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  • cimbazarov@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    10·
    6 hours ago

    I feel like European leaders are basically the Democratic party. They want to keep up the existing relationship with America to preserve the “norms”, but are ignoring that radical change is needed because of how the material conditions are changing and Trump’s new style of imperialism/isolationism.

    Been reading Hudson’s Super Imperialism and I found the British refusing to default on their debt to US after ww1 interesting and maybe a parallel to today how Europe refuses to stop being lap dogs for the US.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOPM
      8·
      6 hours ago

      I think that the liberal failure to engage in material analysis stems from their allegiance to idealist philosophy, which argues that ideas, values, and perceptions, rather than material conditions, are the primary drivers of reality. Liberals see abstract concepts such as freedom and democracy as having primacy over tangible systems like production, resource distribution, or class relations. Idealism leads to a delusion that societal change can be willed into existence through moral rhetoric or policy symbolism.

      Hence why liberal solutions often collapse under material constraints. For example, advocating for green energy transition without addressing the global supply chains for rare-earth minerals or the fossil fuel dependence of industrial agriculture is idealism in action. Similarly, calls for universal healthcare in the US generally ignore the profit-driven structure of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Liberals focus on the symptoms while ignoring the underlying problem of capitalist commodification of health. This sort of performative and individualistic analysis is pervasive in the west.

      Idealism’s fatal flaw lies in its detachment from the base-superstructure dialectic. Liberals refuse to accept the truth that the material conditions shape our ideas, and not the reverse. They invert this relationship, fixating on cultural narratives while dismissing the infrastructure of power. The result is a politics of aspirational gestures such as diversity quotas, carbon offsets, and so on, that leave material hierarchies intact.

      • cimbazarov@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
        5·
        3 hours ago

        I think the symptoms analogy is pretty apt, especially as I’ve seen people on the left refer to Trump as a symptom. If you view Trump as the core problem as liberals do, then yea you won’t abandon the status quo since it can be solved by simply removing Trump. That’s what in theory the laws are supposed to do. But Trump still exists despite the laws, because he is not the problem, but a symptom of the problem.