I hope this community is acceptable for this topic - sorry if it's not. I just went and saw the brand new documentary called Musk by Alex Gibney and let me tell you Leon is getting exposed! He has threatened Gibney with a lawsuit over this film and was basically told to go for it because discovery is a thing! I 100% believe he interfered in the 2024 election and possibly earlier ones as well. He's directly responsible for decimating the government workforce and in my mind , the worst thing he did was dismantle USAID which has already resulted in thousands of people dying - mostly kids - and will undoubtedly lead to many more. Anyway, please support this excellent film and make sure the word is spread about what a complete waste of skin this malignant narcissist is.

Ten years ago, while socialist Bernie Sanders was making his historic run for the Democratic presidential nomination that drew millions of supporters and promised a “political revolution” to live long past his campaign, I was part of a small revolutionary organization that pooh-poohed him as a faux renegade.

The socialist left at the time had been largely marginal to the American political landscape. This was not only because so few socialists sat in political offices. Organized socialists were unable to insert our ideas, strategies, or demands beyond small meetings and study groups, only occasionally influencing national discourse by being part of movements that showed themselves on the street in mass numbers. But movements naturally ebb and flow, and in their absence, much of the Left would retreat back into itself time and again.

In 2016, Bernie Sanders showed that socialists could be relevant to mainstream discourse, could move the needle on major policy issues, and could do so on the basis of a class politics that resonates widely and deeply around the country. Though he didn’t win that primary nor the following one in 2020, Bernie’s runs transformed the mainstream political landscape and, along with it, the organized left.

The section of the Left that threw itself in with Bernie’s campaigns — most significantly, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — grew exponentially in both numbers and influence and developed a deep well of experience and savvy. The section of the Left that scorned his campaigns in favor of independence from the Democratic Party and time-honored revolutionary principles stagnated or fell apart, leaving DSA and electoral projects at the forefront of an ascendant movement.

The Left was thus reorganized to take the lead from Bernie’s “political revolution,” where electoralism was one important piece of a broad strategy to contend for power and build a mass politics. Ten years on, that political revolution continues to grow, while the approach of smaller socialist sects that had characterized so much of the pre-2016 left has receded into the background. We need not return to the path of permanent outsiders ever again.

With DSA a powerful political force in the country and democratic socialist elected officials making concrete strides forward for working people, the intraleft debates that surfaced in 2016 are largely settled. They offer important lessons about the pitfalls of a sectarian approach that places organizational identity above building the biggest and most powerful left and holds rigidly onto traditional principles above shifting political realities.

As much as US Democratic Socialism is focused on the fucked domestic situation, it seems like the problem of international imperialism is the corpse under the floorboards of US leftism, and I've been online enough listening to more revolutionary strains to know we ignore the terrible beating of its tell-tale heart; and to our peril,

I'm not just talking about Palestine, I'm talking about the larger issues that keep getting brought up about the supply chain and the various Horrors therein and how the US encourages the horrors to keep cheap materials flowing to capital.

In particular, the argument that domestic improvements without revolution would just lead to more abuse of the global south by megacorps because Line Must Go Up, and then the imperial boomerang comes back and starts this all over, haunts me.

Ditto to the idea that I've seen that folks like Zohran and AOC will inevitably be corrupted by the system no matter what they, or what even the activists in the DSA, do to push back, which I hear haunting me every time they get super loud over a (Usually urging us to ditch any ideas of electoral power for only external structures) and my memory of the history of how activist movements in my lifetime (I was born in 1992) have constantly been crushed and failed to change anything beyond cultural issues for the better at-scale and how the Dems fucking us and subverting people who go against them has been a huge part of that.

And, while I'm critical of large portions of folks with revolutionary tendencies (But not all) for not caring for/actively negating those who need help now in favor of a generational hail-mary of a project*, I don't think the problems they bring up are easily dismissable, because I'm someone with a working conscience who doesn't want to e one of those assholes who anonymize the people of the Global South, and I know enough about post World War II history to see where they're coming from.

So I want to know, what's the specifically DemSoc solutions to the problems that keep getting brought up, both in larger theory and in practical policies to fight for and structures of power to build, that don't say full violent overthrow is the only way?

Or at least show how utilizing state power to; say; unfuck SSI or give medicare for all doesn't necessarily lead to the further destruction of the Global South as corpos try to find a way to make up the "lost" profits?

*And also for them treating people with scrupulosity issues like myself online like Democrats treat small donors, but that's its own ramble.

So I graduated from Georgia Southern University this May with a bachelors degree in criminal justice in criminology and ever since I have really felt stuck which between my career interests and my personal values and political beliefs. I have no desire to serve the Trump administration or be a police officer and as stupid as that sounds having gone into this field, my interest has always been helping people and stopping bad people in simple terms. I just want to be able to adhere to my beliefs, but still pursuing a career in my field I would really appreciate any advice from someone else in my predicament or has been in my predicament.