Bro quashed the railroad strike.
Nah, I thought so too at first. Look it up, his administration helped with the negotiations
He still banned the strike. They didn’t get to use their own power to demand the terms they wanted, they had to accept what the outside negotiators were willing and able to get for them.
I’m not disagreeing with the article’s premise, Biden is the most pro-labor president in a long time, but this gaslighting just makes Democrats look deceptive.
Edit: See @rockSlayer@lemmy.world’s response for a great way to respond to this. You don’t need to pretend his shit doesn’t stink, acknowledge it and then talk about the good stuff.
Gonna need a link. A quick search only talks about him banning that strike for “economic reasons”. While I’m willing to dig, I’d bet plenty whose minds may change are not.
It’s a major black mark on his labor record, but I can tell you with first hand experience as a union organizer that he’s done significant things that should have been done decades ago.
The administration has actually done quite a bit in the background surprisingly. You do need to dig for it though
We’re totally doing the opposite of what we do in public, only where you can’t see it.
All good things are being done in secret for some reason, but they’re happy to be very publicly bad.
It’s all in public.
You only heard about the bad stuff if you listen to Fox News or to other people who got it from Fox News.
And you wouldn’t have a different situation with any other recent president apparently.
