Support for such measures (welfare, healthcare, unionization, high taxes etc) is usually low among Americans.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...
I am theoretically eligible to get 60% of my income for 3 months after losing my job, while I look for my new job. But if I actually try to claim that, they demand so many documents and meetings that it's not actually practical to receive that benefit. The only people who can receive benefits are the people who are experts at navigating the benefit system.
For instance, if you do not file a certain form on a certain exact day, then your benefits will not start until 3 months after you became unemployed. That is exactly the same time period this unemployment insurance benefit normally covers. By that time you should already have a job anyway and they will ask you to explain why you couldn't get a job in 3 months, since the benefit normally only covers 3 months.
Nobody will tell you how to navigate this. Nobody will tell you the correct form to fill out on the correct day. If you don't already know the arcane rules, you don't get the money. This is how most European social benefits work. They aren't actually provided to normal people.
As is, we have some middle class "hippies" finding ways to backpack travel across the world on the taxpayers' dime.
Here in the UK, it is amazing to follow just how much money has been pumped into the various 'right of the Conservatives' parties for the last 15 years, while it might seem like a grass roots movement, the majority of the cash has been coming from those with vast wealth inside and outside the UK.
Simple
Effective
Affordable
EthicalAnd unfortunately very common. I'm not sure what you think when posting this, but this wont endear people to your ideas.
I'm sure there are communities where this is a standard stance that gets cheered, which I'm sure a lot of people would find quite concerning.
The problem with political violence is that the other side will do the same thing, and you end up with an IRA situation where the country descends into sectarian violence.
Preemptive first strike logic[1] aside. This logic doesn't work because political violence never gets out of hand so fast that an entire political movement can be wiped out. On the other hand by starting/advocating for political violence you're almost certainly going to get the descent into sectarian violence before you can wipe out all the "fascists".
[1] Iran, anyone?
Tell that to the German left during the rise of Nazism.
The US has a problem with right-wing political violence; it's a long way off having a Baader-Meinhof.
(Still quite a bit of murder of informers, soldiers, lawyers, and a teenager who happened to be in the wrong car. As well as government snipers firing into a crowd, planting a bomb on a band, and so on)
How many people died under the totalitarian regimes that preceded them? These oppressive regimes did not start in a vacuum.
You're proving my point. Political violence just leads to a cycle of more political violence and/or totalitarianism. The Chinese Communists, if you recall, were violently put down by the Nationalists in the civil war. Starting political violence to stop the "fascists", just condemns your society to that fate. Not to mention that people who engage in political violence aren't exactly the most sane people. What makes you think they'll stop at "fascists"? The Bolsheviks eventually turned against the Kulaks, once their allies, and Mao launched the Cultural Revolution to consolidate power and push out rivals.
What? No, it isn't inevitable that the US descends into sectarian violence. What a silly notion. There remains more that unites us than divides us.
If the US does descend into violence, the blame can be squarely assigned to the propagandists (typically but not uniformly supporting the right wing) for twisting reality and making people feel their lives are under constant attack. How many Baby Boomer and older Gen X relations in your life are afraid to go to the mall or fear an apartment building being built in their local neighborhood for perceived increases to crime rates (versus standard NIMBYism of higher traffic issues)? Anecdotally, the FOX and ONAN and NEWSMAX views in my world declare every summer will lead to a race war. None of the "mainstream" media views think twice about that before being threatened by the federal government.
Strange.
Yes, the communist regimes were absolutely awful - both from nuts-and-bolts logistics failures as well as what was described in an earlier thread here as "prerogative" application of the law.
Action against The Enemy replaces any action to directly address economic and social marginalization.
It's how we process information. Avoiding this cognitive glitch takes practice.
This is where the racism comes in. As long as you believe that the social safety net cuts are disproportionally hurting the "other" more than you, you have plenty of space for the cognitive dissonance required to support the cuts even when they are negatively impacting your own situation.
Combine this with the fact that the right has two tiers, one of them made up of wealthy asset owners who politically push for the changes (and benefit from them in the form of extremely low taxes) and the second made up of working class people who can be convinced the changes are good as long it allows them to think those they see as below them will suffer more than they will.
Get yourself a nice feedback loop going in the form of hurting the poor, convincing them the source of their oppression is the "other" to get them to support even more austerity, repeat and you can explain a lot about the politics of much of rural America.
Isn’t it the case anyway that if you add state, federal, local, property, capital gains, and sales taxes, add the money that you and your employer pays for healthcare, that you’re basically paying slightly more in taxes all-in?