• axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    11 months ago

    i feel like libs only change their minds when they’re sufficiently embarrassed or pressured out of being liberals. A huge part of that entails they have to be some level of vulnerable though, like facing hardship. Rich liberals with a three story house in the suburbs aren’t changing. Brick walls. also I was never a liberal, so maybe I have no idea. I went straight from confused apolitical teenager to rabid commie the moment the iraq war started.

    Confused liberals who are open to stuff like unions might be more amenable. They’re often curious, but because they might only be liberals from typical social osmosis.

    People who are stuck in that very difficult wishy-washy social democrat area are the worst. Their biggest hurdle is often nationalism. They’ll want a better world, but can’t get over their view that foreign people have cartoonishly evil societies. With those types of social democrats, or perhaps also the unprincipled poorly read “anarchists”, I genuinely have no clue what to say. They’re at a hurdle they can only overcome themselves or through repeatedly deconstructing their own views. The whole reason they’re in that position in the first place is they want to be a leftist, but can’t commit to being the type of leftist who is ostracized in the west. As in, they can’t commit to saying nice or even neutral things about the west’s enemies. They can’t commit to possibly having views that are typically viewed as frightening or unpleasant.

    also I have some hypotheses about this, I also don’t wanna stereotype, but trans people are many orders of magnitude more likely to become leftists from my experience compared to the rest of the population. It’s probably a lot to do with that necessary vulnerability I mentioned earlier. Getting liberals to listen to the experiences of trans people and why that led them to become socialists could be helpful, possibly

    Also, changing minds never matters much unless you’re changing people’s minds to actually do something. I should have started with that. I’ll take 5 confused liberals joining my union over 500 socially chauvinist, self-described leftists who do nothing other than post online. (not directing that at anyone here, I mean people like that Haz or Caleb Maupin guy)