Andrewism
I am perfectly aware of Andrewism's work - I stopped watching them (and most anarchist media) because I don't think they are actually serious about performing the real theoretical work preconfiguration would require.
Anarchist FAQ
I am perfectly aware of the Anarchist FAQ, too.
I never heard that reference before in regards to fascism and liberalism.
That's the left's fault in general, I'm afraid - many of us are too afraid to admit (either to ourselves or others) what liberalism really is and always have been. And that's costing us - it hampers our ability to actually explain to people why everything we are seeing is happening in the way it is.
Build a life without the state.
How?
confronting the state
How is this going?
What do you mean talking about Good cop?
What did you think the relationship between liberalism and fascism is? Good cop - bad cop. Carrot - stick. I'll ELI5 it for you - when liberal lies ceases to protect the status quo, they stand aside and allow the fascists to take over and protect the status quo through unbridled state violence.
Did you notice how the COVID pandemice highlighted the class divisions between the billionaire parasites and the rest of us? Did you notice how the decades-old liberal propaganda machine surrounding Israel came crashing down just recently?
Do you see the lies starting to fail?
You - and the rest of us - are now stuck watching the "stand aside" part of the process in action. This means... no - we can't go back to what was last year, or before 2016, or any time before this. And no, we cannot "strengthen" democracy because we never had any to begin with. What we had was a piss-poor democracy-knockoff which, anti-democratic as it fundamentally was, is now seen as unnecessary by our political establishments and it's billionaire handlers - if Trump and his myrmidions' behaviour hasn't clued you in to that by now I don't know what will.
If all you want is to have the "good" cop to come back, and to be subject to the carrot instead of the stick - fine. You do you.
But is it too much to ask for you to simply be honest about it?
I don’t think I care enough
You don't care to find out if the thing you have been calling "democracy" your entire life even qualifies as democratic?
Fair enough, I guess - maybe the people calling themselves "democrats" not lifting a finger to stop fascism hasn't convinced you to question the lies these very same people have been selling you since birth... but that could never be me.
Why are you mad at me?
Ummm... I'm not mad at you.
I'm trying to show you that you aren't asking to get democracy back (because that's something you never had).
What you are asking for is to have the "good cop" back - the very "good cop" that is right now busy handing you over to the bad one.
If I were (as a thought exercise) to consider your metrics for democracy valid, I'd have to enquire as to what the point of democracy even is if it comes with fascism as a built-in feature - which, of course, is perfectly acceptable if we were to use your metrics.
And that's before we even get into the nitty gritty of how your metrics of democracy solves the fundamentally violent and fundamentally irreconcilable incompatibility between democratic values and the capitalist mode of production.
Depends on you threshold but we have had it for a while
Getting to "choose" which pack of political racketeers gets to be the public face of capitalist looting and pillaging falls outside my threshold... which means that we've never had anything that can be called "democracy" with a straight face.
If we accept the liberals' definition of democracy we might just as well accept the tankie's definition of socialism, too - both are equally warped and vile.
I’d be happy to just get democracy back.
When did we have democracy?
See how absurd this statement is?
Liberalism is literally the ideology of the status quo now.
Is it absurd to point that out, too?
Prefiguration is a theory of praxis
Soooo... the failure of anarchism to actually preconfigure anything since the end of WW2 in the face of massive liberal counter-insurgency is perhaps tied to anarchist's theories about preconfiguration not being remotely good enough - if they even exist at all?
A critique of hierarchy - no matter how airtight it might happen to be - is not a suitable basis for preconfiguration.
Knowing what something mustn't be is not nearly enough - one must know what something must be in order to build it.