Forgive me, but I'm reading through r/qanoncasualties, I've been watching the QAnon documentary on HBO, and I've listened to QAnon Anonymous for at least a year. I find the subject totally fascinating. QAnon is like this twisted mirror image of socialism.
Basically it looks like this creepy fucking boomer named Jim Watkins and his weird shitposter son Ron created QAnon to bring more traffic to 8chan, which they own but which has never made any money for them. (I'm far from an expert on QAnon but the documentary makes a compelling case, let's say.)
I've seen the first three episodes of the documentary, where people are starting to literally kill each other over QAnon, and the Watkins' boys just don't fucking care. This may even go beyond CIA-level psychopathy, or is at least at a similar level. Meanwhile, r/qanoncasualties has story after story of friends and relatives losing their fucking minds, their jobs, all their relationships, and often killing themselves because of QAnon. It's just absolutely insane.
I've also spent maybe about two years "studying" (listening to podcasts on) Zizek and started drifting toward Marxism at around the same time a lot of these people were turning to QAnon. I haven't lost any close friends or family because of this, but it's definitely strained some relationships. (All of my close friends and relatives are either liberals, Berners, social democrats, or even beyond.)
When normies or liberals talk to QAnon people, they clearly think that the QAnon people are insane (although to some extent the average American believes in at least some parts of QAnon—including me, if Jeffrey Epstein counts as being part of QAnon, although I can't recall ever hearing a QAnon person mention him).
When normies or liberals talk to Marxists, does the same reaction take place? Do they just deploy horseshoe theory on us? Would they prefer to talk to QAnon folks over Marxists? Do they think that Marxists, who point to systems as the main issue, are really the same as QAnon folks, who blame all the woes of the world on a shadowy cabal of Satanic pedophiles?
To sum up: how do your non-Marxist / non-anarchist friends and family treat you when you talk about politics?
100% of my remaining family treats me like a complete lunatic. They just stay away from me. My politics to them, standard sort of Marxist stuff, are indistinguishable from ranting about alien brainwaves or fluoride in the water. They're also largely reactionaries and I have it on good authority several of my cousins are in the klan.
My coworkers sometimes humor me, but they believe I say defensive stuff about China or Cuba out of some contrarian streak rather than any actual convictions I have. Conversations with people outside of work or family tend to conclude with the other party declaring me some sort of real life troll with fringe, otherworldy beliefs that no person could ever possibly have.
It really is fascinating. Not only is leftist organization suppressed here in the USA, but any advocacy for leftist policy is regarded as inherently extremist or so fanciful that it might as well be imaginary. Standard Marxist/communist/leftist whatever movements are pretty common worldwide, plus several governments have leftist parties in power. I wouldn't say it's the largest political force on Earth right now, but it's certainly not some unknown, fringe movement that died decades ago, like how is usually articulated to me.
I mostly know conservative folk because of where I grew up and live. Their reaction to Marxism, so long as the s-word and c-word aren't mentioned...is actually pretty positive a lot of the time. The bare explanation of class structure and socially necessary labor time and all that is often able to resonate with people I've been around. It was actually pretty easy to get some otherwise conservative people on my side of a union vote if we kept the scary words away. This might be more of an instance of class interests transcending whatever cultural ideology had been ingrained in them, maybe, because they're working class.
However, if the socialism/communism words do come up, that's when liberals and conservatives jump down my throat. Usually their end goal is to find a way to declare me a "bad person" and so that gives them pretense to cut off talking with me. They want to find some way of tying me implicitly to genocide or advocacy of political violence or whatever, but I'm usually not shy about it. I'll outright say all billionaires are criminals or that we should be seizing empty homes and making them into shelters or whatever else is up my butt that day.
One of my aunts gave me a book for Christmas once entitled "Conspiracies and Secret Societies" because she says I like to "expand [my] mind about the world" essentially calling me a conspiracy theorist in a positive way, I guess. The book at certain points just outright repeats various theories about the whole secret Jewish blood libel new world order bullshit if you're curious about the quality of it.
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I'm not even talking about people with self-identified coherent ideological positions. The average person I've met will either consider communism some distant, outlier dead thing from the past or some nebulously defined, extreme, horrifying thing that has something to do with things being taken from you. They're people who would refer to modern day Russia as communist, since they just use the word as a synonym for bad.
Someone who would claim to be a neoliberal or libertarian would probably be a bit more on the ball I'm guessing, since that would imply some level of research into various ideological stances.