I find it so hard to understand the liberal viewpoint of things.
One minute the USA is fascist for overturning roe v wade and possible other amendments, the next minute the USA is the global defender of democracy. One minute the USA is facing the most social instability with gun violence, inflation, wage stagnation, over policing, the next minute we are the shining city on the hill that must set an example.
You’d think after Korea, Vietnam, and the war on terror we’d learn are lesson about exporting democracy and just mind our own business. But america is not in the business of learning lessons.
We care so much about Taiwanese independence but what of the indigenous people HERE? What of Hawaii? What of Puerto Rico?
Stay strong y’all. See through the contradictions and keep applying Marxism Leninism to the times! There is still hope yet!
What not reading political theory does to a mofo, but for real.
These people have no clue what they are talking about and only seem to parrot whatever the media or higher ups tell them.
I hate how I sound like a right wing nut job right now but it’s true.
Taiwan? No I’ve not read up on them other than in the media and through whatever sources they use. Uyghurs? Same story. Capitalism? Same story. Communism? Same story.
Topics are so unipolar for liberals and lukewarm leftists that they almost always fail to see the broader picture, like @chinawatcherwatcher said below. Their ability to cherrypick the good parts and scrutinize the bad parts as separate things, rather than to see them as a whole, is amazing.
It gets them to a point where everything their government does domestically is bad but at the same time everything their government does and says elsewhere must be good and true. The USA is a fascist christian ethnostate but at the same time it’s the defender of democracy for Taiwan, and we won’t question whatever intentions the US has. We’ll learn about those intentions in the inevitable Netflix documentary in a few years, so I don’t have to question it now, because taking action through other means than voting is tankie shit.
Excuse my rant. It may not be my most profound comment but lately I’ve been having a bit of trouble with all the bullshit I’m reading so I had to get some of it out.
I wouldn’t call the us an “ ethnostate” more like a caste society. Like that one time David duke ranked all of the races. Even tho lots of goofy people would prefer it be an ethnostate. We live like the kid who doesn’t want the different food on their plate to touch.
Tbh America is just liberal liberal and conservative liberal.
“Reactionary Liberal” is the proper term for the proto-fascist GOP. Conservatism is not a political ideology.
You’re right I just say that cuz it kinda emphasizes the fact that:
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Language doesn’t really mean shit in the us ( liberal = communist, libertarian= free market, etc) people will throw around political jargon without knowing it’s history/ ACTUAL definition.
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The American parties are really just two sides of the same ruling party. No matter how much you hate either party they’re still both liberal parties working towards roughly the same ends.
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Straight to the point, to be fair.
Do you find that people you know irl hold the same views as the media?
I tend to find it’s the opposite for most things and need to remind myself not to treat the media’s worldview as universal. It’s just presented in that way. It does depend on the social circle, though. Some liberals, usually the avowedly liberal-type, tend to be stubborn af and simply refuse to listen and go glassy eyed when alternative facts or a different narrative are presented.
Really depends on the type of people irl. The more typical working class people I know can’t be arsed to form an opinion it seems, but I’d bet money on it that they’d choose China if they had to.
But there is a very large, very smug ‘educated’ liberal and left wing group that think they know it all. And they tend to be the most vocal about these kind of things. Especially the so called radical left wingers in mainly The Netherlands, who think they have invented a superior form of socialism and every actual socialist state is not socialist and should be scrutinized. In Belgium, where I live, people so far seem to be more nuanced on the take.
Sounds about right.
There’s an argument that it’s the education process that creates the “very smug ‘…’ liberal and left wing group that think they know it all”.
I’ve got an educated liberal friend that I’m trying to work on radicalizing, but their education just makes it incredibly hard. They form opinions and just assume those opinions are right because they’ve been educated. They talk about decolonizing, but mean it in a figurative “reach enlightenment” kind of way instead of, ya know, actual decolonizing. When I said we needed actual decolonization and that it would require revolution, I was told that was a “colonizer mindset”. It’s horrible.
I’ve got an educated liberal friend that I’m trying to work on radicalizing, but their education just makes it incredibly hard. They form opinions and just assume those opinions are right because they’ve been educated.
I was that person once 😕.
One thing that helped pull me towards Marxism was having a Marxist friend point out the contradictions in my liberal answers – and confirm that these contradictions were problematic because X,Y, Z.
One problem is that the better liberal thinkers tend to point out their own contradictions but they have ways of dismissing criticisms. It seems like intellectual honesty and high-minded reasonableness 🤮.
For example, they may conclude (without any strong evidence), that theirs (not necessarily your friend, but e.g. Berlin, Hayek, Rawls, etc) is the best answer because even though it has flaws, ‘there is no alternative’. You may have to do some work convincing your friend that there is an alternative way of thinking that resolves the contradictions rather than letting them just 'hang’in the air: i.e. Marxism.
As Mao said, liberals stand for unprincipled compromise. But (educated) liberals have been taught that this is good. Liberals can be stubborn even when we go softly softly!
A useful strategy may be to get your friend to draw some lines in the sand and say they would not compromise on A, B or C, then lead them to see that their liberal answer would mean compromising on exactly those points. Then let them stew with the cognitive dissonance. In a later conversation, bring it up again and propose a Marxist answer that would not compromise on A, B, or C.
A, B, or C being, say, easy and cheap access to e.g. housing, food, healthcare, etc. Maybe even torture, etc, depending on the topic.
That’s a good idea. I’ll try that. Thank you!
It’s honestly a toss up for me. Some people are very down with the communist perspective, even if they don’t self ID as Communist. Others who disagree with me are able to at least have civil convos with me. Unfortunately some people I know are very sheltered and yes will literally believe anything they hear on X media outlet.
That’s probably why there’s so much anti-communist messaging. Those media outlets know what they’re doing.
the liberal way of thinking is undialectical in the sense that it thinks it can take the good and separate it from the bad, when both are literally and historically interdependent and opposing. this is why you can have essentially blanket reverence for the “good” parts of the founders (freedom of speech, democracy etc) while still being aware of the bad parts, i.e. fucking slavery, genocide, settler-colonialism, and clear oligarchy. to any historical materialist, not only are the bad parts primary because they’re basal and not superstructural, but the bad parts cannot be separated from the “good” parts because that’s just not how history works lol: these aspects are interdependent on each other and cannot be understood outside of their unity. but the liberal is idealist and metaphysical, thinking that “liberal values” are essentially the same as during colonial times and that because of these values i.e. how people think people have become more inclusive over time as they apply liberal values to more people. nevermind the fact that the basic contradictions that resulted in slavery and genocide were never resolved, but simply developed, and yet we see this upholding of “liberal values” through the times clear as day in pieces like the hamilton musical.
big wall of text, but you can pretty easily use this framework of analysis on the phenomenon you’re describing as well: yes, liberals recognize USA is horrible because of modern slavery in prisons that is still the backbone of our domestic economy, child labor, human trafficking, modern genocide and ethnic cleansing as it relates to africans but also indigenous peoples, bad wars at least in some cases abroad, and now an uptick in institutional patriarchy. but at the same time they’re able to claim that the US is the best country in the world and better than any other country because of its liberal values (or in many cases a revisionist understanding of its history, like previously described). they again see these things as separate and not co-constitutive. this is often the case for radlibs like anarchists as well, noam chomsky being a hilarious example
Even the “good” seems pretty empty at this point. “Freedom of speech” unless you talk about alternatives to capitalism. “Democracy” for white landowners, later expanded to allow a certain set of white people to vote for a select set of candidates. The “liberal values” are empty and always secondary to capitalist values.
yeah ofc, the good was never really good to begin with for the most part, with the exception of liberal identity politics being at least some sort of progress even if it’s empty and generally not applicable to proletarians. as the empire’s power wanes and slides further and further backwards we’ll come to see how longstanding those gains even were in the first place.
You’d think after Korea, Vietnam, and the war on terror we’d learn our lesson
Oh a lesson was learned, alright. Just not a good one.
The establishment learned that if the media blasts out a different narrative loud enough, people will believe that even if it contradicts their material reality.
They learned that if you can make your lie more popular than the truth, your marks will do your work for you.
It’s why they hate Marxism - because it’s a way of looking at the world that focuses on assessing the material reality of a situation.
I would say liberals are just looking for “entertainment”. They always want to be on the right side of a big crisis and just “adapt” the one they are on to fit that. It’s like cheering for a sports team for libs.
Edit: Not to say that liberals don’t genuinely care about some issues (such as the abortion ban) but some of them such as Ukraine or Taiwan serve for purely aesthetic purposes.
It’s white supremacy. Libs think there can be bad things about the United States, but regardless of how bad US is, it’s still centuries ahead of “shit holes” in global south because they’re “culturally superior”.
It’s the western chauvinism at the heart of liberal progressivism.
Their thought process is “the U.S. is bad, but it’s not as bad as Russia or China or the DPRK”, and some of them outright say this, which is why these people can simultaneously believe the U.S. is a reactionary shithole, but also that the U.S. needs to terrorize the Global South to promote feminism, LGBT rights, and democracy.
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