[dude with glasses in a communist t-shirt, arguing] I'm the only leftist here, your opinions are TRASH
[dude holding a theory book on smug, arguing] Read theory you losers, you're all WRONG
[dude in an anarchist hoodie, arguing] Nuh-uh, I'm the only leftist here, you're SHITLIBS
[the three dudes are now caught in a cartoon fight, glasses gone flying, punches everywhere, while a firing squad of nazis are targeting them with rifles]
[a confused nazi asks] Why… why are they still arguing?
The antidote to infighting in my experience is organizing in ideologically diverse spaces. I've organized with liberals and all types of different leftists. It has left me with the perspective that all these people are good people that just want better for the world. It's hard to get angry at them once you know them. Per usual the solution is to touch grass.
You're right, BUT it will never happen. Hearing different perspectives and understanding other viewpoints will not only broaden your horizons, but it will also deradicalize you... but the people who you are asking to do this are the radicals who are allergic to ideologically diversity. Purity testing is one of the hallmark defining traits of the modern left, and the further left you go the more extreme it gets. The far left will excommunicate anybody who doesn't agree with on just about everything. You simply can't have a serious movement with this type of mentality being as prominent as it is.
Grass is dangerous, specially if you have allergies. My advice is to never touch grass!
LOL as someone with significant autoimmune issues this rings to true.
You are saying (correctly) that we need to organize in ways that appeal to more median voters, moderates, liberals and even conservatives around much broader initiatives that appeal to more populist ideas like wealth inequality, social programs to help poor neighborhoods, rebuilding infrastructure and creating more livable communities.
But people who read this are going to translate it as:
"They're saying I should reach out to the Green/Primitivist Anarchists I banned from my discord server" or "Maybe we should include the Orthodox Marxist–Leninists even though we hate them"
Or even worse: "HOW DARE HE SUGGEST I COMPROMISE WITH MY OPPRESSORS I WILL RIP THROATS OUT"
We all have to live next to each other even if we get the best policy results and I think everyone on either side forgets this. This isn't centerism, this is understanding that we have to rebuild together even if we don't share objective realities, we have no choice in the matter. I think too many people get stuck in their algorithmic ideology bubbles and think "the revolution/race war is coming, and everything will be great after."
Nobody is coming. Nobody is going to make it better. There is no secret cabal or underground movement, there will be no socialist revolution. What we see is what we get and if we want it better, we need to get a LOT better about getting our shitty emotions under control, learning to socialize and using our energy wisely.
Amazing posts! This is the correct approach. 99.9% of people want the same thing salvo's all the time, it's tiny issues that divide us and we've allowed that divide to grow and grow. People surround themselves with echo chambers and become more and more extreme hating each other and just making things worse.
We have an enemy. We always have. The mega rich. The billionaires, the grifters, those taking advantage of other people. That's who we need to go after.
Can we smoke weed instead? It's also green.
The opposite is the case. What worked historically is organizing in an ideologically united platform.
Vanguard parties won revolutions. Ideologically diverse big tent organizations have always eventually broken apart and none has brought a revolution thus far.
And working with liberals has never been a good idea. They're not a part of the left, they belong to a right wing ideology. That would be like saying we should work together with Nazis, because after all they have socialist in their name.
The truth about many republicans, is that they want good things for society as well. However they are some of the most gullible, ignorant, uneducated, even miseducated people you will ever care to meet.
It is possible to reach them. But it is one of the most Herculean tasks you will ever undertake. One of the hardest parts of it is to avoid triggering their programming. Starting small with basic concepts you can both agree on. And working from there.
How do you find common ground when “wanting good things for society” to them means “enslaving all the n****** and killing all the f******”?
It's shockingly easy to reach people of different political ideology if you view them as humans. Don't interact with the people who have punisher tattoos and roll coal, but that's not everyone right of center. Most conservatives are just ill-informed working people with no emotional intelligence or no capacity to care about larger problems than their next utility bill and resent progressive messaging because they're struggling so hard.
You can break through with class consciousness, almost every conservative I've talked to, and turned, started with educating them where their tax money goes, so get educated yourself how the tax code works, what the federal budget actually looks like, what your state's work laws are and such, and teach them why they can't afford food AND electricity some months.
You also need to be social and hospitable, do not have the intention of changing people, have the intention of teaching ONE thing and stick to it. This is what Bernie did for decades.
Edit: I will reemphasize for anyone reading down this far, PLEASE STOP TRYING TO CHANGE EVERYTHING. You're not going to get Bubba and Sheila down in the trailer by the scrapyard to suddenly start promoting trans rights and advocating for a free Tibet. Just let it go, our focus on micro-problems and social issues that don't impact the majority of people has been a deliberate sabotage of progressive movements to make people turn away. If we can turn people against Republican politics the rest falls in place and we get a better tomorrow, maybe not today but eventually and we have to start planting trees and stop expecting to have all our desires satisfied in our lifetimes.
They think that "those people" must be controlled and enslaved even for their own good. They have been programmed and indoctrinate so deeply they actually believe that those people are the problem. That it wasn't systems Etc that kept them disadvantaged and down. But somehow something in there very being
Similar to those sneaky manipulative immigrants. Who are on the whole often far more abiding than your average American citizen. Somehow thinking they have forced employers to pay them less and take advantage of them just to hurt law abiding americans. It's not logical, it's honestly fucking insane. But a lot of it comes from a similar place. They are hurting too. Much like the rest of us. They just can't see everyone else. It's always about them. So the best way to start in on them. Is to point out how the exact same systems have victimized them. And how those they support have enabled and supported it.
Don't get me wrong there are absolutely many you are shitty people to their core. Whom you shouldn't bother with. The plenty of them have no concept of class 4 or how much they are being manipulated by Elite bourgeoisie. They just want things to be better. But have no clue about what that would look like or how to go about it. Often times having been completely indoctrinated against it.
If we're talking about the stereotypical cartoon characters that you see hired by Jubilee to drive up hate and "engagement" then yes, they are real and they are almost impossible to exist around.
But they're not the majority of people who identify as "conservative" or to be more correct, they don't tend to identify as anything. The large swath of America's conservative movement has been just uninformed people who work all day and night and don't even have time to watch the news and believe earnestly that one out of five people are now trans and they're trying to shape public policy... because this is the reporting they see on their two hours of downtime they get on Sunday night while scrolling Facebook. These are the tens of millions of people who say "I didn't know who to vote for, I would have voted for Bernie if he ran, but I picked Trump just to see if he would be better than Harris, at least he's gonna do something about [problem X]."
If you want to change people and reach hearts and minds, you become better at socializing, you make people like you, then you introduce actual progressive politics to them slowly and gently, starting with class-consciousness. Teach people where their tax money goes first and you will create Marx's greatest warriors in a week.
I was a conservative, I found my way on my own but I have reached many people, I have turned many people to community consciousness and equality and even equity, because I know what it really looks like, I understand that the stupid unwashed masses just need guideance and they fall so very fast.
Oh God yes Jubilee and that surrounded bs. Though the recent one with Jordan Peterson was somewhat cathartic. Yeah they get some of the most toxic ones.
Yep the majority of them are more like my brother-in-law or my SO. She at least realized back in February the mistake she made. Though I can understand it. As a military daughter who spent her life going from Base to Base as her father moved them around the world. Republican bullshit is sort of ingrained in her family. And she doesn't actually engage with a lot of the news personally. Instead it gets filtered to her through family.
Brother-in-law came from a privileged bougie family. They own a number of stores in the area. All the fancy tchotchkies as a child. Summers and other regular holidays throughout the year at the lake. Started out from 3rd and thought he made a home run. With a very similar story. Hereditary republicanism. No critical thinking. For One Shining Moment talking about how Democrats and Republicans both suck. On which we could agree. Only to inevitably return back to the Republican talking points. That situation is a whole other shit sandwich unfortunately though.
Just as a tangent, Jubilee and ALL the related content-farmers on Youtube, Tiktok and other social media platforms are radically skewing our own perceptions as well as that of the right. They are the enemy of our better tomorrow.
We're all getting lost down ideological, algorithmic bubble-worlds but the worlds look so different it's hard for us to identify that we're also being manipulated.
This is another area you can find common-ground with the right, and a way to get them to start realizing they're being played and cucked by corporate elites. (Use that language.)
Absolutely. None of us are immune to propaganda or our own biases.
So follow his lead. Divert a river and float the shit away or make them run in snow until they are tired.
You pretend, for a little while, then slowly introduce truth to them drip by drip. Like an undercover propaganda agent.
Since that's probably what they're doing to us.
I've seen this type of tactic really well displayed in this video by SquidTips.
This man talked to a fucking Proud Boy wearing a rainbow shirt that said in large letters "GAY" on it with a button that had the hammer and sickle in trans colors, mentioned his partner was trans, and got the guy to agree with him on the fact that he should be focusing on the class war rather than the culture war.
Even Proud Boys and people on the far, far right still think that what they're doing is good for society. You don't have to convince them to "stop being evil, switch to being good" you just have to convince them that "this is a more effective method at making society better than what you currently believe is the best."
Will it work for everyone? Of course not. Some people are just going to be too far gone for you to reach, but there's a lot more people than you might think that could be swayed, despite what the flood of media coverage of the extremes of society can make you believe.
I've found that even if you do this, it doesn't really alter their behavior. A moment of consensus is never going to be enough.
People need to treat this kind of stuff like breaking someone from a drug addiction or helping someone lose weight. Without addressing the lifestyle factors that drove them down that path, you'll never get them to actually change.
That's why the brainwashing is so terrifying. People can fall into it pretty quickly and then it can take years and years to deprogram them.
Fair enough, though I do think this can still help with any broader approach to changing their overall mentality.
A moment of consensus on its own might not be enough to sway someone, but if they hear someone try and contradict what they had recently agreed on, it can then make them feel more cognitive dissonance, and potentially make them at the bare minimum just stop and think for a second.
If someone else is later trying to sway them in some way, it's going to be easier when that person says something, and they can think "I remember saying something similar" rather than "this is the opposite of what I already believe."
Plus, there's also just the sort of "exposure therapy" factor to it, as well. A lot of people are radicalized to believe that the "opposing side" is pure, limitless evil, and that they hate you and want you dead, so just interacting with them can be enough to help slowly deradicalize them.
For example, this Pew Research article states, regarding the likelihood of people to support trans people's existence:
But of course, that isn't just limited to acceptance of people by gender. It also applies to race, social and economic status, recipients and non-recipients of welfare programs, people working in different industries, etc.
Again, not saying it's at all some magic universal way to change someone's mind, or that on its own it's necessarily a factor that can override their overarching condition, (hell, that quote from before shows that it had a much smaller impact on republicans than democrats even given the same exposure) but the more and more this happens, the stronger and stronger an effect it has overall, and I'd say that alone makes it worth doing.
True. And I'd expect you'd need fewer of these moments for younger people than older ones. Every little bump might be the one that diverts someone to a different path. I know it hasn't worked well on my older family members, but it was those kind of moments that helped my diverge from my religious upbringing when I was younger.
This strategy is dishonest though. We cannot use all the same methods of the far right and ruling class.
There's a conflict of interest between wanting people to think critically and then lying to them and only slowly letting them learn parts of a truth. In another example, you can't have a democracy when all parties try to deceive the voters. That will damage the concept of democracy and the existing supposed democracy.
There is also the danger of falling your own rhetoric and propaganda. Prime example of this is how fascism was created. Mussolini actively engaged in nationalist pro-war propaganda as he thought the continued war would lead to the conditions necessary for socialist revolution. He wasn't wrong about that as then revolutions broke out in several successors / breakaways of the Russian Empire, in Germany and in Hungary. But eventually he fell to his own propaganda and created fascism.
Well that's why they're winning, because they have no problem employing spies.
Armed and ready to fight.