It’s not just cowardice. It’s also strategy. There are many Americans out there who hate Nazis but support fascist beliefs as long as they aren’t coming from Nazis. There are many social media moderators out there who will immediately ban self-admitted Nazis but approve of fascist posts and beliefs - this is especially common on modern Reddit where the most important thing is not to scare off advertisers. So Neo-Nazis online learned a long, long time ago to hide their power level, so they can keep posting fascist shit without being banned and gradually radicalize people into agreeing with them.

It’s also cowardice, of course. I’ve found cowards are often authoritarians. They feel more secure with a “big man” backing them. It’s why bullies at school attack their targets in gangs and then run to the teacher to cry if the target fights back. And it’s also why teachers typically take the bully’s side and punish the target for fighting back. Cowardly authoritarians gravitate to careers that give them power over children, and they protect their own.

(Now that I write that, there seems to be a clear parallel with Stonetoss spewing vile shit at minorities for like a decade and running to Elon the minute he faces any personal consequences for his hate. Fascists gonna fash, I guess.)

The one thing that I know for a fact (as an Anarchist), is that the way anarchist and left Organisation works is through social interactions. Sports clubs, Mastodon / Lemmy, families, school friends, uni friends, etc etc. All of these links, if they are strengthened, if we can use them more often than we use the capitalist machinery, are the social consciousness we need. If you eat your neighbours’ bread and give them your tomatoes, you’re closer to a left utopia, closer to “left unity”, and closer to working together against tyranny.

So, we need to fight for third places, we need to fight for places to live, we need to fight for social connections which are peer to peer, not mediated by tech companies. If we can work with that, we can work on a unified left.

Love it!

No, quite the opposite. The Democratic Party’s strategy is to appeal to leftist unity only when it’s time for elections, only for them to give no concession whatsoever and keep on their neoliberal agenda.

There are two different questions going on here:

Is the Democratic Party leftist? Stipulated, no, they aren’t.

Does the Democratic Party appeal to leftist unity? Yes. Very aggressively. Mostly by saying “Trump is worse”, and, more practically, “if you work with us within the two party political system you are more likely to enact some of your policy goals than if you work outside it”.

Which gets to my point: leftists who are willing to compromise their principles and policy goals for the sake of unity typically make that compromise with the large, powerful organization that’s already asking for their support.

Which means, if you call for “left unity” outside the Democratic Party, you’re speaking to a group of leftists who have already refused to compromise their principles and beliefs in the name of unity. So it’s a hard sell from the beginning.

In the United States in 2024, the most passionate and dedicated supporters of left unity are the Democratic Party and its supporters.

Most of the American left is in fact unified - behind the Democratic Party.

If your reflexive response is “the Democratic Party isn’t actually leftist” and “no compromise with fascists” and blah blah… well, that explains your perception of disunity. Because the leftists who are willing to compromise their principles in order to accomplish some of their goals are already compromising - under the Democratic Party banner. And the ones who reject that banner are the ones who are the most stubborn about holding their principles and refusing to compromise for the sake of unity. Which explains why they can’t compromise with each other, either.

That sounds like a lot of responsibility. I’d rather just keep voting Democrat, eat plant based once a week, put my pronouns in my e-mail signature, and tell myself I’m doing my part to make the world a better place.

Every single state created after a revolution by a socialist or communist Party has resulted in a continuation of capitalism.

This is absolutely correct.

And every single stateless society created after a revolution has been crushed by state violence.

So what options are there?

Work within a capitalist state to mitigate its worst excesses (the European democratic socialist model)?

Work towards a socialist state that practices state capitalism as a transition stage to full communism, and hope your socialist state won’t become a self-perpetuating dictatorship clinging to state power for its own sake?

Build a stateless society within a “friendly” state and hope that state’s leaders will treat it kindly?